From a very early age I have wanted to partake in the glory of King Arthur. That’s what led me to try on the Hero Coat, many, many years later. That was a disaster – no sooner had I put on the coat on then I knew I shouldn’t have done. My bravado got the better of me, I’m afraid. My cursed bravado. But that’s jumping too far ahead in the tale – we’ll come to that later. We’ll come to that in good time. The debacle of the Hero Coat. That’s definitely a story for another day.

It’s hard for me to tell a straight story – my mind keeps jumping back and forth like some kind of crazy time-travelling flea. At times I find myself wondering if what I’m writing is actually even true. Possibly it isn’t. Nobody can prove it one way or the other, after all. Nobody can prove anything, when it comes right down to it. They think they can but they can’t. I will however try to tell the story in the correct order, sticking to the facts wherever possible. The two impulses that dominated my early life were the desire to channel the Archaic Primordial Hero Energy and the other being abject fear. Not what I like to call clean fear, but fear that is tinged with shame and self-loathing. Or maybe self-loathing is too strong a term, it implies an energy and ability to focus that just wasn’t there. Really what I’m talking about is a kind of murky soup that I managed to ignore throughout my earlier life. It was intimate and it permeated me to the very core; it never left me day or night, and yet if you were to have asked me I wouldn’t have been able to say anything about it, or even acknowledge that this soupy inner atmosphere was there at all. Such is generally the way when we are children I believe.

Of my school days I will say nothing – I can’t see an point at all in dredging up any memories from that part of my life. I collided with the apparatus of state education in a kind of a daze, not really noticing what it was that I had collided with, but being dimly aware of its awfulness all the same. It wasn’t a collision with the apparatus of education so much as it was a collision with the human world itself of course – however bad school might have been, it was only a foretaste of what was to come. A grim foretaste perhaps, but nothing compared to what was to follow. My fantasies of being a hero quickly gave way to the humdrum necessities of living on the dole in Thatcher’s Britain. Remembering to wake up in time to sign on on Thursday mornings, which is easier said than done. ‘How hard can it be to wake up at 10:00 o’clock once a week?’ you may ask, but it’s not as easy as you may think. Not by any means is it as easy as you might presume to think. That’s Thatcher’s Britain for you – that and the short sharp shock. And the Falklands War. And The Human League playing on the radio and all that kind of stuff. The Human Plague, as my friend Paul used to call them. It all seemed very normal back then but now I realise that that was the eighties. That was all eighties-type stuff, an actual genre in itself. If only I had known at the time I might have enjoyed it more of course.

‘What is the purpose of human life?’ you might ask me, but I just don’t know. I’m just as clueless now as I ever was. Some people say that it’s all about God’s Plan. God created us and then He said ‘Look guys, I’ve got a plan for you and the deal is that you just have to stick with it no matter what, no matter what anyone else might say. If you don’t then you’re toast.’ If you don’t then you’re going to be sentenced to death by public frying just like in the track on Potatoland, which was an album by Spirit that came out in 1982. Death by public frying – the fate that every potato person fears. And we’re all potato people here, metaphorically speaking. We’re all potatoes when it comes right down to it. I’m not particularly impressed by this theory of course – I think it was invented by lazy scared people who don’t want anyone to be thinking too much about stuff. Or thinking at all. ‘What do you think God gave you brains for you dumb bastards?’ I want to ask them. ‘Do you think God only loves stupid people who are good for nothing but obeying the rules, like a bunch of dumb complacent idiots?’ ‘So what is the purpose of human life then?’ you ask sneakily, trying to catch me out. ‘I’m damned if I know’, I reply, ‘but it’s got nothing to do with following any sort of plan, that’s for sure…’

I’m allowing myself to be distracted, however. That’s not really what I wanted to talk about. I’m actually trying to write a proper autobiography here. Perhaps I should start again – go right back to the beginning, sort of thing. Only I don’t want to because I’m bored already and I haven’t even started! And if I’m bored already, how would I expect anyone else to feel? All the details of human life seem to me to be so frighteningly generic, and what else is one supposed to write about? It’s an odd one, isn’t it? The vicissitudes of life, it’s wretched ups and downs, the dreary dramas that go to make up our tedious narrative – how is anyone supposed to have an appetite to write about that?

Anyway – I shall start again. That’s obviously the only thing to do. Rewind and make a fresh start. From a very early age – as I recall – I yearned deeply to be some kind of hero but my natural timidity in the face of danger argued convincingly against this. My abject cowardice, shall we say. Let us not mince words after all. Let’s call a spade a spade. Let’s say it as it is. Fear neutralizes all life, as we all know very well. Fear neutralises everything. If we can hide we do (straightaway!) and then we get all obnoxious and cocky (we become insufferably smug in other words, we become insufferably smug because we’ve forgotten that we’re afraid) but then when we can’t hide anymore we remember all of a sudden that we are nothing but writhing maggots and so we go back to our writhing. The bubble bursts pretty quickly then. That’s the truth we don’t like to see, of course. We all know it but there isn’t us a one amongst us who will ever admit to it! What jerks we all are, right? How is anyone supposed to take human beings seriously? I’ll start again however, I’ll start again…