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.

Came down from Cambridge to work for my patrons, the Tallis family.  Had a top time at Cam, really did.  Looking to apply for Medical school - Mr. Tallis says he'll support me, top bloke.  I have to say, life's just going pretty damn well at the moment.  Ma's well, so's Ceclia.  God, did I tell you about her? What a crumpet.  Unfortunately, we had a bit of a spat down by the fountain today with a rather valuable jug of hers.  So, I decided to write her a letter this afternoon to apologise.  I ran a bath to think things through and faff myself silly (reimagining her in that slip by the fountain - God!) and bashed it out on the typewriter.  Had a giggle to myself though - a hoax letter in which I wrote that I want to kiss her 'sweet, wet c**t'.  Inspired!  Perhaps the steam of the bath cleared me out - it did me the world of good!  I wrote a slightly more acceptable letter and popped it in an envelope.  Luckily, I ran into Briony on the way over for din, said she should pass on the letter.  Looking forward to a lovely evening.  What could go wrong?

Robbie Turner, Upper-Middle Class Suburbia, 1935.

CADS ON TOUR!  Wahey!  I was just looking through the portraits the cads and I sat for on our tour of the Caribbean, what memories (or lack of!  CAD).  I chundered everywhere on that boat trip over that wide Sargasso Sea.  Banter!  I met this right babe too, god she was fun, someone to really bring home to the Estate to show Ma and Pa.  Now, however, she's gone bat shit crazy and keeps trying to set fire to me in my sleep.  I think I'll lock her up in the attic and pork the governess.  CAD.

Edward Rochester, Thornfield Hall, 1847.

We Swiss keep getting it in the neck for being dull, feather-capped automatons who remain stubbornly indifferent to the better things in life, like shagging, pugilism and getting blotto. The only thing Johnny Foreigner concedes to us is okay chocolate, over-priced watches and the odd vale of ‘sublime’ scenery – a meagre consolation, even if you share our ardour for punctuality and strenuous hiking. William Wordsworth stopped off here on his 1790 walking tour of Europe, and summed the place up in his customary glibness: ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be waking up and leaving for Germany. To be young in Switzerland was very Hell.’

This sentiment seems to have stuck among his smug compatriots; mores the pity, for I, a son of genteel Geneva, am the living proof of otherwise: Who else, I ask you, would build themselves a monster – eight feet tall, stacked like a brick shit house and ugly as a Frenchman – out of disparate body parts filched from dissecting rooms and grave yards, and bring the hulking fucker to life by plugging him into the mains socket and slapping him about the face a bit with a wet flannel. And all for my own bloody amusement and because I damn well can. I play by nobody’s rules but my own, bitch. But not only that: no sir. I also reanimated my dead wife Elizabeth (who was also my first cousin; yeah, you heard me right) after my badass monster viciously strangled her to death in her own bed – just so I could pork the woman one last time. That, my friends, is how I roll.

So, is that raucous enough for you English snobs? Not so keen to call me a yodelling pansy now, are you? Huh, huh? Come to Switzerland, bitches; it’s insane – promise.

Victor Frankenstein, the Frozen Wastes of the Arctic, 1818.

I've just been to invited by Mr Bennet to his house for supper.  How exciting!  I can't wait to inherit their estate, find an obedient wife, enjoy a comfortable living in an amenable parish, and be moderately content within my means.

Mr Collins, Sussex, 1813.

Just raped my wife's sister 'cause she called me a Polack.  Off to play poker with the cads.

Stanley Kowalski, New Orleans, 1947.

My sheepdog chased all my sheep off a cliff.  I shot it.

Gabriel Oak (now without a livelihood, or a sheepdog), Wessex, 1874.

I can't handle it.  We've nowhere to stay; every lodging we find ends up with rejection as my dad and his latest squeeze Sue aren't actually married.  I think it's got something to do with my siblings and I.  We're in the way.  I mean, couple that with the fact that my father hasn't really ever moved on from getting rejected by Oxford, and my step-mum Sue is a bit peeved she's had kids with her cousin.  So, I've decided to finally do something about it.  I've just strangled my siblings, and I'm about to coat-hanger myself too.  Have left a note: 'done because we are too menny'.

Little Father Time, Oxford, 1895.

It is a wearisome business to spend a large inheritance from an unknown benefactor. A London lawyer by the queer name of Mr. Jaggers, with a cultivated taste for seventeenth century French erotica and a whaifish little daughter he keeps imprisoned in his Belgravia basement, informs me that I am to become a 'gentleman'. We'll see about that, Mr. Jagger. I know the type - bloodless, effeminate mimsies of an oddly foreign hue, who get up to the most conventional things with the most conventional women in the most vulgar Rococo four-posters. But I thought it best not to irk the sod, and furthermore he keeps buying me expensive luncheons in the very louchest Soho establishments. So I have taken up lessons in boxing, fencing, backgammon, bear-baiting, apple-bobbing and trans-Atlantic slave trading. All such a dreadful bore. (And so drearily conventional.) Unbeknownst to Mr. Jaggers I have been stealing off south o' the river in my spare evenings (Tuesdays, Thursdays and occasionally Sundays) to visit the most sordid brothel in Camberwell, where the women are as filthy as the window panes. A grand, cobwebbed matron of quite impossible age, known to the clientele as Mrs. Havisham, keeps for my fevered pleasure an unpleasant little cockney called Estella with a mouth like a Dundee docker and legs like Westminster lampposts. I think of her now - reclining in a louse-ridden chaise lounge in my rented apartment, smoking a rare opiate from the Hindu Kush - with Great XXXpectations.

Pip, Pimlico, 1835.

Just necked a couple of shots of Victory Gin, whilst my bird puffs nonchalantly on a Victory ciggie. Am about to explain to the dumb bint that 2 + 2 = 5, and whip out my little Big Brother for a spot of doubleplusgood bedsport. Now that's Newspeak, bitch.

Winston Smith, Oceania, 1984.

Paddled down-river for days on the ghastly Congo, with no crumpet for miles (I was promised differently by some worldly sod in a London tavern). However, just caught an eyeful of my boss Kurtz's swarthy new native wench. Phwoar, thighs like a rugger bugger and a rack stocked better than the pantry at the Savoy Grill. I wouldn't mind exploiting that natural resource. Don't mind so much entering dark places after all.

Charles Marlow, Darkest Africa, 1902.