JAMES WARD: I LIKE BORING THINGS

I haven’t been sleeping very well recently. Generally, I wake up at about half past three in the morning and then spend the next few hours trying and failing to get back to sleep. It happened this morning and I ended up thinking about Poppets. 

When I was kid, I used to go to an indoor water park called Water Palace in Croydon. On the way there, you’d go past the Paynes Poppets factory. It was a huge factory where they made Poppets. As you approached, the air would begin to smell of chocolate. It was very exciting. 

I started to think of all the people employed in the factory. The people in charge of ordering the ingredients. The people who checked that the machines were working properly. The people who cleaned the toilets. The people who managed the warehouse. The people who drove the fork lift trucks. People at every stage. People having serious meetings about Poppets. 

Then I began to think about all the other people. The kids at the nearby schools whose parents worked in the factory. The pubs where the workers drank. The hairdressers whose customers worked making Poppets. This whole Poppet universe. 

And then I thought that they’re just Poppets. I’ve maybe had Poppets three times in my life. All that effort for a box of Poppets. I started thinking about how this is true for everything. Not just Poppets. Mini Cheddars and toothbrushes and AA batteries and minced lamb and screw drivers and party hats and tins of beans and Sudocrem. There’s all this stuff and all these people. And I started to feel a bit giddy so I stopped thinking about Poppets and played Two Dots instead.