Lister gazed out of the porthole and his facial muscles accessed the programme: 'No One Home'. He began to catalogue the series of disasters that had led him to this point in Time and Space. He started to list the bad decisions, the poor career choices, the unreliable friendships that had led him here -- to a prison ship bound for the most inhospitable penal colony in the outer reaches of the Cosmos. He'd never expected much from life. All he'd ever really wanted was to be a soft-metal guitar icon, thrashing out rock anthems all night to half a million fanatical hero-worshippers. Was that really too much to ask -- to be mobbed nightly by hordes of emotionally unstable women who would all feel compelled to smear his body with a wide range of dairy products and then remove said dairy products in a variety of interesting ways? A thin smile drove across his face and skidded to a halt at the corner of his mouth. Well, something had gone wrong somewhere. He'd never got within so much as a Whirlwind-amp-lead distance of fulfilling that particular dream.
Why? Was it bad luck? Had he just never had the breaks? Or was it simply that he'd never bothered to learn how to play the guitar?
Really play it.
Three chords.
What the hell -- even four, maybe. If only he'd bought that damn book that taught you how to play in a day. One lousy day -- things could have worked out so differently. He certainly wouldn't have wound up here, stuck in the middle of Deep Space, the last member of the human race, and literally light years away from the woman he loved a really hot curry.
Somewhere along the line he'd made a really poor career choice -- he'd ignored the door that said 'Legend of Rock', instead opting for the door that said 'Useless Piece of Directionless Sputum, Destined to Lose Big Time'.
Lister let out a sigh, like a newly opened bottle of chilli beer, and wondered when it had started to go wrong.