Black Mirror: Bandersnatch

You start with a modest noticeboard on the wall by your desk, where you pin a postcard of MC Escher’s stairs, a concert ticket that you keep to pretend you’re someone who regularly goes to gigs, a photo of a plastic Action Man mastiff like the one you had when you were a kid before you let your friend Richard “borrow” it… There’s no point removing any of this stuff as you gradually add more paper, so the collection expands upwards and outwards, and increases in its palimpsestic depth. It’s all fine. It’s just a noticeboard, your noticeboard, and this is what it’s for. Keep adding. It expanded so gradually, inch by inch, so that you can’t pinpoint when your ephemera properly overflowed the edges of the board and began papering the wall itself, a skin of tissuey scales. Soon you’ll reach the ceiling and so you spread further to the side until you first touch the corner. Later there’s no space on your wall for the latest clipping, an advert for the Street Hawk computer game you were supposed to get as a free gift when you subscribed to Crash! magazine but, with its release constantly delayed, you never received. Where can you stick this, your first warning that companies don’t always deliver what they promise, that the system isn’t working for you? That adjacent wall looks so clean and it feels wrong to spoil it. But, then, your noticeboard wall is full and it’s only this one piece. Just one.

(Thanks Hugo)