My hair hung damply down the back of my back and I instinctively reached for the ends of each tress and began mechanically braiding them into pointed,flat rows that looked,in the mirror behind me, as if they belonged on a piece of graph paper rather than my head. I glanced over as James and he was balancing a pencil on his fingertips,staring down a void white notebook and huffing “Well that doesn’t sound good,” or “No,that’s not right at all.” I turned the machine onto 10^5 Celsius fan heat and level 5 foam and poured my cup of coffee with two sugars and an dead fly biscuit on the side just as I did every morning. If I was going to watch James grumble then I ought to at least have a decent breakfast. However no sooner could I sit down than James was up like the crack of a shotgun and shrugging his sunny raincoat over his shoulders. “I’m off for a walk!” he snapped,shaking his head as he fiddled his right arm through the left sleeve. Although he didn’t need to tell me at this point for it was the third time this week that James had stumbled his way onto the salt-breezed shoreline of Metricland and returned in a slightly less frustrated mood than before and often bearing gifts such as a broken calculator, a chewed up old magazine or the head of a doll. The bathroom windowsill was already becoming infected with a collection of them. Gently twisting the handle to the kitchen drawer, I pulled out my favourite navy patterned ribbon and swung my hair into a coiled bun. It wasn’t the neatest but it was good enough to keep my braids up while I worked on something much more important than hair. Maybe I should introduce it to James, I thought as I cleared my mug into the metal sink basin, he could use some help working on things more important than hair.