This is one of my favourite books.

Sadly, I never read it when I was a child. Supposing I had, I might have grown up a better person somehow, guided through life’s moral quandaries by my very own Mr Endicott.

Supposing… is out of print now, which seems to me a very sorry state of affairs. There’s another imprint featured here so it was definitely reprinted at least once. I guess it just fell out of fashion at some stage. It’s a damn shame because it’s a wonderful, transporting book.

The single bad review on Amazon speaks volumes:

‘This was a terrible book that children should not read. It opens up crazy thoughts in a person’s mind that they shoudn’t think about. You don’t write a children’s book that thinks about taking old hair from a barber shop and mailing it to people you hate. There are more crazy thoughts like this one in the book. DON’T LET KIDS READ IT.’

The response is even better:

‘Reading this review alone made me want to find the book and give it to my children. After searching the Internet for a while, I obtained a copy, and my children (who are now teenagers) loved it then and love it now. It’s a book for creative and mischievous people — and parents who prefer their children to be clever and creative than hard-working and productive.’

I swear, if I had just a little more gumption and a lot more time, I would start a campaign to have it republished. Damn it, maybe I will.

Anyhow, I hope you’re well. It’s all going so quickly, isn’t it?

hours cycled :: 0

tennis matches played :: 0

pouches of tobacco smoked :: 3

weeks of work remaining :: 27

new books :: 4

old books :: 1 (the fantastic Supposing)

physical concerns :: 2

mental concerns :: 6

Because I couldn’t afford to go to Italy for my holiday, as I’d vaguely planned, I went to Sunderland instead. Not a natural second choice for many I know, but it’s home to me, and I got to spend a few days with my mum who’s now well enough after her recent bowel hiccup to drink booze again, so I introduced her to White Russians and we watched a film she chose at random about a writer who’s struggling to kill off her central character and then meets him face to face. It has Will Ferrell in it. We enjoyed it very much and you know those beautiful and illuminating moments you sometimes have on the back of films and booze? We had a couple of those. Then I had a cigarette out of the window.

My holiday ended, however, with a weekend in Sussex which left me scabby and aching and scratched-up like a man who is never happier than when he’s in a large sack full of angry voles.

A friend of mine – we’ll call him Gee – his family have a converted garage down there in a leafy little village. Every time I visit, probably only once or twice a year, I’m always fresh-filled with the desire to flee the swell and moan and ceaseless industry of London and set up shop amongst the crickets and the hornets and the black spangled skies of the English countryside. Or maybe Sri Lanka.

When we are there, Gee and I, we entertain ourselves with guitars and giant sketchpads and paints and we purchase a chicken to rip apart like men who live in the woods and we cook it on a fire of freshly chopped logs. And if the field is overgrown, we strip to the waist and rage through the nettles like Vikings with scythes and a Flymo. And then Gee goes all Ray Mears and imparts some arcane knowledge about wild mushrooms or Mad Jack Fuller, of which he has much. Then he proclaims himself a social libertarian and says, ‘I can’t believe I neglected to deadhead my buddleia!’

But never mind that – look at the nature!

Boom! A bee!

For all his faults, Gee does know a lot about the country, and country ways. I’m not bad. I’m quite resourceful in a tight spot and I reckon I could survive out in the wilderness with nothing to eat but shrubs and berries for a good couple of hours but Gee is a regular Christopher McCandless. With blade-sharpening and everything…

And also, he taught me the difference between a wasp…

…and a hoverfly…

Notice the markings across the thorax. The hoverfly is way cooler. And much more dangerous. It can sting a man by thought alone.

This, however, is a mole.

It’s not pretty, I know, but it is thoroughly awesome. Makes me want to set off a firework like in Drowning By Numbers.

But this wasn’t a weekend for celebrating death. It was a weekend for celebrating life. And all anyone ever really needs when celebrating life is a large rabbit dressed as a prostitute. Thankfully, the country provides…

Here she is again in situ.

What’s particularly striking about this display of undeniable sauciness is that it’s meant to draw attention to an upcoming summer fair held by the local Church of England Primary School. I really don’t want to seem old-fashioned, but really… a prostitute? Or do I besmirch a piece of pure and light-hearted communal expression with my dirty arse of a mind? After all, sometimes a rabbit dressed in the undergarments of an ageing harlot is just a rabbit dressed in the undergarments of an ageing harlot.

If only there were a second piece of summer fair signage to give us some signal as to what might really be going on in the minds of this particular Church of England Primary School.

And lo…

This guy is just round the corner from the rabbit sex worker. As you can see, he is a representation of the crucified Christ, manifest in a mouthless cricket player.

An old couple passed as I was taking photos and they regarded me with simmering bewilderment. I looked at them with big eyes, nodded at the great work and said, with accidental over-zeal: ‘Amazing.’ They did not reply. They just kept walking.

It’s definitely Christ though.

Why He’s playing cricket, I cannot say.

But He is.

And that was pretty much that, apart from the drawing and the kicking a ball back and forth across a field. The drawing went well, but the kicking a ball back and forth across a field was brought to a untimely demise by an incident involving a bramble bush.

In a nutshell, I was completely wrecked and I totally ran into it…

Don’t even think of bothering to tell me that’s not cool. It’s totally fucking Gibson. I look like I’ve been raped by a bear. And the especially excellent thing is that every time I remember crashing into that buggering bramble – properly think of what went through my head as I realised it was about to happen – I laugh out loud.

LOL.

Next holiday, August, Big Chill.

Now back to work. I hope you’re well.

Anon!

For all their inestimable adorability, cats get a lot of bad press. This is because at heart – just like the worst of human beings – cats are self-centred and manipulative, and everything they do, they do for themselves. Even the sweetest-natured, most people-friendly cat really couldn’t give a damn about you. You know that. They’ll take your love and your meat, and they’ll enjoy it and be grateful, but even as they smile and purr and rub and play, even as they watch you leave for work with seeming sadness in their eyes, and even as they greet your return with seeming selfless joy, somewhere behind their eyes there is braying, scornful laughter. You are beneath their contempt.

Cats, in short, are two-faced little bastards.

In June 2005, in Oregon, Gemini was born.

She is their queen.

Yet still, and rightly so, we can’t help but love them. This is because we are inferior to them.

There are, however, two types of cat-lover. There are those who coo and aww over odious, sickening images such as this:

…and those who appreciate the darker side of the cat. ‘Cats in Peril’ will appeal to neither.  Prepare yourself… [Click to embiggen.]

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Cats in Peril

DROWNED

OK, this isn’t really a cat in peril at all. It’s a cat in a rucksack. No bricks, no canal trips, just a cutesy winsome image to ease us into the pain to come.

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VIOLATED

This is actually kind of sweet too. Albeit in a slightly vicious way. This was in Istanbul. A woman called Linda lived upstairs. She used to breed these pedigree white cats and because she could sell them for a large amount of money, she would actively encourage their fornication. When this photograph was taken, Linda was just out of shot, rubbing her hands and drooling.

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POISONED

A friend took this photo whilst travelling somewhere in Africa. Or India. One of the two. As you can see, it is a vomiting lion. The body is bent, the face clenched in retch and all pride has gone totally out the window. It’s weird but you don’t really think of lions vomiting. Or at least I don’t. Nor dolphins, giraffes, elephants or flies. However, given the right combination of alcohol, they all do.

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LYNCHED

This is in the Gambia. The kitten in peril is called Toubab, which means ‘foreigner’ in Wolof and it’s what the natives shout at you if you happen to wander around their village being white. They mean nothing by it. It’s just their way. Like the hissing. However, to return to Toubab, it needs to be pointed out, for the sake of historical accuracy, that he is not actually in real peril here. This is not Zimbabwe. Toubab is actually having a great time. In fact, there is nothing he likes better than hanging around on the end of a rope struggling to breathe. He is the Michael Hutchence of Farafenni.

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ABDUCTED

This was in a little wood cabin resort in Tarrafal in Cape Verde. It was a gorgeous place. A perfect little paradise, and the gangs of green monkeys that marauded through the palms like tooled-up long-tailed Fonzies were a large part of its charm. At least they were until they bared their teeth and crossed the line between cuteness and psychosis.

Terrible little thieves are green monkeys, and shameless taunters of feckless tourists. Try getting a sandal back off them and you will know humiliation. This was different though. This was a tiny kitten, taken hostage by what we rather presumptuously assumed was a grieving mother. No one knew what to do. Except me.

I took this photo.

Others approached the monkey, holding out their hands and making strange human sounds. But the monkey would just bound away or stand her ground and hiss and squeeze. And when monkey squeezed, kitty squealed helplessly. Eventually, the kitnapper retreated to a high rooftop and just sat there, stroking her prize. We went for a swim.

By the time we got back, it was just bones.

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EVISCERATED

This was somewhere in the south of Turkey. We were on our way back to wherever it was we were staying when we passed this poor cat with its insides all knocked outside. Presumably by a car. We walked a little way up the hill, pitying poor Tom, or more probably poor Hasan, our gaits a little heavier, our stomachs a little less resolute. Then I ducked back down the hill and took photos.

This first one is kind of poignant I think. Look at Fatima in the top left. Are those tears in her eyes? Yes. She’d probably known Hasan for years. Decades in cat time. And in a moment, he was gone. Disembowelled by night terrors. Ten minutes ago he was crossing the road to kill a lizard. Now he looks like he’s just spent ten minutes with Richard Gere on PCP.

Fatima’s probably musing over about how much Hasan still had to offer the world. She’s probably thinking, ‘How Cruel and Tenuous this Life; how Arbitrary and Infinite Death’. Little Adnan meanwhile, is thinking about supper.

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It’s What He Would’ve Wanted

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Nature’s way.

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If you have a picture of a cat in peril and a story to go with it, please send it to me at once.

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Next week: Children in Tears.

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A version of this post originally appeared years and years and years ago on Pondlife, which is now dead.

I remember sitting on the loo at about 4am some time in September of 2007 with my laptop open on my knees. I was checking to see if anyone had already written anything about their experiences as an ugly man trying to find love, because I’d just had a dream in which someone suggested I do it. It hadn’t been done. So for the next three months, every morning on the hour-long bus-ride to work and every evening on the hour-long bus-ride home, I wrote about Stan – his early sexual experiences and stuff about his childhood. I figured I’d start it in January and keep it going – if I could – for a year. From the moment it came into my head, it seemed like exactly the right thing to do.

Having said that, from the moment it came into my head, I knew it was weird. And I knew it smacked of something unethical. It was basically saying the thing that was not so, and I was and always have been very much against that.

But I liked the idea, and I needed something to write. And the internet was dead to me because of a gargantuan business fuck-up. And I relished the idea. So I did it. And despite some very harsh words over the last week and a couple of lost acquaintances, I don’t regret it at all.

Thankfully, all but a very, very small number of the people whose reaction I really cared about – which is to say a few long-time commenters and a few people with whom I’d communicated in email but never revealed myself to – have accepted the truth without umbrage or rancour. And I’m genuinely sad for those that haven’t, but I don’t think there’s anything I can do about that. I’m hoping that in time they won’t feel too badly about it.

I was going through all the comments and replying individually but in the end it got on top of me. So hearty thanks to the well-wishers and apologies and condolences to the miffed and bereaved.

Before I move on properly, however, there have been two criticisms that I should probably address in detail.

1) Financial Malfeasance

The charge of fraud has been addressed most vehemently – and yeah, go on, most hatefully – here (scroll) and here. This excerpt is from the second link, a blog called IV written by a man who’s had it in for me for some time:

‘…if some cunt from off of the Internet invents a fictional character, writes sob stories about how hard up that character is and THEN installs a fucking PayPal button so people can unwittingly donate money to that fictional character without them knowing it WAS a fictional character, then he’s a con artist too. By inviting his entire (and in some cases, bewilderingly loyal) readership to donate real money to his pedestrian little creation, this arrogant, pompous, trumped-up little carpetbagger has shown himself up for what he really is – an unscrupulous swindler.’

Ouch.

The story of the PayPal button is not quite that straightforward, however. It was installed after I wrote the Bingo post. Specifically, as I explained here, it was installed after the excellent @rishil sent me the following message.

‘Where is your donate button? I want to put money in there for this awesomeness of a post.’

So I put up a donate button, from which I’ve probably made about £130.

Now – a quick digression. Over the last week, a few people have said things like this to me:

I showed this to a friend last night and he was actually quite indignant. ‘How can they say it’s all fake?’ he said.

Which was when I realised that I should probably make the point more stridently that it wasn’t all fake. In fact, most of the stuff on the Bête de Jour blog is absolutely true. It’s stuff that happened to me. I just happened to be wearing a disguise when I wrote it down. Most if not all of the actual made-up stories took place in the first year. The rest was mostly spot on.

So Stan moaned about having a pain in his stomach for over a year because I had a pain in my stomach for over a year. He moaned about having a proctologist’s finger in his bottom because I had a proctologist’s finger in my bottom. He lived with his gran for four months because I lived with my mum for four months. And he moaned about being skint because I really was skint.

I mention this because of this chap Napoleon’s claims. This from the blog post quoted above:

‘So the vaguely-famous blogger Stan ‘Bete Du [sic] Jour’ Cattermole has come out and revealed he’s not a hard-up, ugly-as-old-balls, thirty one year old loser, but is in fact a non hard-up, ugly-as-old-balls, forty year old office drone and former teacher.’

(And loser, I’m sure he meant to add.) I don’t mind the abuse – part of me actually likes it – but the misrepresentation irks. (I know, I know, I do see the irony.) But the fact is, I’m 42, I’m only a temporary office drone (please, God) and I am definitely, indubitably fucking hard-up. (Oh, and I never claimed to be either ‘homeless’ or ‘starving’ either, you silly man.)

So, back to the donate button.

It never even occurred to me that there might be a problem with accusations of fraud, as I always thought the money that people donated they donated because they enjoyed the writing, and not because they felt sorry for me because of things I’d written quite a long time previously.

But – of course – I could be wrong.

So, if any of you who did donate feel that you did so under false pretences, please drop me an email and I’ll happily refund your donation.

I say ‘happily’. It won’t really make me happy. Because I’m skint.

In the meantime, if any of you would like to give me some money because you enjoy my writing, please feel free to click on the donate button in the sidebar. It would be very much appreciated.

Alternatively, if any of you would like to donate to the Stan Cattermole Relief-fund for Obsolete Figments (SCROF), there’s a button for that too. (Actually there’s not. But it’s an amusing thought. Well, it amuses me.)

Alternatively, if you’re not satisfied with my explanation, please feel free to get the police involved. I can’t help feel that any publicity from the subsequent trial would do wonders for sales of the book. Also, if I go to jail, I won’t have to be an office drone anymore! And I can write a book there. Like Hitler. (Damn. Hoist with my own Godwin.)

2) Sexual Malfeasance (tinged with Intellectual Rape)

Here the accusation – ‘talking to girlies in character… that’s just wrong on a number of levels’ – seems to be that I am an internet sexual predator who has groomed ‘girlies’ or perhaps in some cases, even grown women, into having sex with me. By pretending to be ugly.

Well, it’s true that I have been to bed with a few women on the back of the blog. But I swear, in every case, they had all seen my real face before we took our clothes off.

You know how silly this is?

‘A man was arrested today for lying about his appearance on the internet.’

It’s that silly.

But what’s the worst-case scenario here? Surely it’s that I pretended to be ugly so that I could con women into feeling sorry for me and liking me enough to forgive my lies and sleep with me anyway. That would be pretty sordid, I agree. Thankfully, that’s not what was going on. For a start I was in a serious relationship from when the blog started until March of last year. And yes, she knew all about it, and no, I never cheated on her (or lied to her at all actually). And no, Wellington, the blog had nothing to do with why we split up.

Incidentally, every woman I’ve met through the blog turned up on Friday and was very nice to me.

Right. I’m think I’m pretty much done now.

There will always be those amongst you who just can’t accept that there wasn’t something nasty going on and I will always be sorry about that, but like I said above, I’m not going to pretend I regret it because the good things that have come of Bête de Jour far outweigh the bad things. In my opinion. To wit, I’ve made some really fantastic friends over the last two and a half years, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. Also, I happen to know that I helped some people through some particularly tough times, and that would never have happened if I hadn’t pretended to be someone else for a while. And also, perhaps more than anything else – I had fun. And some of you did too.

I’ll end with one of my favourite comments, which, as I’ve posted my least favourite comment above, I figure I’m allowed to. It’s this, from elsie_em:

‘Pablo may not have died but my cat did, and when I read those posts I cried and cried, and then I felt much better. Actually, that’s sort of how the whole thing made me feel.’

Me too.

But now I’m moving on. Feel free to come with me.

Anon!

Actually there won’t be cake. I’m sorry. I just can’t stop myself.

This is the pub.

As you can see, I’ve deliberately chosen one of the ugliest pubs in London. Or have I? Well, yes, I have. But it does have a huge area out front – basically a concrete pit – where one can carouse and court cancer and eat grilled meat. It’s also the perfect location for pinning someone up against the Crossrail hoarding and running them through with a blade.

And while there may not be cake, there will be sweet sweet booze, and lots of virtual strangers meeting for the first time, which means, almost certainly, there will be tears. So do come along.

I’m aiming to get there at around 7.30.

So. The last few days have been a veritable smorgasbord of emotions. I intend to spend the weekend rummaging through the reactions to the last post and on Monday I’ll attempt to answer various charges, including that of intellectual rape and grand larceny. After which, almost immediately I suspect, it will be on to pastures new. Which for a short while will whiff ever so suspiciously of pastures old. But that’s often the way with pastures.

I hope to see you this evening. Or maybe you’ve got more interesting plans for the weekend. Have you? Aw, go on, tell me what they are. You’d tell Stan. And Stan would only tell me anyway. He told me everything, you know. We were very close.

Oh, suit yourself.

Have fun anyway. See you on Monday, if not tonight.

Anon!

x

‘To call a story a true story is an insult to both art and truth.’ – Vladimir Nabokov

bulk :: 12st 5
age :: 42 (as of yesterday)
elbows :: 2
elbows in head :: 0
regrets :: a few
pretentious quotes :: 1
marital status :: single
children :: 0
% of physical truth in Bête de Jour :: approx. 75%
% of emotional truth in Bête de Jour :: 100%
occupation before Bête de Jour :: TEFL teacher
occupation after Bête de Jour :: up in the air
 

As the many ham-fisted, wrong-footed or otherwise abortive attempts I’ve made over the last couple of years testify, this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write. (So hard in fact, that in the end, rather than just blurt it out, I disguised the reveal in last week’s hitching trip.) Just in case there’s still any doubt, however, or just in case you’re more confused now than you were a week or so ago, let me just clarify:

I’m not the ugly brute I’ve been claiming to be for the past couple of years. There. I’ve said it.

I know a few of you had your doubts, some of them verging on the vociferous. Well, congratulations. Your cynicism was not unfounded – at least not entirely.

Right. So. Where to start?

First, I think, with an apology. I know that some of you who’ve come to know me as Stan Cattermole will be upset to think that I don’t exactly exist. It’s happened before on the few occasions I’ve come clean to readers of the blog. A couple of times the reaction has really surprised and shocked me. I’ve encountered feelings of anger, betrayal, humiliation and even bereavement. And before I begin to explain how all of this came about, I would just like to apologise to anyone who feels hurt, angry or cheated at this point. Especially those of you who have felt close enough to me to share some of your own lives and emotions in private correspondence. I’m sorry if you feel double-crossed because of this revelation, but really, nothing has changed. I’m still exactly the same person underneath. Exactly the same. And I hope that by the time you finish reading this, you will accept that.

Leading on from that point, I’d like to properly introduce myself to you, finally. My real name is Karl and although I may not be the freakish deformed character I made myself out to be, I have had my moments…

…and perhaps more pertinently, I certainly felt ugly for most of the first twenty or so years of my life.

I wasn’t ugly though. I was just an average-looking kid with dodgy eyes, a concave chest and an enormous inferiority complex.

I grew up feeling terribly afraid of people, and more generally of life as a whole. I went through a lengthy phase of vomiting every morning before I went to school, simply because I was so daunted by the daily confrontations that school-life tossed into my face. For a long time after that, I was afraid of going into shops – essentially, I was afraid of people. Without wishing to allocate blame, I blame my parents. A kind of non-blaming blame, because it wasn’t their fault that they were trapped in a seemingly loveless marriage, dominated for the most part by my father’s alcoholism and concomitant vileness. But I think it was because of all that, and because of never feeling particularly wanted or loved by my parents, that I turned in on myself and became terrified and self-hating.

And the reason I mention all of this is to try and show that some of what fuelled Stan’s story was very closely associated with my own childhood, and my adulthood too.

To tell the story more specifically of how Bête de Jour came about, we have to go back to September 2007, when the London-based social networking site I’d been helping to run was falling apart, and I found myself moderately depressed and totally lost, clueless as to what I was going to do with the rest of my life. It was around then, with my future splintering around my ears, that I had a dream.

I dreamt that I was talking to a funny-looking friend of mine, and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you write an ugly man’s guide to finding love?’ In response, my friend looked vaguely offended and said he would be too embarrassed. Then he said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ And I thought about it – still in the dream – and I thought, ‘That’s actually not a bad idea.’ Then I woke up, still thinking about it, and still fairly convinced it made sense for me. I needed something to write, and also, I needed somewhere to hide. I’d had an unpleasant experience with the internet which I’m sure I’ll talk about before very long, and I felt very strongly that I needed to distance myself from it. So what followed was a combination of autobiography and fictionalised autobiography – sometimes highly fictionalised autobiography, and a bit of straight fantasy for good measure. Plus lots of straight, daily-bread blogging.

The main difference between Stan and me at the time was that Stan was depressed because he was 30, morbidly obese and loveless, whereas I was depressed because I was 40, a little bit fat, and somewhat broken, very much reeling from a four-year odyssey through the rancid lower intestines of internet businessland. We both needed to write something. By that point, I had been writing fairly aimlessly and certainly without any palpable success for over 20 years, and teaching English as a foreign language to scrape a living. I was actually pretty close – certainly closer than I’d ever been – to finally giving up the dream of writing for good, and getting a proper job.

The biggest difference between Stan and me, however, was that I was in a relationship at the time. And at the time, it was going very well. Mostly. My girlfriend went on to become the basis for some of what happened with Sally and Morag, and when we actually began to break up at the end of 2008, our break-up morphed into Stan’s break-up with Morag, dead fox and all. Except we’d been together for two years by then, and Stan and Morag had only managed a couple of months.

Oh, and another significant difference was that Stan, as you can see from this photo of me, aged 23, is significantly better-endowed…

So, in December 2007, I became Stan Cattermole and started blogging about my life, dressed up as Stan’s life, and for a long while I assumed that like most of my other projects, it would just dry up and fizzle out, uninspired  and unregarded. But then people started to read, and more importantly, people started to write to me. At first, this made me feel terribly guilty because I knew that our correspondence was based on something that wasn’t entirely true. But then I felt very strongly that everything I wrote as Stan was at the very least emotionally true, entirely so. It was me. So I put my guilt to one side and I did what came naturally. I wrote back, and I made friends.

Also, for a long, long time after starting the blog – at least for the first year – I kept expecting to be found out. Every time I clicked on a new comment, I imagined someone declaring that Stan was obviously fake and that I was a despicable charlatan. But it didn’t happen. It just kept going…. At the time, I used to dread being outed, but when I found myself alone in London at the beginning of 2009, I began to will it to happen. I wanted to be me again and able to write about my real life, which was suddenly much more desolate than Stan’s. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t because I’d written myself into a corner and was trapped utterly by this large, elbow-headed man. By then of course, I was writing the book, and had signed a contract with Harper Collins which said I wasn’t allowed ‘to alter the direction of the blog before paperback publication’. So I was in it for the long haul. As they say.

I want it to end now too by the way. Now is approaching the end of August ’09, which means I’ve got at least another nine months of pretending, and maybe occasionally appearing in public with a bag on my head. Last week I was on GMTV, my true identity hidden by a paper bag. Although I can’t deny it was fun, it was also painfully ridiculous, and I still find it difficult to believe that the whole thing has gone on for so long.

I’m not complaining of course. Well, not much.

And if you are actually reading these words, then I guess it’s over. Cattermole is out of the bag. And although I am doubtless feeling highly relieved, I don’t want to give the impression that I in any way regret Stan and everything he’s done for me, because of course I don’t. He’s been wonderful therapy and I really think he’s helped me evolve to some extent. The only regrets I do have concern the extent of any hurt caused by the upheaval of the truth, something of which as yet I’m completely unaware.

I hold out hope, however, that the upset will be minimal, because – as I see it at least – the truth isn’t that staggering a departure from the lie; to reiterate, the truth is merely that I’m not the brutal, brutal physical mess I was pretending to be. On the other hand, lots of the old stories, ninety per cent of the day-to-day stuff and the vast majority of the relationship stuff was pretty much verbatim.

So, really, ultimately, this is not so tragic. Is it? No, of course it isn’t. In fact, it’s positively Good News. Especially if you ever cared for Stan. Just think: he was never tied to a chair as a child – that was my father; he never had plates thrown at him by his mother – that was my brother; and he never coerced a kitten into licking his nipples and penis – it was a puppy, and he did the licking. Actually, that already sounds worse. It should give you some idea though, of the difference between what I wrote as Stan and what actually happened, so…

I was thirteen when I licked a dog’s balls. I don’t know why I did it. It was just a weird teenage experimentation thing, and I was lonely. It was on the living room floor of my sister’s house in Chatham. I was alone in the house, just me and my only friend at the time, a red setter called Boot. Here he is. Bless him.

So Boot was lying on his back with his legs open – gagging for it, he was – and I leant over his genitals, slowly, and I licked his balls. Just once I think, and believe me, it held no pleasure for me. I don’t know if you’ve ever examined a dog’s scrotum – maybe you’ve even licked one yourself – but it’s not an attractive thing. At least Boot’s wasn’t. It was all sparsely haired and liver-spotted, much like the balls of a tired old man. I imagine.

This is the two of us together. Don’t we make a lovely couple?

I loved that dog.

So there you go. We’re equally troubled, Stan and I. And equally flawed and equally furnished.

Of course, I realise that now the truth is out there, you might tend not to believe anything I say. I’ve probably given up a certain amount of my privileges when it comes to being believed. I am the Elephant Man who cried wolf and I guess I’m going to have to live with the consequences of that. And it’s a shame because I’m actually one of the most scrupulously honest people you’ll ever meet. No, honest I am. It’s just that, for the purposes of this blog, I gave the truth a little tweak, that’s all. Just a little tweak.

I realise also that for many of you, none of my attempts at justification will cut any ice and my apologies will ring hollow and meaningless. Well, I’m sorry. All I can say is, none of this was ever meant to be deceitful. Despite the lies.

So. What are your thoughts? Are we still friends? I’m still having a party on Friday if you fancy it. Partly to celebrate my birthday. Partly to celebrate the publication of the paperback. But mostly to celebrate the fact that, for the first time in my life, I am actually ready to accept who I am. (Before I was Stan Cattermole by the way, I was Graham Pond for six years. Before that, a whole bunch of other people. I’ve had a bit of an identity crisis, pretty much since I was a child. But I’m done with it now. And I feel really good about that.)

Anyway, there it is. Make of it what you will and if it’s at all possible, I hope to see you on Friday. At the Royal George on Charing Cross Road. Please don’t stab me.

Thanks.