To speak at all is to lie and so that puts us in a pretty pickle right from the start! To speak is to lie, to think is to lie, and all we ever do is speak and think, speak and think, speak and think. What else do people do? Sometimes we speak without thinking and sometimes we think without speaking, but it all comes down to exactly the same thing in the end…

To speak at all as to lie, to speak at all is to lie. Not that I’ve got anything against lying, you understand. To some people lying comes very easily – to me it comes as naturally as breathing! More naturally, in fact – sometimes I forget to breathe but I never forget to lie… The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is to lie. I lie when I’m asleep too – when other folk are sleeping peacefully, dreaming whatever dreams they might happen to be dreaming (sometimes good ones, sometimes bad) I’m in my bed lying to myself! Telling myself porkies, telling myself whoppers…

I remember when I was only a little squirt –  I remember that I used to go robbing cooking apples from a nearby orchard. I remember it as clearly as if it were yesterday! Just innocent fun, you understand – it was all innocent, good-natured fun that wasn’t really doing any harm to anyone. Then I moved on to robbing tape-decks from cars – tape-decks were the thing back then you see – there were no CD players, no Blu-ray, no USB storage devices, no SoundCloud or iTunes or anything like that. There were just tape-decks back then and I robbed them. I robbed them from parked cars in South London and then I’d get £15 for each of them from a guy in Brixton. I was being robbed myself I know – you don’t need to tell me that. I was being taken for a fool – I should have got at least £20 for them.

After a while I moved onto robbing the actual cars themselves. TDA they call that – ‘taking and driving away’. You can do a lot of time for TDA’s if you persist at it long enough. The magistrate loses patience with you after the third or fourth time and you’ll end up getting 18 months in HMP Brixton or HMP Wandsworth or HMP Wormwood Scrubs to knock the badness out of you. Not that it ever does of course, not that it ever does…

That was before I graduated into the serious stuff, you understand. That was the beginning of what you might call a fairly distinguished criminal career. I like to think that I’ve made my mark. Back then however I was still fairly wet behind the ears – I didn’t actually know jack-shit. Back then I was a bit of a half-witted muppet, I suppose you could say. I was a bit of a dumb prick. I’m embarrassed even thinking about it. Even now – after all this time – I find myself being embarrassed…

Things have got a lot grimmer since then, needless to say. It’s all become rather dark. Darker then I would ever have dreamed possible. All the innocent fun has long since gone, I’m afraid to say. It’s gone never to return…