The Company of Monsters

The cover makes us look remarkably organised.

There I am with my arms folded, looking as though I know where we're going. Everyone has assembled. The lighting suggests we have a mission.

In practice, I suspect we'd spend the first twenty minutes deciding where to eat. Luci would suggest somewhere else after we'd ordered. Bloop would know the waiter by then.

Still, that's my company.

I like to imagine the five of them living here with me. When I'm alone, they're big enough to claim a cushion, occupy the window seat or get between me and whatever I was trying to do. When somebody comes over, they shrink until only I can see them. The guest gets a reasonably ordinary host. I get a very small audience with opinions.

They each carry something of mine. Giving those things faces has made them surprisingly easy to recognise.

Bloop would be terrible at keeping a low profile.

I can picture him waving from my pocket while I'm buying something. A hello becomes a question, the question becomes a conversation and suddenly a perfectly simple errand has acquired a supporting cast.

That part needs very little imagination. I do talk to shopkeepers, drivers and the people working in places I visit. Sometimes we have a proper chat. Sometimes we only exchange a few words. Either way, I like leaving a little room for the person on the other side of the transaction.

Bloop lives in that room. It's also why he gets to welcome people here. He was going to say hello anyway. We might as well give him a job.

Luci's employment prospects are more complicated.

She has clearly taken inspiration from her namesake in Lucifer. I imagine her leaning in with her own version of the question: "What's your deepest, darkest desire?"

She would love a dramatic answer. Something worthy of the horns.

Unfortunately, at one in the morning, the answer might be a McDonald's meal.

I'd spent the day being sensible. I'd made a small speech to myself about eating better. Then we pass those golden arches and Luci discovers that my principles have a drive-through entrance.

She can work with bigger material, of course. A casino in Cyprus. A quiet beer with friends that suddenly needs tequila. But I think she enjoys the small victories just as much. There's very little preparation involved in getting me to say, "Go on, then."

The short hair in these pictures is another of her projects. A sudden burst of encouragement, a trip to the barber and there went the hair. I can hardly blame her for the scissors. I did sit in the chair.

With friends, she has an especially receptive audience. Someone suggests a slightly stupid idea. There's a pause. We're all old enough to know how this goes.

Someone smiles first.

Sprout would like to know whether we could make the slightly stupid idea work.

He's useful like that. Give him a small problem and he'll get close enough to ask better questions. How is this attached? Why does that move? What would happen if we tried it another way? Three eyes seems a reasonable allocation for someone who wants to inspect everything.

I recognise him whenever a quick repair stops being quick because I've become interested. The job still needs doing. Now I also want to understand the thing.

This is usually when Stardust arrives.

A small repair in the garden gives Sprout something to investigate. Stardust takes one look at the available space and starts imagining a garage. A large garage. The kind of garage that introduces several new questions about the size of the garden.

I haven't finished the original repair. In my head, I'm already walking around the building.

Those two explain a fair amount of how I work, even when there's no office involved. Sprout gets his hands into the present problem. Stardust wanders off to see how far the idea could go. I enjoy following both of them. Occasionally I have to remember which job I actually came outside to do.

Fortunately, the whole company doesn't have to turn up for every outing.

If I'm sitting alone by the sea, Sunny can grow big enough to sit beside me while the others disappear on whatever business they have. They can tell me about it later.

For a while, there's no conversation to start and no project asking to become a much larger project. I can watch the water. Sunny is good company for that.

Then something happens that I can rarely force at a desk: a question I've been carrying starts to make sense. I might have spent hours going around it, trying to get a useful answer out of myself. Sitting there, with a little space around the thought, I finally see where it leads.

I find that quiet in the sauna too. Somewhere I can stop adding things to the day long enough to hear what's already there.

That's what Sunny carries for me. It's why she looks after the missing pages on this site. If you reach a 404, she's the one waiting with a way home.

She has some experience with a person getting lost in his own head.

So yes, the poster is probably overselling our readiness. I couldn't promise a successful military operation with this lot. I couldn't reliably promise we'd come back from the shops with only the things on the list.

But I like having them around. They make familiar parts of me easier to spot, including the parts that are currently talking me into something.

If we meet, Bloop will almost certainly be there. You'll get the hello. I'll be the one trying to look normal while Luci whispers a follow-up question.

You can meet the whole family at Little Hours.