"Profound, existential mayonnaise: the triumph of many connoisseurs, sciencey men, the opiate della something, don't care."

(Isn't he just stunning? That voluptuous pink frame, those inscrutable eyes and his full, disarming grin that just screams "Blobby"? I can't help but surrender, my head just goes soft.)

I visit the fine folk of 24 Ash Copse to talk to them about misplaced fear, in my grandiose, bumbling style. Three overmicrowaved duck à l'oranges steam on the counter. Baby Blobby seems upset that his dinner is delayed, while Mrs Blobby is understandably puzzled by the fixity of my eyes, the little hairs on my skin. "The, um, way words escape you," I ask, "just nouns left littered, fit only for pointing … the situation made a puzzle of bare names?"

The father's absence looms larger as the third meal cools, uneaten, and my stomach tightens. Mother turns the TV on and Baby picks things up and puts them down again, making an inventory of touch. I suggest a walk when the program is over, keen to try something else, and we go. Baby has chocolate around his lips, although I can't remember him being given any. At the end of the street, Mrs B steps toward a cat laying beside a bin, and says "Blobby." Hesitantly, I say it back, gesturing at a brick wall illuminated by the richly oblique early-evening sun of late summer: I'm not sure how this is received, or if I said it loudly enough, for it doesn't seem to register.

Later, we watch some white noise for an hour or so, but I know I must break this bond and leave. I make my apologies and turn to the door, but little Blobby grabs my leg, screaming hideously. His mother bundles over yelling and heavy-handedly rips him off. Wincing, I heft up my rucksack, turn around - she and I are face to face, inches apart; this is the most open she's been with me all day, I feel, but still I cannot catch her eyes, looking at everything but me, shifting about like a pair of bricks on strings. Otherwise she is still, breathing with weak rasping coos and just occupying space as a sofa occupies its corner of the room. I try to slip past but get stuck between the counter and her bulk before straining loose and out the side door. Turning to look back through the window with deep unease, I glimpse her standing, unmoved, exactly where she was, her yellow spots greasily reflecting the fluorescent tubelight above.

I catch her neighbour as I get into the car: "Oh her? That's Sarah-with-the-aura, she doesn't enjoy living; we saw Satan raw like lightning from heaven on the bus home from the cinema last week."

                                                                        -
In this second part, I'm suffering from what I can only describe as a severe case of audio-visual burnout, when I get a surprise visit from a rather jolly Mr Blobby.

Trying to impress me with bare-minimum signs, he wears an oversized quilted jacket and straw boater to vary his look. Wondering how to entertain him, I take him to the back room to show my model train set. As he tries to capture a reaction to this world laid before him, with the train steaming nostalgically as it pulls into the little village station, his opening warble suddenly dilates in horror and he pushes off thickly into the next room, catching his funny bone on the door handle. His body collapses away from the source of pain but he flees on, wailing through the various parts of the house.
Turning back to the table, I spot a decent-sized spider crossing the line further on, moving up and down the balsa wood constructions like a cartoon villain.

I let him go. As I bend my head to look at the camera, my voiceover finishes with an epilogue: "Never mind, there's a different friend for everything, so I don't push him too hard here: he is my narrow- and broad-psyche man, always one to confidently lean on a lamppost as if it owned him."