In isolation, one of the holes in the phone's plastic looks like a full stop. An exclamation mark is a full stop with a cockatoo's crest. Full stops, three full stops. Had you been waiting for me to finish your sentence and to join the dots? Lichtenstein or Seurat or the sign of a therefore's stacked notation, used to indicate the conclusion of a

His voice was still a whisper and it sang with alcohol. 'She worms into you the way that smoke gets into your hair.' He nodded and would not stop nodding until I nodded too.

The thrown pyjamas get halfway to the spider then crumple in mid-air. They become floor and, in the same way that a black cat's yawn can cause a sudden new colour and potential violence to a scene, your crumpled silk pyjamas change the room entirely. They sprawl a glowing chalk outline on the carpet.

I don't know a thing, I wanted to say. I am not very clever but I am affectionate about knowledge. Let's start there.

I have a doctor of my very own who is paid by a multinational pharmacy to investigate my case and observe how I cope with it. He tells me that a number of people experience similar synaesthetic aspects—they associate colours with days of the week, for example, or endure specific tastes when they hear certain sounds. My condition, however, is

And —you should never start sentences like that, I know, but what's a sentence, really, if not time spent alone—

acetabula et calculi

Irritatingly, he did not seem to want to help me with the etiquette of the situation, however, and as I hunched on the plastic seat he shot me a look that tasted of mackerel and grapefruit.

The Brothers Grimm wrote a huge, popular dictionary that outsold all their famous monster tales—with its first edition reaching something like eight volumes it was far from itsy-bitsy. They wrote a fairy story that began "A SPIDER and a FLEA dwelt together in one house, and brewed their beer in an egg-shell". Since reading that at an impressionable