Surreal stories

"Tell us a story, tell us a story, go on, tell us a story please"

"Come on - I know what you're up to - you just want to get out of going on the table"

"Go on - please - tell us a story - tell us a story - pretty please"

"What? Both of you? You both want a story? Well don't think it'll get you out of anything but while I have another coffee and a cigarette I'll tell you a story, Now, which one do you want to hear?"

"Tell us the surreal story!"

"Yes - the surreal story, please. please, please!"

"You mean the one about the lady with the flower growing from her heart?"

"No, no, not that one - the other one"

"Oh, the one about the ten thousand mile bicycle race and the Indian celebrated by Theophrastus?"

"No, don't be silly, no, not that one, that's got too much sex in it, the one about you in London!"

"Oh come, come, girls you know that that isn't a surreal story really. I've told you so before. It may seem so to you but it isn't it's true."

"Tell us about the big machines that take the millions and millions of people into London in the morning and then takes them out again every evening. Millions and millions of them."

"Trains you mean"

" ... tell us about the cage you had to sit in all day"

"The office, not the cage - though it felt like a cage sometimes"

" .. and how there was no sun so that you lived your whole life in the dark "

"But I don't understand, if it was dark all the time when did you work in the fields? How did Gill grow her lavender? Did you take your dogs to the beach in the dark?"

"OK, it's true that we got up in the dark and came home in the dark most of the year, or at least it seemed that way, but it wasn't because there wasn't any sun. And we didn't have a farm in London and there was no lavender"

"What about the beach? and the dogs?"

"Well. there was no beach nearby and we didn't have any dogs - we didn't have the time or the space for dogs ..."

"No dogs? That's not healthy. How did you manage to stay sane? What did you do in the cage? Couldn't you have taken a dog to the cage with you?"

"Office - it was an office - and dogs aren't allowed in offices. As for what I did all day well now that you ask, it sounds a bit odd, but I used to be paid to think. To have ideas about software for computers. To design big, complex, systems of hundreds of programs that worked together. I used to enjoy it I suppose."

"More than you enjoy it here?"

"No, not really but yes I did enjoy it and I was good at it but in retrospect it does look kind of surreal I guess."

"And Gill did the same stuff? When you didn't have a farm or dogs?"

"Yes she did but she was paid to organize lots of people to build the sorts of software systems that I was paid to think up"

"So she worked in your office with you?"

"No, we worked in separate offices a long way apart - both in London but a long way apart. OK girls, I've finished my coffee now, enough questions - I'll tell you the story once we've all done some work ... OK?"

"OK"

"OK"