Lazy Boy

For two years my daydreams had been haunted by an image, more accurately a GIF, looping on the inside wall of my skull. It showed me slumped against the lip of the sofa in a rumpled shirt, hair matted, eyelids drooping, left temple propped on my curled fingers as I stared over the top edge of the TV screen. A ribbon of numbers and words, headline statistics of the June referendum or the November election or some monstrous hybrid of the two (farage edging electoral college), streaming indifferently across the screen’s base. Around me, scattered alongside misshapen aluminium takeaway trays slick with palm oil: a smartphone low on battery, a laptop low on memory, unsheathed pens set on the open, soiled, blank pages of a notebook…