I had the most delightful luxury apartment in Mulvoy Avenue – it was called ‘Better Betting’. You bet it was. It was called anything you want it to be called. There are no limits when it comes to naming things after all. Some call this ‘the Freedom of Naming’ and it truly is a freedom, a freedom of sorts. It’s a freedom we can all rejoice in. Some of us like our own lucky names and some of us don’t but that’s just the way it goes – one person’s good luck is another person’s very great disappointment. I had an exclusive top-of-the-range apartment in Mulvoy Avenue but really it was only a small stone by the side of the road – I’d kick this stone down the road and as I did so I’d hum a happy little tune to myself. Life was good, and I for one wasn’t complaining.

I decided to order the Breaded Supreme of Chicken. It’s important to be decisive – as you know – and I for one didn’t want to be caught out. Unless you make sure to strike hard when the iron is hot it’s all too easy to fall between the cracks. That’s my thinking on the subject anyway. That was my thinking on the subject at the time it’s true, but I changed my mind at the last minute all the same. I changed my mind even though I knew this might not be a very good idea. I would probably have been far better off sticking to my original plan, it occurred to me – it’s never any good losing your nerve at the last minute. That’s the story of my life however, it happens to me every single time – which is to say, I resolve to be decisive, I resolve to stick to my guns for once, but it always falls to pieces at the very last moment.

Nothing is ever truly what it appears to be, is it? We start off with all these expectations and then slowly – year by year, one after another – they all prove false. It all seems so straightforward when we are young of course. Everything always seems so clear-cut. Those are our illusions and one by one they all get smashed. Nothing escapes the Grinder, nothing escapes the Mincing Machine. Thus are the illusions of life destroyed! Thus indeed. We start off thinking that life is going to be a certain way – and quite possibly we’re even looking forward to it to some extent – and then, bit by bit, we learn that it’s not. More than that, we learn that it never could have been that way; we learn that what we were so foolishly looking forward to in life was only ever an absurd fantasy. It was only an absurd fantasy which doesn’t make a jot of sense no matter which way you look at it. You know that’s got to be kind of demoralising, right? Demoralising isn’t even the right word for it – it undermines your very being.

Life is good and I for one am not complaining. Or maybe I am, just a little bit. Just the tiniest bit, just a shade. But what exactly am I complaining about in that case, you might ask? What’s my gripe? Exceptional times call for exceptional measures of course but that’s nothing to do with what I’m talking about here. Nothing at all. You could never have had what you wanted to have, you could never have been what you wanted to be, and so how is that going to make you feel? There was a type of a mismatch between the theory and the reality and it’s the type of a mismatch that can never be made good. The more you look the bigger that mismatch is revealed as being – it gets so big that it’s not even funny…

This means that you don’t want to look too closely, of course. You really don’t want to look too closely. You really, really don’t! You absolutely know you don’t. I don’t need to tell you that. The bigger the mismatch the greater the terror and terror isn’t good. By no means is it good. That’s the key thing to understand here – terror isn’t good and so we have to tread carefully. We have to tread very, very carefully – so extremely carefully…. Don’t look where you’re not supposed to look. Don’t ask any questions that you’re not supposed to ask. Never do that. The Great Old Ones were coming back to life and nobody wants that. No one ever wants that.