Arrived at the new foster home on the Yorkshire Moors. It’s a similar sort of stout country pile to those I’ve lived in and destroyed several times in the course of my young life. It’s called “Wuthering Heights”. Priceless!

“Wuthering”, let me tell you, was the name of a wildly popular drug back on the streets of Liverpool. It was invented by my gang mate Percy. Percy, before he died halfway up a chimney, was an enterprising semi-invalid who developed Wuthering by mixing 15% low grade opium, 10% tobacco, 40% dehydrated mare’s urine, 20% factory effluent and 5% fish stock. The remaining 10% was comprised of some anonymous tar-like substance which Percy called “Dark Majesty”, and whose provenance he kept to himself. It was all boiled down into an aromatic treacle which me and the boys flogged to sooty Liverpudlian street urchins like ourselves for 2d for an emaciated fistful.

Shove a single sticky globule of Wuthering up your hooter and, provided your lungs don’t froth up and drown you on the spot, you are transported to a world of sweetness and light where the angels sing and buxom matrons ply you with custard and declare you “a very good boy”. Anticipating boredom and compulsory afternoon walks t’up moor in’t rain, I stashed a neat parcel of Wuthering in the handkerchief I fastened to the end of a bent stick, along with a pair of clean undies and a small tobacco tin filled with gunpowder.

Having told my foster-father Mr Earnshaw that I would knife him “repeatedly” if he attempted to send me to the local community school, I am content to spend my days on the back terrace, dismembering beetles and the occasional barn mouse while laughing manically. In this I have an eager accomplice in Cathy, the feral girl-spawn of Mr Earnshaw who declares her favourite books to be “tha’ evil ones ’bout murder an’ incest an’ jesters an’ stuff” and her favourite food to be “raw pig meat wit’ tha’ blood left in”. There’s also Mr Earsnshaw’s pimply boy-spawn, Hindley, but he’s a timid little turd and is usually scared away by a casual threat from Cathy that she would gladly inflict “great ’arm on ye face wit’ broom ’andle”.

I thought it might relieve the more tedious afternoons to get Cathy hooked on Wuthering. It was a doddle: the little missy will chew or inhale anything provided it’s dark and pungent enough. There we sit, divvying up the filth on the kitchen table next to the mutilated beetle corpses – and no sooner does she bung a wodge of Wuthering up her freckled nostrils than she bolts through the door, leap-frogs the gate and scampers across’t moor. Wuthering heights indeed!

Cathy’s ecstatic shrieks and wails echo through half of western Yorkshire, and I am always close in pursuit, balancing a flask of gin and a tin a stale pies for our merry picnic. After her shrieks have given way to phlegm-corrupted gurgles, we collapse on a stretch of heather and begin swilling gin and fondling each other’s “evil parts”, as Cathy is want to call them in feverish tones. We vomit periodically and strategically, and it usually begins raining at some point. Et in Arcadia ego.

I am growing accustomed to the rustic manners of the Yorkshire countryside in ways I had not anticipated. Drug-fuelled picnics with posh country totty easily beats nicking carriages with my gang mates in Liverpool or offering favours to bearded sailors at the slave docks. I rather fancy myself as lord of Wuthering Heights one day.

Heathcliff, Wuthering Heights, Yorkshire, 1771

My name is Kim, and my life began in a heap of shite. I was born in a diseased backstreet of Lahore to a syphilitic Irish squaddie and his bedraggled compatriot filly, who both then promptly died. My life proceeded through further heaps of shite: a childhood spent thieving apples from market stalls and performing services for bearded trader-pederasts from Peshawar. Occasionally, after running assignations for an elderly sorceress/prostitute called Huneefa, I would straddle the great green-bronze Zam-Zammah gun (‘the fire breathing dragon of the Punjab’) opposite the old Ajaib-Gheir, in a mighty phallic gesture suggestive of late-Victorian discourses of imperial masculinity. That was the only non-shite bit.

Relief came in the form of a visitor to Lahore, an old Tibetan monk in travel-soiled maroon robes. He ignored my offers of ‘lovely carpet – nice girl – hashish best price’ and instead mumbled over the flicking of rosary beads about a river, the River of the Arrow, formed in ancient times by an arrow fired by the Buddha, who was fantastic at archery apparently. The monk wanted to bathe in said river, to free himself from the Wheel of Things. Personally, I really like Things, and want to have as many of them as possible; but, fair enough, I thought, each to their own. So I endeavoured to follow him in his quest and carry his rucksack and steal apples for him, in return for pretty much nothing – besides the odd go on his prayer wheel, which had its limits. And so I took my first step on the Road to Imperial Manhood, a road which was back then kept in spiffing order by satrap native police officers and paid for by the conscientious taxation of a grateful local peasantry. The shite-ness was ebbing a bit.

Months passed, stuff happened, my balls dropped and hair proliferated in strange places. Through an entirely coherent and rational chain of events, I was conscripted by the British to run around northern India ferrying intelligence documents from surly Afghan chieftains (where were the jolly ones, I kept wondering) to sweaty white Sahibs with monocles and detachable collars (who were also not very jolly) – all to show the Russians who really wore the pith helmet in India. The Great Game, it was called, or as Colonel Creighton, one of my monocle and detachable collar wearing mentors, put it: ‘This here is little more than a game of cricket in the shires, followed by sandwiches. Merely substitute the village green with an arid high-altitude valley in the Hindu Kush, the fielders with hostile Pashtun tribesmen wielding plundered Enfield rifles, and the rules of play with no rules at all – and, hey presto. Now let’s get you kitted up with some field binoculars and a belt of faulty grenades, and the fun can begin!’ I felt a whole new wave of shite to be swiftly oncoming.

The Colonel, who clocked me as a white boy, a Sahib, despite my turban and pointed slippers – ‘let’s just forget that you were born poor, and Irish, and a bastard, shall we?’ – had many lessons to impart, generally about the white man’s dreary burden in undermining native industries and playing bridge on bungalow verandas. The secret to British rule in India, he said, was two-fold: an insistence on sit-down loos in the face of the most formidable challenges ever mounted to plumbing; and the richness and variety of our lawn sports. ‘The French may have boules, a vigorous sport admittedly. But we have croquet. And I think we might reasonably lay claim to women’s archery.’ He paused for effect. ‘Did the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb return from campaigns to send coloured wooden balls on their graceful passage through iron hoops, to the blushing admiration of his concubines? No. I doubt the chap even kept a decent patch of lawn on which one could play croquet. I rest my case. Now, Kim, let us share another can of tinned salmon, over a game of bridge. You shuffle.’ In retrospect, the Colonel liked to speak a lot of shite.

My training has been dreary. I haven’t even encountered a Russian yet; maybe they’re just a figment of the British imperial imagination, like Frenchmen. In mid April, as the heat and dust of the plains have Britishers across the Indian Civil Service suppressing the urge to detach their collars, I have been told to go up to Simla. There I am to begin an immersion course in Espionage and Advanced Bridge with a Persian gem trader (and rumoured bridge cheat) called Lurgan Sahib. ‘Plentiful young memsahibs up there away from their husbands,’ the Colonel winked. He then said something I couldn’t understand about the carefree cultivation of un-tame cereal. Sounds pretty shite.

Kimball ‘Kim’ O’Hara, North-Western Provinces, British India, 1895.

Pillaging takes it out of one, particularly with the onset of a Mediterranean summer. Troy was looking a little sad after we’d summarily executed the men, enslaved the women and boys, and tanked numerous kegs of Heineken while chanting Mycenaean sports club songs. Everyone was headed off home, dragging their haul of Anatolian carpets onto one of the thousand ships that sat parked on the beach. I was up for a holiday – just a chilled couple of weeks on an island with a favourable exchange rate and plentiful visiting tarts from the mainland – as were some mates I’d made during the siege. Why head straight back to Ithaca and get an earful from Penelope about dead sheep, rapey suitors, and the difficulties of single-handedly mothering a bored, masturbating teenager called Telemachus? I’d have the rest of my life to grow olives and father bastards with serving wenches.

So Lee, Brian, Steve-o, Winston, Kev and I piled into my vessel with 54 bottles of ouzo and an emergency stash of cheese-and-onion pasties. We set sail: on tour, once again. The nearest spot on the map was the Land of the Sirens, described by the guidebook as ‘a place where attractive women sit all day on sea-facing rocks and sing loudly at passing stag parties’. ‘I’m not sure I’d be into that,’ I said to the men. ‘Sounds a bit like Prague.’ So we passed it by – a string a concrete ‘villas’ gazed at us from the shoreline, with a few dejected-looking women visible on rocks (standard) – and began raiding the ouzo store.

Weeks passed in an aniseed fug. I vaguely recall an altercation with a giant one-eyed landlord, with ‘Polyphemus’ etched on his safety-pinned nametag, in a cellar bar in Zakynthos; also an incident involving Steve-o and a whirlpool in which we lost most of our cheese-and-onion pasties. Owing to the latter, and the hunger abetted by the recurrent ouzo- and spear-based masculinity contests – the last deterrent against raw buggery – we made a detour to the island of Ogygia, where Winston assured us was a well-stocked Greggs selling a variety of tax-exempt heated pastries.

Immediately upon quitting the stony beach we were set upon by a hen party of sunburned trollops from Sparta, swinging their handbags and baying for man-flesh. We unsheathed our (slightly rusted) spears and succeeded in impaling all but one of the harpies – who, in the melee, had grabbed hold of Kev and now stood, quivering, holding a Swiss Army knife to his neck. Her demands were simple. ‘I am Calypso,’ she spoke in a rich baritone. ‘Surrender me the small squinty one,’ she pointed at me, ‘and I shan’t kill this overweight, freckly bastard here. I like the small squinty ones.’

We reasoned among ourselves. ‘She’s probably just after a bit of sport, a night at most,’ Lee said to me. ‘Totes,’ said Brian. ‘And we need Kev. He knows people. He can get us into anywhere. Just lie back and think of Ithaca. You’ll be home in no time.’ I acquiesced: to take it for the team guarantees one a favourable afterlife resplendent with obliging nubiles and pitted olives. She turned to the others as she led me away to her cave: ‘Now fuck off and get on with your holiday, boys.’

I’m still stuck in Ogygia, a year on. Calypso has marriage plans. It’s not all bad: she goes like a train and always makes me a steak sandwich afterwards. That’s more than I can say for Penelope. But – I never thought I’d say this – I dearly miss exploiting peasants and throwing lambs off cliffs (a local variant of a Dionysian rite) on my home-island of Ithaca. And it pains me that I’m not there to belittle my son Telemachus’ hunting skills (‘that’s not how to spear a pig, you snivelling pansy’). I just want to go home.

Odysseus, the island of Ogygia, 1178 BC

Hwaet, etc. (we won’t go into that).

I was chilaxing in the park with some Geat mates, after a campaign of wholesale rapine in Juteland, when a messenger-boy of King Hrothgar approached me and handed over a letter bearing the royal Danish seal. Turns out Hrothgar had spotted the advert I put out in the Danish papers, offering my services in ‘smiting’ disadvantaged youths who vandalise public buildings (incidents of which have seen a sharp rise in Scandinavia after the economic downturn of 468). The King’s tone was urgent and his prose riddled with Viking expletives that I shan’t repeat here.

In short, Hrothgar had opened the royal coffers and built a state-of-the-art community centre in a down-at-heel suburb of Copenhagen – somewhere the recidivist kids of overburdened single mothers (the fruit the of the Norse invasion of 455, when oats were, so to speak, wildly sowed) can play ping pong and learn the tuba; ‘activities’ that keep them from lurking on street corners chugging jugs of mead and leering at elderly women. Hrothgar named the place Heorot, after his uncle’s infamous drinking game involving runestones and Frisian slave boys.

Yet no sooner had some local tart cut the ribbon and the doors officially opened, then this lairy specimen called Grendel – a larger than average yobo, commonly spotted in a yellow hoodie and navy blue trackies, with ‘bestial eyes’ and ‘foul, infernal breath’ – starting breaking into Heorot after hours through the men’s loo window. Always operating alone, Grendel would snort ketamine off the ping pong table and stash tubas into his gym bag, before urinating on the educational magazines and writing ‘cunt’ on every blackboard. And this had been going on for several weeks, so that, in Heorot, the local youths were presented with an environment that scarcely differed from their own home interiors. Would I, with my years of experience in axing faces and taking names, help Hrothgar make Denmark a safer, fairer, more inclusive place for all, by smiting an oversized boy with chronic self-esteem issues?

I sent the messenger-boy back with four words for his majesty: ‘bring it on bitch’. I immediately quitted the company of my Geat chums, who continued to chew on chicken wings and stare into the middle distance, pondering last month’s rapine, and sped onwards to the Danish embassy to request a four week work visa. My excitement mounted at the thought of all the fur garments and slave women I would receive by way of payment from Hrothgar. But one thing troubled me: Grendel’s mother. In the letter she was cited as a ‘possible hazard’, and described as ‘a veritable fish wife, built like a brick shit house and possessed of a temper like Odin after a really shit day in Valhalla’. I doubt she’d take kindly to her boy getting done in by some Geat bloke in a horned helmet. As I neared the embassy gates, a shudder of trepidation ran over me, such that I always feel before a longship journey. Hwaet, etc.

Beowulf, Geatland, 470 AD

I've moved into my new place in Long Island (not on the damn subway) next to the house of a dubious specimen called Jay or Jeffrey or Jeremiah or something. An air of suspicion hovers about him: some say he saved a baby and mauled to death a polar bear in Svalbard; others conjecture he dealt in the illegal trafficking of elk spleens in pre-WWI Serbia; a small contingent even claim him to be the true inventor of instant coffee and the crossword puzzle.

Despite the mist cloaking his origins and business activities, he is a typical ‘self-made man’ – by which I mean an arriviste wanker who keeps turning up in my driveway in his souped-up Fiat Punto wearing a croquet blazer. Who the fuck drives a Fiat Punto wearing a croquet blazer? I don’t care if it’s the ‘Jazz Age’ or whatever; it’s no excuse to look like a tosser. I’m quite adamant about this.

Anyhow, the man’s invited me a couple of times to ‘come ride’ in his ‘two-seater aeroplane and enjoy the wild thermals over the Atlantic, old sport.’ Interpreting his invitation as a sordid euphemism, as is prudent, I’ve instead spent most of my off-days in the exhausting company of a lady golfer who grunts louder than the doughtiest tennis femme. My neighbour, on the other hand, is sweet for this posh mid-western filly – Daisy or Deidre or Diocletian, dunno – who likes nothing more than to run over poor women in fast cars, like the veritable New York society woman she is fast becoming.

To impress this questionable hussy – she keeps going on about her baby (nobody fucking cares) – my neighbouring vulgarian keeps throwing large house parties. Throughout the preceding day one sees vans revving up to his doorway delivering endless cases of Bud Light. I roughly surmise the idea to be to get the lady so rat-arsed she’ll say yes to a ‘ride’ in his ‘two-seater aeroplane and enjoy the wild thermals’. Wicked cad that he is.

Nick Carraway, West Egg, Long Island, Summer of 1922.

Phew! India was behind us – and so we got legless on Kingfisher beer and Old Monk rum, dad and mum and I, and periodically projected our half-digested masala dosas over the rails and re-enacted the entire song repertoire from Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (mum’s favourite). The Patels were On Tour, for the first time since the wet Himalayan pilgrimage in the summer of ’74 (where there was that incident with the snow leopard and the Shiva trident, which dad still likes to bring up over chai breaks). But perhaps you’d care for a little context, and perhaps some religious allegory and animal metaphors to layer on some artistic resonance and secure lucrative literary prizes. Alright then.

We had sold all our exotic pets and hotfooted it onto that liner soon after my dad read of the ramping up of Indira Gandhi’s Emergency in the Kanian Tamil News – daddy was not to be sterilised by that woman – and were treading over the waves to Canada, or some such New World dump, when the ship crapped out on us. Suddenly there was all this cracking and splintering and feminine wailing. The next thing I knew – the Kingfisher hangover blurred things somewhat – I was squatting on a rubber dinghy in the middle of the Pacific, with nothing for ballast but a pair of handcuffs, a box of flavoured condoms (hint of lemon), a bottle of scented lubricant (essence of elderflower), an over-ripe cucumber, and a trussed-up Barbra Streisand in a low-cut crimson dress.

Karma could not have dealt me a crueller hand, and I looked wistfully back to my prelapsarian days among the animals in the Pondicherry zoo, who always accepted me for who I was and never questioned my motives. How was I to survive for days, possibly weeks, possibly months, aboard an inflatable vessel with a cluster of useless implements and a hostile, possibly dangerous animal onboard? After a determined bite of the cucumber, I pondered my options, and thought about Krishna and Mohammed and Jesus. Still not sure why. Maybe this all means something?

Piscine Molitor ‘Pi’ Patel, the Pacific Ocean, 1977.

Hobbiton is shit. I am so through with Hobbiton. Seriously. Fuck Hobbiton. The women are all bearded rapists and the men do nothing but sing madrigals and grow phallic vegetables in garden plots. My best mate Frodo’s got engaged to one of those hairy tarts. He kept screaming no, waving his little arms about – but she wouldn’t cease in her advances, forcing on him one of those faux gold rings with tacky Elfin lettering on the side. Such has been the fate of all too many young male hobbits.

But he’s already planned an escape, my man Frodo has: he’s bought himself an all-inclusive, week-long trek in the alpine region of Mordor, setting off by coach at half six on Thursday morning. The trek culminates in a visit to Middle Earth’s largest and most scenic volcano, Mount Doom, where you can get your picture taken for a small fee by a dwarf in front of the lava flows. The sherpa for the trek’s a bit dodgy though, I hear: some skinny ned called Gollum with ripped tracksuit bottoms, a tartan baseball cap, and a consuming penchant for cheap bling. A possible source of discord, I fear, but apparently a powerful wizard – Gandalf or some shit – is coming along too, so he should keep that skanky pleb from downing too much Buckfast and stealing people’s jewellery.

Anyway, Frodo plans to give his engagement ring a surreptitious toss into the volcano pit; when he gets back he’s going to make up some bullshit story about the ring harbouring sinister powers, necessitating its molten destruction lest it fall into the hands of the evil Lord Sauron (he got the name from one of those obscure Korean soap operas he likes to watch). The important thing, however, is that he’s asked me to come along with him. Apparently there’s a stopover in Rivendell, the notorious Elf brothel, for a bit of rough sport with some leggy bints. Lads on Tour Mordor 2011 – has a certain ring to it. I might order t-shirts.

Samwise Gamgee, Lower Hobbiton, 2011.

I must lay down, once and for all, how I first met that Capulet bint Juliet. It was not at some gay little masked ball or at either side of fish tank (I wish people would stop saying these things). Actually, we met in a grotty dubstep venue in a disreputable suburb of Verona. The reason she denies this is because she can’t remember it. And I don’t blame her! MDMA does that to people. Anyhow, we were both thirteen; I got into the club because I borrowed Mercutio’s ID, and Juliet got in because the eunuch-bouncers let any slapper in who looks old enough to down an alcopop and give a stranger a hand-shandy.

So, there we were, off our tits on pills, flailing and grinding against people from various echelons of Veronese society. E makes me piss like a bitch, so I was constantly elbowing my way to the pisser and letting rip into the porcelain. One time I stumbled accidentally (or not!) into the ladies’ bog – and there I saw her, crouched over a loo, the door of her cubicle ajar, heaving vomit into the bowl and retching like a dying basilisk. Like the good Montague gent I am (ha!), I skipped over and helped her empty out the last of her swan dinner. Then I offered to take her home; I think I said something about the dubstep being ‘proper shit’ anyway, and that I intended to crash at a mate’s house just a few blocks down from her palazzo. And so we walked. One minute I was helping her spew again into the fountain of the Piazza della Erbe, the next I was up on her balcony, balls deep in Capulet gash. Back of the net; House of Montague 1, House of Capulet 0.

On reflection, it’s not a terribly ennobling story, and it clashes somewhat with neo-classical doctrines of chivalry currently prevalent in Renaissance Italy. Perhaps I best stick with the masked ball and fish tank bollocks. Because, honestly, if the truth got out about our drug-oiled rutting, we might both have to top ourselves. Imagine!

Romeo, fair Verona, 1562.

I’m a thinkin’ masters who be makin’ concubinage wi’ them slave-women be mighty awdacious an’ ’gainst the Lord. A Southern Christian man best be fornicating wi’ his wife or his sisters I’m a-sayin’, jus’ like ma pap – though pap be always drinkin’ an’ cursin’ an’ all manner o’ sinfulness, as said ma keeper Widow Douglas when she tryin’-a sivilize me good back yonder in St Petersburg. No, no sir, I cannot abide concubinage wi’ them slave-women. But when in Missouri…

Huckleberry Finn, on a raft somewhere on the Mississippi River, 1884.

To kill the bitch, or not to kill the bitch: that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the menstrually-induced backchat and lacklustre cottage pies of that outrageous hussy, or to roll up one’s sleeves and give her a good going over with a rolling pin – and by opposing her, end her. To have a lie-in, at last; and by a ‘lie-in’ to say that I end the ear-ache and the thousand unpleasant shocks that her flesh is heir to (you really should see her first thing in the morning; a sight most unseemly; not exactly Juliet), ’tis a ‘consummation’ devoutly to be wish’d. To have a good ten hours: perchance to dream or listen to the radio while scratching one’s testicles: there’s the rub; for in that epic repose what dreams may come when I have shoved off that mercifully mortal woman, must give one pause: there indeed is too much rub, which makes calamity of late morning. And stuff, and things, fair Ophelia. Now get thee to a fucking nunnery.

Hamlet, suburban Copenhagen, 1599.

I just don’t get it – these odious midgets now want to turf me out of their Lego kingdom. I swear, the last time I pissed on someone they slipped me a tenner and treated me to a steak pie at the King’s Head. Besides, ‘size’ is an Enlightenment social construct. Fuck Kant, seriously. (Although entering the society of really really small people does do wonders for one’s sense of adequacy). So that’s it, I’m off. No bargain buckets of miniature sheep could persuade me to stay. I’m going to do what I always wanted to do, ever since my sinister uncle Oswald took me on an ‘educational’ trip to the family stud farm when I was six: I shall live among horses, and make my sport there. Horses don’t talk back when you ride them, and what’s more it’s socially acceptable to whip them. Far preferable to midgets.

Gulliver, Lilliput Border Detention Centre, 1702.

I was doing my thing, prowling on London rooftops in green tights, peering into the bedrooms of young middle class ladies – pretty standard night really. One silly bint had left her window open, so I crawled in and made myself thoroughly acquainted. Wendy – an alright sort of girl, despite the shit name. A bit naïve though; I had to carefully guide her towards ‘Never Never Land’. But after that it was straight on till morning, let me tell you. Unfortunately her little brother was in the room; I had to cart him out the window too, after I’d finished explaining myself. Meanwhile, I’ve been languishing in Hook’s dungeon for ‘lost boys’, hoping the goateed bastard doesn’t grab hold of my Tinkerbell. He never wants me to grow up, you see.

Peter Pan, J.M. Barrie’s deeply suspect imagination, 1904.

‘Be fair to me, wife, I’ve had a reeking shit day being a Thaine in early medieval Scotland, trying to extort rent from a belligerent peasantry and hosting swan dinners for visiting French “dignitaries”. What’s more, these three old trollops keep following me about mumbling things. I just want to come home to a fish supper and some wholesome bed-sport in our drafty four-poster. Is that really so much to ask from a housewife in the eleventh century? I can’t be doing with your “I’m not going to put out until you commit regicide” back-chat this evening. Get with the fucking times, woman. Know your place.’

Macbeth, Cupar, 1039.

Jus' suffocated my teenage wife cos my bes' mate told me to. Bros before hos, as the Moorish adage goes.

Othello, Venice, 1603.

Been trapped for what seems like half the fucking war in a cramped tunnel beneath a French field, with only a sewer-rat commoner called Jack Firebrace for company. Story of my life really. Can’t hear a bloody word the pleb says. Beyond his risibly blue-collar name, there doesn’t seem to be much to him. He didn’t take a gap year before the war. The only way I can preserve my middle class sanity down here is by replaying scenes from mine: France 1910! What a mess that year was.

There was this middle aged French bird in the house – Isabelle. Absolute tigress. She used to lure me into the ‘red room’ and then beg me to give her a good seeing to. Now, my friends, an English gent never tells. But, rest assured, she got a thorough pounding from this Englishman – in the biblical sense. Rode her like a huntsman on Boxing Day. Naturally her husband threw me out the house. CAD.

And now, look at me, up to my balls in mud in some grim corner of France, trying to spank one out next to a grinning cockney ex-minor who keeps mouthing on about the laughs he had (hardly) digging the Channel Tunnel. War: the futility of it all. I think I shall write a slim volume of effeminate poetry, detailing my suffering.

Stephen Wraysford, the Western Front, 1918.

‘Calm down, Peter, of course I didn’t mount your sister Susan while you were off conversing with magical creatures. I’m Jesus; I don’t knob people – it’s just not what I do. Don’t believe that Dan Brown bastard; that filthy slapper Magdalene washed my feet and snuck a look up my toga, nothing more. Besides, all that was before I became a metaphorical talking lion. Everything’s different now.’

Aslan, Narnia, Winter (but not Christmas).

‘Alright, woman, I’ll eat that sodding Granny Smith and put my willy away.’

Adam, Eden, the Dawn of Man.

I’m ready to be done with that muggle bint Hermione. She keeps getting her baps out whenever we go camping. What’s more – I shit you not – she keeps grabbing my broomstick and asking to ride it. So inappropriate. It doesn’t matter that I keep reminding her that the Firebolt’s out of bounds to all but the Gryffindor quidditch team. Me, I’m still sore that my last broomstick snapped – the Nimbus 2000, the best ride in Hogwarts. (Snape did for that one.)

Harry Potter, an anonymous bit of woodland, 2007.

Went to my daughter’s bedroom this morning and found her playing with her daemon. I think I’ll make it the subject of my annual slide-show lecture at the Royal Society: ‘The Limits of Masturbation.’

Lord Asriel, Jordan College, Oxford (parallel universe), 1995.

I was reclining with delicious languor in my Oxford rooms – do note the plural – surrounded by inscrutably expensive reproductions of tempura frescoes by the lesser known Venetian masters of the High Renaissance (there were three separate Bellinis, you should know) and a mahogany bookshelf stacked with modish yet hopelessly trivial monographs of the very latest literary criticism, when I was of a sudden overcome with a desire for a mid-afternoon session of rare champagne and homo-erotic badinage with my indecent friend Sebastian.

So I dropped my lightly thumbed H.G. Wells novel (a lamentably derivative dirge, as I later discovered, and a perfect waste of my time) and walked in a brisk, effeminate manner to Sebastian's rooms – again, be so gracious as to note the plural – carrying beneath my spindly arms, unsullied by sporting exertion, a tin of shortbread to gift his beloved teddy bear, Sir Catamite the Elder, as part of a general effort to prove to Sebastian and his friends that I was not in fact a middle class sponge of a social parasite with few qualities of my own.

Sebastian was doing something wicked elsewhere, so I helped myself to a fecund bowl of quails' eggs he had thoughtfully placed on his dressing table – one could expect such things of an Oxbridge student in those halcyon days – and with quiet, gluttonous impatience awaited the arrival of one deemed, by common consensus among the many repressed sodomites of my recent acquaintance, exquisite: the sauciest, most iniquitous aesthete then present in that shady, cloistered seat of learning (or should I say, sin).

In preparation for Sebastian I withdrew from the inner pocket of my rough tweed jacket – mark how I flaunted the wearisome injunctions of my cousin Jasper to 'dress as one would in a country house' (the very idea!) – and placed on the dressing table a single-stemmed white rose (to symbolise purity and the transience of youth), a glass bottle of lightly perfumed lubricant, a slim hardback volume of Baudelaire's naughtiest verse, and a crude cardboard parcel containing a young hamster I had christened Sir Catamite the Younger.

Those were innocent days. How heavy our passions, how light our pleasures.
(To be continued.)

Charles Ryder, Oxford, 1923.