I was sitting eating cheese with my friend Megan when lightening struck and their was a power cut. I woke up. To find there was a thunderstorm outside and there had been a power cut. And that I wasn’t friends with Megan and I’d run out of cheese. Life’s like that. One time, hiding behind a mud bank, while a farmer paced beyond with a shotgun, in a cold, grey Suffolk winter, having been chased by pigs, I can remember thinking “by God. I’ve got cold feet. And they’re wet”. Porcine pursuit is scarier. Being chased by angry future bacon is disturbing. Farmers get bored. And shotgun shot isn’t lethal from a distance. A pig will chew your bollocks off.
Although the porcine pursuit may have been motivated by curiosity rather than anger. What kind of idiot hangs around to find out? I was over the fence faster than George Blake. That night, lying on an insulating mat, on a slab of stone, in a very flat field, in Norfolk, I looked up at the sky and thought “there’s more black stuff than stars. It must be better”. And fell asleep for a bit, only to be woken a short time later by a coach load of UFO hunters from Birmingham, who I amused with drunken tales of being abducted by UFOs, which they bought wholesale, until I brought UB40 and the Second World War into it. Talking colons while lecturing about the bombing of Coventry was over egging the story.
