The clearest way to describe Claire Thomas is to say she is fat. It isn’t genetic or due to some other ‘modern BS’. It is because she frequently scoffs. She scoffs indiscriminately. Domino’s Two For Tuesdays by the two, eggs by the eight, and milkshake. She loves food like an English teacher (which she is) ‘loves words’, but she eats a lot more than she reads, and reads a lot less than she drinks, and eats and drinks to excess. That is the main fact. Anything else is conjecture. She is also lazy.

A copy of the photo by Liu Zheng. Does anyone know the copyright situation with this sort of thing?

Splayed, and it wouldn’t be unfair to say ungraciously, over her bed like a dead octopus on a chopping board, she was masturbating furiously. She could just about concentrate on her pornography for a few seconds at a time between checking the news headlines, some of which were reporting multiple fatalities, and reading an email from her school’s headmaster. After around ten minutes and without a proper resolution she gave up any pretence and relaxed, sighed, and turned the volume up on Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. The now muted laptop still blaring The Garden of Earthly Delights. The film was (is) unsatisfactory.

Now, Claire is watching Stefan Graves, an incompetent maths teacher, telling some children off for making light of Nazi war atrocities. She finds this most amusing and it makes her penguin biscuit doubly enjoyable. She chuckles through chocolatey lips, bubbling hot tea to a dripping foam. She imagines the warm embrace of her bed with its luxurious duvet and ready access to Terminator figurines (and lets be frank, to Terminator paraphernalia more generally). This thought inevitably leads to sexual dreams of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career making character and the thrill available to her by drawing his genitals. To do for them what Dali did for the unconscious; to render them visible. Around ten such drawings are tacked around her room as if to draw this was to own it; to see it was to experience it, and to display it was to go too far maybe. Imagining the machine’s penis is an impressive feat when all that is available to us is the barmaid’s reaction in Terminator 2: Judgement Day.

There is a second thing that Claire takes an interest in: The 2011 Royal Wedding. She was lying in her overfilled bath staring at the same patch of flaking wall paper that she has seen every week for the last thirty years. She is next to the room with the bed that her mother died in, demented and miserable, and she is thinking about all the men she has slept with. Atheist, republican, and with an intense interest in Kate Middleton she was again making a show of pleasing herself knowing she would ultimately give up the ghost. She sang ‘I cain’t get no… satisfaction’ and laughed. Her phone beeps, she has an email from me informing her that it is my belief that the Terminator has only a mound, that the waitress’ response was a directorial error, and that all her theories are wrong, that her terminator fan fiction is shabby at best and that I will not allow a further Terminator/Royal Wedding tie in story to appear on the forum I manage.

Yours sincerely,