Chapter 10

Think! There are thousands of unwritten books out there. All you have to do is pick one. Any one! It could be the one for kids, about the ponderous goat who finds a questionably shaped carrot, but decides to befriend it anyway because that would teach the children to be accepting of  others (and the grown ups could laugh at the pictures). Or it could be the dark and intense thriller - the blind spy known only as ‘The Mole’, trapped in a cult-like covenant behind enemy lines. Two lovers meeting on a zeppelin ride before the whole affair is cut tragically short by some ill-fated technical fault and their story is lost to the annals of history. Just pick one!

Or…you could make a sandwich. Yes. Definitely the best remedy for a mental block. Sandwiches are relaxing. Almost musical. The warm, mellow tones of the peanut butter; the zangy brass stabs of the pickles; the short, satisfying poppy percussion hits of the sweetcorn; the overpowering and dissonant string crescendo of some properly mature cheddar and, holding it all together like culinary and musical glue, the mayonnaise bass line. All on a stage made of bread. Ah yes…sandwich jazz. Mmmm.

(Approximately twenty hours later, Dail was at the house of a slightly eccentric friend, when the jazz sandwich made a casual reappearance. This, however, required the use of the see-through/glittery toilet seat which, in Dail's honest opinion, was completely lacking in taste and not conducive to sitting on and having a pleasurable, private moment. Or movement. Or both.)

 A sandwich for my thoughts. Ok, how's about this one, bread gods: a book on how to do nothing. Become something of an expert in that. Wait...no. The reviewers would be all over it like wasps on bbq chicken.

"What Mr Dail has done here in his book "7 Steps To Doing Nothing", rather than usefully inform you how to do nothing, is to merely suggest (over the course of 634 pages) several different and debatably interesting ways in which to sleep, sit, prepare rudimentary snacks and wander about aimlessly, with only occasional references to self scratching. In order to truly do nothing one would have to be dead (depending entirely upon your views of the afterlife and its relative existence). Is Mr Dail then encouraging suicide and possibly even murder amongst his readers, whilst at the same time trying to incite some kind of religious or philosophical war? How dare he. This critic for one won't stand for it (or sit, as he so vilely suggests). I say we find out where this man lives and exert some vigilante justice in retaliation for this heinous attempt at disturbing the peace. The swine." ** - The Times Literary Supplement.

Swine? Swine?! Bastards. I'll have the last laugh because I'm not even going to write that book. Ha! Try poking holes in something that doesn't even exist. Except it's possible to do that with some things...like school toilet paper. That pretty much doesn't exist, even when it does.

Dail didn't hadn't noticed he was sitting on the stairs whilst eating his sandwich until he tried to get up and walk away; realising the amount of available floor space he had on either side of him that wasn't either lower or higher than the bit he was currently on was much less than he had anticipated. Another sneak attack by the stairs. First his toe, now his brain. Whilst he would easily admit that they had their uses, he was also often prone to loathing them; because they were often pulling mischievous, bastard-like stunts like this. Luckily, he had been sitting fairly close to the bottom of the stairs and felt that he could comfortably jump down to the floor, which he subsequently endeavoured to achieve. Unluckily, he forgot that his ex-sandwich had been on a plate, which was balancing on his hand waiter-style. At this junction, he was surrounded by nothing but air and moving briskly towards the ground floor - to cut out all the boring details, Dail lost a plate but found an old sock that he'd been looking for for a long time; such a long time that he'd thrown its partner away.