Last week Pixelsmith wowed you with his tales of ordering lemons on the Internet. This week, the story reaches its dramatic conclusion, as a mis-click lands him with more ginger than he has ever seen in his life.

Midnight on a Tuesday. Nobody awake except drunkards, burglars and insomniacs. Nobody, that is, except me and the Tesco delivery man. The clock was still a little shy of the strike of 12, but already I was questioning whether it was worth receiving shopping in the middle of the night for the sake of a £1.75 saving. It doesn’t matter if you’re a natural night owl - the second you know you’re not allowed to go to sleep, sleeping becomes all you want to do. I found myself plunged into an irritating, drowsy limbo, unable to do anything meaningful except fritter away the minutes and wait for the knock.

What can you even buy for £1.75 these days? A coffee? Some chips? Oh yes, it looks appealing when you’re staring at an on-screen timetable and Tuesday night’s four days away. Everything’s simpler when it’s in the future. But after an hour and a half of anticipation, all traces of goodwill had evaporated. Essentially, I was being paid two pence a minute to procrastinate. I should talk to my union.

Knock knock! Finally. I opened the door, exchanged niceties and began ferrying trays to and from the kitchen. When I was done, the Tesco man informed me they didn’t have the cereal I wanted, which was fine because they sell it at the Co-op down the road. That’s where normal people buy their cereal. I signed on the dotted line, wondered whether you’re supposed to tip, decided against it because I’m British, then waved him off to wake the neighbours up with his van.

Surprises awaited in the kitchen. There’s a lot to be said for ordering boxes and cans on the Internet, as your average pack of Calgon doesn’t tend to vary too much from the next. Fresh food is a different matter. Cox’s apples like small cricket balls, carrots with a hint of balsa wood and a pair of mangoes requiring three weeks on the roof before they could be cut with traditional human tools. I could barely be bothered to eat them by the time they had ripened, having been staring at them resentfully for the best part of a month.

The best surprise lay at the bottom of one of the bags. Due to a website mis-click I’d inadvertently ordered half a kilo of fresh ginger, a rogue zero having multiplied my desired 50g piece by a factor of 10. 500g is probably enough ginger to kill a man. It’s hard enough getting through one bit before it turns into a withered lump, and now I had the knobbly equivalent of a pack of potatoes sprawling all over my counter. What on earth did they think I was going to do with it, back at the packing plant? Hey! This guy sure loves ginger! He must be having some kind of crazy ginger party!

I wasn’t having a ginger party. I ended up giving it away at work, save for one chunk. I didn’t even manage to eat all of that before it had gone woolly. Internet grocery shopping: brilliant in theory, hazardous in practice. Luckily the Co-op’s just down the road.

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I have managed to convince my newspaper to give me a proper column. I don’t know what it’s going to be about yet, but I thought I might test out some topics on Bruces before plonking my stupid face on the kitchen tables of 30,000 North Yorkshire pensioners.

Three onions and half a Chinese lettuce: the sad contents of an unloved salad drawer. In the shop, these vegetables are thrilling items filled with potential, tightly packed parcels of flavour bearing the promise of stir fries, stews and soups. But give them a couple of weeks in the fridge and they end up with all the appeal of old shoes. Best just to have a sandwich.

Sustenance is a continual concern for the young homeowner. It’s all very well swanning round Waitrose when your entire wage is disposable income, frittering away your hard-earned cash on Organic Nicaraguan Single Estate Peanuts and Sun Dried Cornish Swan, but once you’ve got council tax, bills and a mortgage bearing down on your bank balance like a pack of angry bailiffs, you have to scale back. Goodbye to aspirational food, hello to bog roll, Domestos and beans.

Mindful of the inherent drudgery of the weekly shop, modern life has offered up an alternative: Internet supermarkets. If manhandling a wonky trolley down an aisle full of cheese isn’t your idea of a fun packed Friday night, it’s now possible to plan your forthcoming meals without even having to stand up. When you’re the kind of person for whom simply ironing a shirt feels like two months in prison, the sheer, unadulterated laziness of online food stores is an incredible draw. Thus I fired up my computer and headed to Tesco Online.

Ten minutes later, it emerged that I should have brought a shopping list. Actual supermarkets have a physical structure, which is an immeasurable help to the disorganised customer. Restocking the kitchen is as simple as ambling aimlessly past every shelf and tipping anything brightly coloured into the trolley. Once you’ve reached the end: hey presto, 20 dinners. But you can’t do that on the web, where mere minutes of browsing and the random stream of text and images converts your brain to mush. Hence recipes, pen, paper, planning. 25 minutes later I descended on the “search” bar with the precision of a military campaign.

There were pitfalls. It took three attempts to find the accepted spelling of yoghurt, and a messy scramble through thousands of deserts to find the plain version I wanted. A quibble over the accepted syntax of couscous threw me once or twice, unwaxed lemons proved initially tricky and the failure of the cyber-store to admit to stocking fresh basil led me on a five minute wild goose chase through every section that looked like it might contain something green. Eventually, however, my basket was full.

Delivery options are entertaining. Pick a prime slot and you can expect to pay through the nose, but plump for a knock in the middle of the night and it’s just shy of £4.00. It didn’t seem too much to ask, as the army of invisible butlers who were about to commence hand picking my goods and driving them to my house doubtless had families to feed. I typed in my debit card details and clicked the button to pay.

Then I looked at the time. The entire process had taken me one-and-a-quarter hours. Driving to Morrisons would have taken half that time, with the added bonus that I wouldn’t still be hungry. Then again, it would also have involved standing up.

Watch this space for the shopping’s thrilling arrival!

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I’ve run out of Euro Tour. I had loads but I used it all. I’m going to have to do some more. This thing below is off topic, but it does contain plenty of that hilarious Pixelsmith action you’ve come to know and treasure, even to lust after like a wolf.

Time. Theories differ on what it actually is. Boffins think it’s a dimension. Philosophers argue it’s a way to quantify the complex chain of cause and effect that makes up our world. Flies think it’s is a type of food. Flies think everything’s a type of food.

Ask the man on the street, however, and he’ll tell you that time means something very different. It’s the thing he uses to work out what he’s supposed to do. If it’s 7am, he has to wake up; if it’s 8am, that means he should have left the house; 9am means he should be at work; and so on, throughout the day, until the strike of midnight informs him that he’s already missed a proper night’s sleep, giving him a good reason to feel guilty about letting himself down.

You see, somewhere, out there in the ether, lies a huge intangible clipboard containing your life’s To Do List. Literally everything you ever need to do is on there, from the slightest insignificant occurrence - throw the milk out, wash your trousers - to the most important events on the human calendar - get married, die. Your parents look after the clipboard for you when you’re growing up, crossing off the items and directing you accordingly.

But once you flee the safety and structure of their nest and strike out cluelessly on your own, you realise nobody’s in charge. It’s just you, the clipboard and time, leering out at you from every inch of reality like a big, ticking headmaster with an officious grin and a weird, interdimensional Biro.

If we take a step back from this analysis, we can see that the man on the street’s view of time is, in fact, broadly similar to that of the philosopher. It’s a yardstick, of sorts, a handy measuring device used to chop up reality into bitesized chunks, with the added bonus that you can also use it to beat yourself around the head.

But love it or loath it, time would be useless if we couldn’t see the chunks. There are many handy ways to keep tabs on these, from sundials to alarm clocks to simply counting in your head. The new Suunto Core watch series is another. Designed for outdoor types, these timepieces - which celebrate the brand’s 10th anniversary, helpfully saving everyone else the trouble - can also interpret the weather via an inbuilt barometer, tell the direction you’re facing via an inbuilt compass, work out your underwater depth via an inbuilt depth meter and affix to your arm via an ingenious inbuilt strap.

All that’s useful if you’re Bear Grylls and you live in a tree and eat wasps. For normal people who live in houses and eat sandwiches, they look quite nice and tell you when you’ve missed your bus. Or your wedding.

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Monday, April 28

Our train from Copenhagen to Hamburg was at least twice as nice as any train I have ever caught in England. It seemed to be a special, German engineered cross-Europe train aimed at businessmen. Germany often does things very well - a trait which has proved slightly troublesome in the past, but which fortunately is now something everyone can enjoy. We journeyed in uninterrupted comfort until we reached the sea, at which point our train boarded a ferry and told us to come back in 45 minutes after it had had a sleep.

This was fun. Taking a ferry broadened the range of transport types we had experienced during the trip, which until then had run to planes, trains, buses, cars, human legs and a canoe. We clambered off our train and headed upwards, out of the bowels of the ferry and into an upper area custom designed to eat the cash of bored travellers.

Navigating this vessel turned out to be trickier than we had anticipated. We faltered in front of an automatic door, which boasted a large black circular button with no English instructions. Common sense dictated that the button would open the door. But there were no instructions. We were English. English people need labels, rules, manuals, guidelines pointing us in the right direction so that we know, for sure, that it’s somebody else’s fault when things go wrong. What if this button controlled the emergency stop device? Or, worse still, the plug? We decided not to risk it, instead leaning nonchalantly against a nearby rail pointedly not staring at the door until somebody else came and opened it. After about a minute, an old woman approached up, prodded the button, then trundled off through the open door. She was a braver man than either of us.

We killed some time browsing the duty free shop. I pondered picking up some cheap booze, until I checked the prices. Given that we were coming from Northern Europe, even these discounted spirits were more expensive than I’d pay at home. What’s more, we were en route to Serbia, where we’d heard you could pretty much buy a wife and family for half a dozen eggs and a digital watch, so we wouldn’t be saving money by spending it here. Instead, we stood above deck gazing into the water, passing fellow ferries and eventually drawing into the windmill-packed coast of Germany.

Inevitably we got lost on the way back to the train. But we found it before the ferry docked, reclaiming our comfortable seats and settling down for the ride to Hamburg.

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Monday, April 28

The scramble! Waking from the briefest of sleeps, I began gathering up my things.

The traveller’s first reaction upon arrival at his destination is usually to make himself at home - shoes off, coat up, phone plugged in to recharge. If you count the charger and European adaptor, this is already six items removed from the safety of his luggage or his person and strewn at various points across his temporary home. Add a couple of nights to the equation, and this haphazard distribution of possessions will have affected at least one half of everything he owns. Toothbrush in the bathroom, towel on the radiator, books on the table, DS plugged into the only free wall socket in some hitherto undiscovered segment of the kitchen and recently washed pants and socks manically affixed to anything which generates heat, including the homeowner. This situation is fine if the traveller is never planning to leave. On the morning of his departure, however, it swiftly morphs into a crisis.

At least I didn’t have to worry about forgetting my wallet, which two days previously had made a successful bid for freedom in the centre of Lund, stealthily flinging itself from my inside coat pocket complete with my credit card, debit card and 50 Euros. This could have been terrible, leaving me stranded without cash for the remainder of the holiday.

Fortunately I had loads of money. Due to my organisational skills being greater than those of Brodos - that is, greater than zero - I had booked all the plane and train tickets on my credit card, with him then repaying me his half of the £1,100 total in Euros when we met at Stansted. What neither of us had realised is that only two of our six destinations, Finland and Italy, accepted Euros. Combined with the 300 or so I had taken myself, this resulted in me lugging around a wad of hard cash heavy enough to kill a rodent. This meant that losing my cards was barely a flesh wound, although on the downside it also made me a very appealing target for opportunistic murder.

One thing we made sure not to forget was chocolate and Schnapps, provided by Morani and Maddok as a gift from our Swedish hosts to our Serbian hosts. With this stowed away and my remaining Swedish cash tucked into a second-hand wallet donated by Aakarp, we heaved ourselves to the station.

Waiting for the train made for an odd mix of emotions - morose because we were leaving, excited because we were heading into the unknown and bored because we were waiting for a train. Given how tired we were, it was a miracle any feelings managed to break through at all.

The train arrived and we said goodbye to Aakarp. She looked sad. I think she wished she was coming with us.

The first leg of the trip took us over the huge Öresund Bridge at Malmö, into Denmark. Given that neither of us had been to Denmark before, we figured that our 30 minute stop in Copenhagen station meant we could tick the country off the list. We discovered that the Danes have holes in the middle of their money, which strikes me as unnecessary. I suppose it means you could keep all your coins on a string, if that’s the sort of thing you like. Besides that, we squeezed as much learning and exploration into our half hour visit as we could, walking from one platform, buying some tickets and then walking to another platform.

I’m not sure if we got a flavour of absolutely everything that the country has to offer, but from my brief stay, I would be confident in informing less experienced travellers that Denmark’s culture is primarily based around trains.

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Sunday, April 27

Bejeweled ate up plenty of our time today. But that wasn’t the only thing keeping us occupied over the weekend. We watched a bundle of films, ploughed through an entire animated Terry Pratchett tale, and occasionally even played World of Warcraft.

This was an upsetting experience for me. At home, I use a strange looking device called a Nostromo, essentially a third of a keyboard with a little directional pad and a few extra buttons attached, which fits your hand much better than a standard keyboard. It took me at least three days of cack-handed uselessness to acclimatise myself to it, which means at least three days of re-adjustment lie between me and the ability to do anything meaningful in-game when sat at a normal keyboard.

This wasn’t the case for Brodos, who became surgically attached to the PC within moments of firing up the game. I had of course, played in his digital company many times over the preceding 18 months, but it was interesting to watch him in person. It was like somebody had reached inside his head and flipped the anger switch. After spending more than a week near permanently in the company of a friendly, affable and boisterous Brodos, it was quite striking to see such a clear change when he started playing WoW, gradually becoming increasingly irritated yet very reluctant to stop.

I’ve been there myself plenty of times, albeit unobserved, soldiering on despite the fact I know it’s putting me in a bad mood. It’s odd like that. In your mind it’s all about the reward, but a lot of effort goes into getting there; you remember the exciting parts, but there’s a shedload of boredom which you forget; you aim for victories against other players or the game itself, but losses pepper your record too; and all the while, a ton of other people are kicking around in the same place, lending huge social variety to something which, after years of familiarity, has itself long been mundane.

Online gaming is not merely comprised of enjoyable experiences, essentially. It’s often very annoying, because it’s full of other people, and other people - especially the ones sat behind the safety and relative anonymity of a screen somewhere else in the world - are often very annoying. But that also means it’s dynamic, which keeps it interesting, and keeps you hooked despite the fact you’re sat there swearing at your computer.

You could, if you like, skip the analysis and just call it addictive.

So we watched Brodos play WoW for some time, both today and at other points during the weekend. We also took a confused look at Swedish television, watched a little Danish television - Aakarp pointing out how hilariously hard-to-understand spoken Danish was, a fact sadly lost on her English guests, to whom both languages sounded insane - and munched on a variety of traditional Swedish foods, like pizza, sandwiches and pasta carbonara. The latter, an Aakarp speciality, was especially good, even my limp wristed vegetarian version featuring mushrooms instead of pig.

And, what with us having an early start the following morning, we turned in at a reasonable time for once. Naturally my brain refused to comply, and four hours later I was still playing on my Nintendo DS, trying to ignore the fact that it was getting light outside.

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Sunday, April 27

The clock seemed to strike one million before I eventually rose. This was unwise. Today we were to plan our journey from Sweden to Serbia, and a mere glance at the timetables indicated an early start for the following morning. With nights stretching well into the AM and breakfast generally taking place in the afternoon - this is what happens to me naturally when I don’t work - my sleep patterns were ill prepared for an early train.

Just as we had waited until the last night in Finland to plan our journey to Sweden, so we put off planning our exit from Sweden until the last minute. In a lazy bid to avoid having to plan at all, we checked the Internet airfares, but there was nothing below £250. Thus I sat down with my European rail guide, an incredibly useful, Bible-style tome filled with endless reams of tiny timetables which my father thrust into my hands before I left. Incredibly, we found only one error in this book in all our time in Europe. Sadly that mistake was a false claim pertaining to the availability of food a specific train. But more on that later.

With pen and paper handy, I buried my head in the book for half an hour, analysing a range of routes and times until two clear options emerged. One would give us a night in Prague, a city we had hoped to see from the beginning. The other would give just 10 minutes in Prague, experienced horizontally while asleep on a train. But we had no friends in the Czech Republic, and the second option got us to Serbia sooner, so our decision was made.

Ultimately the route we took would see us catching five trains over the course of around 36 hours, stopping at Copenhagen in Denmark, then Hamburg and Berlin in Germany, before boarding a sleeper train to Vienna in Austria. From there we would catch our final train, an 11 hour trip south to Belgrade via Hungary. On paper, it looked like quite an adventure. In retrospect, its only real plus point is that it has made every train journey since seem incredibly short and pleasant.

But we still had a day left in Lund, which we spent in typically relaxed fashion. The combination of our time of awakening - late - and the time of the week - Sunday - meant there wasn’t much to do when we finally dragged ourselves into town, so we looked in the windows of a couple of closed shops, ate an amazing ice cream from a shop run by genuine Italian people, looked at some more closed shops and then trundled home.

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Much of our time with Aakarp was spent sat on her sofa, staring at the screen of her laptop. This comes very naturally to anybody who plays World of Warcraft. The average person might find gazing at such a diminutive screen a little disappointing, but we geeks are so used to deriving entertainment from our PCs that we don’t find this to be a problem. It was thus that we found ourselves playing a strange little puzzle game named Bejeweled. For hours. And hours. And hours.

Bejeweled is a curious species of videogame. The best way to start is to describe how it works. You begin with a grid filled with jewels of various colours. Clicking on one jewel and an adjacent jewel causes the pair to swap places for a second, then swap back again. This is your only method of interaction. The aim is to use this swapping method to line up three jewels of the same colour, at which point all three disappear. Anything above them in the grid then drops down to fill this gap, while new jewels plop in from the top to replace those, so the grid is always full.

I hope you’re still with me. There are two more things to mention: if you line up four jewels at once, a special exploding jewel is created which lies in wait in the grid, then suicide-bombs itself and any nearby jewels when you decide to use it. If you line up five at once - very rare - an amazing electrical hyper cube style jewel is created, which sits there undulating until you call it into use by swapping it with an adjacent jewel. At this point, it destroys all jewels of that colour. For anybody who has played shoot-em-ups, this is like a smart bomb. If you’ve played beat-em-ups, it’s is like a super move. And if you’re familiar with platformers, it’s like an invincibility power-up.

The strange thing is, if you’re playing Bejeweled, there’s a strong chance you’re not familiar with any of these game types. There’s a strong chance, in fact, that you’ve never played any other games besides Bejeweled. That’s because the game is, essentially, designed for bored housewives. It’s like a two-dimensional, digital version of Valium, except instead of helping you do the hoovering by coating reality in a vague, emotionless fluff, it actively stops you from doing the hoovering by creating a dependency akin to that of a morphine user.

Masquerading as a puzzle game like Tetris or Puzzle Bobble, Bejeweled is in fact so idiotically simple that it functions as a trojan horse. Furnished as it is with fewer rules than a barnyard fistfight and a control method so basic you could play it with your eyelid, it successfully dupes bored middle aged women into thinking they aren’t really playing a videogame. It’s a traditionally impenetrable demographic, the kind which thinks the sum total of mankind’s achievements in the realm of interactive entertainment amount to a handful of copycat killings and a series of loud bleeps, so fooling them onto a computer is a stroke of genius.

Bejeweled isn’t a proper game. Proper games have guns in, or monsters, or people punching each other in the face - some kind of violence, at least. They’re only allowed to not have any violence in if they’ve got cars, or failing that, some kind of ball. Very occasionally, some fringe activities, like pressing buttons in time to music or raising a pet puppy, will be allowed. And it’s important for games to stay within these boundaries, otherwise everybody gets confused and starts thinking anything count as a videogame, then starts trying to beat their previous score while doing the washing up or having a poo. That’s not healthy.

So Bejeweled is like legal smack for stupids. Being stupids, Brodos, Aakarp and I sat playing this thing into the early hours, swapping control every time we completed a level, while those without the mouse remained glued to the screen in an advisory capacity. I do not know where the time went. But then again, there have been many days in my life of which I can say this. It’s a familiar feeling for the online gamer, and a disheartening one at that.

However, I wasn’t disheartened in Lund. For some reason, if it doesn’t feel bad at all to watch time evaporate if you’re not alone.

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Saturday, April 26

Finally, we had found a host who woke up as late as we did. I used this to my advantage by remaining in bed some way into the afternoon, eating up vital space in the living room with my dormant form. Meanwhile, life plodded around me, secretly wishing I’d stop getting in the way but far too polite to kick me until I moved.

Our first stop in Sweden had seen our hosts keep us entertained with a sequence of enjoyable, well planned activities. We toured beauty spots, climbed churches, rowed round lakes and took a picnic in the woods, accompanied all the while by the benelovent presence of our highly organised hosts. We wondered what delights Aakarp had in store for us.

She emerged from her room brandishing a book. “I need to take this back to the library,” she said.

For any normal people, this might have been something of an anticlimax. For Brodos and me, it was a crystal clear sign that, despite living in a different country, Aakarp was essentially one of us. If we had felt at home during both of our previous stops - Iscaria’s family looking after us with overwhelming hospitality, Morani and Maddok stuffing our visit with fun events to keep us from getting bored - Aakarp’s stop was the first place where I felt so at home, I could have actually been in my own house. The plan, basically, was just to sort of mooch about. It was a master stroke. After so much holiday, we were in dire need of a rest.

Of course, that’s not the whole story. Taking a trip into town to return a library book gave us our first real introduction to Lund. It was a beautiful place, littered with well kept old buildings like a good university town should be. It reminded me a little of York, a city in the north of England which functioned as the country’s capital before London stuck its big sweaty head in. There is, apparently, an ancient law which permits York citizens to shoot Scottish people with a bow and arrow, provided they do so while standing on the city walls. I’m not sure whether this has been tested for a few hundred years, but given that my father is Scottish, it would have been a handy law to know about during my teens.

We delivered the book, which meant our task for the day had been accomplished. At a loose end, we ambled into town to look at things. We bimbled around an exceptionally pretty part of town, including a church - complete with tombs - before giving up on the outside world and heading back to the flat.

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Friday, April 25

The night after excessive drinking and casual violence. Everyone was feeling awful. I felt like I had been repeatedly savaged by a dog during the night, after which the creature had gone to the toilet first inside my mouth and then inside my brain. I looked suspiciously at Mingla. No, couldn’t have been. The bite wounds under my arm were too small. As a matter of fact, they looked almost… human. Strange.

I wish I could remember more of this day. My overriding feeling is one of wanting the hurt to go away. It was a triple-threat kind of pain, physical from the fighting, internal from the hangover and emotional, for this was to be the day on which we would bid goodbye to our hosts and relocate to our third stop. We gathered our possessions, nursed our various wounds and said the fondest of goodbyes to Morani, Maddok and Mingla, before climbing aboard a bus for town and finally setting ourselves down on a train seat, en route to Lund with our capable and equally hungover guide, Aakarp.

The journey was punctuated by rounds of musical chairs played with commuting passengers who, unlike us, had taken the trouble to reserve their seats. Naturally we hated them all. A few hours later we pulled into Lund, a town so crawling with students that their sheer weight of numbers potentially qualifies them as a race. Their bikes thronged the station.

Heading back to Aakarp’s student flat, we took a picture of the building in which Morani and Maddok had lived when she met them. Somehow, the sight penetrated my foggy head to create an oddly poignant sensation. It was a tangible reminder that these funny little Internet people existed outside of my world, that they had real lives beyond what I knew of them.

I remember having a similar feeling once when working in incredibly small newspaper office. Like any parochial workplace with a door leading onto the high street, we had a broad range of unusual repeat visitors. One, a troubled youth who sometimes worked in the neighbouring shop owned by his parents, would often pop in to ask if we had anything that we wanted him to put in the postbox. “Do you want anything posting?” - That was all he’d say. We’d say no, and he’d clench his fist and say “damn”, visibly disappointed. We found out later he only went to school twice a week because he had “anger issues” and sometimes “threw things”. If we’d have known this, we’d have found him something to post.

Meanwhile, our regular delivery of letters came at the hands of one of the grumpiest postmen in the world. This isn’t an exaggeration, as it is not physically possible to be more grumpy than him and hold down a job. One notch higher on the grump scale and you’d just stay in bed all day, sleeping until you died. This postman would shoulder the door open, grumble “morning” in the morose manner of somebody who’s just resignedly watched their relatives eat each other, then flop a bunch of envelopes on the table and leave. Sometimes we’d watch him after he had departed, trundling down the street with his oversized trolley of mail and a chip on his shoulder the size of a shed.

Then one day, I was gazing out of the window avoiding work, and I saw these two together. The weird boy with his post fetish, and the sad postman who resented his life. They were both chatting away gleefully as if they had known each other forever. That man must have been like a hero to the youngster, every day touching more letters and parcels than his teenage mind could imagine. The boy, in turn, must have been a breath of fresh air for our depressed delivery man, genuinely excited and enthralled by the postie’s mere existence. They should probably have got married.

And I realised, gazing out at this unlikely scene, that these were real people. Not, as we viewed them, bizarre two dimensional cutouts who existed purely for our own amusement. They had lives, genuine existences which mattered beyond our bubble, as important to them as ours were to us.

I’m not saying Morani, Maddok or Aakarp are like the angry postman or the weird boy. But online, they don’t exist outside of my experience. I chat to them, and if I’m tired or I want to do something else, I can stop. I can flick on my whole Internet social circle with a few button presses, immerse myself as deeply as I like, then shut my laptop whenever I’ve had enough, and they all disappear as magically and as conveniently as they arrived.

But they’re real. World of Warcraft, endlessly geeky and social unacceptable as it is, it isn’t what they are. It’s just how I met them. How the various atoms and thoughts that make up me came to collide, at random, with the ones that made up them, as we went about staring at our feet, plodding our respective, tangential paths.

These people. They are proper. Whether you realise it or not, they are your friends.

I’d never had friends from Sweden before. Given this, we ought to have made the most of Aakarp’s Swedishness while we were staying at her flat, perhaps by browsing the IKEA catalogue, indulging in meatballs or eating salmon. As it happened, we felt so rough that we just sat on the sofa, watched films on her laptop and eventually went to sleep. With such an action packed week behind us, it was exactly what we needed.

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