The day breaks yet the night is still in full effect, a blanket of darkness and moon light shadows obscure the truth from the unsteady masses allowing for the dance to spin on. This portion of the day is lost and forgotten all too quickly, but I am pretty sure it involved chips and chilli sauce and a young red head who didn't speak a word of English. I fall asleep too late and too drunk on the sofa. My body contorted into the only comfortable position my aching limbs seem to believe is possible despite being to any on looker, strangely contorted I'm sure. I am still in full battle dress with the comfort of mind and body of Odysseus on taking to his olive tree bed after chasing away the suitors and piercing the 12 axes. Sleep is a welcome embrace and anyway it's not stopping for anyone least of all the quiet protests by my unwashed teeth.

A man appears on a box in the corner and wakes me, early, my head says too early but it's hard to understand his message as he simultaneously argues with trigger happy, shotgun wielding bulls in the china warehouse he appears to be calling from. Although the voice is scrambled and the few words that make it through the din are unintelligible and anything remotely similar to something that a listener could refer to as a sentence structure is woefully absent, the message is clear. Yes it is very early, yes you quite possibly are still very drunk, but you should have been in work 20 minutes ago. Shit. Is there time for breakfast? A shower and a cup of tea? A swim in a cooling mountain pool of the freshest snow melt, run off into a warm seafront lagoon nestled just off the idyllic Mediterranean sea, surrounded by the humming promise of 1950s futurism? No. Shit.

There is at least the little time that is necessary to peel myself out of the offensive weapons, the only ones available to a young man during such Saturday night based wars, then flee from the comfort of my home as the clock strikes 7. The walk of shame is somehow strangely reversed, the shame remains.

Apon arriving at work I am just in time to discover that the days work has begun and despite it's seeming mundaneness in any other hour this exact block of hours allocated by fate, or actually Ray my team leader. A mister Ray Gunner no doubt one of the few stunning names your, at times much fairer than at this series of moments, narrator has encountered. It almost would make one believe unequivocally that fate must be at work in our universe to see such a man, with such a name, would work in the development of the next generation of hi technology military hardware. Anyway, to conclude the early statement, the mundaneness is just what the doctor ordered.

The days bill of duties involves lying to a large and newly installed data acquisition kit that has been thoughtfully installed in the cabin of the tidy and fresh faced experimental development Wildcat 001 that we will be working in, on, with. We have to tell it it's experiencing vast and instant and in all honesty if reality has anything to go by and I hear reality is so damned hot right now, so we will, that horrific turning forces and vibrations are being applied to the airframe at select points. They call it a calibration but I call it a lie, to myself.

This while sounding like it could be the most complicated of actions to carry out within a large hanger on a static and half completed aircraft is actually very capable of entering the list of Oxford English definitions of simple in the top ten on it's first week of release, I think, personally. Plug in to the next one on the list, box on end of plug, set input on box, read number on screen, let computer save 10 numbers, review numbers, pray hard there are no problems you might have to fix, save file, print file, unplug, rinse, repeat.

By happy chance I am working with a gentle soul named Des a man of little height but of sturdy loins. He has sired no less that 7 children who have in turn brooded on their own to give Des the proud a proud family of 19 grandchildren and recently 1 great grandchild. I believe he and they started quite early. This extensive list of worries that must fill every waking hour of this man's life has given him somewhat of a vaccant thousand mile stare and wistful gentle manner. No doubt a mind so heavily weighted by his own blood in the world had earned and therefore deserves much a manner. Either way it makes for a pleasant working condition for those lucky enough to draw their own card with his.