For Quality Assurance Purposes

I popped into that pub yesterday for a quick lemonade. Thumbs-guy wasn't there but he'd left some of his rancid dressings behind. Cathy Lesurf from 'Fiddler's Dram' was sitting in the corner. It was definitely her. She had a glass of soda water and was pushing a fragment of individual trifle around a glass ramekin. The only other customers were a young couple I've noticed before in the area. They were sitting at a table. She had a half-pint of milk stout and he was drinking a jar of mild. Two torn-open packets of salt 'n' shake crisps were on the table. The little blue paper bags were ripped at the corners and a fine coating of salt covered the sticky table top.

The girl was dressed in a flouncy floral summer frock and straw sandals. She wore half a dozen colourful bead necklaces. Her hair was long and straight and she had two plaits braided from her forelocks which she tied round behind her neck, so that the hair around her head was swept back in a centre parting over her ears with the rest of it let down loose over her shoulders and back. She had big round eyes and a friendly smile which was slightly crooked. I've got quite a crush on her.

Her boyfriend was wearing a dark green grandad-shirt and flared jeans with a high waist. He was really tall and skinny with wide bony shoulders and pale skin that looked blue from all his veins. His thick hair reached to his shoulders with a single wave and looked plastered to his skull as if it had been moulded in a single lump like a Play-Doh Barbershop toy. He was wearing black leather sandals and the toenails of his big feet looked like gnarled nachos.

They waved me over. I sat down with them and the bloke talked about football and birds. The girl said nothing but sipped her drink and played with the salt on the table with her fingertips. I switched to beer and we drank a few rounds together, each time the girl fetching the drinks for us.

They invited me back to their flat for a sing-song. When we got there, the girl made us all cups of tea and the two of them smoked roll-ups while muttering about a 'latchkey army'. They served me cheese and pineapple chunks on a Formica Lazy Susan. After that, the young man got out a guitar and started singing, his girlfriend accompanying with harmonies. It sounded super - really super. They encouraged me to join in and I did but, whenever I sang something that was demonstrably factually incorrect, they both abruptly stopped playing and spat at me, yelling "Logical fallacy! Logical fallacy!" in shrill voices. This happened a few times. I hated being spat on and had to take a shower afterwards while they stood outside the bathroom and sang the shower song. To be fair, though, I think it's made me a more logical person.

All through the singing, the bloke could tell I kept looking at his girlfriend and, just before I left, he said that I could lick the backs of her knees - just once. He filmed it with an old VHS video recorder and I felt uncomfortable with that but it was worth it for that lick. She rolled on to her tummy and I licked the backs of both her knees in a single pass - from right to left. I felt her shudder slightly in her calves. I don't know if it was from pleasure or revulsion. I tried to sneak in another go but the bloke stopped me. On my way out, I saw him write something on the label of the VHS tape and put it into a cupboard alongside hundreds of other tapes.

Anyway, I'm beating about the bush here. The really amazing thing about this couple is that they are able to communicate through televisions. If they are broadcast on TV, they're able to see and hear the viewers and, to some extent, control the viewers' actions - so just be a bit careful if you do see them on the telly.