1065: The Third

Pete slumped down into the chair in front of the hotel room desk and began to type.

“It has been a long day,” he wrote. It had been a long day, but not quite in the way he had anticipated when he woke up this morning. He was expecting a day of jury service followed by a bit of heavy lifting as he attempted to clear out the rest of his now-former residence in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Instead, what he got was a whole lot of sitting around in the courthouse until lunchtime before being apologetically told by the judge that the jury were being let go due to the fact that the trial they were sitting on had to be abandoned.

Pete paused, considering whether he should share further details of the trial in question now that he was technically allowed to, but that he wasn’t supposed to “publicise” it due to the fact it would be restarting with a new jury at some point in the future. He eventually decided against explicit details, and instead invited his readers to have a chat with him if they wanted to know the dirt. It was a moderately interesting case, after all, and it had left him with something of an interest in the law. He resolved to check whether or not Murder One was on Netflix when he finally got “proper Internet” back in his new place… and then hastily explained to his readers that the trial he was sitting on was not, in fact, a murder trial.

He let out a theatrical sigh and wondered what to write next. This hotel room wasn’t the most interesting place in the world, but at least it was warm, vaguely comfortable and had a bed in it, which was more than could be said for the floor he had been sleeping on last week. A “high-tech hobo,” he had called himself — essentially squatting in his own house due to the fact that pretty much all the furniture and other stuff had been moved out in preparation for his girlfriend Andie and him to start their new life in Southampton.

The weekend had been pleasant. The new flat was good, and a lot of stuff had already been unpacked and put in its place. His study still needed putting together, but the skeleton was there — bookshelves around the outside waiting for books and the music scores that had been boxed up for a while. He winced as he remembered how heavy the box that contained them was, and reminded himself to take extra boxes to repack them when he went to pick them up from Andie’s mother’s house.

“Wait a minute,” he said out loud, pausing the frantic clacking of his fingers on the laptop keyboard for a moment. “Why the hell am I writing this in the third person?”

No answer was forthcoming, for the room was otherwise devoid of life.

“I really, really need some sleep,” he said to himself, clicking the Publish button and flicking on the hotel’s painfully slow little kettle for a pre-bed drink.