{dedicated to Cathy who is only too aware that a spoonful can weigh a ton.}

Plastic penguins. Drifting in space for what seemed like a life time takes it's toll on a guy, even a guy dressed in a silver suit and wearing such an impressively shiny and attractive name-tag, impressive and shiny through vigilance and good maintenance and not through alien construction or mysterious top-secret alloys. Despite the name tag, the suit and the relaxed swinging motion back and forth, on what appeared for all the world to be the captains chair on this particular bridge of this particular space craft, and for all the world that seemed not to exist at this particular moment in time, plastic penguins were all Pilgrim could bring to mind. He missed them.

He pondered on how they were small, about two inches tall, made of moulded plastic (in the shape of a penguin strangely) and painted with non-chip-kidsafe paint. He'd seen them in one of the stores on the theme park and marvelled at their simple, yet purposeful construction. They were quite heavy, he found when popping (quite literally) into the store on one of his secret clean-up missions, well there was no one around so "why not?" he thought. On examination it quickly became obvious that a high percentage of their weight was due to the large ball bearing poking out of the penguins...well, it's arse, which assisted in its motion down the plastic slidey-thing. He'd found this out when he placed the penguin at the very top of the plastic slidey-thing which he'd naturally assumed would be the penguin's preferred vantage point. There ensued a great commotion and whirring of sirens and alarms as the stores motion sensors (clearly highly attuned to plastic semi-aquatic birds and not shiny suits or name-tags) kicked up an incredible fuss as they detected a small heavy somewhat curiously-moving object.

It should be noted that motion detectors are pretty stupid, and for most of the day, they are largely ignored. This of course makes them slightly irritable, and therefore even less likely to be caught napping by a plastic penguin. Security guards are often caught napping, pretty irritable, slightly stupid and are (for most of the day) largely...ignored. Some resemble penguins.

The next day a puzzled store assistant spent 15 minutes cleaning sugar and jam traces from the faces of the plastic animals on one of the display items....and for the rest of the day scowled at sticky-fingered passing children.

Pilgrim rocked back on his chair and almost lost his balance, arms flailing, much as he would if a giant jelly doughnut had been pushed in his face, and came to a somewhat disorganised wobbling rest. He rubbed his nose, beneath his hand there was of course no sugar and jam traces, just a tired and lonely lost in space refuse technician.

He sighed and leaned back once more to marvel at the memory of those crazy animals, he watched them in his mind roll down the mostly-red contraption, with its construction of tubes and arcing plastic slides, curly-wurly twisting to the ground around one big central tube. He placed the penguins on the slide and watched them wiz around down to the ground into the base-tray, or animal sorter. How interesting! He'd just remembered there were three slots and penguins seem to prefer coming to rest in the first of the three. He chuckled as he considered what this might mean to modern science and its laws of prediction, little did he know New Scientist had already extensively covered the phenomena. He wondered what this might mean to the mind of a one year old child, they'd get bored pretty quickly he thought, a fundamental toy design floor. Furthermore, the top of the contraption (where the penguins are placed) is far to high for a small child, so he or she would have to attract the attention and seek assistance from an adult or bigger child, which could lead to all manner of troubles. Your average adult isn't quite into the whole penguin-slidey thing and prefers the fine art of quietly watching TV. So, it makes perfect sense to take out the source of the distraction and next thing you know there's a two-inch ball-bearing rectally-inserted penguin whistling through the air on a smash trajectory course with the TV screen.

The whole thing was clearly, poorly conceived. What did a Chinese toy company know about penguins anyway? Not a lot apparently, judging from the copious amounts of no ice, complete lack of fish, disregard of water and sheer amount of, well, red. He wondered if red plastic was cheaper to manufacture? Is vanilla plastic red? Or is it "natural" in another way?, a warning perhaps to unobservant TV-distracted tall people who may just trip and may just sue the Chinese toy company into the ground, "a fundamental toy design floor" he chuckled.

"Insane"...he thought to himself, but what did all this mean?, it all meant something, he was sure......as he rocked forward, then back, a nearby largely unnoticed (mostly red) motion detector of unusually high intelligence noticed something strange about the main console, but what to do? ...it tried the usual red-LED flashing thing it was trained to do when something moves (by it's Chinese toy inventing creator), no joy, this needed something a little more attention grabbing....

The trouble with sanity is that it's entirely objective, much like white noise vs music, or sky vs void of space. How is sanity measured? Ounces? Ball-bearings? Kid-safe paint? ill-logic? Or is it event based? What makes one person sane and another as batty as a fruit sundae? What is the scale of sanity and who is the arbiter? Furthermore, if a refuse technician five hundred million light years away from the small and insignificant planet he called home fell off his chair, would he make a sound?

Pilgrim lay on the floor, feet in the air, he let out an audibly-invisible low-pitched moan obscured completely by the deafening full-volume floor-shaking p/a roar of Barry Manilow's Copa Cabana, he knew this was all too much.