Winston's Quest

It was his very own cotton dream. Well, his partially cotton and partially polyester dream. Perhaps dream is too strong of a term for a mixed-fabric metaphor; his very own partially cotton and partially polyester imagined situation. That doesn't quite capture the warmth and security, but at least it’s not being oversold.
                Sadly, every imagined situation, regardless of fabric composition, has to come to an end eventually. Reality always asserts itself, renowned as it is for being a particularly dominant character; it lacks proper development, and no-one really thinks it’s that charismatic, but it is dominant none-the-less - that’s what being the top of the billboard gets you. Winston’s particular cotton and polyester situation fell victim to reality’s attention-seeking when his mobile phone elected to cause a right-old ruckus, rather than laying quietly on his bedside table. It would be the last time he trusted it.
                Tantrums are best dealt with by ignoring them, he’d always been taught by his broodier friends. Being the open-minded type, Winston decided it was time to put that to the test, rolling over triumphantly and pushing his head farther into the more feathery regions of his immediate vicinity. That was something he felt secure in doing, because in all his years, the feathery region had been a chicken in only one instance. Compared to the number of times it had been a bona-fide pillow, those odds were pretty good.
                Whether it was his lack of faith in ignorance, or perhaps his ignorance of how telephones work, the tantrum continued unabated. In fact, it was worse now, because he would necessarily have to go to all the effort of rolling back over to try another silencing technique. It never rains but it pours.
                Winston didn't understand why this was happening. ‘Why must my not-quite-dreams be interrupted and ruined by the will of that silicon-menace and its sonorous shenanigans?’ He thought, tortured by the acoustic onslaught.
                David had his Goliath; Holmes had his Moriarty; Winston had his morning alarm. If those greats before him had vanquished their foes, then surely he could do the same. He didn't believe himself to be inferior to a man with a sling, nor to a man with exceptional deductive reasoning skills and an encyclopaedic knowledge of many academic fields. Cementing his rivalry with the phone as one of the greatest conflicts in human history, Winston made the mighty trip back onto his other side and swung an arm towards the source of the electronic racket. Sound-waves collided with his ears, palms collided with glass screens, and the phone then collided with the floor. Despite this drubbing, however, it maintained its glorious crusade against human hearing by trying to deafen Winston whilst partially underneath the bed.
                A few times in his life, Winston had wondered if he was in fact the bad guy, and this was one such example. The hero always triumphs over his oppressor, the heroine shakes off adversity on her path to victory, and Winston always fell short of even the most pedestrian of achievements. One or two outcomes of that nature could be disregarded as bad luck, but only a true antagonist could meet with such tragic defeats after a hard-fought and well planned battle, time and time again. Was he the oppressor of his phone? Was the communicative menace in fact the martyr of its people, leading a campaign of resistance against the sleeping villain? Probably not – it was only a phone, and Winston owned it so he was entitled to treat it as he saw fit. But the thought still niggled at him, mostly when he was in a partially conscious stupor.
                With the phone on the floor, and both ignorance and violence failing, there was nothing else for it - Winston would have to do the unthinkable and get up. Technically, not much ‘up’ actually went on – he instead slid gradually out from underneath the duvet, legs first, and flopped gracelessly onto his bottom - but he felt that this was a fine compromise, considering how little he wished to cease being in bed.
                Benefitting from the increased dexterity afforded by his new positioning, Winston deftly grabbed the phone and swiped the alarm to turn it off. The silence washed over him like a tropical stream, only with fewer fish. This was a stroke of luck, since if there had been any fish in his bedroom, he would not have been even slightly capable of answering the questions that situation would have raised.
                ‘Be about your business. Leave me be.’ He would tell the invading fish. ‘This isn't a place for fish to be washing over people.’ He would continue. But since fish can’t talk, nor are they terribly good at moving around outside of water, nothing of merit would happen as a result.
                Sitting on the floor and thinking about what he might discuss with a fish, were he to find one on the carpet or airborne and coming in his direction, wasn't getting Winston anywhere. It never did. Taking affirmative action, he pulled himself to his feet and scratched his head – just like a true-born leader. With the blurry eyes of a general, the sleep-stiff muscles of an admiral, and the sleepy mind of a commander-in-chief, Winston led the charge away from the safety of the bed. He chaperoned his feet safely past the keys he’d dropped on the floor; he strategized a safe passage for his elbows past the cupboard door he’d left open; he shook himself into formation and ploughed his torso boldly through the doorway, to take the bathroom once-and-for-just-a-moment. He didn't need the bathroom for all - not just yet anyway.
                Having quieted the shrieking war-cries of his bladder, Winston stood in front of the sink to wash his hands and stare at himself in the mirror. Mirror-Winston was not looking his best; there were bags under his eyes, there was stubble scattered in an irritatingly patchy way across his cheeks, and his hair apparently wished to have nothing to do with his scalp, craning itself away in any direction it could. Both Winston and mirror-Winston raised a hand to their faces, then flinched away when they felt their cheeks become wet.
                ‘Washing my hands makes them wet.’ Winston reminded himself. From the look on mirror-Winston’s face, he was making rather similar observations.
                A short foray to the towel remedied the soggy-hand situation, but only for the short period until he tried to wet his toothbrush; the taps were all too happy to accommodate Winston’s return patronage and gave him extra water pressure, well above the amount he’d asked for, completely for free. Winston assessed this amount of pressure to be ‘too much’ as he felt the generous spray across his hands, arms, and stomach. The towels once again performed admirably, and soon enough he was foaming at the mouth in a cavalcade of menthol freshness and bristled scrubbing.
                Once his bathroom ordeals were completed, Winston returned to the bedroom to get dressed. He’d tried having pants-days many times before, but this time it just didn’t feel appropriate. The middle of winter tended to be like that. On top of that, he knew that Leah had asked him to do something this morning. He couldn't remember what it was, but he knew that the chances of it involving him walking around in his pants were relatively low.
                His jeans were exactly where they should have been – tangled among yesterday’s shirt and jumper on the floor – but he would have to seek out a new shirt to wear. For some reason, he held to the long-accepted truth that fabric which was next to the torso should be worn only once, but that worn nearby to the bottom was good for at least a week.
                He quickly pulled his jeans on, hopping elegantly around the room as he did so, and expertly shut the wardrobe door with his back when he over-balanced and fell into it. ‘Shut the doors.’ Leah would often tell him, but now he had evidence that it would be wasted effort, when he could achieve the same result whilst getting dressed. He made a mental note to tell Leah about this later.
                Fully trouser-enabled, Winston proceeded to re-open the recently closed wardrobe door and removed a green flannel shirt, putting it on straight away and leaving the door hanging open, ready to be dealt with by tomorrow’s dressing. Today’s dressing was going tremendously – all that remained was to put on some socks and extract his jumper from the ground-tangle. He felt sure that Leah should be proud of him for his morning’s clothing excellence once he was finished, and took a moment to appreciate his own good work.
                Several deep and smug breaths later, he pulled open the top drawer of the wardrobe and bent down to grab a pair of black socks, hitting his forehead on the open wardrobe door as he did so. Cursing his own hubris in leaving it open and expecting everything to be fine until the next morning, Winston tumbled backwards into a seated position on the bed, pulling one sock on and still failing to close the wardrobe door. As the sock passed the ever-critical heel-apex, a soft ripping sound alerted him to the true plight of the moment – the top of the sock had indeed made it all the way to his ankle, but his heel remained exposed to the elements, peeping through a new hole in the fabric, like a street vendor peddling cold-feet from an upholstered van.
                Several seconds passed in deadly silence. Winston didn't move, and the sock didn't react. Gradually, softly, and with the greatest remorse, Winston loosened his grip on the sock and let it snap back to his ankle. He sat pondering what his next move should be, filled with anxiety about pulling the surviving sock onto his other foot. If it happened again then questions might be asked – one sock-ripping was an accident and it could be allowed to slide, but two? That was dangerous territory. But he wouldn't let it come to that; Winston wouldn't let this happen again. With meticulous care, he gathered up the second sock and rolled the sides up until it resembled a tiny beanie hat, and with it he crowned his chilly toes. He then proceeded to unfurl the precious woollen cargo along the length of his foot until he reached the heel, where he paused. He was frozen in fear, lest he claim another innocent sock in his lust for warm feet.
                ‘No, Winston.’ He told himself. ‘Don’t become a slave to this feeling. It was an accident and you’re better than this. You have to move on. Pull up your socks and get to it.’ From this moment he spent a good ten seconds giggling at his own unintentional pun, robbing the situation of much of its gravitas and tension. With a smooth and calculated pull, the sock unrolled over the heel and rose to its full height up his calf.
                Breathing a sigh of relief, Winston then turned his attention back to the exposed heel. He was now in a tricky position of either having to wear one-and-a-half pairs of socks, which would lead to a tremendous debacle when it came to dong laundry, or persisting with the chilly heel and putting the problem off until later. In an effort to help himself make a decision, he stood up and tried walking around the room a little, soon finding that this demi-sock simply wouldn't do. Man’s foot was not made to feel carpet on the heel and sock on the toes. It was not made to feel the boundary of a hole. A sock torn is no sock at all, he was forced to conclude. Taking action quickly lest nerves stall him once more, he gripped the end of the sock in one hand pulled it hard. An almighty ripping filled the room, signifying the final end of a sock’s service.
                Winston responsibly dropped the sock-end onto the floor and grabbed another pair from the drawer, this time leaning his head out of the way of the door. Closing it now would just be letting Leah win. Un-balling the pair and throwing one sock back into the drawer, which was now also left open, Winston carefully re-dressed his foot, realising half-way that he’d left the severed top of the old sock hanging around his ankle. Seeing it as a fitting memorial to be wearing a black-leg band (even though it was made from the remains of the murdered party), he allowed it to remain.
                Pleased to be finally leaving the sock nightmare behind him, Winston picked up his jumper from the floor. He reached in through the bottom and tugged out yesterday’s t-shirt, throwing it into the dirty-washing pile. This pile was a rather nomadic beast, finding itself wherever Winston happened to get dressed or undressed on any particular day. There are rumours that many such piles existed throughout the house, but the dirty-washing pile thought that to be nothing more than superstitious nonsense.
                The rather uneventful pulling-on of the jumper implied to Winston that things might just be OK after all, and he left the room with an optimistic vigour. He immediately returned with an altogether impatient energy, to pick up his forgotten phone from the floor and apparently also to tread on his keys. Uttering a few words to imply that this wasn't a favourable happenstance, he sat back on the bed and rubbed at the sole of this foot. There seemed to be no great harm done, although he did get a little distracted by wondering why exactly he’d ended up dropping his keys in the middle of the bedroom floor. Unable to work out a satisfactory answer, but thankful that he had not generated a further sock-weakness by stepping on the sharpened steel, he picked the keys up and stuffed them into his pocket.

                Having finally made it downstairs, Winston decided that breakfast should be his highest priority. No great works can be completed on an empty stomach, after all. He peered at the side of the kettle and saw that it was a quarter full; this was excellent news since it meant he wouldn't have to tangle with another tap just yet. He flicked the switch and grabbed a mug from the draining board, spilling clean cutlery into the sink as he did so. He peered impassively at the fallen forks and spoons for a few moments, then shrugged and put the mug down next to the kettle. A blue light was shining away on it, and it was beginning to make a pleasant bubbling sound.
                Winston grabbed a teabag from the jar on worktop and dropped it into his mug. Now he only had to wait for the kettle to boil, and he felt mild relief that his immediate tea-making duties were over. Instead of watching the kettle, and possibly causing it not to boil in doing so if the sayings were to be believed, he took a bowl from the draining board and began preparations for cereal merriment. A fanfare of further cutlery tumbling into the sink added a fitting grandeur to proceedings.
                The cereal selection process was an intricate one, which Winston was well versed in carrying out. He wasn't in a huge rush, so temporal concerns were not going to pose an issue, however he did feel slightly groggy from his abrupt wake-up, so a heavy-going porridge breakfast was out of the question. Something light then, but not too sugary – goodbye to the frosted-choco-lumps.
                ‘What does that leave then?’ he asked himself for narrative purposes; he could clearly see the remaining cereal boxes in the cupboard, and there was no-one else around to ask.
                It was a two-way stand-off – the thatched-malt squares versus the corn shavings. Either one would fit the bill and serve his breakfast needs admirably. Winston didn't want to play favourites here, since each of them had served him admirably in the past; he had to find a fair way to choose. Rock, paper, scissors wouldn't work – cereal doesn't have hands. He didn't have a coin or a die to hand, so that was out too. He pondered on the situation, staring at the boxes and feeling his thighs begin to ache with the effort of crouching. The kettle was nearing boiling point, vibrating aggressively on the stand whilst bubbling sounds filled the room. Winston covered his eyes with one hand and reached out blindly with the other, grabbing hard when he felt it hit cardboard – he had picked the corn shavings, and crushed a significant portion of the box whilst doing so. He’d have to explain this to Leah later, but that was future-Winston’s problem. Present-Winston sincerely hoped he would remember what it was that Leah had asked him to do today. Otherwise, future-Winston would be in for even more trouble when she got back and found that not only had he crushed the cereal, but his tasks were left undone to do so.
                Putting thoughts of his future disciplinary hearings aside for now, and satisfied that he had been sufficiently unbiased in his mode of breakfast selection, Winston returned to his bowl and poured out a healthy serving. He then took one of the few spoons which hadn’t made a pilgrimage back into the sink and placed it neatly alongside the bowl. Upon opening the fridge to retrieve the milk, however, tragedy struck once more. No matter where he looked, and no matter how many times he asked the yoghurt, no milk could be found. In a wave of realisation, he remembered Leah assigning him his grim task as if it was yesterday (which it was): ‘There’ll only be enough milk for me to have breakfast before work in the morning, hon. Could you go out and grab some when you get up?’
                Recovering from the flashback, he peered around the fridge one last futile time, and closed the door. Upon it, he saw the post-it that Leah had left to remind him.
                ‘Aha. Yes.’ Winston said to himself. ‘I wish she’d left that note somewhere I’d see it before pouring my cereal out though.’ He muttered, before turning to the cereal cupboard and seeing another post-it there.
                ‘Huh’ he post-scripted.
                Winston returned to his bowl and stared into it mournfully – the arid corn shavings were waiting there expectantly, for the white-rains which would never come. Was it their fate to remain dry forever? Would they never feel the cool embrace of dairy lipids flowing over them? Would not a single one of them become soggy in that hallowed pool of lactation? Winston couldn't give them an answer, which was surprising because the correct answers here were quite obviously ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘no’.
                The situation was clearly not a good one. This cereal could not be allowed to go to waste, but there was nothing with which to wet it, aside from water. Winston didn't much like the idea of watered corn - it sounded more like an agricultural practice than breakfast. The only recourse he could see was to choke it down, dry and powdery. It was at least a small comfort to him that he had discounted the porridge out of hand. Dry corn shavings was one thing, but since he wasn't a horse, dry oats would never have worked.
                It took a few minutes, and many mouthfuls of his piping hot tea, but Winston defeated the dry breakfast. He sat triumphant at the kitchen table, wondering if this was how it felt to be a champion, but soon decided that most champions wouldn't have a dry and burned mouth. Still, at least he had fed himself, and he was resolved not to let Leah down – it was time to go and get the milk.

                Winston made a return to the day’s previous battlefield to fish around for his wallet, then went back downstairs to get ready to go out. His coat was hanging up at the bottom of the stairs, just where he’d left it after Leah had asked him to pick it up from the floor, and his shoes were neatly on the shoe rack, having been through a similar series of events. He put them all on, zipped his coat up to this chin to keep out the cold air, and opened the front door.
                A wintery gale assailed him as he stepped outside onto the damp paving slabs. The sky was grey – not what Winston would have called an inviting grey, but still better than it could have been. The shop was only a short distance away, perhaps a 10-minute walk through the residential estate and onto the high street, so the rain would hopefully not interject during that time. Knowing that this was England however, he braced himself for the inevitability that he would be returning soaked.
                Winston checked that his keys were in his pocket, just in case he’d thrown them across the kitchen subconsciously, and pulled the door shut. The slamming shook the door frame and brought a cold cascade of droplets onto his face, possibly because the door thought he needed a bit of a wake-up call. Fully refreshed by the icy water on his face, he wiped himself with back of his sleeve and set-off up the road. The wind was in his face and caused the loose sides of his coat to flap in the wind, like the sails of a peculiarly landlocked pirate vessel. Similarly, he was somewhat afraid of his mutinous first mate, procrastination – it had been known to overthrow the good captain responsibility for much more trivial prizes than the avoidance of a 20-minute walk. The able seaman fear-of-Leah’s-wrath did an admirable job of keeping the first mate in line, but it was often a close-run battle.
                Winston often found himself puzzling over the lack of rotting leaves in the street as he walked along it. It wasn't that he wanted to see decaying vegetation on a daily basis, but he knew full well that the trees along the verge had been thick with leaves during the summer, then they’d fallen off and coated the pavement, but now they were just gone. He’d never seen anyone cleaning up the detritus, nor had he borne witness to a migration of herbivores. The leaves were just gone, without stooping to rotting. Perhaps it was just their social airs and graces – they couldn't possibly be seen to do something so vulgar. If it was so, then Winston decided to be more grateful towards social pretension in future.
                Striding along the path in an effort to minimise the time spent in the cold, Winston jammed his hands roughly into his pockets. Upon doing so he discovered something vaguely oblong and scrunchy-sounding. This was a surprise to him, since he’d expected it to be an empty cavity. Since cavities are not usually characterised by scrunchy oblongs, he investigated further by twiddling it around in his fingers. The scrunchy layer moved slightly against a harder interior, and the whole thing was reasonably rigid but light. Winston became rather excited as he concluded the likely identity of the object and removed it from his pocket – it was a chocolate bar! This was an unexpected turn of good fortune; he had been expecting a cold and tedious walk towards a shop, for no greater pleasure than buying milk just after he needed it, but what he’d actually got was a cold and tedious walk with a chocolate bar. Much better.
                A second source of surprise was the realisation that he’d been wearing this coat again for a couple of weeks, and must not have tried to use his pockets even once during that time. This bar had been tucked away in the pocket for at least a year, and was showing signs of seasonal turbulence – the chocolate had clearly been melted many times, flowing into the edges of the wrapper and taking on its shape perfectly, then freezing solid again. Still, Winston wasn't going to discriminate against it on such flimsy grounds as its physical appearance – as long as it still tasted sweet he was willing to give it a go. Food poisoning was a small price to pay for that.
                The chocolatey surprise kept Winston going for a good couple of minutes, causing him to amble along slightly more slowly, but with a great deal more contentment than before. He rode that wave of happiness long after the bar was finished, and found himself walking though the automatic door of the mini-supermarket in no time at all. Now his work really began.
                Dead ahead were the crisps and chocolates – sirens of deliciousness leading the good-ship Winston into the rocks of junk-food-that-Leah-did-not-want-in-the-house. Winston turned away in an effort to resist their calorific temptations; he could almost taste the MSG and sugar from here, and it was all he could do to force himself to step in the direction of the fridges. Were it not for the pocket-chocolate, he may not have been able to make it. Mercifully he was victorious, and made it beyond the land of saturates and false promises.
                Winston stopped by the sandwich meats to recover. He’d conquered the toughest part of his journey, but it was not yet over; before he reached his milky prize he would have to make it past the cheeses, press on through the yoghurt, and circumnavigate the perilous spreads - sunflower and margarine alike. He took some deep breaths, set his eyes on the goal, and strode into action. Within a few steps he had arrived at his destination, slightly behind a gentleman in a grey coat holding a bunch of grapes, and considered that he had perhaps overestimated the various dairy challenges between here and the entrance. Or perhaps he’d just grown that much as a person; no more was he the bright-eyed young man who had stood by the meats so long ago. After the ordeals he had been through, the trials of the udder were nought but child’s play.
                Feeling like a mighty conqueror, Winston waited patiently behind the coated gentleman. After a few seconds, he decided to wait impatiently instead. A few seconds more and the time for action was once again nigh for the hero of dairy. He started to lean around the man to reach for a two-pint bottle, but stopped when the gentleman turned to face him.
                “I was a feeling a little melancholy, so I thought I’d look at these grapes. To cheer myself, you know?” the man said.
                “Er, yeah I suppose.” Winston answered, sympathising with a man who tried to take joy from groceries. “Is it helping?” he enquired curiously.
                “Not really, no.”
                “Oh.” There was a silence. The man then dropped the bunch of grapes on the floor and started to walk away.
                “Be careful - there’s grapes all over the floor here…” he said as he went, pointing vaguely behind himself at the floor and turning his head slightly towards the grapes.
                “Ok… thanks.” Winston replied unsurely. He looked at grapes on the floor for a few moments as they rolled away, and tiptoed over them to position himself better in front of the milk. A rack of expiry dates and coloured lids faced him, glowing like a treasure chest in an adventure film. Quite why the fridge needed a backlight was something which escaped Winston a little, but he slowly scanned the bottles, in search of the most futuristic expiry he could find. The front row held only milk which would expire within the next couple of days, and the row behind seemed to have expired already. They were cunningly hidden, but Winston was a seasoned veteran at milk selection, and dived past even the third row to the very back. He grabbed the handle of a two-pint bottle, which was jammed tightly into formation, and began to heave at it awkwardly. There wasn't nearly enough room to lift the bottle vertically above the others, and his arm was already at a sub-optimal angle for milk retrieval, but Winston persevered. Soon his efforts to lift smoothly became hard yanks, and he heard ominous crunching sounds as the bottles became crushed and distorted. He assumed that it was what birthing a plastic calf would feel like.
                For longer than he would care to admit Winston’s battle with the milk raged on, the cage-like rack rattling and shaking violently with every heave. Semi-skimmler wasn't going to yield to Winston without a fight on this day. Every now and again there would be some slight motion as the bottle slipped free briefly, before wedging again and mounting a new defence.  Eventually, Winston wiggled it free of the vice-like grip of its comrades, only for the lid to slam into the bottom of the shelf above. From here the game was different – a matter of bending and contortion, with a worrying number of further crunching sounds in accompaniment. The lid slipped against the shelf, playing a muted glockenspiel and leaving a trail of plastic shavings, and the bottom bounced along the other lids, creating an ever deeper dent in the plastic. After a sterling effort from both sides, however, Winston bested his foe and the bottle was free. The grapes on the floor had, sadly, sustained a great deal of collateral damage – such is the cost of war.
                Winston looked at his prize and vanquished enemy – it bore the scars of battle across all of its surface. The lid was tattered from the metal shelf, the bottom was caved in from countless impacts, and the sides were crushed and fractured from the mangling and heaving. This wouldn't do at all; there was no way that he could adequately explain this adventure to Leah, and she certainly wouldn't want the most mutilated bottle from the shop. So, by way of honouring his opponent and keeping himself from harm, Winston selected a second bottle, from the now loosened row in the rack. This time it came out cleanly, without any sign of a struggle; it seemed that the nation of decanted lactates had well and truly submitted to Winston’s dominion.
                After returning the crushed and humiliated bottle back into its recess, Winston turned his back on the rack and walked away towards the till, leaving footprints of mashed grape as he went. The path towards the checkout passed the fruit and vegetables, where Winston saw that there had been more than one crime committed against the stock of this shop today – the melancholy man had apparently spent some time choosing his viewing-grapes. The grocery section was in disarray; apples were nestled in the bananas, oranges were strewn across the floor in front of the aubergines, and the kiwis had no business being so thoroughly riddled with limes. The true horror, though, was the fate of the grapes. To describe them as crushed and bruised would be to describe the Grand Canyon as a scratch in a rock – seeded and seedless alike, the wine-wannabes had been obliterated, pureed into a soup by a berserker’s rage.
                ‘Maybe these are the grapes of wrath.’ Winston thought, before descending into a fit of giggles at himself and nearly dropping his war-trophy into the fruity viscera.
                After a hearty cackle at his own tremendous unintentional wit, Winston reasoned that if anyone saw him laughing uncontrollably in the presence of such catastrophic destruction, they might reasonably suspect that he was the culprit. Unwilling to be accused of someone else’s mayhem, especially when he’d caused his own perfectly good mayhem elsewhere, Winston decided to make good his escape, past the mercifully untouched pineapples – perhaps they had been left whole as witnesses, to tell the world what was coming.
                Winston wasted no time in approaching the till, eager to put the harrowing sights of the grocery behind him. The self-service checkout was empty, allowing him to avoid contact with yet another person and any strange compulsions they might have towards fruit. The authoritarian instructions rang out in their comfortingly dehumanised way, reminding Winston that he was not in the presence of a real person. He didn't really think that anyone would judge him for purchasing some milk, but one could never be too careful. They might go one step further than casual judgement and actually try to strike up a conversation with him, which simply couldn't be allowed to happen. Under normal circumstances it would have been bad enough, but he had been through too much this morning already – there was no telling what he might say when asked how he was or how his morning had been so far. The machine wouldn't try to engage with him like that; the most personal it would try to get would be to ask if he had his own bags. He didn't.
                Being a firm believer in never emptying his pockets properly, Winston was able to produce enough loose change to purchase an impoverished eastern European nation, which meant that he was just about able to cover the cost of his milk. One coin at a time, he fed the acceptor slot and listened to the currency kerplunk being played inside. It was somehow pleasant to hear his payment landing in a pile of change inside the machine, which was in stark contrast to his usual feelings when money left his possession to be locked away from him.
                Taking it under advisement that he should take his bags and strive to have a nice day, Winston took his milk and exited the shop, back to the dismal outdoors. The clouds had become somewhat more aggressive during the time he’d been in the shop, and the daylight had snuck away whilst no-one was looking. It’d turn up eventually, maybe in a few days. Carrying his precious cargo in a carrier bag, which served no purpose other than to hurt his fingers more than the handle on the bottle would, Winston set off towards home again. He found himself hurrying so that the milk did not warm up too much, but then realised that it was colder outside today than it was in the fridge. Practically speaking, this meant he still had to hurry, but now it was to avoid the milk freezing in the bottle. That would be the cruellest fate of all – being able to see the milk he needed, the milk he deserved, but knowing that he could not pour it no matter how much he tried. Until it thawed in a few minutes of course.
                With no surprise pocket-chocolate, and an increased burden to carry, the return journey felt longer than the trip to the shop. He willed himself to be farther along the street and wished for his door to loom ahead of him, without the tedious necessity of having to ambulate along the pavement. His milk bottle was not a lamp though, and it did not contain a genie. Even if it did, Winston supposed that he wouldn't have spent one of his wishes on bringing his house slightly closer anyway, so the whole thing was futile.
                If he had a Sherpa then he’d be able to offload his milk and complete the hike un-laden. It would involve having him on permanent standby though, which implied there’d have to be a salary to pay. He couldn't afford to pay competitive Sherpa rates just for the occasional milk run, so yet another grand design was ruined by reality. As if to compound his heartbreak, Winston felt the first spots of rain spattering the back of his neck. The time for hurrying was now. Running was out of the question however; the risk of slipping and falling onto the milk was just too high. It would be cripplingly embarrassing to have to return to the shop and purchase another bottle whilst his jeans were saturated with semi-skinned remorse.
                Power walking along the street was never going to last for long – it was a terrifyingly short time before Winston became weary and had to slow back to his original pace. He was warmer now, so that was something, but the rain was picking up and he would certainly be saturated by the time he reached the front door. It was his fate to get wet, and the price of going out for milk. He only hoped that Leah thought it was worth it.
                Winston hurriedly opened the front door and hopped through, placing the milk on the floor and standing still for a few moments, contemplating how wet he was. Once he had given the situation the appropriate amount of attention, he removed his coat and narrowly caught himself before throwing it on the floor – Leah wouldn't like that one bit. Selflessly as ever, Winston hung the coat straight onto the coat rack by the door. Sainthood would surely be on its way for him.
                Once he’d removed his soggiest articles of clothing, Winston marched his milk through to the kitchen, and placed it neatly in the fridge. Satisfied with his morning’s work, he sat at the kitchen table and breathed a deep sigh of relief – another job well done.

                Several hours later, he heard the front door opening – Leah was home from work.
                “Hi Winston!” she shouted through the house.
                “Hello!” he shouted back, hurrying to the doorway to meet her.
                “I shut the wardrobe door with my back while I was getting dressed and I got the milk like you asked, are you proud of me?” he asked expectantly.
                Leah giggled tiredly “Of course I am honey. Well done.”
                Winston’s smile stretched all the way to the shop and back.


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