I was trying my best to ignore the elephant in the room but then the next thing I knew it had whacked me around the head with its trunk, sending me flying sideways in a most undignified fashion. The blow sent me head over heels straight into the wall and then didn’t the elephant come over to where I was lying, in a dazed kind of a state, and stuck me right in the arse with one of its tusks. Let me tell you right now, that was sore! Sore, sore, sore. And that was only the start of it – the next thing I knew the beast had picked me up above its head and had thrown me clean out of the window, amidst the sound of enraged trumpeting. I wasn’t doing a great job of ignoring the elephant in the room, it occurred to me – the creature had me half-killed at this stage and it hadn’t even properly started! This isn’t as easy as people like to make out, I observed wryly, picking myself up from the tarmac outside the house and gingerly removing all the bits of splintered windowpane from my hair and clothes. It just goes to show that folks talk a lot of shyte when it comes down to it, I said to myself. You can get yourself in terrible trouble from taking what people say seriously. You can get yourself in very bad trouble indeed.

I just got back from this Thing Shop and hadn’t I bought myself a whole rake of things! ‘I’m going to have the time of my life,’ I cried out gleefully, ;would you just look at all the great things I’m after buying!’ Special days call for special rules, special regulations, and today was no exception. Very special behaviour is needed on a special day – the ordinary old type of behaviour just won’t do at all. ‘Oh no, no, no,’ says I, ‘that ordinary old type of behaviour won’t cut the mustard today and that’s for sure…’ To say I was elated would have been a poor way of expressing it – I was so beyond mere elation that you wouldn’t even believe it. I was in another territory entirely, that type of territory that you won’t hear mentioned in any dictionary, or in any textbook on psychiatry either for that matter. ‘What territory is that?’ you ask, finally becoming interested. ‘The territory of the psychotically elated ego,’ I reply, ‘as quick as a flash, ‘the territory of the psychotically elated ego…’

Of all the great products I have known in my time, one exceeds all the others. One stands head and shoulders above all the rest, and I think we all know what product that is! I think we do, I think we do… The product to which I refer is of course the situation where no one is trying to tell you any pestilential Satanic products. Money can’t buy you that, you see. That’s what we all want really, isn’t it? That surely is the ultimate, the ultimate of all ultimates. We can but dream, we can but dream. Your dreams are free, isn’t that what they say? So very free. I’m the kind of guy who can’t get anything right – that’s the kind of guy I am. The kind of a guy, the kind of a guy. Yes indeed, my friends, yes indeed. We’re all here on false pretences after all and so there’s no point in thinking that you’re so damn smart. You don’t get to be smart. No one here gets to be smart.

Life can get awfully dull and routine, can’t it? It can get frankly unbearable. This has happened to me a lot and that’s how I know about it. That’s how come I can talk about it with the authority that I do – because I’ve been there. It’s incredible the way this can happen, isn’t it? One moment it feels like the world is your oyster and there are all these wonderful choices that lie ahead of you, just as if you are poised deliciously over a big open box of chocolates, and then at some point in your life it all switches around on you and there are no choices left at all. You’re stuck with whatever you’re stuck with and there’s no getting out of it. All you can do is just carry on with the dreadful rigmarole of it – the dreadful, dreadful rigmarole. Please believe me when I say I know what I’m talking about here. There’s no getting around the authority of experience, after all. We will have to submit to this, sooner or later. You don’t like to admit to it because no one ever does, but there you are all the same…