That boy needs therapy...

The sheets were wet when I woke up; cold, damp and somewhat smelly. A bit like paper wrapped around a mould-injected blue cheese that’s been in the fridge too long. I had been dreaming a pretty standard Orwellian nightmare about Telescreens and the like, you know how it is. It was probably because of that article I had yesterday about how little machines can track Bluetooth devices wherever they go; three days ago I gave up battling the technophiles who ridiculed me whenever I pulled out my prehistoric mobile, and went and bought a new one.

But I couldn’t help feeling that this time I wasn’t just being a borderline-schizophrenic; I swear a CCTV camera had actually followed me yesterday. Then, crossing at the lights as I walked onto the next street, another one on the next corner panned around to take up the duty. To be fair, who could blame them for wanting to keep an eye on me? I definitely ticked all of the 'typical subversive' boxes: on his way to buy milk and eggs, with foisty morning breath, stylish bed hair (that no amount of ‘surf-look’ hair product would ever manage), and the mandatory Sunday morning brain-rot of a hangover. Definitely a threat to the system, better keep me under surveillance to make sure I don’t jump on a soap box outside the corner shop and start a suburban revolution.

So yeah, that night I had gone to bed worrying that the white van man who had left his Transit parked half on/half off the curb in direct view of my living room window wasn’t the painter-decorator his flaking sign suggested. It made far more sense for him to be a member of some Gestapo-type organisation paid for by a slush fund for tackling the binge-drinking renegades (well, the yearly increase in alcohol tax has got to be invested somewhere doesn’t it, and NHS billboard advertising is obviously dying on its arse, so why not?). Anyone who can have that much fun on a Saturday night with utter disregard for either their health, their bank balance or the feeling in their mushed up brain as Sunday begins to turn into Monday is definitely a danger to the well oiled status quo.

Ok, So, maybe I don’t entirely believe that, but it’s easy to think it could all be happening in secret after reading a couple of those dystopian novels on every A Level reading list. I mean, really, didn’t the school psychiatrist have the foresight to realise what reading Brave New World at the age of 16 was going to do to my cannabis-sedated mind?! Now I'm in my mid-twenties and I'm waking up in the middle of the night to find the sheets insisting on sticking to my back as if I’m a zombie trying to elude the shrink-wrap machine in the Undead Butchers. I think I need therapy.