I was dreaming of many things, some of them real and some of them unreal. Wait – that’s not actually true – none of them were real. None of them were real and yet I thought they were. Some of these imaginary things filled me with hope, others with dismay, dismay and despairing resignation. Life was a roller-coaster. Life was a roller-coaster, my friends and I never knew whether I was coming or going. That’s how it was for me. It was pretty much just like that…

My story is easily told, I suppose. You could tell it in ten seconds. I would like to think that there was more to it but there wasn’t. I was an empty personality shell, drifting this way and that, blown here and there by the winds of mechanical causation. It was all down to mechanical causation, even down to what I thought of as my own personal and private thoughts. I thought my thoughts were me. I thought that they were unique and that they belong to me alone but they weren’t and they didn’t. I was totally empty. I was totally hollow and I never knew it.

That’s why my story is easily told, you see. It’s easily told because it was so very hollow, so totally devoid of anything real. ‘You were sad and empty person’, you say, ‘your life was one long meaningless joke and you never knew it’. You were the very last person to know it…’ Then you move on, unable to think of anything else to say. What else is there to say, after all? You’ve said it all.

I was a dreamer you see and I dreamt of many things. Many were the things I dreamt of. But we’ve been there before, haven’t we? We’ve been there before and so I won’t continue. You know the rest. My words turn to dust in my mouth. ‘You live in the Dust World’, you tell me, ‘your thoughts are dust, just as your words are. Your whole life is nothing more than a pile of bone-dry powdery dust on the pavement, a pile of dust that is about to be scattered forever by the first wind to come along’.

I had lots of expectations however. Even if my thoughts were dust. Don’t we all have lots of expectations? Expecting this and expecting that. Driving ourselves demented with our own ridiculous expectations. Sometimes when what we are expecting never happens we feel sad, at other times we are relieved. We feel relieved because we feel that we have dodged a bullet. I had lots and lots of expectations – some of them made me very excited whilst others filled me with a terrible unspeakable dread. So many expectations, so very many expectations…

My story is easily told but I want to tell it all the same. I want to tell it so that I might have some chance of putting all of this in some sort of context, of making sense of it, if you will. They say that everyone has a book inside of them – well, my book is a Book of Dust! I remember when I was at school, not so very far from where I am presently sitting on a bench in Maidstone High Street. I remember sitting in a classroom at my desk and I remember the teacher saying ‘Please turn to page 11 in your Dust Textbook and solve problems 1 to 24.

I was the first to solve all the problems so I put my hand up to call out the answers. ‘The solution to the problem is dust’. I called out. ‘Dust in every case. The solution to the problem of dust is always dust…’ The teacher walked over and rapped me hard on the head with a blackboard rubber. ‘No!’ he shouted, ‘wrong! Try again and get it right this time…’

None of that really happened of course. I made it all up. I’m pulling your leg there. That’s just me using my imagination a little bit too freely. It’s a flight of fancy. None of those things happened. They never did. None of them at all. Nothing has ever happened and that’s why my story is so easily told…