10 Things That Never Happened

Book : Material World

by Alexis Hall

Genres: LGBT Gay; LGBT & Pride; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

Sam Becker loves—or, okay, likes—his job. Sure, managing a bed-and-bath retailer isn't exactly glamorous, but it's good work, and he gets on well with the band of misfits who keep the store running. He could see himself being content here for the long haul. Too bad, then, that the owner is an infuriating git. Jonathan Forest should never have hired Sam. It was a sentimental decision, and Jonathan didn't get where he is by following his heart. Determined to set things right, Jonathan orders Sam down to London for a difficult talk…only for a panicking Sam to trip, bump his head, and maybe accidentally imply he doesn't remember anything? Faking amnesia seemed like a good idea when Sam was afraid he was getting sacked, but now he has to deal with the reality of Jonathan's guilt—as well as the unsettling fact that his surly boss might have a softer side to him. There's an unexpected freedom in getting a second shot at a first impression…but as Sam and Jonathan grow closer, can Sam really bring himself to tell the truth, or will their future be built entirely on one impulsive lie?

Release date: October 17, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca

Print pages: 361

Sample

CHAPTER 1

It probably says good things about modern Britain—or maybe just about modern Liverpool—that when I was growing up, I got way less shit for being gay than I got for being named after a hobbit. And while I’m glad my classmates weren’t homophobic, the hobbit thing did hack me off a bit, especially because the hobbit I was named after wasn’t even one of the weird ones. If I’d been called Meriadoc or Fatty Bolger that’d have been one thing, but my name was Sam. Still is Sam, really. But my full legal name is Samwise Eoin Becker and so every time I started a new class, on the first day, the teacher would be reading the register and they’d call out “Samwise” and I’d have to say, “here, miss” and that’d be it from then on. It didn’t help that the first set of movies came out just as I was starting primary school and the second set hit just as I was starting my GCSEs, so I had jokes about second breakfast and hairy feet from the age of five until I was eighteen.

Still, you’ve got to laugh, don’t you? My dad taught me that. And it’s probably the most useful thing I’ve ever learned.

For example:

“Hey, Ban.” yells one of my employees. He knows what I’m really called, but this is Amjad, and Amjad is even nerdier than my mam and so once he found out I’d been named after a hobbit he thought it was hilarious to refer to me by Sam’s original Westron name from the appendices that he apparently knew off the top of his head. And I let him get away with it because at least it was an original bit. “They’re going to need you in bedding.”

I love my team. Not love love, obviously. More tolerate bemusedly. But the phrase they’re going to need you in bedding inspires a feeling so far from confidence I might almost call it concern. “Why?” I ask.

The only answer Amjad gives is the only answer I need. “Brian.”

I give a small internal fuck and head over to the afflicted department. Bedding’s half the store which means I’ve got quite a wide area to search, but Brian has a way of creating a little zone of chaos around himself so I’m not terribly worried about finding him.

And find him I do. He’s standing next to the Country Living Hamsterley mattress, which with its double layered calico pocket springs, hand-teased soft natural fibres of lambswool and mohair, and one hundred percent natural Belgian damask, is one of the most luxurious, most expensive, and—importantly—most “don’t-trust-Brian-with-this” mattress in the store.

He’s looking flustered. He’s also holding an extremely ominous mug.

“Please,” I tell him as soon as I’m close enough to be heard without shouting, “please for the love of everything tell me you did not just spill tea on the Country Living Hamsterley mattress with the double layered calico pocket springs and the hand-teased natural fibres.”

“No,” he says, “I didn’t.”

And like a muppet, I let myself feel relieved.

“I spilled coffee on it,” he explains.

It’s not the detail I should pick up on. It’s really not. “I didn’t think you drank coffee.”

“I don’t.” He’s doing his best to look apologetic. “But I thought Claire might want one so I was bringing a mug through to the office just in case and, well, here we are.”

So many details to address. And so little time. “And you picked a path straight past the most expensive mattress in the store because…?”

“Well, I thought I should steer clear of the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top on account of what happened last week.”

The fact that I hadn’t been aware of anything at all happening last week as regarded the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top probably said not-entirely-great things about me as a manager. “Should I ask?”

“Well, I was having a jam sandwich—”

“You got jam on the Flaxby Nature’s Finest 9450 Pillow Top?”

Brian nods, sheepishly. “It’s fine, though. Tiffany helped me flip it over, so it doesn’t show.”

Once again, I make the mistake of feeling relieved. Then the bits of my brain that are professionally required to know how beds work start talking to each other. “Hang on Brian, you can’t flip a pillow top mattress. Because it’s got a pillow top.

On the top.”

“Ooh.” Brian winces in a way you ideally never want a man in charge of two grand’s worth of mattress to wince.

I decide that the pillow top issue can wait. “Well, I suppose we can at least flip this one. Come on.”

Flipping the mattress is hard work but at least it’s simple work and, once I’ve reminded him to put the bloody mug down, Brian can handle it with something approaching competence. We heave the whole kit and caboodle up onto one side, pivot it about the middle, and lay it down nicely on the frame that’s being used to display it.

Then I step back and check it looks okay, and I see another large, brown stain spread right across the middle.

“Ah,” says Brian, “now that one is tea.”

***

I’m heading back from bedding, trying to work out how to replace not one but two display models of high-end mattresses, when Claire, my assistant manager, sticks her head out of the office door and yells “His Royal Dickishness is on the phone” the entire length of the store. Which she follows with, “And don’t worry, I’ve got him muted.”

“That just means,” I yell back, “that you can’t hear him, not that he can’t hear you.”

“Well, balls.”

One of these days I’m going to have to do something about Claire’s habit of calling our boss His Royal Dickishness. And also about her habit of shouting swear words across the showroom. And also, for that matter, about Brian just, y’know, in general.

Though I’m guessing that right now His Royal Dickishness is going to care more about the swearing.

I’m guessing right.

“So”—Jonathan Forest’s slightly too-polished accent glides down the phone line and into my ears—“this isn’t what I was originally calling you about, but why the hell is your assistant manager calling me a His Royal Dickishness in front of what sounded like the whole shop?”

There’s no way to cover for this, but I try anyway for Claire’s sake. “It’s affectionate?”

“How’s it affectionate?”

“It’s a northern thing. Y’know, like when you’ve got a mate you call y’bastard.”

“I lived in the north for sixteen years,” says Jonathan Forest—he likes to bring that up because it makes him sound more working class even though he’s a rich fucker who only gives a fuck about other rich fuckers. “And I never had a mate I called y’bastard.”

Privately, I think he’s probably never had a mate. “I’m just saying it’s how folk talk.”

“Even so, bastard”—he says bastard with a short a like a normal person, even if everything else he says sounds like one of the shittier royals—“has a very different connotation to dickish.”

“It’s the same principle,” I try. It sounds weak even to me.

“Okay.” I’m pretty sure Jonathan Forest isn’t a robot, but I almost hear his brain click as he moves on. “While this isn’t what I wanted to talk about, it’s very much connected to it.”

Oh fuck, he knows I call him a dick as well. We all call him a dick because he’s a dick. The way I see it, if you don’t want people calling you a dick, you shouldn’t be a dick. “Is it?” I ask, trying not to sound too much like he’s just caught me wanking.

“Splashes & Snuggles has three branches now and a fourth opening next year. The Croydon branch is performing as I expect it to. The Leeds branch is performing as I expect it to. The Sheffield branch decidedly is not.”

Probably not the time to tell him one of my employees just wrecked four grand’s worth of mattress with a tea run. “In what way exactly are we not performing as you expect

 us to?”

“You’re over budget and under target. And, frankly, I’m a bit concerned you don’t already know that.”

Oh why does this dick have to be such a dick? Yes, we are technically a bit over budget what with all the stock Brian has trashed, and yes, we are technically a bit under target, but that’s because Jonathan’s targets are bollocks. “I know what the figures are. But we’re a new store, it’s a competitive area, and we’re getting pretty close.”

“I didn’t hire you to get pretty close.” Somehow he manages to sneer just with his voice. “I hired you to meet the goals I give you, and if you can’t, I’ll find someone who can.”

Part of me really wants to say “fine, do that”. This job’s not worth putting up with this kind of crap. Except it’s not just my job we’re talking about. If I get the boot, then Jonathan Forest replaces me with somebody who’ll give him his precious fucking “targets” and then what’ll happen to Claire and Amjad and Brian and the rest of them?

So I don’t push back. Instead, I try to walk that line between promising results I won’t deliver and giving him an excuse to replace me with someone who will. “I’m sure we can work something out.”

“I’ve already worked something out.” He gives the tiniest, tiniest pause and then his tone softens just faintly. “I don’t want to let you go, Sam. I think you’ve got it in you to be a really good manager.”

You patronising shit. As far as I’m concerned, I’m already a good manager. Or at least as good a manager as you can expect in a second-rate bed-and-bath showroom in a competitive area with a team full of Brians.

Claire is holding up a piece of paper. It says, Is he being a dick?

I mouth yes obviously back at her, and she holds up another piece of paper saying sorry I can’t read lips.

Normally this would be fine, but normally I’m not trying to work out whether I’m at risk of losing my job. I wave at her to get her to stop. She doesn’t. And there’s no way she was ever going to, but I like to pretend I’m in charge sometimes.

“So that’s why,” Jonathan’s saying when I can focus on him again, “I want you to come to Croydon tomorrow so you can see how I do things.”

Tomorrow is Friday. My least favourite day for going to London. My favourite day for going to London is never. “We’re quite busy what with the run up to Christmas.”

“I’m sure Claire can handle it. She seems to have a lot of time on her hands. Certainly she has enough time to invent ‘affectionate’ nicknames for me.”

Looks like patronising shit is still where we are. “Claire is a valued member of the team and…”

Now Claire is brandishing an elaborate and lovingly rendered picture of a giant cock and balls.

“…and…and…”

She adds ball hairs.

“…makes an important contribution to morale.”

“Then,” Jonathan snaps, “I’m sure she can cope without you for a day. This isn’t a request, Samwise.”

I just about manage not to make a noise, but I physically cringe. I know it’s my name, but

 nobody’s ever used it except my mam, and I don’t want to be thinking about her right now. “Please don’t call me that.”

“The point is, Sam, I’m your boss and you’re coming to Croydon tomorrow. The company will reimburse your travel.”

He hangs up before I can say anything else. Which, at this point, is probably for the best.

“Are you all right?” Claire has put down the dick pic, which is what you might call a small mercy.

I sink into my chair and sit on my hands to stop them shaking. “Yeah. He’s such a…such a…”

“Dick?”

“Such a dick.”

“Do you want to”—and now she’s giving me the sort of uneasy look you should never get from somebody whose paycheques you sign—“talk about it?”

“He just gets to me, and I can never tell if he’s evil or if he doesn’t know or if he doesn’t care, or which would be worst.”

She thinks about it for a moment. “He’s evil.”

“I have to go to Croydon tomorrow.”

“Well, that’s a relief. I thought he was going to fire you.”

“He still might,” I point out.

“That’s not very likely. To drag someone all the way from Sheffield to Croydon just so you can fire them, you’d have to be a complete—oh.”

“Yeah, it’s not looking good, is it?”

Another pause. Claire runs a hand through her platinum blonde hair and looks at me like I’ve got brown sauce on my face and she doesn’t know how to tell me. “I’m trying to come up with something comforting here, but you’re totally fucked.”

“I know. But”—I do my best to pull myself together, to pretend this isn’t affecting me—“what can you do? You can’t stop a dick from being a dick. Will yez be okay to look after the place tomorrow?”

“Love, it’s a bed and bath superstore, not a nuclear submarine.”

“Yes, but Brian’s opening up.”

“Then we’re screwed.” Now Jonathan’s off the phone, Claire’s looking more serious. Maybe because she heard enough of my end of the conversation to know we’re in a serious situation. “You know,” she says, “if Jonathan’s getting on your case about numbers, you might really need to look at letting Brian go.”

I can’t believe she’s saying it. I mean I can, because she is, and because she’s said it before, but still. “Brian’s one of us.”

“He’s the worst Customer Advisor I’ve ever worked with, and I worked with Chel.”

Them’s harsh words. “Chel punched a child.”

“A very annoying child. And she didn’t cost us money.”

“Technically”—nothing good ever follows technically—“everybody costs us money.”

She’s not impressed. “Amjad told me what happened with the Country Living Hamsterley. And it wasn’t the first time.”

“Oh come on, he’s spilled a few things on a few mattresses.”

“Five since June. And

he ripped the seat off a VitrA Sento rimless while he was trying to show a customer how durable it was.”

I’ve backed myself into a defending Brian corner and now I can’t get out. “Toilet seats are easy to replace. Besides, Brian needs this job. It’s just him and his nan, and he’s the only one can cover the bills.”

“I know.” Claire gives me a sympathetic look, which she doesn’t do very often, possibly because she doesn’t very often think I deserve sympathy. “But if Jonathan’s out for blood, and you can either save Brian or me, honestly Sam I’d rather you saved me.”

I want to tell her it won’t come to that. But I can’t. I can just hope like fuck that Jonathan Forest will be reasonable. Which, thinking about it, means that we are definitely screwed. 

 

CHAPTER 2

I manage to forget how definitely screwed we are for about ten minutes until I take a walk out to make sure everything is where it’s meant to be and I realise we were supposed to have our Christmas displays up already and they are very much not up at all. So I go in to find Tiff, who I usually put in charge of that sort of thing because she’s good with design even if she’s not necessarily the most reliable person in the world, and she tells me that all the kit was meant to be delivered on Wednesday, but it never arrived and she didn’t think to tell me until now because she figured it’d sort itself out.

“I mean,” she asks, a lock of blue hair covering one of her eyes in a way I have to admit doesn’t radiate professionalism, “does it really matter? Christmas is a pagan festival anyway and—”

“Actually”—Amjad could hear a factual inaccuracy at eight hundred paces in a high wind—“that’s a misconception.”

“Is not.” Tiff is pretty young, and she still goes to the is not/is too school of debate.

Deciding that half past two on the first of December in the middle of a decorating crisis is the exact right time to get into the details of comparative folklorics, Amjad begins counting on his fingers. “The tree is a German protestant tradition, Santa Claus is the same—the early Lutherans pushed him as an alternative to the Christkind because they thought it was too Catholic—yule logs are eighteenth or nineteenth century, carols are—”

“Amj, is this important?” I ask. I don’t quite snap. I try to avoid snapping; there’s never any good reason for it.

“It’ll stop Tiff spreading misinformation.”

Tiff didn’t seem like she cared if she spread misinformation or not. “Okay, so Christmas is an authentically Christian festival but these days it’s just a celebration of consumerism and—”

I give her a look. “I know it’s a celebration of consumerism, Tiff. But in case you haven’t noticed, you work in a shop. Consumerism is our whole deal.”

“That doesn’t mean we have to support it,” Tiff insists.

“It kind of does.” I like my team to think for themselves, but sometimes fucking hell don’t I wish they’d do it less. “We’re not putting lights up so people will be reminded of the wonders of their salvation, we’re doing it so they’ll shell out a couple of extra quid for some novelty bedspreads with reindeers on them.”

Tiff looks at me with more disappointment than you should be allowed to direct at somebody who’s nearly ten years older than you and also your boss. “This is exactly what is wrong with late-stage capitalism.”

“Y’know,” I say, “you’re very Marxist for a trainee hairdresser.”

“Hair and beauty consultant,” she corrects me, “and isn’t the whole point of Marxism that it’s a philosophy for ordinary working people?”

She’s got me there. “I suppose, but it’s odd given the man himself had famously terrible hair.”

“You’re thinking of Einstein,” Amjad tells me.

“I’m not. There can be more than one famous historical person with bad hair.”

Tiff already has her phone out.

“What are you doing?” I ask. “Are you googling did Karl Marx have bad hair?”

She looks up. “Just finding a picture”—she turns the screen around—“hair looks okay to me.”

The picture she’s found is of his tomb in Highgate Cemetery. “That’s a statue. You can’t use statue hair as evidence. Plus, it’s on his grave. Nobody’s going to put a statue with bad hair on a feller’s grave.” Against all my better judgement I pull out my own phone, find a photograph of the man himself, and show it to Tiff. “There you go, look, bad hair.”

“According to this”—Amjad has joined in the google party, although knowing him he’s been searching for something like Karl Marx Hair People Are Wrong—“he actually got his hair cut shortly after that picture was taken so it’s probably not that representative.”

“And,” Tiff adds—they’re ganging up on me, they always gang up on me—“that’s not bad hair.”

“It looks pretty bad from

where I’m standing.”

Tiff does the disappointed look again. “Sometimes bad isn’t bad.”

“That sounds a lot like shite.”

She gives a long-suffering sigh, which is a cheek because she’s far too young to be long anything. “It’s the nineteenth-century equivalent of those guys who spend hours mussing their hair up just right so that it looks good but also like they’re too cool to care if it looks good. If you’re in the business, you can spot it a mile off.”

“You think he worked at looking like that?”

Tiff nods. “I think he was consciously aiming for Big Das Kapital Energy.”

Realising that I’ve let myself get distracted, I slip my phone away. “Right. Well, that’s been enlightening as always, but if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and find out what’s happening with our Christmas displays because if we don’t get them up by tomorrow—”

“We’ll get them up on Monday?” Tiff suggests.

“We’ll miss the first-weekend-in-December sales and that will make His Royal Dickishness even more pissed off than he already is. And since Claire managed to call him His Royal Dickishness to his face, that’s a pretty high level of pissed off.”

Amjad, who is sometimes useful when he isn’t being a gigantic pedant, looks thoughtful for a moment. “I think we’ve got some stuff from last year kicking around in the back. We could use that in a pinch.”

“And it’ll be all right after a year in a cold back room?” I ask.

He’s thinking again. “Some of it should still be usable.”

“Can we at least hold out for new lights?” Tiff picks idly at the collar of her black work-issue shirt. “Last year I had to go through over five hundred of them trying to find which bulb was broken.”

“Tree might be an issue too,” Amjad points out. “We had a real one last year, which I thought was odd because we sell artificial ones.”

I cling to the theory that this is all still doable. “Right. Well, I’m going to go check with the supplier. Absolute worst-case-scenario we use last year’s decorations until everything gets here.”

“And for the tree?” asks Tiff, who I think is enjoying the chaos more than she really should be.

“We’re on a retail park in December. There’ll be at least three places we can buy one within a twenty minutes’ drive.” I’m doing my optimistic voice, because in an absolutely ideal world I wouldn’t be having to drive around looking for a last-minute Christmas tree that I’d probably have to buy with my own fucking money, just so I could tell my prize dick of a boss that I at least got the Christmas display up on time. But in an ideal world Karl Marx would have better hair and Christmas wouldn’t be a soulless spectacle of conspicuous

consumption. Sometimes you just play the hand you’re dealt.

I head back inside and call the distributor. One of the sort-of-advantages of Jonathan Forest’s habit of being a massive control freak is that there is only one distributor to talk to. Of course the disadvantage of his habit of being a massive control freak is that the distributor isn’t really in the habit of talking to individual branch managers even though that would be much easier for everybody. Every year he has his team in London design the Christmas displays, select our fairly limited range of Christmas stock, and then ship the same combination of fairy lights and Santa pillowcases to all three branches from one central location. And since there are only three stores, you’d think that’d be pretty simple, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few years managing a bed and bath showroom it’s that pretty simple things can be surprisingly easy to fuck up.

“How,” I ask the man on the end of the phone, “did you wind up sending everything to the Isle of Sheppey?”

To give the lad his due, he seems embarrassed about it. “I don’t know what to say. We do a lot of distribution for homewares. We were sending a load of shipments out to the B&M in Queensborough, and Kev in dispatching has terrible handwriting and so—”

“Hang on hang on hang on.” I’m not letting this one slide. “I don’t care how bad somebody’s handwriting is, Sheffield doesn’t look anything like the Isle of Sheppey on account of how the Isle of Sheppey has the words the Isle of at the start.”

The man at the end of the phone makes a noise that sounds like a shrug. “We just call it Sheppey. Anyway, that’s where your stuff went.”

“Can we have it back like?”

“It’s in Sheppey.”

“I know it’s in Sheppey. I need it to be here. I need it to be here as soon as possible.”

He goes quiet for a moment. It’s not a moment I think he’s using to decide how best to satisfy my needs as a customer. “We can do Wednesday?”

“That’s in a week.” I’m really trying not to get angry. I wasn’t brought up to be angry. “How is in a week as soon as possible?”

“Well, there’s scheduling—”

I wasn’t brought up to be angry, but I was brought up to stand up for myself. “I don’t care about your scheduling. You were meant to get a delivery to us yesterday, and now you’re telling me I have to wait until”—I did a quick count in my head, maths was never my best subject—“the eighth. That’s a third of the Christmas run-up gone and you must know how important that is for retail.”

“Out of my han—”

I’m still not letting it go. “Okay, but level with me, lad to lad, is it actually out of your hands, or is it one of those things where you could get it sorted but it’ll be a lot of aggro at your end?”

“It’ll be a lot of aggro at my end,” he admits, “and I don’t want a lot of aggro at my end.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve got him. Apart from the Jonathan Forests of the world, most people won’t just tell you to your face that they’re making your life harder to make their life easier. “And I understand that, mate,” I tell him. “I do. But this was kind of your mistake, and it’s going to cost me and my team a lot, so it’d be great if yez could find some way to help me out here.”

He’s quiet again, but I think this time he’s really trying to think of a way to help. “I can probably get something tonight,” he tells me at last, “but it’ll be late.”

“How late?” I ask. I’m

pretty sure I don’t want to know the answer.

“It’ll take at least six hours which’ll make it—what, half eight, nine?”

I have to take it. It’d be ungrateful not to.

Although it’s not my fault, putting all this crap back together is going to be my responsibility. Redecorating the entire store by myself is almost entirely outside both my skill set and my having-to-be-on-a-train-to-fucking-Croydon-at-the-crack-of-dawn-set.

I slope out to the front of the store to have a think, and find Tiff outside taking an unscheduled break. It’s something she does sometimes, and the one time I confronted her about it she pointed out that if she smoked, then going outside to have a quick ciggy would be completely socially acceptable so by normalising that and not allowing non-smokers equivalent mental health space, I was reinforcing destructive habits.

“You alright?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah.” I’m leaning on a glass-fronted door staring at a grey sky on one of the coldest days we’ve had this year so I’m not really. I’m glad of my scarf, which is a slightly unfashionable powder blue and used to be my mam’s. “Fine. Except I’ve just got off the phone with the dispatcher and the decorations won’t be here until nine and—”

Tiff’s already grinning at me. “We’re doing decorations?”

“Not really we,” I explain, “I can’t do overtime and so I’ll—”

“I love decorations.”

“Okay but.”

She’s already backing through the doors, doing a little dance. “Leave it to me, boss. I’ll get everybody in, it’ll be great, just, like, order us a pizza or something.”

“But,” I try again. Only she’s already heading into the floor, singing De-cor-a-tion par-taaay to a tune I don’t really recognise.

And I hope, then pray, then go back to hoping on account of being an atheist, that this doesn’t go disastrously wrong.

 

***

 

In the end, it’s Tiff, Claire, Amjad, Brian, and this new feller called Chris who’s always the first to volunteer for everything and keeps telling me he’ll be doing my job in three years. I do get pizza in to say thanks for sticking around so late, and we sit in the returns kiosk eating garlic bread and planning how the display is going to look. Well, in theory we plan how the display is going to look. Mostly we just argue over toppings.

“There’s nothing wrong,” Brian is saying, “with pineapple on pizza.”

“Yes there is.” Tiff is holding fast on this one—she’s shifted her focus from the inequities of global capitalism to the more relatable question of whether Hawaiian pizza is shit or not. “It’s the avocado bathroom of pizzas.”

Amjad gives her a nerdy smirk. “You mean it’s fashionable to hate on it but it’s actually fine?”

“No, I mean it’s objectively the worst.”

You should never use the word “objectively” around Amjad. I once heard him argue that the sky wasn’t objectively blue because of wavelengths. “It’s not objectively the worst,” he replies, “it’s subjectively the worst. Taste is subjective by definition. And in fact, if you want to go by objective metrics, then both avocado bathrooms and Hawaiian pizzas are objectively amongst the best because they’re consistently popular and popularity is something you can actually measure.”

“My nan’s got an avocado bathroom,” offers New Enthusiastic Chris. “It’s fine.”

New Enthusiastic Chris hasn’t fully settled in yet which makes him a bit lacking on the banter front, so whenever he chimes in it’s always in a way that kills the conversation. I’m about to launch boldly into a whole new topic when we hear the truck rolling up outside. New Enthusiastic Chris is first on his feet, with Tiff shortly after. The rest of us follow them at a more sensible pace, except for Brian who’s spilled pizza on his shirt and is trying to dab it off with a different bit of the shirt.

Outside we meet a lorry driver who seems surprisingly okay with having been sent on a six-hour drive at short notice perhaps he needs the overtime—and the team pile in to help him unload all of the tastefully selected and corporate approved tinsel. New Enthusiastic Chris and Amjad double-team the Christmas tree, ...