Modern Loneliness/Modern Warfare.

There is a strange melancholy in finishing your work for the night and then, because you're on your own that evening and aren't ready to go to bed, logging onto the server of a multiplayer shooter which was very popular ten years ago and which you used to regularly play with your brother as a means of staying in touch while you were living overseas. The server's empty now, the players have all moved on. But you're still bored and at a loose end, so you log onto the same old deathmatch you always used to log onto when the game was full. You wander around for a while in the generic Middle Eastern market square where you remember calling in a hundred heli-strikes and taking a thousand head-shots, and it feels a little bit emotional, this walk through a deserted make-believe place, this fantasy gleaned from the imaginative parameters of a server that has been left running out of sheer indifference, quietly consuming its megabytes of bandwidth in nibbles and pecks all over the world like some vast indifferent mind. You explore a little, try getting to some inaccessible places you couldn't ever access before, because that's where everyone wanted to go and you'd always get shot before you even managed to lie down. You fire off a couple of rounds, and they echo back at you from the surrounding buildings, perhaps a little mournfully. You switch weapons, wonder who's haunting who. Up in the eagle's nest, you gaze down at the main thoroughfare and think about the good old days. And then – then some total bastard sneaks up behind you and cuts your throat.  

Reference Back.

I feel like kids today are pretty lucky in what they learn about at school. I mean, when I went to school, dark matter wasn't something we learned about. It was what we had for lunch, or what some of us thought we were made of, if we'd been listening to The Cure. Also, the computers we used back then had the same amount of memory as today's calculators and the calculators had no memory at all, due to the fact that they were small piles of stones or bone shards. 

Bleak House.

I am currently doing some work which obliges me to wear a suit. This bothers me because whenever I wear a suit, I'm convinced that there's a faint yet unmistakeable whiff of the Victorian counter clerk about me, the kind of character who has a dewdrop permanently wavering from the end of his nose, ink-spots on all his shirt fronts, cuffs too long for his coat, broken shoes and a collar perennially poking up at one side like the secretary bird in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. No matter where I am or what I'm doing, for as long as I remain so attired, my mind's eye pictures me thus, cramped in the front parlour of some crooked Chancery lawyer's rooms while my master spends his days loitering around the courts waiting for a nice fat legacy to prey upon – and I, at the end of my long day, retire to the Magpie and Stump to drink thimblefuls of gin and complain with my equally unloved and unlovable peers.

My Toy Gun.

I can still remember the exact weight of my toy gun, the way it fitted snugly into the palm of my hand. Actually, I can remember everything about it. The way the hammer pulled back and snapped to. The way you pulled out the pin to release the quick loader and then span it and snapped it shut. It was so light, just a few pieces of black plastic held together with glue and a couple of screws. It was nothing like the real guns I've held. Those were solid and heavy and murderous. In my mind, it was stored in the same compartment of pleasure as all my favourite sweets, synonymous with chocolate and coloured foil and cola bottles. When I held it, I was the Green Berets and Blackbeard and Murdoch from The A-Team all rolled into one. I would sit and wait in the fir tree for hours, keeping watch over the garden, protecting my parents from the nameless yet awful peril lurking just over the horizon. The funny thing is, I don't think there was any fantasy of violence associated with the gun. I didn't want to hurt anyone with it. I just wanted to be a goodie till bedtime. 

Neil Gaiman's Black and White World.

Ah, Neil Gaiman: child prodigy of the comics world, cuddly, artfully tousled millionaire, open relationship renegade and Registered Trademark owner of the intriguing Byronic jacket photo.

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