Spring Club Offers

I'm defending the house against furniture. The place I once ordered some from now seems to think I won't last a week without buying some more. Like it's bread. To entice me into another purchase of a lifetime they send me pictures of rooms it looks like no-one lives in. Small fluorescent paragraphs outline the tragedies associated with failure to spend. I didn't buy this sturdy and fragrant end table and now I have tuberculosis. / There's nothing made of oak in my kitchen, I have completely lost my mind.

Squish

Kids in Lidl shouted Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi at each other and prodded donuts unforgivably. The SWAT team asked them not to come back. Sliced mature cheddar was 99p. Improbable hashtags hung from the ceiling next to photos of meat. I piled packets and boxes of what I didn't go in for between my arms and chin. A goblin asked its dad what's for dinner and he said orange juice. Tubby magazines flopped their guts out next to the wine. That guy from that time in the pub slapped a divider on the conveyor belt. I thanked him profusely in five languages while we waited a couple of hours for a problem to dissolve.

Now Don't Be Alarmed

The crisps really look like they're having a great day at the pool, leaping from the diving board into the sour cream and the spring onion confetti, with a cosmic slipstream stretching up through the three in the air to the last one left, on the board, clearly trembling. Maybe having realised that after the cream comes being smashed between teeth and swallowed out of existence. It's hard to tell. The peppercorn-eyed and mouthless overseer at the top doesn't seem surprised by either the leaping or the trembling.
I phoned the info line and crunched worriedly at them. All they said at first was sir, sir, sir. It was remarkable how they could tell my gender from the I'm not sure but probably tone, frequency, and rhythm of the crunches. By the time I'd eaten half the pack I'd been passed to a manager, who sang a de-escalatory lullaby that had a list of compensations for its chorus. I couldn't get enough.

Gesture Average Grandstand

After I went to the laundrette our washing machine at home turned peculiar. The next time I used it, it span all my clothes together into one big sock. I threatened it with the scrapheap, told it it'd end up as the insides of a post-apocalyptic clown-car on some zoom-boom TV show with everyone laughing while it became smithereens. That night we left the back door open and it waddled out from under the counter, through the garden and into the alley. We later heard from the neighbours that it was trying to form a gang with all the homeless devices. But it was unsuccessful and in the morning I coaxed it back inside and apologised even though I hadn't done anything wrong. I fed it some bedsheets and it sloshed them around all day and started beeping just as I was going to sleep. I apologised again and said the going-to-the-laundrette thing was a one-time-only deal, I was desperate, a bit drunk maybe, it's not the kind of thing I usually do, ask anyone. And it just beeped and beeped and beeped. And I unplugged it and it began to screech. So I dragged it into the street and destroyed it with a sledgehammer.

Lionlike Unwifed

Next door like to scrape and knock. It happens at night and in the morning and they take a break when you leave the house. If you're lying in bed it sounds like someone you've wronged is at the back door. It's good to have a detailed fear. After a million tiny wallops there won't be a wall left. They'll get brick dust in the soup. We've drawn circles and times for when and where we think the first head or hand will burst through. There's good odds and a webcam and I think I might get rich.

Fruit Blues

One of the kitchens I work in has an unstoppable radio. It's bulbous and grey and I stab it with the big cabbage-cutting knife and it takes no notice. It's a non-digital radio and so in the daytime it can either be silent or make a terrible sequence of noises. The most heart-maiming of these noise sequences is a thing called The New Single from The Prodigy.
"The New Single from The Prodigy" used to be an exciting idea. Like "Broadband". Or "Manchester". But nowahours: Are you shitting me? Am I being shat?
Often it comes on while I am making the "Apple, Grape and Celery" salad, which I've never sliced an apple into, ever, because there's never been an apple in the building. There's apple on the menu, there's a delivery every morning, but there's never an apple on any shelf. It's a soul-pummeling visual metaphor for the lack of depth and flavour in Liam Howlett's recent output. The buffet does not deliver what the menu offers. But people still pay for it.

Face It In The Morning

The flat's on the eighth floor of an eight-floor building. The Spar is at the bottom just by the side entrance and sometimes in the afternoon I buy only half the beer I know I am going to need to drink that day so that at the halfway stage I have somewhere to go, and maybe some rain on the face and an impulse purchase. Sometimes when I go to do this I leave the door to the flat unlocked in the hopes someone on the same floor might wander in, in their socks, with a glass in one hand, holy macaroni just seeing who's around. I never leave the ground floor side door unlocked though because there is a don't-let-the-burglars-in notice. There was a theft recently because someone'd propped it open while going to Spar. When they returned with their bags all the flatscreens had gone and they were left with rectangular light patches on the walls with two holes where the bracket screws had been.
Once when I got back the lights in the hall were off and I couldn't remember whether or not I'd switched them off before I went out, so I didn't know whether to be worried, so I was worried and started composing plinky unease-themes in my head while I was taking my coat off, and I went through to the kitchen and the TV was on, I couldn't see it but I could hear a local weatherwoman predicting slight chances of everything for tomorrow, and I thought anyone who's intruded here will have the upper and the lower hand and will be able to completely outwit or overpower me, whichever is needed, it won't be hard, so I got a big Japanese knife out of the drawer and held it in an unusual way that I thought might make me look like I knew how to wield a knife, and I got to the front room and the adverts were on and all the shadows were in their usual places and nobody was there.

Glass Hammers

There was a kitchen that didn't have a tin opener, and a kitchen that didn't have a tea towel.
The kitchen that didn't have the tin opener had no tin-opener for at least six months.
The kitchen that didn't have the tea towel had no tea towel for apparently a year.
I worked one day in both of them. They had a lot of tins and things that get wet.
No one knew where the one without the tea towel was. I'd been given directions to where it wasn't. There'd been some sort of google map postcode-coding error or GMPTE journey search function spasm, but I only realised when instead of arriving at the offices of a company, I arrived at nowhere in particular, and it was a large circle of townhouses probably all with a decent amount of tea towels in them.
People came out of the houses one at a time and I asked them where these offices might be, and none of them knew. And the woman in Londis didn't know, and the three girls at the hotel didn't know, and my bosses on the phone didn't know, and the guy in Topps Tiles didn't know.
The taxi driver knew, and he let me know too, and also let me know that traffic lights on roundabouts is a ridiculous idea.


Next week there will be a kitchen with no knives and a menu with no food. I will turn up in glasses with no lenses and a shirt with no buttons.
I tried to get a job with no pay. I think they call it "volunteering". There was a form. I filled it in and out. They said thanks, and then nothing happened.

Dimly Remembered Kitchens

It's a new thing in the Sunday fluff-and-horror supplements. Always feel disgusted after reading a Sunday paper but still do it once or twice a month.

one:
It had a hard wooden bench and the back door had a seven-foot drop outside it, probably, and I rode my trike off it once and that's my first memory. I peeled potatoes for the first time ever and sliced into my thumb but instead of going to hospital I had a Barney Rubble yoghurt.

two or three:
Peanut butter on toast with extra salt, why not, let's go nuts. Dry spaghetti from a jar on top of the fridge-freezer.

six or seven:
One hand in my pocket and cooking pancakes with the other, spectators deemed it a bit casual. Can't remember if they were any good.

four or five years later:
It had two ovens and twelve cupboards and one morning it was entirely covered in flour.

twenty something:
The ceiling fell in and it was appropriate. A bit of sweeping and carry on. Once and once only a poker night. A lot of drunken afternoons with whatever's left for lunch.

nearly thirty:
Freezing and narrow with the toilet at one end and a fridge full of guidelines. Separate vegetarian cutlery, fags on the back step, cheese on toast.

largest:
In work fifteen minutes early because the bastard never behaved. Very long matches and ninety nine for breakfast and on a Sunday they all turn up at eight fifty five expecting two sausages each.

bedsit:
Impossible to sleep while there's an oven in the same room. I was only visiting.

tennis tournament:
Sky sports eat heartily. We should've given them a trough. Washing up and a skin condition.

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Other one-page features to look out for in the coming months (not the ones that've just passed) include: My Marmite Face, Tragedies That Didn't Bother Me, What I Think About The Moon, The Longest I Have Gone Without Washing, and My Favourite Grey Things.