I imagine that in most families surviving a family party is cause for celebration - cause, in fact, for a further knees-up, this time with friends. In my family this is not the case. Afterwards I worry - what's Thompson up to?

I pick Nana up from her landing at eight minutes to seven, and start heaving her down the stairs. She's all excited, bless her, and has even smeared black mascara all round her marble-like eyes for the occasion. She keeps asking if that spooky fella is going to be there. No, I tell her, there's just going to be me, her and Thompson.

But of course Thompson's broken her own rule and invited Eric Challenger along. He's alone in the candlelit room, hovering over the table in his tuxedo, eating a sausage on a stick and eyeing the crisps.

With his dark, beady eyes and his widow's peak he looks like he's come as Dracula, but he hasn't. Then again, I can talk. For a moment we stare each other out across the darkened space, until I realise from the pile of cocktail sticks on his paper plate that he hasn't just eaten one sausage: it seems his gob is full of them.

Nana's head jerks to one side. 'Who's there?' she says disturbingly. 'Is it him?'

'No, Nana,' I say with a nervous laugh. 'It's Mr Challenger.'

'Eh?'

'It's Mr Challenger,' I repeat slowly, to give him time to chew and swallow, 'our Thompson's friend.'

'Ah,' she says. 'Is there owt to eat?'

To my surprise Thompson has pushed the boat out with this evening's refreshments: not only are there sausages on sticks and crisps, she's also heated a cheese and tomato pizza, and, strangely, there's a plate of hot cross buns.

Eric Challenger swallows with the sound of a brick chucked into a muddy pool, then says, 'I was just saying, nice spread. Lovely. In fact, I was just saying - '

He's interrupted by Thompson's grand sweep into the room. I stifle a laugh. She's wearing what appears to be a powder-blue towelling catsuit. She stops at the table and nods down at the food. 'Eat,' she says in her charming way, avoiding eye contact at all costs.

I pile some nibbles onto a plate and hand it to Nana. I grab a sausage on a stick for myself. Nana and I retire to the darkest corner. I notice Eric Challenger has a can of lager, and Thompson has a bottle of mineral water, but it seems we're to go thirsty. It doesn't matter - I know we're not staying long.

I can't think of anything new to say to Nana, and as we eat in silence she seems spooked by something of which I'm not aware. That's all right - I'm used to it.

Thompson and Eric Challenger lurk by the table, picking at bits, and one occasionally whispers something into the other's ear. Eric Challenger has seen me several times before, but he doesn't seem any more accustomed to my face.

Nana attracts an evil glower from Thompson when she says the pizza's horrible, and I'm having difficulty spinning out my sausage any further, so we thank Thompson for a lovely time and leave the room. I feel an icy blast on my bottom as we head up the stairs.

On Nana's landing I hand her the hot cross bun I've stolen for her and wish her a good night. I notice the mascara has run down her cheeks. She looks like a long-dead ancestor of Alice Cooper.

You'd think that an empty floor beneath mine might mean a bit of quiet. Well then, you'd be neglecting Nana's capacity for making loud and raucous noise.

She might be blind, she might be growing a bit deaf in some of her ears, but don't you forget or forgive her her voice.

'Rarrgh, rarrgh, rarrgh - rarrgh, rarrgh rarrgh,' she decides to sing at seven o'clock this morning. 'Rarrgh, rarrgh, rarrgh, rarrgh-rarrgh-rah.'

Up two flights of stairs it rolls, like mouldering lemon thunder. I think in her spongy mind it's still Hallowe'en.

I leave a gap. In this gap I expect the empty floor below to respond. I think I hear a slight echo, just a lame wallpaper and paint thing, but it's nothing worth munching on.

So she continues. 'Raaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrgh. Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh. Rgh. Rgh. Rgh.' Like an over-powdered gorilla.

Actually, I realise I'm still not feeling all that well. I'm still worried about what Thompson has in store for me for missing last Sunday's dinner. Does this qualify me to give an old woman some grief?

I don't wait for an answer. 'NANA!' I shout. 'SHUT UP!'

There's a pause - one that rebounds, as usual, from the magnolia walls of the empty floor before tumbling down another flight of stairs and entering Nana's cheeky old ears.

'Rr,' she says. If she knew it was me shouting, she'd have made it louder. Instead, all she has heard is a whispered roar - a ghost's voice. She is scared, and this is confirmed by her next sound, a mere, 'r'.

I need to go back to bed. I know she'll be standing down there, unmoving, on the landing. She'll be waiting for the next episode in this animal shouting. For a minute or two I'll play with the idea of going down to see her, but then I'll climb back into my bed and return to sleep.

Well she started it.

There's a surfeit of bread in this house. There is, isn't there? Sorry, but there must be.

Thompson makes delicious bread. It's her one saving grace, and one of the few reasons I ever spend time on the ground floor - but only when she's out of course. And it's never failed to surprise me that she never takes issue when I eat her bread. Perhaps she thinks it's Nana. But then no, of course she doesn't think it's Nana. She knows that Nana couldn't chew a fly that'd been stewed in whisky. I mean, Nana can only eat Thompson's Sunday dinners because her meat's put through a blender and the veg is stewed to mucus anyway.

Happily, the heady bready smell that wafts up the staircase when Thompson's baking almost banishes the musty-pants-smell of our house. This makes me think that she is part human after all.

Then every Tuesday afternoon the bread man pulls up in his big white lorry and carries a pallet of medium-sliced white up the path. He's been coming here since I was very wee indeed. When Mam and Dad died, you'd have thought Thompson might have cancelled or at least amended the order; but no, the man just keeps on coming. Perhaps he and Thompson are having intercourse.

I can't remember why, but I've always called the bread man Thunderpump. What I can remember is that he used to remind me of my late Uncle Tommy, with his frizzy ginger hair and glasses. Now the bread man still wears glasses, but he's almost bald.

Years ago, I think I must have annoyed the fuck out of him, banging my fist on the window, screaming, 'Thunderpump!' as he walked up the path, and banging my fist on the window, screaming, 'Thunderpump!' as he walked back down it again. I was only little, which means my mother was about thirty-three. We had a dog then, who must have been about one and a bit, and his farts of excitement filled our house with a sweetened sort of sulphur each Tuesday afternoon.

Now I just watch the bread man from my window. He knows I'm watching him, but he keeps his head down till he's back in his lorry. When he pulls away with a weak belching of his exhaust I feel saddened that another week of my life has passed the world by.

Ho hum. Guy Fawkes Night again. Gunpowder and dog fear abound. Opening my window slightly, I can sniff them in equal measure.

This year the Government has been making noises about curbing the explosive madness that has afflicted our population. Apparently, some stupid kids have been blowing up phone boxes using big bangers or something. I don't know whether anyone was in the phone boxes at the time.

I used to think the Government was a man with a very large head for whom my Dad worked. I wasn't far wrong. I'm still not sure what Dad did, but I can remember the only perk of his job was that we used to get free toilet rolls. I'm not sure this was legitimate, because each sheet was stamped with the words Government Property alongside a curious empty little square. One evening, sitting on the loo, I went through a roll and put a small tick in each box. I got a right bollocking from Dad. I've just realised it probably wasn't the ticking that bothered him so much as the ungodly unravelling.

Guido Fawkes was some manner of Spaniard who wore a funny hat and tried to help blow up parliament in 1605. He failed, and was hanged for a bit, then he had his heart cut out and shown to the public while he was still alive. That must have been embarrassing.

This morning I decide that I ended up having a drink last night. Sure enough there are some small empty bottles lying in my bin, bottles of something fruity and sickly, engineered for those who want to get pissed quickly without experiencing the joys of a foul tasting liquid.

It's not that I can't remember because I drank so much. No, it's down to the frame of mind I was in. I've only got myself to blame, sitting there in the dark, swivelling in my green chair, swivelling about and swivelling back again, repeatedly tapping at my computer's return key, making a white space bigger, then folding it back up again using the delete key. What kind of entertainment's that? Still, I did it for hours. Eventually I found myself trying to out-stare the distantly smouldering orange and white lights of the City, but the City just glowered back, indifferent to my glum resentment. Actually, it probably couldn't even see me properly - not from that distance.

I wanted a drink. I didn't want too much, but I wanted enough to send me into a treacly sleep. The trouble was, all my masks are in the wash, and the man in the off-licence is a bit of a wuss. So, having earlier heard Thompson pooting off down the street on her Harley, I went down and nicked some drinks from her fridge. What was I thinking of? Haven't I already stored up enough recriminations in Thompson's larder of torment?

Back to this morning. It's just before noon and again I'm swivelling around in my green chair. Fuck this, I think, and I decide to go to the seaside. I ring up and order a cab. I get all excited. I bag two fistfuls of the loose change I keep in an old corned beef tin inside one of my teddies. I'll use this change to feed the slotties. I've put it in a little cheesecloth bag in case I want to go on some grown-up ride, though really that's not my thing. I put on an extra pair of socks and an extra pair of trousers. I start to sweat. A tooty hoot sounds outside my window. I leap down the stairs.

On Nana's landing, from behind a barely open door, a weak voice says, 'Can I come to the seaside too?' But before she's finished her question I've reached the ground floor. On my way out, I nick a bread roll from Thompson's kitchen and put it in my breast pocket. At least my sister won't mind that - she encourages bread theft lest she be smothered in her sleep by the over-floury, fast-reproducing stuff.

I climb into the passenger seat of the cab. How excited am I? Well, my chin's dribbling, but the driver can't see this because my head's buried into the folds of my coat. With skilful use of both feet he silently guides us out through the melee of London, but once we're on the A13 he suddenly starts talking. God, why? I don't want to talk to him.

'So what do you do?' he asks.

After a pause of suitable length, calculated for maximum deterrence, I say, 'Computer stuff.'

With much animation, he tells me that his brother, or nephew, or uncle, does computers. Why does the male relative of each person I don't know work with computers? Are they all related, or are they all despicable liars?

The blurred landscape degenerates into a flat wasteland strewn with pylons and forlorn rusting shipping containers. The sky lowers. The driver turns up the heater and the windows bead with condensation. Still he's on about computers. Aren't they marvellous? I tell him I hate them. Could I do his sister a website for fifty quid? With a snort, I tell him I'd rather hack off my own head, but he's not listening. Computers make good money, he tells me with an emphatic nod. I choose not to tell him that I subsist on the death of my parents when I was thirteen; that my suffering is the interest on the scars I was left with.

As we approach the M25 I'm as low as I can go, sunk deep into the fake leather passenger seat, trying to get myself beneath the streams of sickly pine fragrance wafting from this man's dashboard air freshener.

'And that's another thing,' laughs the driver, unbidden. 'Remember Pac Man?'

Right, that's enough for me. 'Dagenham,' I say quietly. The driver just laughs and glances at me sideways. Somehow he thinks I'm joining in. But then I pull myself up straight and the collars of my coat drop away, and now he's looking straight into my face and he's looking scared. 'Back to Dagenham station,' I say in a very flat tone.

He seems to swallow, then says, simply, 'Right you are.' We come off at the next junction, and soon we're heading home. Well, Dagenham isn't home at all, but it'll do. I can buy a paper, get a pint in a pub, then go home on the train, all in total anonymity. And anonymity is better than sex. Or so I've led myself to believe.

Perhaps next week I'll get myself to the seaside, and I'll end up riding on a brightly-painted, bobbing horse.

It's windy today. The sun is playing silly buggers, leaping from cloud to cloud.

I've been hunched over my computer all morning, trying to get crimson balls to orbit each other convincingly. Nevertheless, the wind seems to be getting to my ears, so at lunchtime I walk down to the chemist's to see if they have something that might help. I'm sold a tiny bottle of liquid. The label says it contains peanut oil. Jesus, these pharmaceutical companies could sell knitting needles to a manky horse.

When I come out, I'm greeted by an odd tableau. In the shadow of the railway bridge, an old woman leans on her tartan shopping trolley, staring accusingly at the pavement. Opposite her, a young bloke in a suit is pressed hard against the wall, his eyes rolled up to the sky. His face seems to have been moulded from a blue and grey paste.

I'm about to push between them when a gust of wind ruffles over us and I hear the sound. It's like a stick being dragged quickly over ribs, or teeth rattling in the cold. The man squeezes more tightly against the wall; his head twitches away to one side. The woman's eyes dart over the ground, closely following the brittle ticking. Just by my feet, I see a sausage in batter rolling over the paving stones. It comes to rest against my shoe. 'Don't touch it, dear,' says the woman urgently, but I can't help myself and before I know it I've stamped down on it hard.

There's a shocked pause. Then the woman's shaking her head at me slowly, tutting softly as if she's sucking a humbug. I look to the man for reassurance, but he looks like he's going to throw up, and before I can say anything he's away, sprinting towards the railway station, his arms and legs pumping hard.

I scrape my shoe on the railings, leaving behind a pink and orange pulp. The woman's trundling her trolley down the street now, and when she stops and turns to glower at me she makes me feel like a war criminal.

A collimator is a device that kind of straightens up beams of light and makes them all point in the same direction.

I could do with one of those for the tatty bits of hair I have left on my head. It would save me buying hairbrushes.

My body seems host to many asymmetric infirmities. I'm sure someone else is living inside me: only half a person, a person with only a right-hand side, a person who is never all that well, without ever really being ill.

You see, for the most part everything that's ever wrong with me is wrong with my right-hand side only. My right-hand lung seems smaller and more like an accordion than my left. If you look up my right-hand nostril you'll see it's tighter and always more snot-encrusted than the other. Even the skin of the elbow on that side is more parchment-like than that of the left. And of course - and this is the big one - when I had my accident, my disaster, my nemesis, it was mostly the right side of my face that was devastated. That's not to say that the left of my face is nice. Far from it. Short but tough flaps of skin hang down on both sides, and from the back of my neck too. But you get the picture. Don't you?

Tonight I'm sitting on the toilet down on the empty floor. A cup of hot chocolate squats on the lino by my feet. I'm half way through the above paragraph when I feel a tick on my right cheek: a tiny squirming. I brush at it once and it melts away. I resume my typing - I've got wireless, hurrah! - but then there it is again. So I flap at it, and something sticks to the back of my hand. It's snub-nosed, translucent and squirmy. It's a maggot. I make a sound like Thompson makes when she sees me coming down the stairs, then I flick my hand hard, and of course the maggot plops into my hot chocolate with but a few bubbles of froth.

The maggot turns a funny shade of brown as its death throes ripple gently through my drink. I shudder, then climb off the toilet and move to the cabinet to check my face. Of course the mirror is covered with my favourite type of black gauze, so I have to peel back the velcro before I can have a proper look at myself. But I keep my focus on the itching patch of face - I rarely look at the rest. There's nothing there. For a moment, I think I can feel something bubbling under the skin, but it's just my nerves backfiring. No, the maggot belongs to the bathroom, not me.

I pull the light off and leave the bathroom. I'll tip out the mug of hot chocolate in the morning. I'm just grateful that I haven't yet started spawning maggots. Well, at least I don't think I have.

No! And perish that bastard thought.

The memory of last night's maggot wakes me up early. I'm still squirming, so I think I'll go and get a shower - if that's all right with you.

Over our toilet are three hook things, one above the other. I don't like to think this, but I think these hooks look like the faces of three small Chinamen. They've been there and bare for as long as I remember - and for at least 29 months I've been meaning to hang some things on them.

Perhaps I'll visit a car boot sale, or a jumble sale, or a bring and buy sale. Or maybe I'll get Nana to make three somethings - for she often frolics in a deeper creative brine than us sighted folk. Her madness also helps, of course.

I must have been standing in the shower for at least forty minutes. I'm lovely and warm and have decided I don't want to leave. Feeling like a gently steaming sticky toffee pudding (as opposed to a blast-steamed head of cauliflower), I must have gone into some sort of trance, for when the doorbell rings I find I'm completely paralysed, unable even to wrinkle my nose. For a moment I feel sure I must have suffered a stroke - until the water suddenly runs cold and I leap sideways to evade its rude blue fingers and prang my funny bone on the edge of the soap shelf.

Cursing the twin devilments of doorbells and soap shelves I spin a towel about my lower portions and pelt down the stairs, trailing a fug of steam. Today is the 15th: Mergrez delivery day. If I miss Nana's Mergrez she'll cry for a month. There'll be hell to pay. She'll starve. She'll roll about her room like a barrel of salted pork. Thompson will poke at my ears with a shitty stick.

I needn't have worried. Thompson has beaten me to the door. She's already taken the bell-jar and the van's pulling away. Now she's talking to someone else. They are silhouetted against the morning sun: Thompson's tall, lanky shape with its bulbous breasts swelling out incongruously on both sides, and a small, stooped figure out on the path.

An old woman's croaky voice is saying, "... would have come sooner, only it happened on a Friday, and Friday is me son-in-law's day of rest, him being a Muslim, then Saturday's me sister's day of rest, her being a Jewess, then of course Sunday's my own day, so I came as soon as I could, but awful it was - just awful - it's taken me all weekend to get over it and still I haven't. And I don't like meddling, but you know, I had to come and say something. Do something. Get it out my system, like."

"Of course," Thompson says, with a shrug of her shoulders. "I'm glad you came. I need to know what goes on."

The woman shudders. "I mean, that poor dog, the way they was kicking the poor little thing up against the railings like that. It can't have been no more than a puppy ... this other fella was there too, he saw it, and he looked just as sick as I was. God help the poor creature. It hobbled off, but it was all thick with blood and I'm scared it'll have died."

"And you're positive it was BC?" says Thompson.

"Well, of course," says the woman. "I often see 'em down the shops. It's not hard to spot 'em in a crowd, and as I said, I followed 'em back here afterwards. No doubt who it was in my mind."

I can't believe this. I step out from the shadow of the hallway. I'm without mask, wrapped in my dripping towel, my few clumps of hair stuck to my scalp like spat-out spinach. The old woman stumbles backwards. "Oh good God," she says weakly, backing away down the path under the pressure of my stare.

Thompson grabs the skin at the back of my neck, twists it hard, and growls, "You're a little shit, BC."

"Argh! A-ya!" I yelp, my thrashing about only winding the skin-knot tighter. "She's a desperate old whore! It was a fucking battered sausage, not a puppy."

"Liar!" calls the woman from the road, her voice trembling. I blow a huge raspberry her way just as Thompson slams the door shut.

My dampness helps me slither from Thompson's grip, but she blocks my way, arms out, hands pressed against the hallway walls.

But I'm not going to let her know how deeply afraid of her I am, so without fuss I bend over and grab the bell-jar of Mergrez. "Could you move?" I say. "I'm taking this up to Nana."

Thompson's glare feels like a solution of spearmint dribbling onto my scalp. Then she snorts and opens her legs. As I struggle between them with the heavy jar, she softly says, 'There'll be hell to pay for this, BC. Sooner or later. But it'll come. You know it."

Oh, how I know it. I'm running out of paying-in slips for Thompson's Royal Bank of Torment. The foul cow.

Anyway, I'm bloody sure that puppy was a battered sausage.

I can't sleep. That business with the puppy has really p'd me off. It seems I still get blamed for everything.

I went to the newsagent's earlier and bought a set of The Lord of the Rings The Return of the King Top Trumps. Now I sit playing them on the window-sill. It's not as much fun as I'd thought.

Despite the fact that Sauron is 'the manifestation of all that is evil and corrupt', he loses on Height, for which his value is 'n/a'. And Shadowfax, Gandalf's horse, has a Height of 6'5'', which isn't very accurate, because if he stood on his back legs he'd be much taller.

It's a stupid game. Top Tramps would be far better.

I'm cold.

Grim November rolls on. My life feels damp and a bit cold. I just can't get warm. My routine's all over the place. I can't sleep before dawn, then I sleep all day. At least this means I don't have to see Thompson.

I'm in the wee hours and sleep is still hours away. I start thinking morosely about my family: about how much I miss Mam and Dad; about Nana and Thompson; about me. This house is most definitely a haunted house, even though you never see any ghosts. The ghosts are just a bit crap at their jobs.

Despite missing Dad, I really can't remember much about him. I seem to remember he dressed like an American travelling salesman from the sixties: white, short-sleeved shirt with a breast pocket full of pens; synthetic trousers with wide, flappy bottoms; glasses with pointy, black plastic frames. Or perhaps that's a NASA mission controller. Never mind. Still, I picture him, sure and steadfast, driving his beefy car in a straight line from Nuneaton to Kidderminster and back again, disseminating encyclopaedias wherever he goes. Or describing that eternal, ugly, scalene triangle that links Stoke-on-Trent to Towcester to Bicester to Stoke-on-Trent. Bisssssster. Toasssster. Stoke.

I know what I have to do. I walk into my stationery wardrobe and fetch a slice of paper, a pencil and a pair of scissors. Quickly I cut out four figures. I frown at them. These have to be Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Why the hell did I do that? I feel like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters.

But perhaps my conundrum isn't quite so tricky as that posed by a mashed potato mountain. Suddenly the meaning of the figures is clear to me: the three bears are Mam, Dad and me. Goldilocks is Thompson. So Nana must be the porridge.

I stare at the figures for about an hour, then one by one I set fire to them and drop them out of the window. It's a beautiful sight. I cry a bit and eventually I fall asleep, my forehead still resting on the cold window-pane.

The cashew is to the nut world what the aubergine is to the vegetable world. No authority will back me up; no sceptic will call me a liar. It's just so fucking true it hurts.

It's ten past three in the morning. Tonight I'm determined to overtake myself, to stay awake all night to get myself out of this stinking, brain-dead nocturnal ordeal. So now I'm sitting at my window, having a fag, looking down at the shadows in the street below. There's something about shadows: if you watch one for long enough then eventually it'll move. You mark my words. So, eventually, one of the shadows moves. Despite my cockiness I jump a little bit and shiver.

It's a cat, a big black or brown cat. At least I feel sure it's not a yellow cat. It looks as if it's decided to pretend it's doing a dot-to-dot puzzle in the dark street, sniffing intently at one dot before decisively moving off to the next, only to sniff intently once again. It seems to be having its own sort of fun.

Something up in the sky distracts me for a moment - it's either a silent helicopter or a very large moth - and when I look back down to the street I feel a bit let down that the cat has gone. I tut and prepare to stub out my cigarette on the sill. Then another shadow twitches and I see the cat is sitting as still as plain cheese in the middle of the street, staring up at me - up here at my dark, third-floor window. I shudder. It doesn't blink, or scrub at its whiskers, or scratch its ear. I'm not sure it's even breathing. It's just staring at me. I don't like this. I wish I had a scone to throw at it, but I don't, so with all my might I fling my still-glowing fag butt at it, hoping to singe its nose just a little bit, but I miss, because the street is empty once more.

I'm very pleased with myself. I stayed up all night Thursday, then I was so tired Friday I did nothing at all until finally I fell asleep during the ten o'clock news. Ooh, I had a lovely sleep.

Fancy this.

Beneath Tower Bridge I float, on a lilo knitted from compressed pink and orange used toilet tissue. Get away seagulls!

From their sparkling white pleasure vessels tourists gormlessly wave at me, then sharply look away as if caught in a filthy act. For a while I don't care. I feel glad to be alive.

The chrome giants of Canary Wharf regard me askance as I navigate the U-bend round the Isle of Dogs, and I know they can only hope I drown. I pass unchallenged through the Thames Barrier - the great flouncy poof - and I turn up my nose at the Beckton sewage works. As I slide under the QEII Bridge's crotch I give Her Majesty a curt, bashful nod, then as I nose round Canvey Island the shores rapidly spread away to either side like a whore's skirts: frilly-knickered Southend to the north, Crimplene-petticoated Whitstable to the south.

The great grey North Sea swallows me whole. It doesn't even burp. I sleep soundly in its vast salty gullet.

When I wake up I feel the best I've felt in weeks. Last week's episode of battered-sausage assault seems a bit silly now.

I wasted last Saturday, and the Saturday before that I failed in my attempt to visit the seaside. So I decide I'll visit the seaside today - but this time I think I'll take a tip from my dream and visit the nice seaside, not the gaudy seaside.

Yes, I'll hire a car and drive over to Whitstable to visit Peter Cushing's monument to serenity. Mmmmmm. Nice.

So it's midday on one of those cool, clear, windy Saturdays that try their hardest to be funny but never quite pull it off. I hack through the dense red and white thicket of the M2 roadworks, and before long I'm out in the yawning expanse of the Thames Estuary, hankering after fish and chips for lunch - superior I trust to those rubberised artifices churned out by the London chip shops I'm used to.

But before lunch I decide I'll have a brisk walk along the wind-whipped beach, where the butterscotch shingle sands squeeze between the crumbling groynes and the garlicky spray toys with my city-child eyes and lips. And where anxious seagulls fly backwards - despite their best efforts - while pebbledashing the pebbles with their payloads of white fishy slop.

And although I'm alone except for a couple of dogs here and there and a father and son combo flying a kite, sure enough I soon manage to trip over a frolicking dog just as a kite swoops down and pecks a lump from my neck, and I find myself jogging back to my car, disappointed and sore, grinding my teeth and bouncing my fists off my ears. Luckily I take a wrong turn and ricochet down an arse-like alley straight into the arms of The Best Chip Shop In The World.

Did those fish and chips soothe my soul? Oh yes, they did. The battered cod was nothing less than a sumptuous crunchy golden slipper crammed with chewy flakes of marine snow, while the chips were mini-harps lacking strings yet bursting with a gland-squirting music all of their own. The tomato sauce was simply the Pope's blood. The salt was crystallised hope. And the malt vinegar was enough to make a gibbon's bum wink.

Altogether it was so gorgeous a hand-held meal that I couldn't face its passing with equanimity, so I stood by my car and balled up the greasy papers and shoved them into my mouth, chewing hard until my eyes watered and my jaws ached. I sucked out every last drop of grease, ketchup, salt and vinegar, then I wept for a moment before ducking down into my hire car. I ripped the sticky car park ticket from the windscreen - I joylessly licked this for a second too - then sparked up the engine and drove back home.

You ask if I found Peter Cushing's monument to serenity. Of course I did! It's called Cushing's View: it's a gloriously ordinary wee space, fashioned from concrete, where people can sit and look out across the wide estuary from Kent to Essex - a view that invariably features scant sunlight slicing from sulky clouds to bounce off choppy, slate-grey seas, and evil seagulls screeching like morose metal mommas as they chomp the tops off bustling waves. Cushing must have chuckled at this spectacle, I feel sure - although not, perhaps, as he played Grand Moff Tarkin.

I've had a pleasant week. A nice week. I'm relaxed. I feel as though I might go out again soon. Maybe.

A couple of points to clear up first:

Q: Have you always lived in London?
A: I was born 300 miles away, in the spicy armpit formed by a river and a sea.

Q: Does your 'situation' bother you?
A: I am Roderick Usher, baked, split open and left for the gulls.

It was the end of November because my advent calendar hung above the fireplace, unopened - though Thompson had already scribbled the word 'tit' on it using a pink felt-tip pen. And it was definitely a Tuesday, because Nana was round for her tea. And it was this time of day, because Nana was just settling down with us in front of the fire. I was five years old.

Because it was a Tuesday - a Nanaday - Mam had bought four chocolate eclairs. One each for her and Nana and Thompson and me. Grandad was still at work down the shipyard and I presume Dad would have been at work too, probably driving to Towcester in his shirtsleeves.

The eclair plate lay on the mantlepiece. I ate mine, Thompson ate hers, Mam ate hers. Nana didn't eat hers because she was talking and talking and talking and talking.

While Nana was talking I ate hers. I ate it so fast a lick of cream went straight up my nose and a bite of the leathery chocolate flopped onto my collar.

Despite my uncontrollable snorting and the white spume forming at my nostrils, and the pool of dog-turd-like chocolate rapidly spreading down my shirt, despite all this I thought I might still be able to feign innocence. I thought this until Thompson narrowed her eyes at me and said in a robotic voice, "BC is very sorry, Nana."

"What?" said Mam. "What for?"

"Eh?" said Nana.

They looked at me.

I turned red and started crying then. What a mess.

Christ. The bitch.

Fuck fuck fuck... how do I get over this this this?