Virtual Strangers Read Online Free

friend who doesn’t and (and I checked at the cashpoint on the way home from work) a scant forty pounds for my Everest trip.

Chapter 4
    Evening. Calmer.
    I assume I am less stressed due to a blood supply re-route; I’m still digesting a half ton of massacred mince. I feel as if I now live in parallel universe version of my previous home. I decide to hole up in the least smelly region with hardware and hummy noises and blinky lights and modem and a very large glass of restorative wine.
    Two very large glasses of restorative wine later, I decide that I must make some serious lifestyle changes. I have simply no-one to send an email to. I spend a few consoling minutes visiting various pages at the BBC, but soon realise that it’s a strange sort of grown up that pores over Blue Peter Summer Expedition reports. So I re-activate the search engine with buzz words ‘tectonic’, ‘mountain’, ‘Everest’, and ‘summit attempts’. But bring up, depressingly, George Mallory’s body, plus an in depth account of recent Himalayan deaths.
    Frozen mountaineers are not greatly uplifting so I make the search a touch more pedestrian instead. End up (as one does) at the Sainsburys website, which at least gives me the opportunity to send a terse little email regretting their removal of French Vanilla polish from stock. After which, well - what to do? Who to email? And then I remember. You silly cow, Simpson! Of course you can send email! You can send one to Rose!
    [email protected]
    Dear Rose,
    Tra la! Tra la! Found your address, and here I am, at last. Many, many thanks for Touching the Void . I’ve read the whole thing, cover to cover, and feel one hundred percent more confident that if I come across a void of any sort (physiological or otherwise) on my trip, I’ll know just how to deal with it. Though doubt whether I’ll look as fetching in bobble hat. And hey! How about this! Simpson on line finally! Impressed, or what? Doubtless you’re knee deep in packing cases and cleaning, but, as the principal leavee in your life, I have simply nothing to do but wail and weep and wonder what the hell I’m going to do without you. What am I going to do without you? In fact, I have an inkling I will be spending a lot of time in this study - which my father insists on calling the dining room, despite that fact that no-one’s dined in it in a decade, bar flies. I think it’s a rearguard action towards re-instatement, actually. He doesn’t approve of eating in the kitchen. Which is rich considering he’s the one causing the stink!!
    Great party, by the way. I know I looked like I’d rather be pulling hairs from my nipples most of the time, but I was in a real emotional nadir last week, having lost a big chunk of all the stuff I hold dear, and having, it seems, picked up an early seventies daytime cookery programme for a lodger instead.
    Bless him, but God , Dad is sending me nuts!
    Email back soon.
    Love Charliexx
    I have not, as yet, any sense of the cyber-space-time-logging on and off again-continuum, but am still somewhat surprised that I have not received a response by the weekend. I imagined that happening people dealt with cyber-mail daily. But apparently not. Or else mine got lost.
    But I do remember that moving house is not only busy, but is also the most stressful thing on the entire planet after shopping for trainers, and decide instead to phone again. I’m greeted, however, by a jocular ansafone message by Rose, reinforcing that ‘hey, we’ve just moved. Think we’ve got time to chat?’ followed by much family guffawing down the phone. Return to computer and send another email instead.
    Dear Rose,
    Guess you’re pretty busy!
    And it’s all happening this end. We already have our invite to the Stableford firework night barbecue party. A record? And that’s we as in me, Phil, Ben and Dad. Though as Phil is on a Brontë awareness (or whatever) coach trip that weekend, and I will therefore have to trail around