Maggrip

I am at home(?) or my mental comfort zone suggests as much. By my Father's chair, to my right, in the corner of the (living?) room I notice what I think is a spillage on the glossy laminate floor. Tackling it with kitchen towel I realise that the (ceramic?) hot water bottle lying on the floor nearby is, when I lift it, cracked and broken and a gloopy, red wine-ish coloured liquid – a surprising amount as I cradle the seal in my hand – is pouring from the neck. My Mother is cross – I'm assuming she's assuming my father (who is not present) has stood on the hot water bottle by accident. My little brother and I are on mopping up duties, trying to stem the tide/damage of the liquid with kitchen towel. I notice, after some frantic rubbing, that the glossy surface of the laminate flooring is slowly peeling away to reveal the pale, untreated timber surface below. This is worrying, the gloss coming away in large flakes. Suddenly it's as if the flooring has turned into strange, elongated (representations) of classic funk and soul lps – the covers themselves are in bold reds and blues, the band names set in artistic fonts, the groups lounge, stylishly dressed in the inset photographs – and there's now a team of us who have been commandeered by a Sly Stone-esque figure to marshal us, to organise us so that we might click this failing (record) floor back into place. It seems to be two panels of flooring exactly side by side, then a single offset panel, then an other two aligned and so on. Someone (me?) shouts, “the funk of America is moving!” and immediately after I question whether this exclamation could be deemed to be a little offensive, if not racist (though Sly does not visibly react, suggesting it is not). The floor appears to move in coordinated waves and someone (who is definitely not me) drawls that it (or is it Sly's instructions?), “rolls over you like a carpet”, a stoned and puzzling observation if I ever heard one-