There was a time in my life when I wasn’t particularly cool. Not especially so. People even used to say that I was a bit of a tool. That’s not the case anymore however: not the case, not the case at all. Absolutely not, as you might imagine. I’m here to tell you. Very far from being the case. Never believe it… I was denying the obvious. ‘Not the case’, I said, ‘not the case, not the case. Absolutely not the case. All totally not the case’. I dismissed everything with a sweep of my hand – I swept it all off the table, blessed as I am with the happy ability to dismiss anything I choose to and automatically enter into a suitably smug state. A dull look of stupid self-satisfaction creeps over my face and takes up permanent residence there – ‘That’s not true at all’, I declare. I’m dizzy with power and yet quietly bored at the same time. I was the Lord Mayor of a city that didn’t exist, the City of Dreams, a city that has been magically dreamt up by the Dreamers who live within it, and who themselves do not exist. ‘How did I get here?’ I asked myself, ‘who is the mysterious creator of this Fiery Hoop?’ There is a wild poetry that hides in the mysterious spaces of the world, after all: those spaces where we never think to look, the space between the toilet cistern and the wall in your bathroom, for example, or the space between the back of the cooker and the inside wall of your kitchen, which is of course a classic one. Admittedly, this wild poetry doesn’t get very far and is very quickly neutralised by the regular old world with its meaningless rhythms and routines, but it is enough to know that it’s there, keeping hope alive for so many of us. ‘Hope for what?’ you might ask, and there’s few enough that can tell you the answer to that one. Perhaps no one. ‘None of the bad things are true’, I state boldly, ‘the bad things aren’t real’. Happy days were back again and I was determined to make the most of them, determined to make the most of these happy, happy days. I had duty to uphold the values of modern society, I realised, and I simply couldn’t take any chances on that score. Not that I know anything about these values of course. I wonder if anyone knows about them. But in any event I don’t imagine that any of us wish to get bogged down in all of that, do you? Let’s just not go there. let’s agree to disagree. Let’s disagree about our agreements. Unusual days call for unusual remedies but the only thing is that some of these remedies just don’t work. Some of them can even make matters worse. We’re all trying to establish control in the best way we can of course; we always try to establish control in the best way we can, but nothing ever really works. Chaos has got into everything and there’s no shaking it out. There’s no dislodging it. ‘Shake the chaos out, shake the chaos out, shake the chaos out…’ we shout frantically, but it’s all just empty talk. There’s chaos in your cornflakes, did you know that? There is chaos in your porridge too, although it might not look like it. You pull a face eating it, it doesn’t taste right but you’re trying to make out that everything is okay. You are making out that nothing bad has happened. ‘Stuff is OK,’ you say – ‘stuff is fine and there is nothing at all to worry about…’