I was eating my favourite pie. It had cherries in it and plums and apricots and pineapple and melon and asparagus and leeks and shitake mushrooms and beef chunks in a rich beefy sauce and curried chicken and duck with plum sauce and pickled quail eggs and lamb’s kidneys and truffles and prawns and smoked haddock and shrimp and crayfish and octopus and mussels and scallops and sweet and sour pork balls and baked Camembert and Stilton cheese! Wow – it was fantastic. I was eating it and eating it and eating it and eating it and it was so good I could hardly believe it. I was eating it all up. Rich gravy was flowing down my chin and down my beard and dripping onto my vest. I was in heaven – I was in Pie Heaven! And then it was gone, and then it was finished. There was nothing left. The wave of pure grief hit me instantly like a vicious punch to the gut and I was doubled up in unbelieving dismay. My pie was gone! There was nothing left! Pain chewed me up from the inside like an angry moray eel and I was plunged into despair. I must have lost my mind entirely at that point because I could swear that I then heard a solemn voice issuing forth from my stomach, resounding and echoing as if within a vast empty cave – “I am the Pie of Suffering!” I realized at that moment that the pie had pushed me over the edge and that propelled me into an episode of fully-fledged psychotic depression. As always, I swore then to every god I knew that never again would I indulge my craving for that filthy dirty old pie.