Where are the other 98?

[faustus]

I was reading Iain M. Banks's The Player of Games in bed yesterday morning, when I heard a flapping sound. It turned into one of those days when you never quite get up. I'd woken at 7.14, which is to say a minute before my alarm would have gone off had I set it, and I figured I had the choice over either dozing through Broadcasting House if I wanted to hear it, or listening to every word if I decided I wanted more sleep. I managed a little sleep through the programme that was on, but the Sunday service woke me and I went to start doing computer things and plot whether I could read two Iain M. Banks novels that day.

A bath seemed a good idea, which gave me chance for about fifty pages of Player, and then I went back to bed. I heard a flapping, but thought nothing of it. I assumed it was a crow, or at the very least a magpie, and that I could have chosen more suitable reading. I put the last quarter of an hour of The Archers on, but decided that I could live without Desert Island Discs, and went back to reading. Only a hundred or so pages left to go, and I've probably time to do them before the repeat of Just a Minute.

Flap, flap.

Eventually I get up and cautiously peer through the curtains, not wishing to expose myself to the pub opposite. I can't see any birds, but my eyes adjust to the light, and see that there is a balloon caught in the telephone wires right outside my window. It's close enough to touch, if I had a big stick, which I do as it happens, but I don't suppose that would do any good. Much of the last few weeks I've been battling with the dawn chorus for sleep, and I figure this is going to drown it out.

Flap, flap.

I don't suppose it's going to decompose in a hurry, and the wind seems to be tangling it up more rather than less. Fortunately, by the time I got home from the pub at 1am, it had tangled enough so that it could not flap any more. Result, I guess. This morning I thought it had gone, blown away in the wind, and perhaps melted in the rain. No such luck - it has merely blown along the wire and is flapping again. We'll see what happens when it hits the telephone pole.