The Staged Game

It is a beautiful thing, hindsight.
When I wrote a blog entry called “Economical With The Truth” (a year ago, but only a pitiful three entries ago) I had little idea of the spectacular disaster that those then embryonic rumblings in the economy would turn into. That blog, as with most of mine, had a fair dose of idiocy, perhaps very partially counter-balanced by a mouse’s paintbrush worth of actual concrete knowledge. Even so, I have been able to glean that my outlook, even if it identified the existence of some of the balloons that subsequently burst, had the wrong focus.

There I was, trying to drum up heroic assumptions about inflation, about some infinite snowball of unutterable speed gathering, rendering all our basic foodstuffs and commodities beyond our grasp as their prices soared, and at the same time dismissing the stormtroopers of the sub-prime mortgage market as a distant and unfocussed army, the masts of their ships barely visible against the horizon. Holed up in my flat, I was unable to see the ticking numbers and jagged lines that tell of sub-prime chaos, of widening TED spreads, of indexes that betray all manner of knowledge and guidance to those in the know and those on the make. Even if I was able to, I would not (and still do not) know what the vast majority of the signals meant. Are these warning lights or fairy lights? Does that number signal prosperity or madness? Does this line on the hospital monitor signal health or a heart attack? Easier therefore to lament about the then daily reports of rises in the price of bread, or rice, or petrol. This is something graspable – that the fiver in my pocket will not stretch as it used to, even though the pain associated with earning said fiver remains the same.

But the thing that brought the dam down was a far slipper thing, some kind of cosmic eel with no head and no tail that lay draped and occasionally writhing until the whole structure gave way. I profess it was through a lack of overall understanding and an inability to see the economy for what it really is - a playground seesaw with seventy obese children scrambling all over it. About ten weeks after writing that entry, and utterly unforseen by me, Lehman Brothers collapsed and dragged the world, bloodied fingernails tearing at the edge, screaming after it.

And so here we are, deflation for the first time in some 49 years (though only in a narrow definition of the word), and all of our preconceptions, even about those gathering storm clouds last summer, turned entirely, whimsically on their heads. That a single rotten grain of rice can infect an entire barrel is not in doubt. And that folk carried away in a circus of spinning pound signs are not to be trusted to make the most rudimentary of decisions, especially when the economy of the world is at stake, is undeniable. A drunken gambler is seldom allowed to write the business plan of a casino, after all. This then is the problem – an interesting one of human nature, herd behaviour, and of the volatile spread of blind panic that underlies all things financial. But let’s save that for another time.

Like depression, or grief, there appear to be stages to the formation of such catastrophes, their aftermaths and the state of normality and its slow transformation that then occurs.

Stage One would appear to be Denial. There was a heady mix of statements of denial wafting around like the involuntary flatulence of a stood-on dog. Mostly it took the form of various commentators denying that a problem existed. In the main, the public (myself included) did not heed either the warnings nor the reassurance because we didn’t understand, and in any case the problem was so abstract as to be invisible, while the possible consequences seemed as important as the outcome of a Su Doku puzzle and there was little we on the street could do about it. Feel like handing your house back to the bank and demanding they charge you a larger down-payment on it anyone? Demand they give you a lower return on that hard-earned cash you deposit with the branch? Thought not.

Gordon Brown made hilarious (again, in hindsight) statements rebutting and patronising the venerable Vince Cable on the floor for the Commons for the latter’s seemingly relentless pessissimism. Of course, there is truth in John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion that everyone remembers those that talked up the market before the crash, while those who banged on for years about an impending crash are never remembered as these crashes fail to happen, but Mr Cable knows of what he speaks. (A statement that I promise will not be without qualification – see book recommendation later).

Stage Two seems to be the actual Panic. At this point, computer monitors on stock exchanges show terrible images (once the porn window has been minimised), and people drop forks to the floor, stubbing into their feet which have been so numbed with terror as to have lost the ability to feel pain. From their mouths dribble the remnants of lattes and sushi or salt-loaded sandwiches as news tickers give minute-by-minute accounts of drops or rises in numbers that few of us ever understand but that all in that room realise to be Very Very Important. For the rest of us, commentators come onto news channels, some wearing their agendas down their fronts like intellectual vomit, extolling wisdom on what might happen next, while others, more honest, profess to having no idea what is going on, but isn’t it all rather dramatic, and that they hope you have been sharpening your claws so that you can fight off adversaries as you scrabble for a meal from that skip.

The newsreels are peppered with references to phrases with a Daliesque quality about them – with analogies that John Steinbeck would have been proud of, all shoehorned together in a mass conveyor belt of financial bile that portrays a scene of utter chaos and irrevocable damage without leaving any humanly image that can be wrapped up and taken home and broadcast on the inside of the eyelids when you lie in your bed. Things like “a complete evaporation of liquidity”, some kind of chemical reaction no doubt, and “Credit Crunch”, a nut-infused chocolate bar, are blurted out by people taken over by their autocues. Again, Mr Galbraith points out that it is possible to enjoy the entire spectre of human folly in this time, for “while it is a time of great tragedy, all that is being lost is money.” This crisis afforded a great amount of time on which to sit on the balcony watching the explosions, for it lurched from side-to-side on an hourly basis for the best part of six weeks like a crazed couple imbibing improbable volumes of narcotics while having continuous tantric sex on a violently yawing ship. Not only that, but there was a historical Presidential race happening in the midst of this swirling maelstrom - we were positively spoiled. But then, the chaos hadn’t personally touched most of us yet. I’ll return to the panic another time, but for now, onwards.

Stage Three appeared to be Reaction. As Vince Cable wrote, there was a realisation that “every lever had to be pulled”. The sheer scale of catastrophe, the complexity of the problems, the confluence of so many horrific forces, could only be met by a determined show of vigour, a raking of machine gun fire against an alien evil. Even as lines fell limply off charts and different combinations of those obese children fell off and climbed onto different parts of the economic seesaw, various heroes emerged in different guises – perhaps most improbably our own dour Mr Brown – and swung into action. The reactions were almost as incomprehensible to the likes of me as the panic itself. Injections of liquidity, a driving down of the LIBOR overnight rate, a slamming down of interest rates almost out of existence, and part-nationalisation of banks like RBS that once stood proud with edifices of ashlar stone and commanded unearthly positions in our psyches. Robert Peston continued portraying our outlook and the meaning and likely success of these various interventions using his Mouth of God and forecasting manias and slumps to such a specific degree that you had to wonder that he wasn’t controlling every news ticker, stock monitor and index graph from behind a curtain with levers and a loudspeaker like the Wizard of Oz.

Stage Four, which I believe us now to be in, is Holding Tight. The panic is slightly in the past, and the markets are enjoying a rally. Structural problems remain – the economy is like a building that has been hit by an earthquake. Its total collapse was just about prevented, but at the moment we are shoring up what we can with scaffolding, and dragging out survivors. The tumultuous events of last Autumn still appear fresh – there is uncertainty, but almost every week we are bombarded with the richochet of the odd errant cannonball – a bankruptcy here, an unemployment statistic there, an drop in RPI, a drop in GDP, and once in a while a true disappointment, or betrayal, such as the Budget. Our situation now is one of the long slog. We may have viewed the excitement of the explosions from the balcony before, but the ensuing fire is approaching, licking at our feet, and many already have succumbed. In a more personal way, the horror is that of the grim sceptre of being thrown out of work, and of that fiver not stretching because of far darker forces than the more relatively benign ones of inflation. And no one knows which view is over-reaction, and which is under-reaction. The ‘green shoots’ of which the papers speak may be genuine indications of a bright new turn in the road ahead, or they may be quickly yellowing weeds prising open the cracks in the concrete of a freshly-destroyed city. Nothing can be done but to hold tight, sniffing our way out of this mess but being wary of false aromas.

Stage Five is Recovery and Reflection, or R&R if you will. Shattered windows are fixed, and the circus reassembles, slowly, with less gumption than before and with new checks and balances. The folk with their hands at the lever, their knuckles now utterly white with the tension of their grip, now start to relax them a little, tentatively. The sweat still streaming through their eyes, they make bellicose speeches with the last of their breath, about how their reforms will ensure that there will never be a repeat. They stagger shakily to the edge of the stage and bow for the deliverance that they have loudly effected following the catastrophe that they silently caused. And Reflection of course courts its venomous counterpart, Blame. Do we mete out punishment to the bankers who caused this? And as is famously known and quoted from the MP's motion following the South Sea Bubble collapse, do we tie the bankers up into sacks full of poisonous snakes and hurl them into the Thames? Though in honesty I think this terribly unfair on the snakes…

And then Stage Six, many decades away, is Erosion. The slow eroding of the innovation-stifling and pesky reforms of the late 2000’s to form a much looser, spirited and wonderful era of financial wizardry, young suits with six-figure hover-boards meandering along Threadneedle Street, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf and the newly revitalised district, now a global financial heartland, of Willesden Junction, to perform their heavenly tasks and reap rewards in both money and status. And somewhere out there, speculation in a special kind of vodka starts to go awry, and Stage One beckons. But you needn’t worry about that for now, for in the long run – as John Maynard Keynes once said - we are all dead.

There then, a personal take on what human nature might drive us to as we attempt to build a system to share out our planet’s scarce resources – for that, according to some, is the primary definition of Economics. Stages Five and Six are the “normal” states of things, but I believe that Stages One to Four will periodically occur. I’m probably wrong, and if I were to extol such a simple theory of economic convulsion beyond the single-digit readership of your this humble blog it would surely be shot down in flames like a wayward Messerschmitt over a farmhouse gun turret. Our capacity to pass on information from generation to generation appears to be weak, though, and for that reason we must be doomed to continue this cyclic pattern of disorder, be it over tulips, companies in the ‘South Seas’, land in Florida, blind speculation that afflicted a generation, the devaluation of the Thai baht, worthless mortgages, or simply the mistimed sneeze of an influential stock trader. Every generation seems, like a crawling toddler, doomed to have to repeat and learn from its own mistakes. The trick to the avoidance of catastrophe cannot be learned vicariously. And on that sage, and possibly slightly patronising note (sorry), I bid you adieu.

Though not without one small aside – to actually attempt to understand this whole situation, for you’ll get scant little sense out of me, I recommend “The Storm” by Vince Cable, written in the aftermath of the panic and yet with a measured and confident take on it all.

This week, Kiran came to terms with the fact that he is a spreadsheet jockey, and that any pretense he held to having a say in what is right and sensible, or of ever having any influence over anything work-related was truly illusory. Accordingly, he has withdrawn entirely from the “decision-making process” and will devote his time to become so indispensable in the use of transport software as to be completely unsackable. It goes without saying (though not without writing) that he is extremely grateful to have this, or any, job. He also went to Devon, bought his first hoodie, froze weirdly in the sunshine and ate his first 80 mph cream tea on the M4 while maintaining marginal control of the vehicle.
Last week he went to his first “Redundancy Drinks”, which seemed a strangely euphoric and hyperbolic affair for those concerned.

The Black Canvas, Part 1

Once upon a time there was a wonderful vodka, distilled from the finest potatoes in all the land.  It was so potent that it made drinkers weep hopelessly in awe.  The purest sensation of drunkeness could be achieved, a magical haze of inebriation so pure that in lieu of a hangover one could awaken with a rainbow on one’s lips and a song in one’s heart.  Many wondered how this product could ever exist on our Earthly lands.  It surely could only have been a manufacture of the heavens, brewed from well within the pinpricks of light of the telling constellations above.  Crowds thronged the streets, in cobblestoned squares fountains glistened with the produce, lecherous drunks tumbling in and rising bleary eyed, arms outstretched to the heavens, sticky like the Gods of Fermentation. 

In the twinkling of a maladjusted eye, as is the way of us humans, the chance of making money from such an elixir was noted.  Those that owned the vodka happily sold it on wholesale, pocketing a profit that reduced their need to sell one-by-one in so demeaning a manner to the proles.  Realising that their stock of golden potatoes would not last forever, and ravenous for profit, they cultivated, cheaper, weaker potatoes.  Others did the same, for imitation was the purest form of flattery.

As time went on, the potatoes that were used grew more and more dubious.  Specimens with strange clots on their surfaces, patches of green, coarse skins like the roughened soles of a primitive soldier, all were used.  The vodka-makers subtly mixed in their cheap vodka with the pure elixir to hide their tracks.  And yet, in all the euphoria around, no one noticed.  Indeed the finest vodka-tasters in all the land had been invited into these spin-offs’ premises, induced with hefty bribes to slap their seal of approval onto the bottles.  Even those that had started with this pure and godly liquid remixed their vodka, sold it on at higher prices, labelled as pure, which it then passed onto more and more wholesalers.  The public, emboldened by the heady mix, started to hoard the vodka, they too realised its potential, they quickly shifted from consumer to speculator.  They locked the vodka in their cellars, confident of its value, having a sip now and then but mainly just letting it burgeon invisibly in value, tucked away.  From below, the warm glow of wealth would seem to prise itself between floorboards, and couples would give themselves knowing glances of security, of happiness, of faith that all was good and that they were only slightly plastered.

The seams of the pockets of the vodka-makers started to burst, laden with coins that pulled their pockets out of shape, endlessly expanding like the stomach of a donkey pumped full of falafel by some kind of hideous Arabic snack fetishist.  Their pockets dragged behind them, driving great divets into the road, and the gilt-edged sparkle they left behind left no one in any doubt of the accumulation of riches being attained.  More and more of this luscious vodka was being produced, far out-stripping any reasonable supply of golden potatoes.  The vodka-makers, lusting after more money to wreck their trouser pockets, resorted to more and more dilution of the original luscious vodka, mixing all manner of ingredients, until the substance was barely recognisable.  But the people saw that the vodka-tasters had endorsed it, and the other merchants saw that the labels were thus genuine, and the happy trade and bingefest carried on unabated.

The vodka was traded abroad, so that now it was not only a potent drink with which the population could gorge itself with but many riches from abroad – brilliant contraptions of the latest technology, the most sumptuous of foods – honey-infused beetles stuffed into snakes stuffed into geese stuffed into cows stuffed into elephants stuffed into a blue whale, dragged ashore using great cogs constructed from the finest steel and powered by the purest of fuels, dreamed up by alchemy, and paid for with the proceeds of the vodka.

Then one day, a bellyache occurred.  It afflicted only an individual a first, but then more and more people were struck down.  Their locations were so random that the only similarity that could be gleaned with any certainty was that they had all touched the vodka.  Even tracing the batch was of no use, everything had been so thoroughly mixed that any barrel at any time could spread the contagion.  Who could be certain that their ‘pure vodka’ had not been infected with the same incipent ingredient as that which provoked the illness?  Suddenly the warm glows of wealth from beneath the floorboards turned to dark shadows.  People tried to ignore their cellars, they turned away from their hoards as a source of shame.  They offloaded their barrels to the highest bidder, and as time went on each bid fell and fell.  The first surly hints of distress, evidenced in the simple shaking of the head of a doctor at a bedside, grew into a vortex of panic.  No one trusted anyone else – for a barrel that looked as if it might yield the elixir of purest joy could yet be mixed with the foulest of belly-aching substances, joyriding mischievously within its liquid.

Soon, the barrels were being tipped down drains, into the sea.  The very choppy waters which had supported vessels of trade became soiled with the stain of a nation’s shame.  A currency of vodka degenerated into a fool’s gold, offloaded by all those abroad, no longer entrusted with storing value.  The very money with which the vodka-sellers had rutted the roads grew worthless, poisonous even.  Exasperated, no longer able to feast on dolphin imported from this or that colony, or to trade vodka for silken clothes of jaw-dropping sumptuousness, the King minted more and more coins.  And as he did so, the wealth of each coin seemed to dissipate.  The folk felt more laden with money than ever, and yet poorer than they could ever have conceived.  Their sense of wealth dwindled by the day.  Long after the vapours of vodka had finished rising from the drains and ports, the sense of doom persisted.  

People stayed in their homes, those that could afford to have homes, others still made the streets their homesteads.  Folk who had made an honest living, far away from the tainted glory of the vodka, found that their trade had in fact survived on overspill from the vodka orgy, from the spend-happy merchants and vodka-hoarders that had whimsically crossed their threshold, and now even these honest thousands were thrown out of work.  And all around, people stood staring fixatedly on their palms as if some lost story or moral might be etched there.  And still others rooted around in the waste that was left, searching for something real to cling to that might wish the invisible collapse that followed the invisible fortune away.  Searching for a single pinprick of light in the burnt black canvas. 

The Path From Neptune

It isn’t easy to immerse yourself in normal life when you’ve been abducted and deposited with all the ceremony of a cockroach’s coronation onto the surface of the icy moon of Triton. In no exaggerated sense, it’s a little like getting on a bus and finding that the seats are occupied by sentient yet intelligent liquids with the aesthetics of poorly mixed custard but the keen and introspective minds of the kind of people that describe pure mathematics as ‘elegant’.

Though perhaps I should go back a little, to last summer, when the fateful events that have plagued me these past few months commenced.

It all started when I visited my doctor, complaining of some kind of mental anguish caused by unceasing boredom. Bless the open door policy of the National Health Service. Whether you’re a soul in need of comfort and hypnotic drugs, or a superbug with a penchant for the smooth-tiled floor of a well-tended ward, all are welcome. Except of course that the latter don’t pay taxes, the thieving supergits.

But you see, the problem with boredom and banality carried to its furthest extreme is that it is always viewed as a benign thing and thus underestimated. Nothing, I grant you, could be further from the truth. While in small doses it may be no more than a minor irritant, something that prolonges time and blends your once-focussed thoughts into a kind of weak and unwholesome mixture (like Cup-A-Soup dissolved in an overly large mug), in large doses it can be utterly fatal. The brain, numbed of all rational activity, turns inwards, like an errant toenail with the personality of Stalin, and starts to feed upon itself. It mines its own gelatinous folds for signs of insecurity and devours these until any fermenting creativity or logic that once may have nested there is obliterated. It probably causes people to burn things and kill people, I kid you not. The number of horrors committed falsely in the name of some trumped-up cause or other, but whose blame could squarely be laid at boredom’s door, does not bear thinking about.

But I digress, some habits die hard. The doctor was a well-meaning, angelic type, and possessed these magical receipts that could be used in exchange for drugs. My local alchemist, Boots, furnished me with the goods, and it was at some point in the ensuing week that the abduction took place.

I had known for a long while that the gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling should be fixed. I’d stare up at it at night and wonder what kind of terrors might crawl through there. The hole had the girth of an alligator, so naturally it was towards this kind of predator that my mind was tuned. It didn’t elude me though, that a shark, radioactive six-foot caterpillar, or even some kind of mutated leg plastercast brought to life using only willpower, a vast quantity of electricity and the adoring strokes of a decadent Venetian, could have also easily fitted through that gap and smothered me in my sleep. In the event, it was none of these conventional predators, but instead a kind of long, metal club-ended pole. At first I wondered what kind of maniac would be trying to infiltrate our flat with a golf club. A solid sandstone tenement demands nothing less than a cannon, or perhaps an incendiary explosive, as any primary school child could tell you. After a few swipes of the golf club, which I feebly batted away with my outstretched palm (violence is not my strong point at 3am), it finally clouted me on the head.

In the rising vapours of the freezing moon, shapes were difficult to make out. The first sensation is of the intensely cold surface as you lie there, like a deep-chilled pumice stone being nudged into the small of your back by an over-affectionate cat. My glasses had gone, as they always do at the first sign of distress. I only buy cowardly glasses that shatter at the first sign of trouble, because I would rather be buried with them off, frankly. Why a monument to mal-sight should be welded to me like some face-hugging alien in my final hours is beyond me. I’d rather not see the combine harvester advancing towards me as I’m trapped in the quicksand if there is absolutely nothing I can do to save myself. Still, as the vapour shifted, it revealed the faces of my abductors.

Face is not quite the word, a person can have a face, a dog can have a face, even a clock can have a face, but using the word face here is to stretch the word’s meaning to the most tenuous threads of its extremities. The beings were more like semi-transparent shafts of light, with half-solid, half-vaporous tentacle forms writhing to their sides, melding with the omnisicent vapour of the moon. If peace could have a visual form, it would be encapsulated in the strange beauty staring down at me, and yet, over the coming months, I would soon find that this deceptive beauty shielded a wrath of unspeakable viciousness.

They were only capable of making one noise, a kind of ghastly squeal on the moment of death, which in itself was a ceremony visited upon them one-by-one as and when the community felt that the usefulness of that being had evaporated. It was strangely democratic yet utterly arbitrary and despicable at once. That squeal was the pent up release of all the gathered knowledge and emotion of a short life half-lived, not one of the squeals ever sounded like the dull exhalation of air that one felt would have embodied the dying gasp of a full and unregretted existence.

For the rest of the time, though, for I would not witness my first enforced death for many weeks, they communicated by their normal form – a kind of gestured telepathy (of the kind seen in enraged motorists, hurling lip-readable abuse from behind their warrior-mobile’s windows). The shafts of light would move into impossible shapes, semaphore-like, and at first it was this that was easiest to decipher. Then, it was possible to perceive of a kind of subconscious signal, one that led deeper meaning to the contrivances of the tentacles. Before long, I had grown luminescent tentacles of my own, though mine were far clumsier and unable to whisk the atmospheric vapour into the ornamental swirls and vortices that I witnessed from the others. The telepathy grew stronger too, though this had to be used with caution, as even your deepest thoughts could be unwittingly communicated, and once or twice this aroused the rage of my captors, their tentacles spinning helicopter-like. Often, they would choose to incarcerate me in a hemispherical rock cave, sculpted to perfection by one of the beings, the rounded dome resembling the smooth convex whiteness of an exposed skull. In these times, I would still be unable to think freely, and my leaking thoughts might earn me further torture. The guardians enjoyed flailing with their tentacles, and this would lend a slight burning sensation to the skin, that made it feel strangely crisp and smelling of prawns.

The landscape on Triton is nothing like the astronomy books would lead you to believe (whatever that is, I dropped my love of astronomy when regrettably young, and no one had thought to send a probe to this enchanting place at that point). No, it had more the landscape of Arizona, only without that red-auburn desert glow. The rock mushroomed into spectacular gravity-defying structures, and on some of these lofty plateaus, the beings would gather and thrust their tentacles toward the great god Neptune. Still no noise would be omitted, except of course from the victims of the executions whose wails would richochet off the statuesque rockforms.

Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the experience was that these beings took almost no interest in me. I believe I was simply a companion, one to be tortured for amusement, yes, but certainly not a kind of artefact to be learned from as in other abductions. If I were to reflect, I would surmise that in that state of banality my status was little more than that of a domestic pet. I’d reason that my abduction had been engineered so that their species may have a plaything to make them feel their superiority (as though that had not already been demonstrated by their four light-hours flight to Earth). Indeed in the advanced state of their communication, their ability to transcend space, their ability to intimate thoughts so directly to the core of an alien brain, and in their gargantuan architecture, those same semaphoric tentacles able to sear rocks into molten form in a feat of sheer wizardry, they were truly awe-inspiring. Their scale of ambition was humbling, and left the similar kind of disappointment of oneself as that felt for your own generation when reading about the exploits of the Victorians.

In fact, to them, I was probably more modest even than a furred domestic pet. Possibly more like a snowshaker – shake him and see him rattle, sear him with your tentacle and watch his nostrils flare at the pungent seafood smell. I befriended one, ogre-shaped mass, whose light had clearly dimmed over time, and who yet his peers had not yet decided to sacrifice. His tentacles transcribed the words Angil-Twan (his name) in the air, and with my still embryonic tentacles, I spent a good four hours describing my name to him. I was more than content to ‘listen’ however. The reason for my abduction was never spelt out to me, yet he told of the great plagues, famines, wars, that existed when the beings, he called them the Lyntoc (I am reminded though, of H.G. Wells’s assertion that the beasts he encountered on our own moon were a mixture of Mooncalfs and Selenites, but how did he know of their names? But please, no more enquiries), existed in their solid state.

In turns out that these Lyntoc had once been more scaly versions of themselves, far from the lofty glowing, dancing shapes they now resembled. In fact, the creatures described were more like armadillos, shuffling along, calamitously waging war on each other for merely eyeing each other up wrong. One side-effect of being so low to the ground was that there was little variation in head height, and outbreaks of skirmishes that could soon lengthen into bloody battles could be occasioned by even the most innocent meetings of eyes. In time, they evolved, though instead of gaining a more upright posture, like man, they started to court more with the gaseous state. In time, they abandoned the conflicts and sorrow of the solid world, choosing instead to court with light, vapour and excesses of temperature. Their stewardship of the solid world despite their gaseous forms had elevated them above their surroundings, and they were at last in a relative if imperfect peace. But for the whole execution business that is, though I wasn’t brave enough to pull them up on that, and with my mastery of tentacular discussion, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight by which time even the impossibly patient Angil-Twan would have flail-seared me to death and had me thrust upon the jagged spike of the traitor’s mountain as a warning to all aliens who attempt such tomfoolery.

To cut a fairly rambling account short, they finally got bored themselves. There is only so much fun you can have with a snow-shaker after all. No matter how gothic the incarcerated castle, or how lifelike the snow - and even if that falling snow strikes the sunlight as beautifully as the dandruff from an unkempt street-urchin’s head as he is shaken in some kind of industrial oscillating device for the separating of paint, at some point, you get bored of it and have to dash it with anguish against a wall and then sit on your bed with your knees tucked up against your face, rocking gently yet somehow violently while sobbing and whispering doleful gibberish about the futility of it all and of the fallacy of having snow rise from the ground and adorn an upside down castle in any case, while the glass-sharded palm of your hand trickles blood lazily onto the duvet like some half-hearted volcano’s lacklustre attempt to bury a hamlet in lava.

In the end, I went out as I came in, with a swift blow of a golf club to the head. Awaking in my bed, I threw away my pills – for no alchemy could touch the insanity of Triton, and quickly gained my senses.

Then I moved back to London, but that’s a whole different story. Life appears to have reached a more normal equilibrium now, though the grim spectre of banality with all her destructive potency stands guard at a nearby corner that I hope never to reach. I still often open jars of seafood sauce at the supermarket to gain a heady whiff of that aroma that takes me back to those strangely alluring yet torturous days. But I still miss my tentacles.