While my laptop was being fixed, my parents decided to keep up with the neighbours by constructing a Faraday cage around the house.
By which I mean, a sodding tonne of scaffolding. For no apparent reason. The first hint came when, upon picking me up from York's Answer To The Middle Class (Fulford), my father looked at a loft conversion taking place across the road. He glared for about 25 seconds and then uttered "We're getting one of those." Considering that the last two times I had come home I had been told nothing had happened of any note and that my hovel was status quo, and considering this was a terrible lie (new kitchen, new front room, new bathroom, coal-fire place, new television with cable and more channels, same parents with wires and less organs etc.) I thought this was a great leap forward in the honesty stakes.
"You're finally getting the loft done?"
"No!" was the rather anxious but exasperated reply. "We're getting SCAFFOLDING."
Oh, obviously. Everyone else on this street is making do with their own homes, obeying exactly what the adverts have ordered to the letter. So scaffolding is in now, the latest accessory for the clattering classes.
Clattering? Well, yes. It was basically constructed around me while I slept. It sounded like World War VII and looked like a cross between a mobile prison and the kind of platforms built for extra-intrusive fly-on-the-wall documentary, but I simply couldn't care so I submerged myself back into my pillow and waited to wake up dead. Or, worse, famous.
By which I mean, a sodding tonne of scaffolding. For no apparent reason. The first hint came when, upon picking me up from York's Answer To The Middle Class (Fulford), my father looked at a loft conversion taking place across the road. He glared for about 25 seconds and then uttered "We're getting one of those." Considering that the last two times I had come home I had been told nothing had happened of any note and that my hovel was status quo, and considering this was a terrible lie (new kitchen, new front room, new bathroom, coal-fire place, new television with cable and more channels, same parents with wires and less organs etc.) I thought this was a great leap forward in the honesty stakes.
"You're finally getting the loft done?"
"No!" was the rather anxious but exasperated reply. "We're getting SCAFFOLDING."
Oh, obviously. Everyone else on this street is making do with their own homes, obeying exactly what the adverts have ordered to the letter. So scaffolding is in now, the latest accessory for the clattering classes.
Clattering? Well, yes. It was basically constructed around me while I slept. It sounded like World War VII and looked like a cross between a mobile prison and the kind of platforms built for extra-intrusive fly-on-the-wall documentary, but I simply couldn't care so I submerged myself back into my pillow and waited to wake up dead. Or, worse, famous.
