My mind went blank in an instant. It clouded over and went murky in a flash and I became infested with nonsense. Toxic nonsense. Jabbering and jabbering. Yipping and yapping. My mind was hollering like a fool for no reason at all, it was coming out with all sorts of demented crap. I started having all these crazy thoughts straightaway. I started thinking all this crazy stuff. Do trees have me’s? Do loops have scoops? Do muppets have puppets? Do boulders have shoulders? Do fleas have knees? Do crumpets have wumpets? Do mips have whips? Do mumbles have wumbles? Do whurgles have gurgles? Do bodgers have lodgers? Do skudges hold grudges? Do twaggers like badgers?

All this kind of stuff. Over and over again. Relentlessly. All these thoughts flashing by so fast you’d hardly see them go by. You’d hardly catch them. You’d just feel the breeze on your face, a bit of a breeze would be it. All these questions: what would happen if the world rotated so fast that we all got spun off into space? What would happen if the clouds caught fire? What would happen if robots took over the world?

Then whatever it was that had taken over my mind got angry and started coming out with bad words, words like “Sweaty arseholes” and “Fuckshit” and “Knobs”. I knew whatever it was that was in my mind was angry by the way that it said these words – there was real venom put into them. They came out dripping with poison. After this my mind made a whole load of words that I didn’t understand at all, words such as “Scumblepuppy” and “Scrungeballs” and “Grollocks”. These words sounded bad too but as I say their meaning was unclear to me. Then things got even weirder and my mind came out with noises that very obviously had no meaning at all – words that sounded like “Woonjgar Woonjgar Woonjgar” and “Wubble Wubble Wubble”.

Next thing was that a whole bunch of stupid rhymes came into my head and started racing around and around like Catherine wheels. Chasing their own tails in a blur of movement. One was like this: “Desmond Decker you little fecker! Desmond Decker you little fecker! Desmond Decker you little fecker! Desmond Decker you little fecker! Desmond Decker you little fecker!” Another one was “Pooey Louie! Pooey Louie! Pooey Louie! Pooey Louie!” There were other ones too but they were rude and unsavoury and I won’t bother repeating them.

All these rhymes caught hold, they got a grip and then they dug in. They got a hold on me and wouldn’t let go. They dug in and they set up a jingling jangling merry-go-round in my mind going around and around and around until I was fit to scream. And then my mind took another tack altogether and started working out the solutions to all sorts of problems. You know the sort of thing: If it took eight men two hours to eat twenty kilos of marshmallows then how long would it take two parrots and a small dog to climb a tree? Or if Sally and Martha could sell five books of tickets to the charity ball in a day then how many oranges would it take to make three ounces of five pence? Or if Sandra can read two books on a long week-end how many loafs of fruit-bread can Steve bake in a month of wet Mondays?

And at the same time my mind was posing these questions it was calculating, calculating, calculating like a demon. It was working out answers so fast that you couldn’t see it move – it was just a high-speed blur like the rotor on a helicopter or the wings of a hummingbird. You just couldn’t follow it. And the whole time it was driving me cracked. It was driving me pure daft. I was up against the ropes and I was taking a battering. I didn’t know what had happened to me. I was kept too busy to see it – I wasn’t able to see that I had been possessed by the thinking mind!