He noticed there were several small discs of metal with toothed
edges on the hamster's chest, looking like watch cog-wheels.
As they gazed into the flames blazing behind the grate, they made rapid,
almost caricatured movements: the granny knitted, the mother gnawed on the
edge of a piece of pizza, the daughter stroked the pussy cat and the father
sipped beer. Remembering man's advice to prick
himself with something sharp whenever he began thinking about the lack of
any general order of things in the Universe, He decided this wasn't a
case of excessive enthusiasm for piercing; it was the result of close
proximity to the technological epicentre of events - the guy with the
ponytail simply never bothered to remove his pins.
When he looked closer he saw they were tiny medals made with remarkable skill - he even
thought he could see tiny precious stones gleaming in them, accentuating the
similarity to parts of a watch. He frowned, picked up the red pencil from his desk and wrote in above
the text: this kind of work - high end. In American terms it's already outdated, of
course, but it does the job for us. All of Europe runs on these, anyway.