For seven years I denied myself the basic pleasures in life, though they sang to me, siren-like. Connie, my partner, was saving for our dream house. Week in, week out, I watched the office clock counting off the seconds of my life, until I could take it no longer. I spent one hundred and forty pounds on a designer shirt which extravagance was more than Connie could bare, so she left me.
That weekend I was a free man. I liberated my four pristine credit cards and my spree began. My appetite was a bottomless pit. Into it I poured the aristocracy of technology; I was a baronet, a viscount, a lord; I could see more pixels and at a faster rate than anyone who had not shopped in the past few months. I clothed myself in designer labels and holidayed in designer locations until my credit cards, with whom I was now married, withdrew my right to spend—and once again I was imprisoned.
Our honeymoon was over and I returned to monitoring the progress of the office clock. Nine months passed, each week only seeming to nourish my growing debt, as if my heavy heart were fuelling its growth. Money and soul. Neither seemed tangible, so perhaps they shared the same currency and one grew stronger at the expense of the other.
“You’re always so cheerful,” said Jessica, who sat at the desk opposite mine.
It was true; I was now a happily married man. I was married to my debt and had decided to put on a brave face.
“Yes,” I said, “What’s there to not be cheerful about?”
“Wish I knew your secret.”
I looked back to my screen and carried on working, an apparently content employee. By now I had even stopped watching the office clock and my face remained fixed in a smile for hours at a time, until a passing comment would remind me to adjust my expression. Life seemed to endlessly amuse me—for, after all, I was now a happily married man. And my humour knew no bounds. Only last week the Department conducted their annual staff psychometric testing. In answer to every question I ticked the most untrue box and floated out of the room with the satisfaction of a job well done.
Jessica said, “You’re at it again; you can’t stop smiling.”
Two days later, Herbert Singer called me into his office to discuss my test results. He closed the door and turned the key in the lock. Somehow this amused me. He had imprisoned us both in his small office. I looked to his window, expecting to see bars. In the distance, there was a descending shard of sunlight glimpsed through parting clouds, which then quickly extinguished the shard, as if discovering their mistake.

Sally Softly had an unusually large collection of tracksuits. The whole thing started two months ago when she suddenly noticed that Peter, her husband, was behaving strangely. He was not paying enough attention to her, so she (and she was quite within her rights to do this) she complained to him, saying, “You’re a selfish pig; you never think of anyone but yourself.”
For the next few days he watched her out of the corner of his eye, and when she had finally had enough of this, she told him, “Stop looking at me; I know what you’re thinking; don’t think I don’t.”
From then onwards he did not say another word but merely kept looking at her with his face contorted, as if in agony. From this, she deduced he was now trying to trick her into thinking she was ugly. But she was determined to not let him get the better of her, so whenever “doughnut” appeared on her shopping list, she would immediately scribble this out, write a further entry below it, drag herself out of her easy chair and stagger to the nearest sports shop to buy a tracksuit (which was the added item on her shopping list), so that she could use the tracksuit to counteract the side effects of eating doughnuts.
At 17 Misconception Boulevard, Sally was now standing in her living room, wearing one of these tracksuits. She watched her usual exercise‑spot on the carpet, when she recalled Peter looking at her that morning with that look on his face. She reflected (—I’ll teach him to try to trick me into thinking I’m ugly—I’ll do some more exercise. Not that there is any excess weight on me, mind—because there isn’t—but—just in case. Then I’ll be so attractive—even more than I am now, because I’m already quite attractive—I’ll be so attractive, men will flock to me. And when Peter sees all these other men wanting me, he’ll then want me too but I’ll reject him—ha!).
She lay on that spot on the floor and endured ten minutes of absolute agony—throughout which she attempted to pluck up the courage to begin using the tracksuit. She then raised her legs into the air—with much groaning and shuddering—and her feet kicked about wildly above her, like delirious hatchets massacring a roomful of imaginary people. She did this for fifteen whole seconds, then her legs dropped to the floor and she gasped alarmingly.