I slept in late the next morning so I was relieved to remember that it was the weekend. As it turned out, I needed to have my wits about me as I emerged from the bedroom. Dog had been lying in ambush, concealed by the doorway of the bathroom. She charged out, pounced on a patch of carpet just in front of my foot and waved a curled paw twice in quick succession as a warning shot. She darted away almost as fast, stopped and fell to her side near the top of the stairs, paws raised, the embodiment of fluffy menace.
"Hello, Ninja cat," I said. She watched with indignant scorn as I went downstairs without meeting her challenge to combat. "You win this time, but I will have my revenge!" I called back to her as I went. I enjoyed these encounters so I didn't want her to lose interest.
I intended to make the most of the weekend. After breakfast, I sorted the laundry before visiting the supermarket to stock up ready for next week. Then I popped into town to buy some tools that I needed to do some DIY jobs about the house. I looked at some t-shirts in a clothes shop and wondered if I was weird because none of the slogans or designs seemed to apply to me. If I had been a surfer, it would have been a very different story. But i'm not a surfer so I would make do with my collection of black t-shirts at various stages of fading for another year. As I walked home, I kept a tally of everyone that I saw who might plausibly be a surfer. There weren't many but then, they might have all been at the seaside
My checklist was ticked. The world was my oyster. From the hallway I could see Dog looking glumly out of her catflap and followed her gaze to see that it had started raining. As I entered the living room, it occurred to me that my checklist probably ought to have been longer. It was in, what many people would call, a terrible mess. I preferred to think of it as being in a state of high entropy: the measure that Physics uses to describe disorder. I half wondered if it might be a good time to tidy up before the other half dredged up a dim memory of the second law of thermodynamics: that in a closed system, entropy must always increase. Was I ready to fight the laws of Physics?
I shifted a couple of pizza boxes from the sofa to make room for me to sit, added them to the teetering stack on the coffee table and switched on the TV. Flicking between the channels, I settled on a snooker game between two players who I didn't recognise. The one at the table (Michael) was starting to lose his hair at the temples and had opted to shave the whole lot off perhaps to show that he had no fear of his encroaching baldness. The other (Lee) had applied a liberal amount of hair product creating the impression that he had been standing sideways in a wind tunnel immediately before stepping into the arena.
After a messy and unsatisfactory opening exchange, it was Lee who started to restore order to the table. Restlessly chalking his cue and titivating his hair between shots, he heroically defied the so-called second law of thermodynamics. It struck me that my house could be spotless if I created a complicated point system for the housework and colour coded the cleaning utensils. Perhaps it would catch on and professionals would invent flamboyant hoovering manouvres to impress awestruck audiences.
The rhythmic clack of the balls and the whispered voice-over had a soporific effect and, near the end of the break, my mind yawed away at a peculiar angle. As the cue set the white ball off in a tiny cloud of blue chalk, I saw its every revolution in extraordinary detail as it hurtled toward the black: the anticipation in the distorted reflection of the audience's faces; Michael's expression of resignation; the bright studio lights above. In my mind's eye the ball exploded into hundreds of smaller balls of many different colours with a searing flash of bright light as it struck it's target.
The applause of the crowd brought me round again with a start. It was still raining so I surrendered the rest of the afternoon to snooker.
Next: 4. Reflections
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