RE-ENTRY: It's Five O'Clock Nowhere

Here's a quick story for you. I know I usually only do these once a month, but it seems most appropriate to post this now because it forms the perfect bridge between my last post, My Top Ten Five a.m. Songs and the next one... My Top Ten Five p.m. Songs. Its title was based on one of the songs in that countdown... well, this one:

Alan Jackson & Jimmy Buffett - It's Five O'Clock Somewhere

I love this song, even though I'm not the biggest Alan Jackson fan. A bit too Stetson-country, even for me, usually. But this is a great working man's hymn, made one hundred times better by the arrival of slacker king and Florida-country icon Jimmy Buffet. If you're one of those people who sits in the office all day waiting for the hands of the clock to hit five... or five thirty... this is the song for you.

What would Jimmy Buffet do?

It's Five O'Clock Nowhere

Sometimes it felt like even the second hand was fighting a losing battle. Karl spent much of his working day scrutinising the clock on the wall opposite his desk, and the more he watched it, the more it seemed like every single tick was a struggle against the inevitable, some wild Canutian battle to continue the forward progress of time when all around them – the clock, and Karl - everything else was trapped in amber.

Now every day was indistinguishable from the ones that surrounded it. The same unremitting routine. For Karl, it always began with email. Five minutes for work (he deleted many of the office memos without reading them, he’d been here long enough now to have read them all before), at least half an hour for his own private hotmail account. A few games of solitaire to get him in the mood, then, if he really felt like it, he might breeze through a couple of reports. He took regular breaks to check certain websites, monitor his eBay bidding, and to see if anyone new had poked him on Facebook, then went for a stroll around the building on the pretext of doing some photocopying or delivering a wrongly sorted item of mail or retrieving an important document from the archive room in the basement. He liked it down there in the archives, though the building work that was going on in adjacent rooms meant it wasn’t as peaceful as it’d once been. Still, he liked the snowflake pattern on the grill outside the windows, and how, if he got up on a box, he could stare out into the street, a feet-level view of the carefree world beyond. He liked to watch the people and wonder why they weren’t in work. Disregarding the kids, pensioners, and housewives, many of the passers-by remained unaccounted for. Deliverymen, council workers, window cleaners – people whose jobs involved moving about the city from one place to another – they made up another percentage, sure, but still not enough to answer for all of them. Some of them, Karl realised, just didn’t have an excuse. They were free, and that was all. Independently wealthy or dole-sponging layabouts, they were one and the same in Karl’s mind. The lucky ones.

After lunch (eaten at his desk because Head Office frowned on employees leaving the building in their lunch hour: what if there was a rush and no-one was around to deal with it?), Karl’s afternoon began with a brief spate of internal correspondence (some of it work-related, much of that deleted unopened, though mostly it was gossip, and the forwarded jokes, pictures and film clips that his colleagues had chanced upon over their sandwiches) before he set into the internet proper. He usually left his favourite worksafe websites ‘til the afternoon sag, the longest part of the day, when Karl needed all the distraction he could get. But even after scanning through all his various bookmarks – news sites, shops, blogs and games; even after downloading and burning another CD’s worth of not-strictly-legal mp3s he’d probably never get time to listen to; even after voting for all the new Hot Or Not girls and wondering for the five hundred and seventy fifth consecutive workday just why the plainer ones put themselves up for it (though he did always take this into account when voting, marking up the mooses, and downgrading the dolly birds)… even after all that: by 3pm, he still hit the flats. 

The flats were when Karl had exhausted every possible diversion the office had to offer, but there were still two hours left to kill. By this point in the afternoon his biorhythms and blood sugar were low, his exasperation and listlessness were high, and if Karl wasn’t careful, moribundity could set in. Sometimes, if absolutely necessary, he’d do a little work to distract himself. Take his mind off the incessant stain of his life, the chronic howl of it all. Other times, if there wasn’t any work that couldn’t be put off, he’d go back down to the archive room and stare out into the street. Wish himself out there, among the foot-loose and fancy-free. A man of means, or a man of no means. From this point in the afternoon, either seemed an occupation devoutly to be wished for. 

By four, he’d be back at his desk – and that was when the serious clock-watching began. With only an hour to go, the atmosphere in the office changed to an unusual mix of electricity and ennui. Postures slumped, eyes drooped then blinked violently alert, but conversations turned to the evening ahead. The drinks, the friends, the bars, the lovers. Films and music and life. Release. By ten to the hour, Karl had his things packed and ready. His final emails sent and websites browsed, he powered down his computer and made ready for escape. This part of the day always reminded him of being back at school, of waiting for the bell that launched everybody from their desks and spewed them out into reality. The tougher teachers always made you wait. Made you sit back down ‘til they’d finished their sentence, checked that you understood the homework, drew out your pain as far as their power could reach. But there were no teachers here, and middle management was just as eager to blow this joint come five o’clock as everybody else. Most days, they were the first ones out the door and into the carpark (unless somebody from Head Office was visiting, in which case they’d mock up devotion and switch on their desk lamps like there was a long night ahead).

Then finally, the silent bell rang. The notional whistle blew. And for a few short hours, this irrelevant enterprise relinquished its hold upon them. Time was no longer for frittering: it was for filling. That most of them went straight home and zombied in front of a flickering box was not the issue - the issue was that had they so wished it, they could have done or gone or been anything else they pleased. At least until the second hand (cracked from its amber, getting only green lights ‘til dawn)

double-quicked back to the 9am capture, where it all started over again. Until then, they were free.

And then one Monday, on the twenty-third of a month like most others, something changed. Karl noticed it first around lunchtime (potted beef, Monster Munch, and a can of Diet Pepsi from the machine), a hiccough in the daily routine of his workmates that became ever more pronounced as the afternoon went on. He tried to distract himself with the usual medley of myspace and minesweeper, but by three o’clock he could feel it in his guts and his water and his chest, in a heartburn those chalky pocket Rennies couldn’t assuage and an urgency in his bladder that usually only came in the middle of the night, when sleep was disturbed by apprehension of the coming grind. Something was different, and by correlation, something was wrong. Four o’clock came and by now it was unquestionable, though part of him was too scared to ask. Part of him didn’t want to know. Why everyone was behaving so strangely, like it was still 10am or 2pm, not nearly 5. Why today there was no late afternoon buzz, no pre-release expectancy, no excitement at all. The electric was off, and the whole place was running on emergency generators only.

Then finally it happened. Or rather, it didn’t. Five o’clock came and nobody moved. Karl, who’d been ready to spring for the last half hour, picked up his things and looked around the office. Still nobody moved. Mice clicked and eyes stared and feet shuffled and everything maintained. Karl didn’t understand. He tapped his watch, but it told the same story as the clock across from his desk, and he’d been watching that tick (like a lame man wading through mud) through the hour. It couldn’t have stopped. He didn’t understand. But neither did he care. He had places to go, even if they didn’t. He had people to see, he had—

“Where’re you going?” asked Lena, looking up from her Mah-jong with a curious pout.

“It’s five,” said Karl, with a tone that added, ‘where do you think I’m going’.

“What?” said Lena. “Didn’t you get the memo? Don’t you watch the news?”

And so she explained it. The new company policy. “In line with recent government legislation, to help make us a more competitive force in the international marketplace post-Brexit, and stave off the tide of outsourcing that’s driving so much of our industry and so many of our jobs overseas, Head Office has instituted a new twenty-four hour working day, commencing this morning at 9am. They’re calculating a projected increase in productivity across the week of… I think they said twenty-five per cent. I can’t quite remember now. God, Karl, where have you been?”

“But, that’s… We can’t… I mean, when do we sleep?”

“Well, obviously, that’s been taken into account. If you need more than a catnap at your desk, the company’s provided us with a comfortable new dormitory in the basement. Though they are asking us to sign up to a rota so that everybody isn’t trying to get in there at the same time – surely you got that email?”

“But…”

“Look, if you don’t like it, you’re allowed to opt for voluntary redundancy if you so… Go and take it up with Michael from HR. Just… I’m very busy!”

Karl left her to her Mah-jong and returned to his desk. He switched his computer back on and waited for it to boot up. He couldn’t just quit – how would he pay off his mortgage? His car? His three grand overdraft and five grand credit cards? Getting another job wouldn’t be that easy. Not one as relaxed as this, with as much freedom to do as he pleased, with no-one breathing down his neck, without the pressure of deadlines and paperwork and… well, work. Sometimes it takes the threat of losing it to make you realise how much of a good thing you’ve got going.

Back down in the archives, after filling in his name on the dormitory rota, Karl climbed up on a box and stared out into the world. Late evening sunlight fell through the grill, the pattern of the snowflakes warming his skin. And though it was almost six o’clock, the street wasn’t any busier now than it had been at eleven, or three. The rush hour was off. People just carried on about their day as though the clock no longer held any dominion over them. And in that respect, at least, now Karl was just as free as everybody else.

June #1: Music To Watch Girls By

Thank you all for the kind words about my imminent sabbatical. I've never seen so many happy comments! Just to clarify though: I'm not going away completely. It'll just be one or two posts a week rather than five or six, until I've charged my batteries. In the meantime, we've reached #1 for June, so it's time for another song-based story. I originally titled this one Rockwell, which was a cleverer title, but Andy Williams has the far more obvious title. It was written nine years ago, so I've left the topical references as they were. I'm sure you can all remember George Bush Jr. What a great president he seems now, given the gift of Trumpian hindsight.

Anyway, today's story is about an age old quandary, and I'm not here to suggest any solutions, just tell the tale. I was amused to see some of the youtube comments about the "blatantly sexist" (from our present day perspective) video. The comments from men are often about how "feminists" will hate the video because of its portrayal of women. The comments from women tend to be more about how good the women in the video look and how all different kinds of body types were celebrated in days gone by. Make of that what you will.


1. Andy Williams - Music To Watch Girls By

Music To Watch Girls By / Rockwell

On Tuesday the 23rd of September, 2008, at precisely 10.45 in the morning, it happened. Every man on planet Earth went blind, and it all started with Dan. Daniel Tull, 27 years old, from Leeds, West Yorkshire. He was the first male to lose his eyesight completely – and then, in less time than it takes to butter a slice of toast, the blindness spread out from him like a shockwave. Like a bad CGI special effect, like the sudden blooming of a time-lapse stop-motion mushroom.

“Oh my god – this is like Day Of The Triffids, but for real, Keisha! What do you think’s gonna happen next?”

“Big tongued plants walking down the street zapping everyone with their evil phallic stamen, Jacs. Gotta be. Give it till nightfall, for the spores to start… sporing…”

Over in the corner of their Headingley flat, Lola sat shivering in that big, mouse-bitten sofa chair, the one they’d tried to throw out when they first got the place but hadn't been able to get down the stairs, even with the help of Jacqui’s ex, Ed. Lola was used to ignoring her housemates when they talked geek, a language she’d never taken at high school and could quite happily have gone the rest of her life without even hearing… but right now, she needed the distraction. Anything to take her mind off what she’d done.

“What are you two… on about?” she asked, pausing to clear her throat mid-question and stop her voice breaking like a spotty fourteen year-old lad. Like the ones who hung out around outside the Washeteria, shouting comments about her knickers through the glass as she dropped them into the machine.

“Classic John Wyndham novel—“

“Made into superior 1970’s BBC drama—“

“About an invasion of walking plants from another planet,” Lola’s housemates explained, tripping over themselves in their eagerness to engeek their normally geekproof sister.

“Before the Triffids attack, there’s this spectacular meteor shower which virtually everyone on the planet stays up to watch—“

“Only radiation from the meteor shower makes them all go blind—“

“Well, all the ones who watch it – there are some people who were either too pissed to get up, or living underground, or in hospital with bandages over their eyes or—“

“Just plain lucky, I suppose—“

“And they can still see, see—“

“A raggle-taggle group of survivors who lead the resistance battle against the Triffids until…”
Keisha scratched the stud on her left nostril and gave Jacqui a puzzled look. “What happens at the end?”

“I can’t… do the Triffids all catch, like, a cold or something?”

“No, you’re thinking of War of the Worlds.”

Jacqui and Keisha stared at each other, each scrunching their mouth over to one side of their face as a desperate-yet-futile memory retrieval aid.

“I can’t remember!”

“We should check the book out of the uni library, they’re bound to have it.”

“Unless someone’s already got it out.”

“Some boy?”

“–who can’t even read it anymore…”

On the television: more crashed airliners, derailed trains, motorway pile-ups. Kate Adie interviewing a brave Sir Trevor McDonald about his first hours without sight. Deputy Labour Leader Harriet Harman, standing in for the PM, urging everyone to remain calm.

“But it wasn’t just the men?” said Lola, sitting forward now but still hugging herself, still shivering, still semi-paralysed by the guilt. “It wasn’t just the men who went blind?” She was wearing what had become her uniform in recent weeks: a chunky Arran cardigan (despite the early Autumnal heatwave), baggy cargo pants, and heelless grey shoes. Her hair was cut short and not a lick of make-up tasted her face: the shadows round her eyes were entirely natural.

“No,” said Keisha, “in that regard, this is more like Y.”

“Oh yeah,” said Jacs, “very Y.”

“Why?” said Lola.

“Y, The Last Man,” Keisha explained. “Great comic—“

“Excellent comic—“

“Where all the men on earth are killed by this mysterious plague, except this one hot escape-artist bloke called Yorick, and his monkey—“

“Hot?” said Jacs. “You think Yorick’s hot?”

“Well, as pencil and ink cartoon drawings go—“

“Don’t you think that’s a little desperate, hon’?”

“What? Like you’ve never – little miss ‘I’ve Got A Puddle In My Pocket For John Constantine’!”

“Ahhh – get away from me – you said you’d never–! Not Keanu, let me make it quite clear, Lola – I never fantasised about Keanu!”

“Nobody fantasises about Keanu, Jacs. Even his fellow floorboards don’t get wood from Keanu—“

“How did it happen!?” said Lola, loud enough to make them both sit back in the collapsing sofa. On TV, George Bush was giving a speech about how Franklin Delano Roosevelt had served his country after being stricken with polio and Woodrow Wilson hadn’t let a series of severe strokes prevent him from seeing out his term in office, so nothing was going to stop him leading America in this time of international crisis. He did however question whether either of his potential successors were up to the job, and put it to the country that perhaps a change of leadership really wasn’t in the national interest at this time. ‘Perhaps this is a matter for the American people to decide,’ he concluded, before being led offstage by a disturbingly chipper Condoleezza Rice. The report cut to Hilary Clinton.

“The plague,” said Lola, when neither of her housemates seemed to understand the question, “in the story – what exactly caused all the men to die like that?”

“Oh,” said Keisha, “well, I reckon it was cloning. Once scientists had been able to successfully clone a human female, the entire male gender became obsolete – and in a Darwinian sense—“

“No way,” said Jacs, “it was the Culper Ring. Biological warfare gone way wrong, simple as that.”

“No, you see I prefer the interpretation that Gæa herself – the earth mother, who even in patriarchal Greek mythology is presented as a woman – chose to tackle head-on the infection blighting our planet—“

“Bollocks!” said Jacs.

“Exactly!” said Keisha.

“Wait a minute,” said Lola, “do you mean they never properly explained… I mean, there wasn’t actually a definitive—?“

“It’s open to interpretation,” said Jacs, “as so many things are in science and the natural…”

“So many of the theories on which we build our knowledge of the world are, in the end, unproven – it’s just, as yet, nobody’s been able to prove them wrong.”

Lola stared at them both for a very long time. It was the kind of stare that ruled out further conversation. Her eyes were tiny little bombs with the timers stuck on 00:01. The room held its breath.

Finally, Keisha broke. “Are you OK, Lol’? You look…”

“What about wishing?” said Lola, so quiet it was like listening to a mouse in another county. “Is there anything in any of your stories about wishing? Because that’s how it happened. They were always looking at me, wherever I went. Every day. Any time I stepped outside the house… I covered up, I stopped wearing anything that could be considered even remotely provocative… but still they kept on looking at me. Sometimes they’d try and be subtle about it, stealing glances as I walked by, watching my reflection in shop windows, rubbing their eyes but spying through the cracks in their fingers… but I always knew. I couldn’t go anywhere, do anything without…”

“People… looking at you?” said Jacs, her glasses making the frown in her eyes even bigger.

“Not – people,” said Lola, “not people – men! Men! Some of them were subtle, others… others were just so blatant! Staring – like, goggle-eyed, drooling…”

“Lols… you’re a pretty girl.”

“You’re a babe is what you…”

“I’d give my eye teeth to look like… and I don’t even know what my eye teeth are…”

“You say that that, yeah… but you’ve no idea. Neither of you. You don’t know what it’s been like for me, you don’t—“

“Yeah, well, we may not be total Heathers like you, Lols, but we do still get blokes eyeing us up, you know. Hard as that may be to—“

“Blokes really aren’t all that – I mean, I think they’re pre-programmed to pretty much ogle anything.”

“It’s genetic – really it’s back to that whole Darwinian—“

“You don’t see what I’m saying,” said Lola, “you don’t… This isn’t about me being a… I didn’t mean to compare myself to… I just meant, I caused all this. Don’t you see? I was in town this morning, and there was this guy off our course… Dan, Daniel something… guy with the glasses and that weird little moustache and…”

“Oh yeah, I know him—“

“I think he’s cute, actually—“

“Jacqui!!!”

“What? I do. I wouldn’t mind him staring at my—“

“I did it!” said Lola, shouting now to make them understand, standing up and using her hands and everything. “I caught him looking at me, even though I wasn’t even wearing anything remotely… He was watching me as I… Staring at me like I was an animal in the zoo or… and that’s when I did it. I wished. Don’t you see? I wished they’d all stop. Every single one of them. I closed my eyes and clicked my fucking heels and wished, harder than I’ve ever wished anything before in my whole fucking life… I wished they’d stop staring at me! And they did. All of them. At exactly quarter to eleven… they stopped. And now look what I’ve done…”

May #1: Coming Down Is The Hardest Thing

Saw my old gigging mate Dave at the weekend, for the first time in about 18 months. Yes, we went to a gig. Probably my only one for this year. More on that soon. Anyway, he was telling me how he's taken the plunge and booked a ticket for Tom Petty's only UK date this year: Hyde Park in July. With Stevie Nicks in support. (What are the chances they'll do Stop Dragging My Heart Around?) I'm jealous, because Petty is pretty much top of my wishlist for artists I still haven't seen, but there's no way I could get to that gig. Even if I could afford it, I'm on holiday that week.

Maybe next tour, Tom, you won't just do one UK gig...

After the video, there's a silly little story I wrote a long, long time ago based on one of Tom's biggest hits...

1. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers - Learning To Fly

Learning To Fly

Jonathan started flying to work the day after the M62 pile-up. Two lorries, five vans and fourteen cars, three of which were indisputably Audis. He didn’t get home ‘til after nine. Missed Property Ladder with Sarah Beeney, which Jess had asked him to video because they were doing Sheffield, so he caught hell from his girlfriend on top of everything else.

He was sick of it. The delays. The queues. The road rage. The utter lack of… civility. The vanity plates with their 4’s that were supposed to be A’s and 7’s straightened into T’s. The off-white vans with ‘I wish my wife was as dirty as this’ and ‘She is, mate’ finger-written on the back. The way that whenever you left a decent stopping distance on the motorway, some arsehole always pulled into it. The taxi drivers. The skip wagon drivers. The motorcyclists. And, yeah, the Audi drivers. Eight years he’d been doing this journey now, to and from a job that wasn’t worth half as much effort, and he couldn’t take it anymore. So the next day, he left his car at home and flew. It took him just over quarter of an hour, from Huddersfield to Leeds, as the crow flies. After that, he was kicking himself – why hadn’t he ever thought of this before?

            He tried to calculate his average speed by putting a ruler on his Big AA Road Atlas of Britain (pages 64 & 65 – rather annoyingly, his exact destination lay smack in the centre binding), but got pissed off because he couldn’t figure out the simple mental arithmetic that’d allow him to work out miles per hour. Throwing the Atlas across the living room, he knocked over the Aloe Vera plant on the windowsill, spilling soil down the back of the radiator. Genius! Similarly, he struggled to estimate the average height of his flight-path – high enough to be mistaken for a bird from the ground, he reckoned, but not so high he was in any danger of headlonging the jumbos circling for Manchester Airport. He half expected to be spotted lifting off, exiting every morning through the dormer window in the attic (riddled though it was with bastard woodworm) but he soon gave up worrying. People round here, they kept their eyes to the ground. Nobody looked up, not in this street. As for his landing, he touched down as a rule on the multi-storey carpark across from work. It rarely got so busy that anyone was parking on the top floor before nine.

            Bad weather could be a problem – but it had been when he was driving too. He didn’t get any wetter than if he were riding a bike to work, and he carried dry office clothes in his backpack, arriving in plenty of time to change in the Gents, even after that glorious extra half hour in bed. The rain didn’t bother him so much – OK, it bothered him shitloads, but he kept trying to tell himself it was invigorating. He thought about those crazy octogenarian Norwegians he’d seen in that documentary on Channel 5, starting each day with a naked dip in the icy fjord. They said it was good for you!

Low cloud was a pain though – not only was it like flying through a sauna (except one where the steam was freezing), but sometimes he ended up heading in the wrong direction entirely. One time he was halfway to Burnley, and only a near-collision with the Stoodley Pike monument set him right. Having broken a bone in his toe kicking the top of the monument in one hundred feet high dudgeon, he couldn’t put weight on that foot for a month, and really had to watch his landings.

            After a while, he started to take it for granted. Discovering he could fly had been an incredible moment (tapered by the irritating idea that if it’d always been possible, only he’d just never tried it before… he’d wasted so many unnecessary years walking, driving, and catching the bus), but that was as far as it went, and soon Jonathan wanted more. He tried out a few other incredible capabilities – breathing underwater, shooting laser-beams from his eyes, sending horny messages to Jess via telepathy – but nothing else took. It was the lack of physical strength that niggled him most, and not just because he should have been able to boot the top off that fucking monument… but because Jess wanted a lift.

            “Go on then, Storkman – take me for a fly!”

            But he couldn’t get off the ground with Jess in his arms, couldn’t even feel the boost from the soles of his feet.

            “You saying I’m too heavy?”

            “No… not at all. I couldn’t lift a skinny lass either…”

            So there was another argument. She wanted him to fly her to Paris. But even if he had been able to lift her, he didn’t think he could fly that far in one journey. He’d had to stop and rest for an hour in Kettering on his way to see Eric Clapton at Alexandra Palace (saved fifty quid on the train fare though!). What’d happen if he ran out of propulsion halfway across the Channel? Not that it really mattered, he had very little desire to go to Paris without Jess anyway (actually, he had very little desire to go with her, other than to stop her moaning about all the blasted romance – and was that any reason to do anything?) Anyway, after that, the flying really became an issue between them.

            “Maybe if you worked out – developed some kind of upper body strength – the stork could become an eagle…”

            But he wasn’t going to join a gym for anybody. And when Jess bought him the dumbbells from Argos, he lost it completely.

            “If you’re not happy with me physically, then sod off and find somebody else!”

            So she did. And two nights later, the police were at his door, with a warrant  for his arrest. His solicitor told him not to worry; the CPS couldn’t even decide what to charge him with. Public nuisance? Flying without a pilot’s license? Common assault was suggested, but no-one could take that very seriously. There was absolutely no precedent.

            “I haven’t assaulted anyone!” Jonathan protested.

            “They could try and argue,” his solicitor explained, in a drab, windowless office that really needed a good dusting, “that you’re putting anyone who witnesses you in the act of… ahem, ‘flying’… in direct fear of imminent force or criminal attack… though first the prosecution would have to demonstrate malicious intent on your part, or a propensity for violence which…”

            Jonathan hoped nobody had seen him booting the top of the Stoodley Pike monument; or kicking hell out of his neighbour’s dustbin that time it’d blown over, spilling yoghurt pots and teabags (how many teabags did that tosspot get through in one week anyway?) all over their shared back yard; or putting a brick through the windscreen of the green Audi with the ever-shrieking car alarm that was always parked on the end of their street, but didn’t seem to belong to any of his neighbours; or knocking over the temporary traffic lights up Scapegoat Hill that’d been stuck on red three nights running; or…

            In the end, he struck a deal. No more flying to work, and no charges would be pressed. MI5 wouldn’t be informed and The Sun wouldn’t be given his home address. Jonathan was resigned to the outcome; he’d always known it was too good to last. But he couldn’t go back to queueing on the M62 every morning, so he quit his job and went on the dole, supplementing his income while he waited for the first benefits payment to come through with various activities that he refused to feel any shame about. They’d driven him to it, after all, the bird-burglary (as opposed, you see, to cat-). Well, if they had him down as a bad guy anyway – why not?

He was cautious now though, taking care only to pursue such activities on dry nights, with no moon, so nobody would see him entering via the unlocked skylights, bedroom windows, and twelfth floor flat balconies that led to his loot. Wet nights, he stayed in and watched stolen DVDs.

            As for Jess, apart from the time she had to call out the chimney sweep to extract the dead stork from her flue, she never heard from Jonathan again. No great loss there. Her new bloke worked for Ryan Air, and flew her anywhere she wanted.