I’m trying to work out what other people are doing so I can do it as well. I’m listening in – on the sly – to what they’re talking about, trying to catch onto it. Trying to catch on, trying to latch on. The catch is in the latch. They all talk so very quickly though – they practically gabble. Their speech is like one long pressurized stream of gabble, a big long burst of it. They have so much to say, don’t they? So much to say and they’re so keen to say it. It’s baffling to me… I have to try to understand it though. I have to try to get in the loop somehow – it feels terrible not being in the loop like this. Being on the outside the whole time. What’s it all about? What’s it all about? Sometimes it seems to me like they’re twittering like birds, at other times barking like dogs. Small excitable dogs. The worst kind of dogs. Poodles on helium. All I can hear is the yap, the yappity-yap-yap of it. People are bursting themselves talking. They can’t contain themselves. Yipping and yapping and yipping and yapping. Howling like monkeys. Barking like sea lions. Gibbering like a troop of gibbons. Mewling like a sack-full of kittens. Sound and fury, signifying nothing, I quoted, remembering my Shakespeare. A tale told by an idiot. Or perhaps it should be a tale told to an idiot. The idiot in question being me. The idiot in question being yours truly. It should never have been allowed. Yours truly, an indignant viewer. Indignant in Tonbridge Wells. Exacerbated in Ealing Broadway. Beside himself in Berkhamsted High Street. Out of order in Otford. What’s the meaning of this outrage? How dare these people make fun of my predicament? How dare they make light of my discomfiture. Is that even a word? Should we allow it to be a word? Should we take steps to have it struck off the list? Should anything be allowed, for that matter? It’s all going a bit far, if you ask me. My thinking is a high-speed burst of gabble shot out of a gabble-gun. Recycled around and around in the gabble cyclotron. And then collided with a high energy burst of anti-gabble coming the opposite way down the tracks. Spewing short-lived debris in all dimensions whilst we try to discern the hidden secrets of the universe from the mess we have briefly created. What’s it all about? What’s it all about? What’s it all about? What’s it all about? A tale told to an idiot. The idiot in question being yours truly…