I was in the Normal World and everything was going according to plan. ‘How good is this?’ I declared grandly, I’m in the Normal World and everything is proceeding according to plan.

‘Everything always goes to plan in the Normal World’, I said to myself, ‘everything always goes to plan in the Normal World and that’s the good thing about it.’ I was happy in the Normal World you see, and I intended to keep it like that! That was the plan, at any rate…

‘The plan is always the plan’, I said to myself wisely. ‘The plan is always the plan and everything always goes to plan in the Normal World, and that is a very good thing’. I was happy in the Normal World and that was part of the plan. That was an important part of the plan. ‘The plan is very good’, I told myself piously, and that was part of the plan too. It was part of the plan that the plan should be a good one.

Making progress in the Normal World, in a regular and normal kind of a way. That was to be the title of my new book, Making Regular and Normal Progress in the Normal World. The book was an instant success – even before it got published it was an instant success. It became an instant roaring success the second I thought of it!

Everything I thought of became an immediate success just as soon as I thought of it. I was the most successful person I knew; I was successful without even trying. Even my stupidest thoughts were pure gold dust – I felt that I should be writing them all down, regardless. I had so many ideas going through my head that I didn’t know where to start or stop. Even my farts were resoundingly successful. They made the grade in a big way. And then I realised – with a sudden rush of fear – that I might have become too successful. For all I knew I might have gone past that point (the point of being too successful) already.

When fear strikes it strikes very hard. Sometimes it does, anyway. Sometimes fear strikes very hard indeed. Every now and again it does and when it does that can be very frightening. This was one of those times when fear strikes as hard as it ever can strike and I was covered all over with icy perspiration in a flash. I  had realised – and it was much too late by then – that I had become much more successful than I ever ought to have been. I had gone too far. ‘How successful was the Buddha before he became the Buddha? How successful was Jesus before he became the Messiah?’ You can see where I’m going with this line of questioning, I trust? When you make the mistake of becoming too successful then warning lights start going off somewhere. Don’t ask me where because I don’t know the answer to that question. I just know that red flashing warning lights go off somewhere whenever anyone gets too successful.

That’s the big mistake we all make. We don’t know that it’s a mistake until it’s too late, until it’s already happened. Until we have already made it. We always think that it’s good to be visible but that’s only because we have forgotten what happens when we aren’t. We have conveniently forgotten that part of it. You’re cocky and sure of yourself and you think that you’re great, and all that. All that kind of stuff.  And then the horror comes without any warning, and you cave in on yourself. You collapse inwards like a house of cards…

You were supposed to be getting smaller and smaller, not bigger and bigger. We forgot that we were supposed to be running away from the Big Angry Thing, not towards it. If you run towards it then you’re going to attract its attention. It’s going to know that you’re there. It’s going to see you and if the Big Angry Thing sees you then it’s going to shout and roar at you. It’s going to bellow at you. It’s going to frighten you very much. You will want to escape when that happens. You will be desperate to escape. Your insides will turn into stinking bilge water. You will want to pretend that you don’t exist. You got too close and so now you have to flee…