As I stand once more at the very edge of the gates of social transmogrification, it occurs to me that such change has oh-so-rarely provided the coq to a rich gaming coq-au-vin. When history’s none-lamented pawn Chamberlain returned, sans-hindsight, from that Munich debacle, waving, child-like, his hope-ridden “piece of paper”, few could have imagined such a sight would re-appear in modern analogue. In he walks – my commissioning editor here at WotR – all dress-to-the-left insouciant charm, waving aloft, like the freedom-plea banner of a Tiananmen student, his very own “piece of paper”. He greets me. I deign to lift but one crook’d finger of weary acknowledgement. It is then that dastardly bombshell of outrageous fortune shims from its graceful arc of bitter travail and lands upon my plain of work-reason.

Upon my desk sits his foul “piece of paper”:

“Dear Mr Pond

As you may be aware, we have been attempting to re-position WotR as a more mainstream read. There are various sensible commercial reasons for this move. We here at WotR have enjoyed your contributions of the past years and would like to thank you for the efforts made. However, it is felt that ‘Fuck Penicillin’ probably does not fit well with our new positioning, full, as it is, of the most God-awful wank. May we take this opportunity to wish you well in your chosen career.

Yours sincerely,
Chester Drawers
Commissioning Editor, WotR”

This, then, is the trick yellow-brick-road that has seen me delivered upon the steps, as some wave-lapped flotsam, of Putney Job Club. I did, of course, attempt to create that comforting barrier – so familiar from our time in the womb – an amniotic-fluid wall of music delivered to the cortex via that jewel of modern consumerality that is the iPod. But a proverbially London-red shithousian fellow relieved me of Apple’s curious fetishistic note-conveyer having first bundled my form into a fetid piss-scented alley adjacent to Superdrug. Ahhhh, but the howls of a wounded man. I bellow them to the ghosts of Pliney The Elder himself, my pride buried too under the molten rock and lava of a Putney/Pompeii twinning. He took my watch as well.

An image of true democracy

So it is… reducing ticket, grasped firmly into the purposeful hand of God, that I wait. Wait for the slow broken-clockwork movements of the system – your system – to move with ungracious jag’d slip. As I wait, consideration must be paid to the Dionysian contradiction that is shared low-social existence. The Chas of grubby-torn waiting-room seats, the Dave of grey-faced workers handing down sentence of politik to each shambling doley, the ‘Tottenham, Tottenham, We’re Gonna Stop Them’ of my own number sitting faceless, hidden and dark in my frightened hand. That all such things have yet to appear in the digitised maelstrom that is our modern gaming landscape. Save but cameo within the working-class cheer of a Full Monty or a Boys From The Black Stuff, such scenes have rare but entered the mainstream of entertainment tool.

My number. Those adjacent have slipped by and any hope of a Bobby Ewing shower-scene awakening have slipped with them. I proceed to my fate…

…benefit denied. I must eat soup.

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