20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#12

Previously on Peachy Coochy I had attempted to find a balance between softness and hardness by visiting Clint Eastwood’s house in Ladbroke Grove.  Who should come out but Lance Johnson, the young surfer from Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. Lance walked north to the outskirts of London and I followed him.

Lance was played by the late Sam Bottoms. Sam’s first movie was Bogdanovich’s ‘Last Picture Show’ in 1971. That’s him in the small town cinema, aged 15. He played Billy, a mute and backward boy. Lance, Billy and Sam were brothers. They were all wistful, which I liked. Billy had a soft, distant smile.

Lance was stoned most of the time in Vietnam.  He was so out of it that he didn’t seem to see the horror around him. Or maybe he did see it and had to get out of it. It’s so strange to think that soldiers smoked dope. We used to think that dope was part of the revolution. Lance was on acid going upriver. He befriended a puppy.

I knew that Sam was dead because he kept walking through things. It made it hard to keep up with him. He had a brain tumour. That’s why he died. Lance kept him going. Lance said “Sam,  come over here, I’m on acid. It’s beautiful.” We were near St Albans. Lance didn’t understand that Sam was already dead. Lance would always be eighteen.

Someone joined us along the way. “Who are you?” we said.

“I saw you going by from my house,” he said, “I’m Bluff Jack.”

Lance said “That’s a beautiful house, man.”

Bluff Jack said, as was his wont, “It is a beautiful house.”

Lance said “I like you, man, you’re direct.”

Jack put his hand out to shake Lance’s hand but it went through him.

As we neared Duxford Aerodrome we found Squadron Leader ‘Tatters’ Taytham and Group Captain ‘Taters’ Tatham sitting in deckchairs by the roadside.  Bluff Jack was quick, as was his way, to establish that they, too, were dead. “We are,” they confessed. I asked if they were familiar with Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. They said that…

…they had admired Lance’s performance but found the drug references perplexing. Sam, assuming a protective attitude to Lance, told them it had not been a just war and they seemed to understand. I felt that they were soft in their hardness but this could be explained by their phantasmal bodies. They had not changed their clothes since 1943.

A large group of dead women pilots marched towards us. My mind began to race. If the women and the men walked through each other would the women become pregnant?  Because this would be the ideal sex, where the bodies were light and there were no imperfections. The babies would form almost immediately.

But it was actually very cold. Several dead women passed through me and my brain silted up with snow. I heard Bluff Jack, the only other live man, moaning piteously. Then everything was quiet. I could not even hear my footsteps. I knew that I must keep going, though. Eventually I saw a steep pathway.

Sam was dead. Again. Lance, Billy, Jack, Tatters and Taters were nowhere to be seen. I felt sick and depressed. I knew exactly what had happened and where I was.  For reasons that were as yet unclear I had brought myself to a place where the only way forward was death or enlightenment. In other words a place of the utmost banality.

I was within moments of embarking on one of the most pointless journeys that life has to offer. Beyond cliché, beyond sentimentality:  the stairway to heaven,  in all its variants,  some less prescriptive than others, some involving actual death, some not, was  the single most debilitating prospect that any sane and healthy person could face.

Eager not to be absorbed into the eternal light, I went to a pub that sold Timothy Taylor’s Landlord. It’s an ale with a good head, malt aroma, fruit, a hoppy flavour, fairly dry and bitter. At 4.3% it’s obviously not as strong as, say, Director’s or Abbot, but it feels strong and delivers a beer buzz quite quickly.

My thoughts turned to Jade. I’d found her bullying and lazy racism pretty unpleasant  on Big Brother but now that she’d gone I had no ill feeling towards her and felt sorry for her kids and even the surly, feckless Jack. In a perceptive article in ‘The Guardian’, Madeleine Bunting quotes the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, who suggested that…

in Goody’s dying we are “grieving for the death of a fantasy world we have all been living in”. This was, clearly, the world of easy credit, happy motoring and limitless resources. Bunting also quotes another psychoanalyst, Andrew Samuels, who detects “a huge diffused anxiety” about the future spreading through society.

“Patients talk to me,” says Samuels, “of walking through a door into a room that has no floor. People fear the structure of their lives falling apart.” I ordered another glass of Landlord. It was clear that I had been mistaken in seeking solace in Clint Eastwood,  let alone Sam and Lance. I had been walking with ghosts.

I could see that ghosts were – to use a loaded term – spirits without bodies while zombies were bodies without spirits. I liked zombies – their single-mindedness impressed me. We’re encouraged to see them merely as the living dead but I think that’s unfair. Also unfair is the way that they are denied political status.

This zombie, for example, is dedicated to a critique of the coercive cult of depression embodied in the colourful and manic clown.  The latter,  in its pre-depraved form, fails to address either the complexity of contemporary experience or the primal simplicity of the incontinent shitting and pissing upon which much slapstick is based.

Zombies also represent the obliterating power of religious belief wherein the sufferer, fuelled by the great light that suspends discernment, arrests experience and neutralises scepticism,  subjects those of us still beguiled by the material world to the numb intimacy of the thousand yard stare.

What if the driven body of the zombie were somehow filled with the restless melancholy of the ghost? Surely this should result in a perfect balance of the softness and hardness that I had been pursuing! I needed to find a large open space to which I could attract great numbers of almost human creatures.

I hired a luxurious coach and filled it with uncooked meat  and a sound system playing Dutch gabber at 180 beats per minute. The coach had a capacity of 76, plus a driver – necessarily undead. It soon filled up. I would follow behind in my Volvo. We drove to Colindale in North London, a site of perfect melancholy.

20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#

Previously on Peachy Coochy I had developed the idea that it is possible to split off those parts of oneself that are at odds with the way one would most like to be or, at least, the way one would like to be seen. I was familiar,  however, from my reading of psychoanalytical texts, with the dangers of such splitting.

There were two ways to go: the soft or the hard. I could soften myself to the point where the distasteful parts were embraced and absorbed, losing their harsh power and simply being accepted as part of the whole spectrum of qualities that were just very much me and who I simply very much am.

I knew that that which is split off will return. With an attitude. How could I forearm against, for example, the allure of objectless worlds of wistful intricacy that existed only to provide a haven for yearning that would be extinguished by the slightest contact with brute reality?

I thought that I would model myself on Julia Roberts’ lips. I arranged to meet Julia in the bar at Blake’s Hotel. I had a Stella and Julia had a half of Bombardier. After making small talk I asked her if I could take hold of her lips. Specifically, could I take her upper lip in one hand and her lower lip in the other hand?

Julia suggested that, since she hardly knew me, it would be better to discuss what I needed at another level. She said that, in fact, she had only got where she was today through a process of inner hardening. Her apparent softness was largely a matter of  strategy – it was needed to counterpoint the apparent hardness of the male actors with whom she worked.

Walking back through the park I met a hippie. I recalled that back in the 60s the hippies were very tolerant. They said that you should dig yourself. I asked the hippie to elucidate. He said “Okay. It’s like there is all this shit moving in patterns. You have to disconnect from the patterns and let the shit flow by.”

The hippie raised an interesting issue. He had described something that sounded straightforward yet had no basis in anything anyone could do about anything. How do you disconnect? What from? How long does it take? Can you reconnect if needs be? If, indeed, there are patterns, do they impinge in the least upon our lives?

I concluded that while patterns can be found all over the place they had fuck all to do with our lives. Our lives appear to be shit storms in an unending  typhoon of disorder. So what if a fucking shell has a spiral? So what if things come in fucking threes? What’s it to me if nature is ridddled with nice shapes? I’m fucking not.

Fuck Julia Roberts! Fuck hippies! Fuck this underlying shit! It’s underlying! It’s not fucking overlying! If it was fucking overlying we’d all be lying on deckchairs waiting for an enema from Princess Diana while listening to violins and sucking sweeties! Shit would never happen!

It wasn’t that it was abstract or philosophical, what the hippie said. It was that the world is full of people whose connection with meaning is based entirely on the desire for meaning. They see a pattern, they admire the pattern, they imagine they contain pattern, so they identify with the pattern they see.

The desire to dwell within pattern has been considerably intensified within the domain of consumer capitalism. Sufferers from obsessive compulsive disorder, in an attempt to suppress what they experience as intrusive and unsettling thoughts, will repeat ordinary actions, such as turning off the lights in their house, over and over again.

In so doing,  they unwittingly enact the condition of the consumer who has been taught to feel incomplete unless they repeat an act of consumption. The consumer, however, becomes a beacon attracting further invasion whilst enjoying the sensation of shedding light on a predicament

In this scenario pattern is everywhere to be seen and closure is achieved on a rhythmic basis. The consuming act will, it is suggested, fill the hole that you deserve to have filled but, like the Chinese meal of legend, has to be reinforced by many subsequent acts. In this respect consumption is an ecstatic practice.

Its strong repetitive rhythms assist the process of ‘getting out of it’. The ‘it’ that you get out of is imagined to be a hard place full of objects and obligation while what you get into is a soft place of transcendence and meaning. In fact it’s a place scoured by the winds of yearning and hire purchase.

I’m sorry. I got carried away. I don’t normally rant but I was embarrassed by my crass behaviour with Julia Roberts. I had hoped to pitch her a screenplay about a young man of modest background who wins a fortune on a television quiz programme thanks to plot devices apparently based on 1950s children’s stories.

I needed to get to a hard place – it was clear that softness was not doing me any good. I needed to reject all those elements that led to self-doubt. I thought of the Italian Futurists and their undisguised admiration for machines and war.  Self-doubt had no place in their programme.  Unfortunately most of them were fascists.

So how to expel softness without splitting? Was there some way of being soft and hard at the same time? Like a chocolate. Or a snail. Or an egg. Or an olive. Or a peach. But these were scarcely sentient things. I could hardly model myself on a chocolate. Then I noticed that I was passing Clint Eastwood’s house in Ladbroke Grove.

Despite his forbidding and often mean screen personas he seemed affable and approachable in real life. I realised, however, that this did not mean he would be pleased to meet a random passerby. I walked slowly past the house, glancing casually at the windows as I did so. I could see paintings on the wall of the living room.

I walked back past the house, not looking this time. Then I turned and walked back the other way. Not looking. I turned again and walked back. Then I turned, and walked, and then, after a short while, I turned again and walked back. Past the house. Not looking. I walked up and down. I walked up and down.

Then out came Lance Johnson, the young surfer from Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. He was played by Sam Bottoms. Sam died last year from a brain tumour, aged 53. Lance walked up the hill. I followed him. He walked north, through Edgware, Radlett, Frogmore.

I followed him. He walked and walked. He never paused. I kept following him.

20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#8

Previously on Peachy Coochy: I  had realised that I had been taking advantage of my executive  position within the Peachy Coochy organisation to present barely disguised accounts of my personal life. I regret taking advantage of my audiences in this way and now wish to make amends by restricting myself to statements that are plain and direct.

I remember a tremendous bang and a cry. I tumbled over and over myself like Charlie Chestnut Goes to School on an Icy Day. There were others all around me but I pushed my way through.  And then I joined up with Jane. She had been living in her mother’s house. We settled down together in a little place her mother had set aside.

As the months passed Jane and I grew so close that it was as if we were one. We decided to call ourselves Victor. All day long he received messages and information which he carefully stored. Soon the little house became too little. On several occasions a snake attacked the house thump thump like when Miss Sassify Berella and Smallene Toot saw off the Gump.

On one particular day I came under pressure to move on and, habituated by now to the warmth and dependability of the place, I found I was loath to leave. Pressure soon came from all sides and I was forced to climb down. The shock was considerable. I realised I had never been outside

As I looked closely at the place I began to realise that it was composed of countless tiny figures. I gathered some of them up. They said their name was Alan and Margaret Edney. I didn’t know them. They called me David, saying that Victor was only temporary. However, what they then went on to tell me has made me the person I am today. 

Alan, who wore a blazer, said “All the good food that you eat turns to shit inside you. Why doesn’t it stay good inside you?” “There’s shit in you now,” said Margaret. I said “If I had a baby would I have a shit?” “Of course you would,” said Margaret, “There’s only one hole.”  “Does the baby hurt your bottom?” I asked.

“Of course it does. It splits it,” said Alan, fingering his pipe. “And then the shit is out all over the place,” Margaret went on. “Can you put the shit back?” I wondered. “No. It won’t go back,” they said together. “How does the shit get up the bottom then?” “People put it there.” “In the night?”  “That’s when they push it up.” “Is the baby shit?” I enquired.

Alan adjusted his tie. “It’s a big shit,” he replied. “The mummy carries the shit. That’s why she sticks out,” Margaret confirmed. Alan began scraping the bowl of his pipe with a blade. “The mummy grunts when the shit comes out,” he announced. “Does she love the shit?” I wondered.

“She very much loves it,” Margaret asserted roundly. “She makes it into a baby.” Alan tapped the pipe bowl into an ashtray beside his pint. “And the shit goes inside the baby,” he averred. “You can’t see it,” he added, “But it comes out.” “Like sick,” observed Margaret. “Can she sick the baby?” I questioned.

“Sometimes the baby is sicked up,” Margaret stated matter of factly, adjusting her necklace. I spoke “Does she put it back?” “She can eat it up if she wants,” Margaret spoke. “Can she stick it up her bottom?” again I wondered. “It’s better to eat it up. It’s quicker,” Alan responded then.

“The baby doesn’t die,” Margaret pronounced. “No. The baby never dies,” they said together. “No. The baby never dies,” they said. “No. The baby never dies.” I posed them a query “So where does the baby come from?” “The daddy,” they said together. I came up with a further enquiry, “Is the baby in the daddy?” Margaret looked at me. “The baby is in the daddy’s peepee,” she told me.

I touched my collar. “My peepee has peepee coming out of it how does that make babies?”  Alan puffed up some tobacco. “The baby is in the peepee,” he confirmed. “The daddy peepees in the mummy, David,” mentioned Margaret.”Where does the peepee go?” I wanted to know. “In the mummy’s hole,” Margaret came back.

“What hole?”  I queried. “The bottom hole,” “The daddy is full of babies,” “There are as many babies as the mummy wants in the daddy.” “Why doesn’t the daddy have the baby?” I shouted. “He gives it to the mummy,” Alan murmured. “The mummies are nicer,” smiled Margaret. “Does the baby shit?” I pressed.

“All the shit comes out of the baby.” By now Alan was puffing easily. I had to keep on, though. “Does the mummy shit in the baby?” I insisted. “Yes, David. The baby is full of the mummy’s shit. And then it comes out of the baby. Onto the ground. That’s at the beginning – when the baby is out of the mummy the mummy can’t shit in the baby.”

“The mummy’s shit goes on the ground. And the baby’s shit goes on the ground.” That was both of them together in unison at once. “Does the mummy shit in the baby?” I had to know. “Yes. The baby is full of the mummy’s shit. And then it comes out of the baby. Onto the ground.” “Is the ground covered in shit?” I ventured.

“That’s what the ground is. The ground is all the shit that has come out. People wear shoes because of that. Because the shit can go up through your feet,” Alan said. “The ground is a big shit. Done by all the people ever,” Margaret said. I posed my last question “Before people was the earth a big shit?”

“Yes. It was a very big shit in space. In the stars. And people came along and did their shit on it.” Alan drained his pint and shook my hand. I turned to Margaret, “Margaret, are you my mother?” “No,” Margaret said. Alan had quite an interesting car – a 1959 Series II Hillman Minx saloon with long handle floor-change gearbox and single dial dash.

I was feeling hungry. I had never been in a restaurant before. I ordered the all day breakfast. It actually only took 20 minutes to eat. The food was very filling  and quite greasy. I felt an urgent sensation at the pit of my stomach. I had not yet learned to control everything that happened in my body. I stood up and completely lost control of my bowels.

The nurse told me that the King was coming round to see people who had conquered their shame. She asked me how ashamed I was. I said I was not ashamed to see the King. She said “That’s not what I mean, cunt. Everyone wants to see him. He only wants to see people without shame.”

I realised that I was too wretched to see the King. He would be disgusted. Then I had a good idea. It was the beginning of my life, I needed something I could rely on, something I could use in everyday situations. I took a deep breath and split into two. I hid the disgusting half in a house in Hertfordshire. Then I went to London.

20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#2

I realised that I was suffering from a fear of bursting. Some months ago a friend had been performing a yoga posture in the quietness of his front room. Without warning his intestines rushed from his body and coiled on the floor before him. Despite the enduring serenity he claimed to have achieved thereby, I saw myself become uncharacteristically chastened and cautious.

Everything around me seemed distended. Things thought thin now oozed uneasy bloat. Mere tautness to the touch portended splishsplash. Surfaces seemed to seep, to suppurate. I flinched in parks as flamboyant gesticulators inflated then shrugged or softly smiled. Envelopes groaned, sausages mocked me.

I lived in a small house in North London. The street was secluded and little traffic passed along it. Most of us in the street read the work of Dick Francis although we did not discuss it. House hedges were high but used volumes were left on low walls for communal exchange. I had just finished the 1972 tour de force ‘Smokescreen’ and hoped to acquire 1973’s ‘Slayride’.

Preoccupied with my preoccupations I rose that day and made my way along my street. Dick’s works were laid out as usual. I had read them all. Towards the end of the street I spotted an unfamiliar jacket. At first I assumed it was a Dick because the first two letters of the surname were the same. “Dick…Freud. Who is that?” I wondered.  I picked up the volume and examined it.

I read the book from cover to cover,  initially under the impression that it was a pseudonymous racing mystery with a theme of prediction. I gradually realised that, in fact, it contained a very interesting theory. Apparently, at least in Freud’s view,  there was a vast hidden world buried deep inside every one of us. Why had no one in the street mentioned this?

The book had been translated into English in 1913. The relative obscurity of my street meant that the translation had not become available until 2007. This would explain why I was so poorly informed. I knew, however,  that I must now, without further delay, do something that would reshape my life and stop me bursting. I wanted a subconscious and nothing would stand in my way.

I left my street, taking some some fish paste sandwiches, a dictionary and a cassette player. Where would I go to get a subconscious? I passed a number of imposing towers and these somehow stiffened my resolve. I had a choice: either I could head into the dense bush in the hope of finding a mound or I could consult a passerby. 

As luck would have it I came upon a most accommodating fellow. “How might I obtain a subconscious?” I asked him. “Fuckingpigsarse! Fuckingduckshit! They’re all fucking smiling now but he’ll come down if you ask him! Come on puss, come on, you fucking belligeranti, you fucking warwound! Fuckyourmother!  Fuckyourmother!”

So I went to see the Queen. She was relaxing in her Royal Room. I bowed low and told her what the red-headed man had said. “Yeah,” she said “if you go with me it will certainly make things easier for you.” The Queen lay very still and shouted royal messages “This is my throne, this is my ermine, this is my sceptre, you are all vermin.” I went blind.

Nurse, nurse! She opened her purse and my eyes have burst. In the park in the dark. My eyes have burst. I’m cursed. I’m immersed. All taut gone slop. All night gone shite. All night now. Who seeks shall find; Who sits with folded hands or sleeps is blind. I miss the sweetest sight, my parents’ face.

Benny! Benny!  Benny! etc

Down the deep creeks creak sheep. Flying fences in their sleep. Stifled with a muffle. The engine rooms are just intolerable. Wrap some towel round that, would you? They were soft, like grapes – we cut them out. We heard a tapping. On a pipe. With a spoon. Or a knife.

Then I saw my parents again. Len, Joan, Joan and Len. I had to move them apart. I got between Joan and Joan for the first time ever.  I went between them and pushed and pushed. There was a crack. They kept holding on to Len and Len but I broke my mothers in two. Joan and Len then Joan and Len. The sky opened up and things came down.

Oh now! Jimmy Croc Cow! Jimmy Croc Cow and I don’t care. Dogcheese,  catalept, pigment, turvy tops and tails, in through the out door. Well, I don’t know, Margaret, I opened the curtains and people were relieving  themselves in the street! It was awash with ones and twos! The fucking stench! Men with banjos were speaking with their mouths full!

She went to the cupboard and I was bare. Then she opened it. Then she ran her hands over the shelves. Her little dog barked. I screamed out because those shelves were so sensitive – I could feel her fingertips, they were rough. Doesn’t she know those things are inside me? Doesn’t she know I’ve eaten the world and I’m a naughty boy?

“It was getting silly.” I either had to swallow or puke. If I swallowed then I would shit – I’d shit the world out. If I puked then the world would not be so harmed. It would come out more or less in decent condition, none the worse for its days in my stomach. The only problem was not knowing what order it would come out in.

I moved my legs apart slightly to give myself a stable footing and stood between two parallel bars that I had noticed nearby. I grasped the bars and, thus braced, took a deep breath. The world felt heavy but I knew I could do it. I opened my mouth wide and contracted my diaphragm forcefully. Suddenly the world was in space again. I jumped down onto it.

The very first thing I did was to go and see Celine Dion. We had met in Morrisons and become friendly. I found her down to earth and easy to be with. Celine quoted from Guy Debord, the Situationist writer,  of whom she was very fond. They had been neighbours when she was a little girl.

“You see, David, “ Celine said, “The spectacle is not a collection of images, rather,  it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” “But, Celine,” I confessed, “I fear the sheer, engulfing volume of it all. It floods into me until I can hardly bear it.” Celine grew serious “David, listen to me. Your fear of bursting is over now.  Once you’ve puked the world you can do what you fucking want.”

I didn’t go back home. I felt light. I felt effective. I discovered that you don’t have to have a subconscious – it’s just an idea. I met some people who were cognitive behavioural therapists – they confirmed this. They said it was all to do with changing mental images. If you have  an image inside you you don’t like, you can change it. It’s all to do with images.

20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds and spoken to for the same period, no more, no less. The script for one of these precision-based presentations is found below.

Season 1: PC#7

In the course of the First Season of Peachy Coochy I delivered a linked series of presentations that were ostensibly concerned with the attempts of an empty, collapsible plastic packing case to find and consolidate an identity for itself. I realise now that these whimsical digressions were simply tissues obscuring a set of nakedly autobiographical concerns.

When I was sixteen I had a girlfriend called Anne Silberstein. Here we are in a punt in Cambridge, our home town. Anne and I walked out for three years. She liked modern jazz and introduced me to the Modern Jazz Quartet. Her father was Dr Kurt Silberstein, the City of Cambridge Police Surgeon. Anne was self-conscious about her nose, which she thought was too big.

One day in Anne’s house I found a leaf that had fallen off a potted cactus. I put it in my mouth so that it looked like a protruding tongue and showed it to Anne. She laughed a lot then put a leaf in her mouth. We pretended to kiss. Then we took the leaves out and found that our tongues and lips were covered in tiny spines.

They just wouldn’t come out. In fact, they seemed to be digging deeper and deeper in. We told Kurt and he shouted at us then fetched an anglepoise lamp, a magnifying glass and some tweezers. For the next hour he pulled out spines first from my tongue then Anne’s. A few just wouldn’t come out no matter what. Kurt said they would eventually be absorbed into the body.

But I wasn’t convinced. I once broke a plate by accident and a small piece of china lodged in the side of my thumb. Over the years it has moved slowly under the surface of my skin towards my wrist. If anyone would like to see it I can show them after the presentation in which I am presently absorbed. Sometimes at night I can feel the china fragment inching towards my heart.

The spines were quite different, however. They impinged directly upon my moods. At first I did not understand what was happening to me. Within a few days of the incident with Anne I succumbed to inexplicable and novel changes in my general feelings. Not only did I experience intensities of familiar emotions but also improbable and unwieldy combinations thereof.

I endured simultaneous fits of obsequiousness and superciliousness, storms of schadenfreude and ignominy, electric bouts of quizzicality and certainty, monsoons of gloom and jubilation, collisions of constancy, zest, pep, vim, black dog, pepperiness, turpitude, languor and general shit.

In his book ‘Teenage – the Creation of Youth Culture’ Jon Savage describes the Wandervogel – ‘wandering birds’ -groups of disaffected German youth who ran wild on the outskirts of Berlin in the 1930s. They wore old women’s hats with ostrich plumes, brightly coloured scarves, ears pierced with enormous rings, wide belts daubed with esoteric numbers and diagrams.

Pinioned by the staccato of tiny pains I realised I could no longer find solace in my home town. Setting aside my despair I parted company with Anne, my school and my family and took a train to Berlin. As the spines bored relentlessly through my tongue I determined to find the Wandervogel  before the arrows centred on my heart.

The Wandervogel  hike through the countryside with musical instruments, living off the land, sleeping on ferns and drawing inspiration from the ways of the American Indians. They believe in a mystical bond between the land and the soul of the people. The Berlin group, I found, was flamboyant but highly principled, with strong beliefs in purity.

I passed many tuneful days with the Wild Youth, as they called themselves. Their rituals were fascinating and their self-discipline was exemplary. When the strange exaltations of feeling seized me, as they did so often now, my companions were grave and supportive. It was when I told them about Anne that the situation changed. They escorted me to the edge of the city.

Jim Mitchell was from Wichita and sought to seek his fortune. He was travelling with Estelle Carter from Gillette, Wyoming. They were both fifteen years old. When the big banks all collapsed their parents turned to drink and started beating them. The freight train pulled though the night across the Great Plains under a blanket of stars.

Some of the older hoboes started shouting at us. They were making threats against Estelle. Then we heard screaming and crashing sounds. Something seemed to be moving down the train towards us. The end of the boxcar suddenly exploded open. An enormous translucent worm slithered through the gap. Inside it were the writhing bodies of the tramps.

We were sucked into the cold, slimy mouth of the creature and probed by the furious tentacles lining the tunnel of its body. As they entered my mouth, ears, nostrils, penis and anus simultaneously I felt a dull electric current followed by an excruciating pain – the spines in my flesh had swarmed together around my heart and were defending it against this abomination. 

The freight train was deserted. The driver and the brakeman alike had been consumed. The train clattered on for hours and hours. New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana. I was consumed by an epileptic hail of conflicting emotions. They coursed through me regardless of my thoughts or whatever it was that I found myself doing.

I settled for several years in a small farming town where I kept bees. The constant wandering of the spines was a relentless source of discomfort which I found I could alleviate by drinking honey every few hours. But small town life wasn’t really what I craved. I yearned for Anne and the crash of the city.

I was methodical: I tried to imagine what she would be like now and where she would go. I spent a few days in Notting Hill, some in Hoxton, some in Soho. I kept mostly to the main streets, reasoning that she would have to use them from time to time to get to where she lived. Several months passed. I decided to visit Camden Town.

“Anne, Anne – it’s me, David! From Cambridge!”  “Fuck off!” “Anne, you’re still beautiful but you look so tired!” “Just piss off, will you? Get out of my fucking face!”  “I’ll come back – when you’ve had a rest.” I was elated. I knew where her house was! Obviously she was shocked to see me but it was clear she’d been working hard and was a bit nervy.

I went back to the room I had rented in Acton and tidied myself up. I’d been on the streets quite a while and hadn’t been too concerned with my grooming. On my way back to Anne’s house I saw her coming towards me. “Anne! My God! I’m so sorry! It’s all my fault! The spines – they’ll never leave us!”

I had a sports drink with me, with syrup in it. Blake kicked it out of my hand and slammed me into a wall. He spat in my face over and over again. I contracted Hepatitis C and in consequence could not process the removal from my body of harmful substances. The spines gathered around my liver. The pain was overwhelming.