I screamed, bringing the relatives running, and setting the dogs off howling in sympathy.
‘She’s blown a circuit, man,’ I heard my computer-wrangling nephew whisper. ‘Maybe the complete hard drive.’
‘Nah, she’s just seen something she didn’t like on the telly,’ said my son, keeping his wits about him, wresting the remote from my rigid fingers and, with a practised motion, switching channels. ‘Tea and Tim Tams should fix it.’
Later I was able to report that I’d seen the scariest thing on TV, something that summed up the whole damn Area 51-ing, X-filing, grassy-knolling, crop-circling shebang. Little did Rupert’s illuminati pals know that a clue for the masses had slipped under their Echelon monitors when a hardly-known and less-watched craft program on the Odyssey channel let slip part of the Big Plot, the one where we all forget how to read anything but self-help books and the phone bill.
The program was Treasure Makers, and they were teaching you how to use a book for its proper purpose, which was not reading but, according to a ‘craftsman’, as domestic knick-knackery. The genial hostess advised all us housewives to go to second-hand bookshops and ask for the pretty, old ones, with the hard backs. ‘Most of them can’t give them away,’ she beamed. Then you take them home and by divers evil arts turn them into lamp bases, photo frames and, oh, irony—bookends. Craftsman grinned as he drilled through Fowler’s Modern English Usage, placing it at the top of the book corpses.
Some books you want to keep, of course: I couldn’t see the bookend choices, but I imagined Anna Karenina and Ulysses, drilled, glued and gelded to provide a support for Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, The Liver-Cleansing Diet, The Celestine Prophecy and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It was the worst viewing moment in 2003 and it had plenty of competition.
Whatever else the record-keepers tell you about 2003, the hottest, the direst, etc. (I meant to type ‘driest’, but let it stand, let it stand), this year has been the shortest on record. My records, that is. You know how you find yourself in the supermarket scowling at those damn Easter eggs that pop up straight after the January sales, only to be reminded by a pitying checkout chick that it’s March already? Well, the whole year has been like that. My biorhythms must be slowing down (just