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this Steranko smashed it to
pieces with a hammer – he had an approach to home improvement that was utterly his own – and called the electricity board. One of the people doing work on the house, he said, had
accidentally knocked the meter with a metal ladder, thus touching off a potentially dangerous short circuit.
    Somebody from the Electricity Board came round within the hour but after taking one look at the meter it became obvious that he wasn’t going to have any of this shit about accidentally
breaking it with a ladder.
    ‘Shall I tell you what happened?’ he said.
    ‘Yes,’ said Steranko while I looked on.
    ‘You shoved a copper pin into the meter, the meter bust and so you smashed the meter with a hammer. Am I right?’
    ‘No you’re not right, Sherlock Holmes. You’re fucking wrong,’ said Steranko. ‘It’s like I told you . . .’
    In the end Steranko’s household only narrowly escaped prosecution and were made to pay a huge deposit for a completely impregnable meter. Undeterred, Steranko got in touch with Erroll, a
guy with singed eyebrows who, for twenty-five quid, showed him how to disconnect and reverse all the leads so that after running the meter forward for six weeks you could then run it back for
another six, thereby cancelling out the units used. The only problem with this technique, Erroll pointed out casually, was that since it involved holding about six thousand volts of raw power in
your hands it was an extremely dangerous operation. It was therefore important to get things right and not get anything muddled up. It was advisable to wear Doc Martins but even then, he concluded,
they probably wouldn’t do you any good.
    What had happened now, Steranko explained to Freddie and I, was that after about six weeks of running it forward he had switched the meter round and run it backwards. Without realising it,
though, they’d used up enough units to take the meter back to less than zero, to about 9000 units, close to the maximum.
    ‘With the clock like that we’d have a bill of about five thousand pounds – probably more than the whole of the street put together so I had to reverse the leads to send the
meter back past the other side of zero, zero, zero. The meter man’s due any day now so we’ve got the house on full steam ahead, fires, lights, everything, twenty-four hours a day. Even
when we get it into positive figures we’ve still got to nudge it just past the previous reading. It’s dangerous too. The wiring in this house is pretty dodgy. Feel that wall
there.’
    We touched the wall which felt hot as a potful of tea.
    ‘Jesus,’ said Freddie. ‘I think you’re getting close to meltdown.’
    We sat sweltering for a few minutes and then Steranko – unusually, I’d not seen him for a week – asked what had been happening to me.
    ‘My life plummeted to an all-time low,’ I said. ‘I was on the edge of the abyss.’
    ‘You should have looked over the edge,’ said Freddie. ‘You’d have seen me lying at the bottom of it. You could have dropped in for tea.’
    ‘I got fired from my job,’ I said.
    ‘You’re kidding,’ said Steranko, laughing. What was it about my getting sacked that everyone found so funny? There had been some amazement when I’d been offered a job in
the first place and even more when I accepted it. It was as though getting a job was a temporary illness from which I had now recovered.
    ‘What were you sacked for?’
    ‘Oh it was a whole load of things: attitude, skiving. I don’t know what it is about me and work. As soon as anyone pays me to do anything I devote all my energies to skiving. A lot
of the time skiving’s even more boring and tiring than doing the work but the urge to attempt it is irresistible.’
    ‘That’s why people work,’ said Freddie. ‘Employment is a prerequisite for the truly fulfilling task of skiving, of feeling that you’re screwing your employer. Even
heart surgeons probably try to find some way of