Nothing like the smell of a freshly baked photocopy. That mad mix of printing chemicals that have been sucked out of the toner, that thing that inevitably goes wrong, or so you think. There’s a medical procedure you need to go through to fix it- just as soon as that little red roller signal starts flashing you know there’s potentially 1/2 an hour of frustration ahead – do not stop until you’ve fixed it. The cover draw drops down like the tongue of a St.Bernard after a marathon, panting for your fingers, you lay hold of those green tabs as suggested and manipulate them as if you’re about to land a lunar module – Is there some school for learning the art of photocopier maintenance? You think you’ve got it and the machine labours and whirls and papers seem to flitter about inside but that symbol flashes up again – aha you think maybe it’s a paper jam, another round of opening panels and hatches follows and you find that rogue piece of paper, close all the drawers and for added sealing of the deal you turn it off at the power point- yep that’ll really fix it.

A hundred computations and agitations of the inner workings later you finally get to print out that thing from back ‘there’ – and you can’t even remember now why you wanted to do it. Has this happened before? Is this whole performance you’ve just been through a photocopy of a previous event? Just the way some days are photocopies of the day before – what did you really do differently today than yesterday?- if you can’t answer then you need to live your life a different way and take notice of things and find different pathways in your numbered days. Do something new.

Do you want your life to be a book of photocopied pages that all look the same or do you want them to be coloured in – well now is the moment for taking action. NOW! Otherwise you might just find yourself tinkering with a jammed mechanism until the day they wheel you into a nursing home and your memory’s gone and if your memory’s gone then all you’ll have left is your book of photocopies, do you really want to look at a bunch of pages that are all the same? Don’t you want to have one of the pages explode in your face with a memory of that train ride you took across the Rockys, or that time you walked from one side of the British Isles to the other, yep that’s it, fill it up with memories that might be of use, not dull grey photocopies ….