I once had to spend a night holding an Aluminium cube. The vendor suggested we all go out and club it. I had no option. It was that or go with wood. I figured it’d be safer with the metals.

For the first time ever I saw the lesser metals in their natural habitat, and it weren’t pretty. I’d seen them clustered at exhibits before, being proud but… this time I was surrounded.

Everywhere I went it felt like they were watching me; fish-white sheen puckered by the rusted light; tight forms peering out for fresh meat; screechy, booze-soaked surfaces hollering out for a hand to take ’em halfway up the road to the next all-night watering hole. A shatter of glass; a round of applause; a sixteen-year-old mother of three vomiting in an open sewer, bairns looking on, chewing on potato cakes. I ain’t never going back to holding Aluminium… not never.