The maudlin losers danced around my pizza box grave that night I rose from the dead. Drinking their coloured liquids and poncing fags off that one walker. Nobody knew about the trick before I did it, but when I did, good golly, they fucking shat bricks like a machine heavy on the rag.

Before I played the spoons there was a man in a green dress who felt me up like a dog does a lamp post and there was nothing I could do about it but take his ten shillings and grease up the wound after his hurried departure to anywhere but by my putrid side.

And then began the torturous misanthropy of the middle years when I saw every living thing as some kind of hollow trick with nothing but a yabble and a matzo ball for a soul. Each night I walked the canal in search of that man with the powders who, for a nominal fee, would free me for just two candy floss minutes, while the girls in the panto rang the old man's bell as the flecked coats in the abattoir scorched hair off swine.

The 'lemon hulas' were a promiscuous band of pre-teens with a fixation on flik-flak watches. 'Flick-fack is water resistant,' they would sing to a carny tune while Jebodiah, the fire-eating coconut with ears for eyes, and teeth for toes, blew one out of his shell.