Outside Conor's Flat

I live in a tenement flat in Edinburgh's swingingly upmarket Milton Street. Due partly to a local gravitic anomaly, but mostly to a preponderance of brewery fumes, the atmosphere in Edinburgh is almost tangible, but with a sharp oxygen density gradient. Hence social stratification is reflected not by housing area but by housing altitude. Final year postgraduate research students such as myself are entitled to half a lungful of mixed air and a tablespoonful of marmite every third Wednesday.

Criminals convicted of convection face severe penalties which seem to have a considerable deterrent effect. Nonetheless, Brownian motion is widely practised despite being strictly prohibited by a number of municipal bye-laws.

Recent attempts by the lower classes to deploy the heavier fumes from tobacco smoke in order to displace oxygen upwards have proved laughably conterproductive. The brands of cigarette they can more readily afford are liable to combust spectactularly in the resulting enriched atmosphere, thus consuming the ill-gotten excess and restoring the natural social order.

Of course, the Scottish Parliament will change all that.

No. You can't come in (except to use the bathroom), but you can look upstairs or go downstairs to the street.


Conor's Personal Page