“London is a big, big city with big, big men,

Who sit in offices and count to ten!”

The options were poles apart, the possible repercussions incalculable. Therefore, Fred Tyrrel decided to simplify everything down to the bone, ascertain the bottom line and logically remove any shreds of doubt.

Fred took a piece of clean paper, much as I have just done before attempting to set out this record of his ruminations, then shaped it neatly upon hia desk and measured it thoughtfully with the span of hir hands. Just the job, he said to himself, turning to me et the other desk with a smirk of triumph travelling diagonally across his pinched face. I tried to appear as if I were ignoring his manoeuvres with the office stationery, by bending over my own with mock-intensity.

It needed all my powers of mind projection actually to look through his eyes as if they were portholes, upon the blank lined paper squarely before him on the lilac green blotter.

Strange, it surely was, to suffer someone else’s writers-block: the blaring white of the A4 grew almost unbearable, searing as it did the very medium to which I had consigned my consciousness. However, he soon placed pen to paper (to rule the box grids for his tolerances, margins of error, potentials for synergy, rounding differentials, windows of statistical opportunity, top & bottom slicing of returns for median efficiency and, finally, the inevitable bravado guesses) and, consequently, I felt myself relaxing into a more laid-back, devilmaycare attitude.

…until I saw the error. It stared out at me: a sore thumb with the curling back of the quick like the eroded feeler of a large foreign insect. The error was in an insignificant box halfway down the third column, between the ballpark trends and the brainstorming projections (oh ho, that was a bit too close for comfort?), and I thought it must be blindingly obvious to Fred, too.

But he forged on: the whole set-up becoming infected by that one statistical Quirk, confusing all the figures into one conglomerate non-truth, causing all the itemisations to dance before Fred’s bleary eyes. He looked around appealingly at me, but I continued to pretend to ignore him. I was enjoying this.

…until (horror!) I realised that the Quirk had even infiltrated the media ways and I was trapped inside his head: the pen in his hand took off far too glibly for its own good, forgetting all the margins and tabulation frames, and even scrawling beyond the confines of the white paper on to the blotter. It was only fitting that the word “blotter” itself appeared on the blotter ... I suppose...