Pages From a Journal

It was another quiet evening yesterday, and today was a pretty ordinary day at work. The Union are balloting us all over strike action due to the pay dispute, so that will probably happen. On my way home I bought some milk and the latest issue of The List magazine, the local events guide, which I don't buy regularly just very occasionally to get some idea of what's going on.

When I got home I was readng a few short stories by Neil Gaiman. The first story was "Goliath", and was originally written to tie-in with the first of The Matrix films. It involves a man in 1980s London who realises that the entire world as he knows it is a computer generated simulation and the "real" world is a futuristic nightmare run by machines who have been secretly training him to fight off invading aliens. In "Pages from a Journal Found in a Shoebox Left in a Greyhound Bus Somewhere Between Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Louisville, Kentucky" a woman travels through America searching for a mysterious woman about whom she remembers nothing, but is being apparently guided by a series of apparently random coincidences and objects. In "How to Talk to Girls at Parties" two teenage boys in 1977 London attend a party to meet girls only to find that these girls literally are from another planet.