And so at half past nine, almost inevitably, I woke up again. I rolled over for a moment in bed and when I next glanced at my watch on the bedside table, it was half past two in the afternoon. I knew it was afternoon because it wasn’t dark, and I’ve had a firm grasp of the concept of night and day since I was a relatively young man.
Seeing as it was half past two in the afternoon, I thought to myself, ‘Well, if it’s half past two in the afternoon I suppose I’d better get up. I expect a lot of people will have been up for quite a long while already.’ So I got up and headed over to the computer on the other side of my room, in order to find out what all my friends were up to.
I have a lot of friends on my computer. I know some of them personally, but others I don’t even know at all. Whilst I was waiting for the computer to load, I drummed the fingers of my left hand on the desk, and used the index finger of the other to remove dry crows from my left nostril. This was a satisfying diversion that helped to pass the time.
I eventually arrived at the page where my friends were. It turned out that one was combing his hair, another was laughing out loud for no apparent reason and another was pretending to be a cow, by typing the word ‘MOO!’ at half hourly intervals. I found this rather amusing, and it was at the very moment I was displaying my amusement by way of an almost invisible smile, that a strange man, surely well into his thirties, with orange hair and extraordinarily pointy features entered my bedroom.
‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What are they up to?’
I calmly told him what they were up to, particularly emphasising the cow impression which had so amused me, in the hope that he too would be amused by it. It didn’t seem to me that it was yet time to bring up the fact that I’d never set eyes on this man before and to ask him what he was doing in my bedroom.
‘Yes,’ he said, with a very sober expression on his face, ‘that is rather amusing. Imagine a cow typing ‘MOO!’ on her computer. It seems very unlikely. That’s why it’s so funny.’
Whilst he’d hit the nail on the head with his summation of the cow impression, his response greatly irritated me, and I suppose that was why I jumped up from my computer chair and rolled it towards him at extreme pace. He seemed unsurprised by my surprise attack and easily stepped out of the way of the chair, which rolled out of my bedroom door and crashed pathetically against the banister on the landing.
This created an awkward situation between us for a moment, but he didn’t dwell on it for long. He strode towards me and gripped me in a firm headlock. This really eased the tension and I immediately began to relax.
‘Would you mind at all,’ I asked, ‘if I wrote down what we’re up to here so all my friends can read about it?’
‘Not at all,’ he replied, and shuffled us over a little so I could reach the keyboard.
‘A man with orange hair and pointy features has me in a headlock. LMHDTS!’, I typed, before explaining to the man that ‘LMHDTS’ meant ‘laughing my head down the street’, but that it wasn’t necessary to actually do this, as it was just one of those humorous abbreviations used to fit in with people on the computer.
The man understood this perfectly, which further enhanced my opinion of him. I had already concluded that he was of above average intelligence.
‘So,’ he asked, ‘what do we do now?’
‘We just wait,’ I said. ‘The more comments we get, the better things will be for us.’
And so we waited there for a while, but received no comments. Then the man with the orange hair released me from the headlock and suggested that we should perhaps venture outside to pass the time before returning to look at the computer. As I’ve always enjoyed passing the time, I readily agreed and we set off out of my first floor flat, down the dark, untidy stairway, through the dark, untidy hallway and out of the ordinary looking front door.
However, upon reaching the pavement, we realized that it was a disgustingly sunny day and our faces and eyes were burning right up. We bowed our heads and ran straight over to the cellar bar across the road to avoid going up in flames.
We made it fairly easily and passed a good time in the bar drinking beers, lagers, spirits and wines for forty minutes exactly. I can say now that those were the best forty minutes of what turned out to be a busy day. We frowned upon other people in the bar, ate fistfuls of Bombay mix, had not an altogether uncomfortable chat with the barman about his social background and discussed serious matters with earnest expressions, making ‘but what can you do about it?’ hand gestures.
By the time it came to leaving the bar, I had become firm friends with Emmanuel Goliath (for he said that was his name, and I believed him). As we stopped by the door to steel ourselves for the dash back across the road through the sunshine, I wondered aloud what kind of comments we could expect from our computer friends when we got back.
‘If you don’t mind,’ he said carefully, ‘I won’t come back to the computer with you. It appears that I’d forgotten all about it and it’s quite possible that I’ve lost all interest now. I think I’ll just go home to bed so I can be fresh for things that may or may not occur in the future. But don’t worry,’ he continued, sensing my disappointment, ‘I’m sure we’ll bump in to each other in your bedroom very soon.’ This last part may have been a joke, but it was difficult to tell due to the constant sternness of his pointy face. He shook my hand and left, leaving me to face the dash home alone.
After legging it back to my flat and locking the door behind me, just in case, I thought it would be best to follow the wise Goliath’s example and go straight to bed. By now, it was half past three in the afternoon, a clear hour since I’d got up.
I sat in bed for a while smoking a cigarette before throwing myself down to sleep. Unfortunately, the cigarette had left me agitated, and I tossed and turned for a good two and a half minutes before deciding that there was absolutely no way sleep would come.
With a certain amount of frustration, I threw the bedclothes off and briskly tip-toed over to the computer. I’d have a quick look, just to see what people were doing now and to find out people’s reaction to the thing I had told them I was doing earlier.
I was pleased to find out that I had received a total of twelve comments, and only one of them was negative (‘What do you want?! A medal?! GWFA’ (grimacing with furious anger) from David K, who is an instinctively negative person). It obviously wasn’t as many comments as the cow impression had received, that was only natural, but it was still a good number and made me happy.
I finally returned to bed at a quarter past four, thoroughly exhausted by the day’s exertions. I drifted off with memories of the forty minutes in the cellar bar and the good reception for the thing I had written on the computer filling that happy period immediately before sleep.
Sadly, I haven’t seen Emmanuel Goliath since that wonderful day, although it’s true to say that I still occasionally hang around in my bedroom in the hope that I’ll bump in to him.