conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first four paragraphs for a story with the title 'Metroland'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Metroland
  Melodramatically, Arthur straightened up his back with his thickened fingers, then kneaded away at the cable-stitches of his cardigan as if they were strings of seized-up muscles.
  He'd scanned me with an unforgiving glance, then rushed off with an energy untypical of one who'd just been tangling with cabbage stumps. 'Ferdinand,' we'd heard him shouting. 'Ferdinand. FERDINAND!!' From the hall, a friendly pad of paws, some slobbery mouth-noises, a solid crump as brogue hit labrador. 'And never let me catch you in my chair again.'
  There were various incompetence ploys open to me. There was throwing-the-earth-all-over-the-place- (like on to the lettuce cloches) -in-a-fit-of-enthusiasm. There was breaking-the-tools; though this led to trouble with my father. The best one I thought of – though had to abandon as I couldn't find a bow-saw – was cutting the stump off at ground level and covering the whole thing up with earth ('Oh, sorry, Uncle, you didn't say you wanted me to dig the whole area up – I thought you just wanted to avoid tripping over it in the dark').
  Finally, as a compromise, I decided on delaying tactics. I dug in a wide circle of radius four feet or so, all round the stump, occasionally cutting off the odd spindly, unimportant root, but never remotely threatening the solidity of the thing. I worked parodically, with a maniac zest, ignoring four o'clock and finally drawing my uncle out into the garden again.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me three more paragraphs.. End with the sentence ' Dave put on a frown.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: We went to a bar and had a drink. Gradually we ironed out who was French and who English, despite Dave's curious method of conversation, which consisted largely of proper names pronounced in a heavy French (or Franche, as he would say) accent, accompanied by a semi-hysterical gesture. Marion offered no behavioural mannerisms one could grab hold of – whatever was said, she remained quiet, direct, open, bright. Mickey was the hardest to master, though. Ego, charm, competitiveness, and a certain cunning, which made him pretend to know less than he did until he'd found out roughly how much you knew. The sort of character who makes me react by being academic, diffident, wry if possible, but basically straight.
  Dave looked ready to come up with an impression, but couldn't think of which bit of a wrestler to do.
  Dave pulled up one of Mickey's eyelids, slapped him round the face a few times, and listened again. Marion watched impassively. Dave put on a frown.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: But she was breathing normally and lying safely. I mechanically straightened her bedclothes and headed downstairs; I felt fully awake now. I wandered into the sitting-room, emptied an ash-tray, and pushed back the sofa with the pressure of a bare big toe (speaking the advert ironically to myself, 'Ah, those Touchglide castors'). I walked through the hall, glancing at the wire letter-cage on the front door ('Room 101', I always think), and went into the kitchen. The cork tiles are warm to the feet, even warmer than the carpet. I heave myself on to one of our cane bar stools – the sort with a low back rest – and feel lurchingly master of all I survey.
  In the road outside is a sodium lamp whose orange light, filtered through a half-grown fir in the front garden, softly lights up the hall, the kitchen, and Amy's bedroom. She enjoys this civic night-light, and prefers going off to sleep with her curtains drawn back. If she wakes, and there is no orange glow pervading her room (the lamp operates on a time-switch, and goes off at two in the morning), she becomes fretful.
  I sit on my bar stool in my pyjamas, grip the sink unit, and tip back on to two legs. Then I shift my weight and move on to a single rubber-capped stool-end. I feel a kind of lazy pleasure at being able to do this without overbalancing. I feel a kind of lazy pleasure too at the smooth, clean, dry expanse of stainless steel in front of me. I rotate on the single leg of the stool, holding tight with one hand, then passing the other one behind my back so that I am gripping with both again. Now I am facing in to the room. The table laid for breakfast, the neat line of cups on their hooks, the onions giving off a crepuscular glisten from their hanging basket: everything is orderly, comforting, yet strangely alive. The spoon by my breakfast bowl implies the grapefruit cut and waiting in the refrigerator, the sugar on its surface already hardening into a crust. Objects contain absent people. A poster, flat and pinned, of the château of Combourg (where Chateaubriand grew up) narrates a holiday four years ago. A phalanx of a dozen glasses on a shelf implies ten friends. A feeding-bottle, stored high on a dresser, predicts a second baby. On the floor next to the dresser is a plastic travel-bag with a bright sticker we bought to amuse Amy: 'Lions of Longleat', it says, with a picture of a lion in the middle.
  I swing round again, strangely comforted, and face the window. The orange light has turned the stripes in my pyjamas brown. I can't even remember what their original colour is: I have several pairs in different colours, all with the same breadth of stripe, and they all come out a muddy brown in this light. I reflect on this for a few moments, to no particular end. I follow a half-factitious line about the nature of the light: how the sodium with its strength and nearness blots out the effect of even the fullest moon; but how the moon goes on nevertheless; and how this is symbolic of... well, of something, no doubt. But I don't pursue this too seriously: there's no point in trying to thrust false significances on to things.
  I stare out of the kitchen window for a few minutes, directly at the street lamp which shines through its gauze of fir. Two o'clock occurs. The lamp snaps off, and I am left with a lozenge-shaped blue-green after-image. I continue to stare; it diminishes, and then, in its turn, and in its quieter way, snaps off.