Lack of humour is such a terrible thing, isn’t it? It’s so graceless. I hate it when there’s a lack of humour – it makes me very angry, in fact. It really gets my goat. Why does everyone have to be so bloody serious all the time? Don’t they realize that the universe is essentially playful and not an exercise in goal-attainment? I was making up the law as I went about the place – ‘walk like this, walk like that’, I told myself. ‘Do things like this, do things like that…’ And then I would of course obey the law. First you make the rule then you obey it. You have to obey the rule because that’s the rule. It’s the rule that you have to obey the rule, it’s the rule and there’s no getting out of it.

Demons rushed into my body and invested me. Infested me I mean. Demons rushed into my body and invested me. They told me to speak the words of men so that I might be understood. Understood rightly in the world of men. Go forth into the world of men, they told me. Go forth and speak the words that we have given you, that you might be rightly understood by those that you meet. ‘By the power’, I declared with all the grandiosity I could muster, ‘by the power that is invested in me’. But then I couldn’t remember what I was going to say next and so I went quiet again. I went quite for a very long time.

Six good reasons for creating an unreal hell world for yourself: [1] Why not? [2] Give it a go. [3] You might as well. [4] You might like it. [5] Everyone else likes it so you’ll have company. [6] It’s what I always do, after all. I could probably think of some more reasons too but why bother? Isn’t that plenty? That’s plenty to be getting on with in my book. Six perfectly good reasons. Yes sir – plenty to be getting on with there for sure. Plenty to see, plenty to say. First I saw it all and then I said it all. I had a lot to say but none of it was true. It was all lies. Honesty’s a long-forgotten virtue in our corrupt age of course. It’s a dirty word. It’s a dirty word with me anyway. Me and lots of other people just like me. Plenty to see, plenty to say, and not a single word of truth amongst it all. I conceived myself to be a legendary hero, deserving of full rights, entitlements, privileges and honorary titles. Life let me down though, as it always does…

I was talking about Potatoland, trying to explain it to the people who were listening. Which was no one. Trying to help them understand what I was attempting so incoherently to convey. I was making a great effort to explain about Potatoland, and everyone knew it. Or rather they didn’t. They didn’t know and they didn’t care. It’s like a vast, surreal panorama, I explained enthusiastically to no one at all, with endlessly rotating luminescent orange plastic ducks in the middle background, solemn stone faces balanced on granite pillars in a baroque desert landscape that stretches off majestically into the distance, giant weeping eyes suspended in the sky, and lots of things like that. Perspective playing games with your head. And above all, the sense of the utterly absurd. Pure consciousness of absurdity as the supreme principle of reality.