I was multiply surprised when I was awoken this morning. The first thing that surprised me was my mysterious landlady’s voice. I opened my eyes in terror, and found that she wasn’t in fact standing over my bed with a megaphone. She was in an entirely separate part of the building, but her armour-piercing voice was ricocheting at full volume along the naked corridors in all directions, making her seem omnipresent. She was evidently pleased that she had found someone who spoke her native language, presumably someone else from planet loud, and was yelling at them for all she was worth. Or perhaps her partner in dialogue was deaf.
A second surprise was in store for me. The drumming of the landlady’s voice wasn’t sitting too well with the throbbing in my head, so I decided to seize the day, and get out into the street. I threw off my bedclothes, and looked at where my body and legs would normally be. But someone had replaced my legs and torso. After all, my trunk and lower limbs don’t have words written all over them, and big arrows pointing to their features and attractions. My knees aren’t announced by black biro boxes with the word “knee” scrawled in them. My belly button doesn’t normally have “navel” written upside down next to it. Nevertheless, the muscles in these gloriously labeled body parts responded to my desires. I managed to dress these new parts of anatomy, step over an empty vodka bottle and a guilty looking biro and make it to a bar for a beer. Over the beer, the limbs and I became best of friends, and I’m taking them to Italy with me later today.