On choreographing an award-winning awakening

The window was open and the bed unmade. I was sitting on top of the bookshelf dangling my legs aimlessly below. Margaret gave me a nudge from the TV set with her telescopic prod and told me to stop snoring. This woke me. Bessy was hanging by her tail from the curtain rail whistling a sweet nothing to her dreamy self. Thus our day as a family began.

It was no wonder everyone else looked so sleepy on my way to work. I had not even left our driveway when the postman - also named George but not the same person as my receptionist - blinked reddened eyes at me and handed me the mail. Somewhat alarmed at his distressed state, I asked if he'd slept awkwardly last night. He said he hadn't. I suggested that was why he looked so awful. He was still staring at me as I made my way past him and out through the gate.

Not having any mail of his own, I allowed Felix to open mine. He said I had been wasting electricity again. I asked how he knew. He said I had a bill. I blamed it all on Bessy who has taken to using a hairdryer, and she presently absconded, thus delaying my departure from the bench by an hour. I found her eventually up a tree discussing Magritte with a snail.

In the surgery George was proudly polishing a trophy. I am convinced it showed a biplane in the middle of some complicated aerial manoeuvre. I asked George if he'd returned to flying, knowing that in his past he flew from the North to South Pole in an open cockpit without any socks on.

It appears the trophy did not depict a biplane at all. Though George would not tell me what it showed, he was offended that I had not detected, as Cookie apparently had, that it was in fact the trophy for England's annual competition in the propagation of mysterious fates. I considered the trophy for some time and decided I was probably best just to nod.

I was unsure if Mr Brown was propagating his own mysterious fate when he entered the surgery asking me to fill the diastema between his upper central incisors. In order to mollify George I asked him for an expert opinion. He took one very cursory glance at Mr Brown and declared he was defining his own dento-facial fate, and that this was totally un-mysterious. I felt a little dissapointed on Mr Brown's behalf, though he seemed little concerned.

I suspect that propagating mysterious fates must be rather uncommon, though apart from this one occurrence with the unfortunate Mr Brown, I have no other evidence one way or the other. Perhaps, then, it is more common than I think, in which case, if George has won a trophy, he must be well-accomplished in yet another discipline I hadn't previously been aware of.

Sometimes I find it hard to keep up with George. Indeed, I find myself somewhat envious of his dynamism. Which has got me to wondering, this lunchtime, if there isn't an award available for the best choreographed morning awakening.