My mind had been caught out and now it was confabulating. It was confabulating like crazy. It was trying to fill all the empty space and there was a lot of it. It wasn’t the friendly type of space either – it was terribly, terribly unfriendly and there was an awful lot of it. More space than I knew what to do with. More space than anyone would know what to do with, I imagine. What the hell are you supposed to do with space anyway? That’s what I keep asking myself. Space – who wants it? Who needs it? I don’t remember asking for all this damn space. The space was catching me out. It was keeping me on the hop. I was trying to tile it all over and I wasn’t making a very good job of it. Isn’t that an amusing image – me with my boxes of tiles beside me and my big plastic tub of tiling grout, sticking them up and sticking them up and gaps appearing everywhere all the same. The faster I work the more gaps there are appearing. The whole thing is threatening to come undone – whole rows of tiles are falling off the wall and smashing to pieces on the floor around me. Only that’s a bad metaphor because there are no walls and no floor. I wish there was – there’s only me with my tiles and my tub of grout and all that space. There’s only the space and me trying to do a job on it. What’s so bad about space, you might ask. What’s so terrible about it. The thing about it is that it’s unfriendly space, as I have already told you. Real unfriendly space. Maybe you don’t get that. Probably you don’t. You’d have to be here really – it’s no good me just telling you about it and you sitting there in your proverbial armchair making your supposedly helpful comments. Nothing’s quite that easy when you’re actually up against it is it? It’s a different story then. Not the same at all. There’s just me with my grouting knife in my hand and all that hostile space. Reams and reams of hostile space. Space with teeth, you might say. Shark’s teeth. Little flat white triangles with points and serrated edges. Only not so little. And even when I say this I’m stretching the truth. I’m stretching it more than I can get away with, as it happens. All the verbosity I’m using, all the fine phrases I’m coming up with, all the metaphors that I’m so happily throwing around the place, they’re all just tiles. Just so many substandard tiles. They’re all part of my failed tiling enterprise! The thing is that when I say that there’s just me and my boxes of tiles on the one hand and all that hostile space on the other I’m not being strictly honest. The truth is that there isn’t ‘just me and all the space’ – there’s only the space that I am unsuccessfully trying to tile over. I’m just a sordid little lie that I’ve told myself. Why I don’t know. And the space isn’t hostile at all it’s just the truth. I’m just the result of my mind getting caught out and confabulating away in the stupid moronic way that it does…