HAN SOLO

Swimming pool acoustics. ATMs. Escalators. Nothing of interest anywhere. I bet they have nothing by Durkheim in the bookshop. (I'll ask for the laugh.) People, unattractively good looking and numerous. Hollister. Harvey Nichols. House of Fraser. Nama. Austere couture. I could have sworn I saw an imperial stormtrooper. My mate calls this place the Death Star. I met her for coffee on the fourth floor balcony. I couldn't see her and that's how I knew it was her. Her voice emitting behind a tower of purchases. She spoke of fit celebrities and favoured restaurants. She cast doubt on welfare recipients. She made frequent mention of her sundry achievements. 'I guess as a person, you could say I'm kind of driven.' And that's when I felt driven to do something.

I stood on my chair and jumped on the table. Then I placed a foot on the balcony rail. She screamed beyond her shopping as I escaped the Empire's clutches, plummeting down and away from consumer dismay. As Han Solo once said – 'boring conversation anyway'.

Daphne

We used to keep a big cow in our yard called Daphne. I liked that cow a lot and used talk to her until the sun went down. My relationship with my father was difficult. He was ...distant. He'd just kind of stare at you and when you looked back at him he'd turn his eyes away with something you might mistake for disdain.

Anyway, one day I was in the yard talking to Daphne about Star Wars and my father appears at the kitchen window. "Get to bed, you're going to need your energy for your birthday tomorrow" he says, so I hop to it. "Oh boy, my birthday." The next day I get home from school to find my dad making a big old barbecue. The biggest barbecue I ever saw. Everyone was there, my cousins and uncles and aunts, and everyone from the co-op, all wearing huge dirty napkins around their necks and eating up. "Keep eatin' you guys, plenty to go 'round" my father roared as he deposited great racks of meaty rib and greasy hamburger onto everyone's plate. We ate everything. We ate everything right up and then, belly full, I scampered off to talk to Daphne about Tron but she wasn't in her part of the yard. "Where's Daphne papa?" I ask my old man and he looked at me, with something that might've been a sneer, ...but it was hard to tell, it always was hard to tell with him. "That cow?" he says, "oh, ...she got hit by a train."

It was a few years later that I moved to the city and discovered The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.