Ted sat down on the floor with his back to the wall. He detested being here by himself, locked up with just his thoughts. It drove him mad. Well not actually mad, not mad as in thinking he was a penguin called Ulric McFoible Do-Da-Do, but it made him very, very frustrated.
Thing was he’d get obsessed with little projects just like this internet search engine upgrade. That was only the latest in a long line, amongst other things he’d spent a few months trying to work out if it was possible to help men with short hair cuts with some sort of shampoo that stopped little tufts of hair sticking up towards the back of their head. He’d purposefully grown his hair that bit longer just to avoid this problem, well that and the fact that he couldn’t really afford a proper hair cut for the last few years, what with living on the street and all.
But it was silly little projects like that which would dominate his life. He’d spend ages working away at them whilst the world went on around him. Occasionally he’d decide to pull himself out of his hermit-like isolation and actually make something of his life. But every time it was thwarted. Only two days ago he got fed up of looking at his unpainted walls and decided it was time he should go and buy a paint and brush and breathe some life into his flat. It was just his luck that the paint shop was closed for the owner going on holiday for two weeks.
And just like every other time his mind wandered onto the topic of sorting his life out he found himself staring out of his living room window, unsurprisingly attracting bizarre looks from people walking past outside. He gazed into the blue sky, wishing instead of being completely clear it was filled with various shaped clouds which he could gaze at and try to work out what they looked like. He knew that most of the population of Avysmere would kill him if he made that wish of his come true; after all it wasn’t often that the weather wasn’t driving rain here, let alone sunny. But at that moment, he felt that his boredom took precedence over anything else.
In his frustration, he turned round and lashed out at the wall with his fist, moments later realising how silly that was when his hand began to throb. All this moping around was getting him nowhere. Maybe, he thought, if he went for a walk around the block he might clear his head.
