‘I don’t usually do this sort of thing,’ smiles Jess.

‘What, kill people?’

‘Oh no, I do that all the time. I just don’t usually tell them beforehand.’

Alfie Twitch, strapped to his own desk chair, rubs his wrists against the black plastic bin-ties. He looks up at the large landscape painting of London’s skyline that hangs on his wall and realises for the first time how ugly it is. Purple daubs of cloud hang low over St Paul’s. He thinks of the day he bought it, how important it was to him that he owned it, how he has never stopped to really look at it, and he feels ridiculous.

He looks at the desk, handmade to his own specifications by a couple of hipster carpenters operating out of an alley in Kennington, and dizzied by this rare moment of introspection, vomits into the paper bin. Wiping his mouth, he looks down at the chair he is sitting in, bought in great excitement from an artisan place off King’s Road and he starts to laugh, because he doesn’t know how else to react to the level of meaning he has attached to these inanimate objects.

Jess eyes him with irritation.

‘You’re having some manner of epiphany, aren’t you?’ she says. Alfie nods. ’Well, this is very annoying.’

**

The latest Alfie Twitch update was brought to you on a stinking hangover after my cousin’s 40th. Happy Birthday dude.