Ashamed of your cowardly self, and so spurred into taking some sorta action that someday perhaps might grow you a backbone -- so you can stand tall in that hotel restaurant and then proudly sit at luncheon -- you banish your sorry self. The Moon seems as appropriate as any place for your exile.

Outside the hotel. And it is night.

Torquay in the first decade of the 21st Century has not shied away from architectural frivolity. By day: the postcard of seaside quaintness from a bygone age. By night: a screenshot from Ridley Scott's Bladerunner Los Angeles. Overhead, blimps school as relaxed as whales: neon adverts blaze along their sides; BBC English, unified Europa's chosen language for this week, purls over hailers, the vowels blending nicely with the hypnotic plashing and hissing of sea up and off the cobbled beach, and the harder consonants echoing between the buildings, and rattling the glass in window frames.

Stepping deeply into the one puddle in an otherwise unpotholed street, you see before your chilling filling bubbling shoes the moon full, shimmering, and then the blimp you're after slipping across its face like this is all Fate.

FREE MOON STARTER HOMES -- Blazing blue and orange along the airship's belly.

Pick-up kiosks dot the curving seaside boulevard. Making its pick-up run one blimp, flashing red-white OOH LA LA all over like some out-of-place bio-luminescent deep-sea jelly, swoops sedately trailing cable and a large hook. It looks like fun -- the hook setting, the blimp ascending, jolting the kiosk up like a good catch and all those inside squealing so!

Stepping inside the FREE MOON STARTER HOMES kiosk just as the airship begins its slow dive toward pick-up, you notice with instant alarm that there are no seats -- no railings to hold on to -- only the wire mesh of the kiosk cage itself that you immediately loop your fingers through.

Braying engines swoop overhead. You have no idea if you squeal or not, because the jolt knocks you out.

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