Time stretched away from the planet. It wibbled and then plopped over sideways towards Venus. Invisible workers on the periphery pushed and pulled it back into place and dusted it off. Good as new.

Most people on Earth experienced it as ‘one of those days’. The kind that drag on forever and for every hour looked at the clock only a minute has passed and the more often they look at the clock the more choruses of office workers start to chime ‘that can’t only be the time’, et cetera, et cetera. A few lucky couples spent the time in their love bubble, where the outside world ceases to exist anyway, and therefore were unaware of time shifting. Unfortunately, for some it was utter torture in the most literal sense.

Beings of Earth don’t realise quite how lucky they are to have such dedicated Time Gremlins propping up the jelly of time surrounding the planet. Gremlins of other inhabited planets in the universe gave up their stations long ago to bundle carefree around the universe. Time on those abandoned planets continuously wobbles around, which has resulted in the inhabitants regressing as they struggled to compute the new strangeness of time: intelligent life can only suffer so long under these circumstances. But here at Earth, the gremlins do their best to keep the gelatinous wobbling to a minimum.

Some days are naturally missed. New Year being the biggest one, but we celebrate that on November 12th. Time is a little less predictable and linear on that day, and you see more claims of déjà vu and psychic abilities increase. The cleanup on the 13th is messy but worth it. Last year, Norah found a blob of time as far away as Phobos, and oh, what a laugh we had. Maybe less so for Jack Evans in Hull, who repeatedly turned his alarm off because he was convinced it was Saturday each time, though we do try to keep these incidents to a minimum.

Then there is George, the unruly one. He rejects his place as a Time Gremlin, and it doesn’t matter how much his dad tells him it is his entire reason for existing, George claims he is destined for bigger and better things, not for holding up invisible time jelly surrounding a bunch of animals and plants that don’t appreciate his efforts (completely ignoring the appreciative fungi). ‘They get to live their lives normally; what about my life?’ he asks. A lot.

In fact, the only new jobs that have come up are a) keeping the other unruly time gremlins who have abandoned their planets from encouraging our lot to do the same and b) keeping George in check and, where needed, hold his bit of time up until his dad drags him back huffing and puffing.

I’m not entirely sure why I am relaying this or to whom, for there is no-one to read it, not unless something truly catastrophically terrible has happened. Oh, what’s George doing now..?