I was supposed to be naming robots the day I couldn’t stop reading about the man dangling upside down from the Bleckley Brickworks chimney. The meeting to present the latest round of names, along with the rest of the brand identity, was in the diary for 4.30 p.m. The Danes of AmbiNano had flown over.
On my desk’s big monitor, angled to hide me from most of the office, I had our team’s Figma file open, everyone’s usernamed cursors jiggling, resizing, tweaking. Multiplayer design collaboration, Figma called it. My cursor lay idle, my character fragged.
Almost ready to write –something, anything – in the Word document on my laptop screen, my phone buzzed. Christian, all the way over in whatever time and day it was in Rotorua: Isn’t this where you’re from?
The link he’d sent was for a minute-by-minute Sky News blog:

LIVE: MAN HANGING UPSIDE DOWN
FROM 275-FOOT BLECKLEY CHIMNEY

I scrolled through the posts while trying to work out how many times I’d pissed onto that chimney. My cheap booze-laced urine softly sculpting those long-neglected bricks.

07:12
With a police helicopter hovering overhead, all emergency
services are present and roads around the brickworks site
have been closed to the public. Footage broadcast on
multiple news channels shows a person hanging upside
down.

I knew it was daft but I couldn’t help thinking: what if I know him? What if that dangling man is someone I went to school with, played football with. Someone who’d shoved and threatened me on a night out down Market Street. Come on, though. Bleckley felt small, to our ever-pissing teenage selves, but it was a town of 143,000 people, according to the census from back then. I found some news footage. The man was apparently hanging by his left foot, which was wedged between the chimney and the metal ladder running up its side.

08:03
A spokesperson for the police told reporters, ‘Fire and Rescue Services are working tirelessly, with input now coming from the coastguard and other blue-light agencies, to try to bring this gentleman back down. We are utilising helicopters and drones to help assess the situation.’

*

I zoomed into my section of the presentation, slides 91 to 106 out of 110. On Monday, I’d put red dots at the top-right of each slide that needed work. I turned the red dots green once the work was done. All but one of the dots glowed red. Each of the three creative routes we’d share that afternoon needed three names in it. (Almost everything I did, no matter the agency, client, or brief, was arranged in threes, don’t ask me why.) Given what AmbiNano had rejected last time around, I had to find five new names across those three routes, plus a hundred or so words of test copy for each. Headline, LinkedIn post, sales team script.

Route 1 – Spirits & Genies [Key responses: vital |
magical | powerful]
Route 2 – Animals & Nature [Key responses: majestic |
inspiring | nimble]
Route 3 – Guides & Seers [Key responses: wise |
supportive | dependable]

A new post faded in at the top of the news blog, the hour-behind time stamp jarring, like I was trapped in a minor future: the police had informed the press that they’d spoken to the dangling man using a drone. They’d confirmed his identity, which would remain undisclosed until his family had been contacted. I locked and pocketed my phone, gave myself permission to think: maybe it’s Squid up there?
Which was even dafter than thinking it might be someone I half-knew. It was the drone that did it. Squid was something of an expert, for a while. Won a couple of regional awards at FPV race meets. They call it first-person-view because you wear goggles that are wirelessly connected to a camera on the front of your drone, a hi-res screen an inch in front of each eye. Squid’s channel was still there on YouTube, the last upload four and a half years ago.
He’d flown his drones around the Bleckley Brickworks, along with dozens of derelict sites all over the area. The Rylands cotton mill in Wigan. The Bootle Docks grain silos. Haig Colliery in Whitehaven. Gutted and dilapidated relics of industrial times, stronger times, better times – as we’d hear all too often as kids.
‘Alex!’ Franzi called across the office. ‘We’re ready to go.’ The agency’s AmbiNano team stood around Otto’s desk, ready for our 9.45 a.m. stand-up. Franzi had printed out copies of the email she’d sent to us all just after 7 a.m.: Please raise the critical slippage of the Timelines during the Meeting Introduction slide. I will make a Bullet Point.
I’d already edited that bullet point, changing the text from red to black, from panicky, threatening German-English to urgent but affable branding-English.
That was a key role of mine: floating around the deck, editing and rewriting things written by others. I sometimes tell people, those who ask what a copywriter does, that I mostly turn other people’s shit words into slightly better words – with no judgement at all. Any attempt I’d make at designing a logo, or a media-agnostic grid system, would look far worse than the copy dropped into the deck to explain her work by our São Paulo-based lead designer, our Greek motion designer, our sporadically involved Slovakian information architect.
Stand-up meetings were in the diary for 15 minutes every day.
The idea of a stand-up is that you can’t sit down, to encourage brevity: this is what I’m working on today, these are the blockages I perceive, this is what I need to unblock them. A minute or so per person. It never worked. Lola, the mid-weight designer, was talking about her cat, Mylo, a torn-eared calico she’d rescued during a holiday in Halkidiki. The vet had recommended novel proteins.
Locals had raised the alarm at 2 a.m., the blog said. Which would have been after the last of the drunks had stumbled home from the Brickmakers Arms on Lowercroft Road.
‘Alex?’ Franzi was frowning at me.
‘Right,’ I said, ‘yes, sorry. Morning, everyone. I’m on the names. I’ll have a new round of names ready. Three routes. Nine names. Five of those will be new names, plus the names they liked. Test copy. I see no clear and present blockages.’

*

I searched Reuters, AP, Getty, already over a hundred images craving to be licensed. None of the photos were zoomed in enough to tell you who he was, no doubt a directive from the police. A clear November morning. The sky that dense, wet porcelain blue you only got around there. Light as clear as new binoculars.

B
L
E
C
K
L
E
Y
·
B
R
I
C
K
S

The man’s torso and drooping arms covered most of that first ‘B’, a minor corporeal redaction.
Most of my stories about Squid came from Robbie and Mally. He’d dropped out of Business Management at Liverpool John Moores within two months. Jumped from job to job in his twenties. A car dealership next to the Ripley air base. On the phones with an insurance ombudsman. A fruit seller’s assistant on a stall at the covered market. Coke and speed and weed every weekend, then most days. He’d stopped uploading his drone videos around the time I heard about nights he wouldn’t go home at all, passing out at the flats of Gary Jeffers or Petey Tiller, both known to sell crack.
A couple of years ago, over for my dad’s funeral, I was in the town centre looking for a tie, surprised, and not, by how grim it all was. Half the shops shuttered, a couple burned out. So many people just staggering around. Volunteers from St Joseph’s draping people in blankets, handing out steaming soup in polystyrene cups.
Squid wasn’t quite staggering, when I saw him, but there was no direction to his ambling. His whole body seemed to limp. I called his name. He looked around, suspicious, a northern Nosferatu, then sparked to life when he recognised me.
Alex mate, Al, look who it is, Alex K, back in Bleckley. To what do
we owe the pleasure?
He’d lost two front teeth on the top row, one and a half from the bottom. Those left were brown, shorter. His eyes were gone, focus over my shoulder, phantoms leaking out from the cracks in the Allerman train bridge, even as he performed for me.
Squid was always the centre of a crowd. Always touching people. Clasping men’s hands, using that grip to move them out of the way so he could cheek-kiss their girlfriend, a wink back at the man. Another woman’s hand taken gently, fingertips kissed, a deep bow. You always wanted Squid to listen, when you spoke. That head-back laugh, an upturned waterfall.
There were no zoomed-in photos on Twitter, Reddit. I messaged Robbie. You seen the news?! I’m guessing / hoping it’s no one we know up there?

12:11
An attempt by a Coastguard helicopter to reach the man has been aborted by the pilot, due to the precarious position of the man and the dangers posed by the rotor’s downwash.

*

I tried writing a few names, deleted them, scrolled around in Figma, changing ‘robots’ to ‘cobots’ on the slides Otto had added to justify the logo development. I read again, knowing there’d be no inspiration there, the signed-off copy for the new homepage:

Co-creation unleashed: meet our cobot family
No more cages, no more concerns: AmbiNano’s collaborative robots are designed to work side-by-side with employees, seamlessly integrating into your workflow, and becoming trusted partners on your path to effortless
automation. The future is together.

Every clause an artery-nicking dagger of concession, yes of course, we see what you mean, yes it absolutely can be punchier, we’ll go again on that, won’t we, Alex.
I looked through some Word files from my own Google Drive, a fistful of failed attempts to write about Squid, Bleckley. Who we were back then. What he said and did. Didn’t do, couldn’t say. Why I left at sixteen. I opened a new document, tried to think about what might have been said between this maybe-Squid, his brain a carrier bag full of blood, and that mosquito priest of a police drone.

Tell them my name is William Pinkerton, Billy to some, most call me Squid. Tell them I’m sorry for everything, that it wasn’t supposed to go like this. Tell them this ladder’s broke. Tell those that want to know so that I love them. Tell those that know what they did to me that this is on them, and tell them that I’ll never forgive. Tell them that I hurt—

My AirPods pinged. Robbie:
Yeah mate saw that. Everyone in the office talking about it.
Can see the top of the chimney from our toilet.
It’s a guy from Millston. Someone here dated his brother.
Not been well all his life apparently. Poor fella.
Anyway hope you’re good.
Still in Berlin? Gotta get over.
I snorted at that not been well.
Millston was on the east side of town, about as far away from our village of Gipperston as you could get in Bleckley. The poor fella and I would never have met.

14:06
In their latest press update, the police spokesperson informed the media that the man has become unresponsive but that—

Ohhh but come on, though, that’s enough, stop.
Just stop.
I’m done.
Out of time.
Out of time.
I haven’t even got to the point of all this.
All I wanted to do was write about one of Squid’s videos. Try to find some purpose for it, some meaning in it still being there.
Squid’s real, by the way. As is his channel.
Choked to death on his own vomit, alone in a bedsit next to the Ormsey overpass.
But I’ve made up so much, stolen the rest. So much digging and plundering. If you were in the UK at the time, you’ll know the story of the man dangling to death on a chimney.
A real man, in a real northern town, with his own carrier bag full of traumas. You’ve every right to be disgusted I even tried to make fiction from it.

I named some robots, sure. The clients were Swedish, went back to Västerås happy enough. They were supposed to choose one route. They chose a name from each, as I knew all along they would. A ragtag family of exhausted compromise: Echo, Dolphin, Luna.

My contract was extended by a week
We delivered what needed to be delivered
I paid my rent
Today’s the thirtieth day of October, but even having two more days before the deadline won’t save me. Especially when I waste time trying to turn text upside down.

*

BEST FPV CLIP YOU’VE SEEN!!! YES LADS.
Ever the uppercase showman.
It was shot at the Bardsley Beck mill. Opens on Squid walking across a vast warehouse floor.
The drone’s in his hand, camera on and recording – that’s the footage we see. Elasticated goggles loose around his neck as he narrates for us. We’re going up to find this tower thing, he says, see if we can fly from there.
He hops across the beams from a collapsed-in roof, sky visible for a second. How cool is this place, you could race around these pillars.
Up concrete steps, kicks open a door that leads to nothing but a view across the site: several football fields’ worth of buildings with saw-toothed roofs, two brick chimneys, cluttered yards. It’s proper windy out there, lads.
He climbs a metal ladder to the roof, puts the drone down, camera facing a four-metre tower. He climbs it – This is like Assassin’s Creed – his feet the last thing you see as he hauls himself up.
Then you wait.
He added a timelapse in the edit, low grey clouds sliding across the sky like smoke behind glass.
Then here’s where it starts, 4:22 – you can skip straight here if you want.
Right then, the last thing he says before the drone takes off, that urgent whine of its rotors through the microphone, and straight away you see him, Squid, stood stock-still on top of that tower, goggles over his eyes, radio transmitter in his hands.
Then out zipping and barrel-rolling the drone goes, over the roofs, up the side of a chimney, down to twisted piles of scrap metal, minutes of it, a generic euphoric banger soundtracking the frantic rollercoaster of it all.
Then he loops back to the rooftop, the tower he’s stood on.
And here’s where it still gets me, right in my chewed-up tennis ball of a heart.
He circles himself, slower.
Seeing only what we see.
A hi-res screen an inch in front of each eye.
Micromovements from his thumbs spinning the world around himself.
Watching and knowing himself in the third person.