good morning world

Well, I've just had a dream about Hell. I didn't even know it was a dream at the time , I thought I was just having a kind of intense train of thought. But let me tell you what it's like.

First of all, it has lots of escalators, like the Jubilee Line. The stations are vast & cavernous, built to handle enormous rush-hour crowds.

Your vision sometimes disappears. You can go quite a lot on feel, as it happens, but if you sit patiently, you will be able to see again at some point, and carry on.

Hell is also full - I almost wrote "fool" - of people who don't get the upshot. They think they're on a package holiday or something. They block aisles, dawdle so you can't get past, are indecisive, check maps. We knew this already, but I can now confirm it.

It also has lots of people you sort of know, or barely know, or used to know. In this respect it's kind of like Facebook, without the little gifts. But it's hard to have a conversation because you are in Hell, and no one knows what they're doing there. A lot of them, as above, don't get the upshot. They think they can just leave. Also, numbers dwindle.

Don't go in the pool: it may have a wave machine and even whitecaps, but the water is that colour for a reason. This is confirmed later as it lies darkly still, showing murky shadows underneath where once were swimmers. A cluster of young people at the far end, like a photograph from Jonestown, goes strangely unnoticed by the other inmates.

There are also those kind of annoying blonde young women there, so familiar from Stoke Newington Church St, but deprived of their off-road buggies all they can do is put their chair on top of your bag or something, or knock into you, and then blame you when you ask them to please shift over just an inch.

In Hell they eat this really stiff green jello with shredded leftover cabbage in it. Well: they don't eat it. They are a voice with no body, and with no Tannoy system either. They give it to you, in a square plastic dish.

The comedy in Hell is provided by the yummy mummies, when they see the green jello.

And there is one other good thing: if you are brave, or grim, enough to force down one cube of the jello, the rest of it disappears. The chicken's not bad.