Book Vs. Life

During my lunchtimes at work I can generally be found sitting in the chair by the window in the coffee lounge downstairs, reading a book. And not always the same book.

Last week, for example, it was Christopher Priest's The Islanders. But this gazetteer of imaginary islands isn't like a real book at all. More like a book a character in a novel might pick up. You can't go to these islands, yet you somehow feel that they exist, in the way that places revisited in dreams seem to exist. Travel is a thing of the mind.

Somewhere beyond the page, a maintenance man was talking to another maintenance man about a woman, a 'fucking tea lady', who sat 'like this'.

There followed a scraping of chair legs against the floor as (presumably) this woman's (possibly quite bizarre) stance was demonstrated.

The first thing the guy said to her was: 'Where's George?', and she came back straight away with: 'What do you want?' Thus, as he put it, they 'got off to a bad start'.

Then she complained because 'someone put their hand on the door'. Would you believe it? Some people. I tuned out again. Back in the book, the man who purportedly writes the introduction is revealed in the following pages (which he claims to have read) to have died some time previously.

Go figure.