As I have remarked elsewhere, my Mother has of late been having sexual relations with Winthrop Burberry, the owner of the Firkinside chain of bookmakers - Burberry’s Officially Ordained Betting Shops. Since their liaison began, a whole new world has been opened up in front of my previously unseeing eyes, an intoxicating potion of a world, runneth over with joy and madness, ecstasy and agony, hegemony and hedonism. But – hark! I have overunneth myself, such is my urge to tell you of my terrible acts that are tantamount to a crime against our saviour. It began, last week, as I commenced my daily defecation.

I was seated upon the porcelain throne of our fine Royal Doulton facility, when the bathroom door unexpectedly burst open, and Winthrop Burberry crashed in, stinking of the foulest ale, and clad in nothing but a red and gold dressing gown, covered with pictures of Superted and Spottyman. I immediately recognised it as my Christmas present from Mother last year, a dressing gown that I had been informed had been given to one of the charitable organisations for deprived children. When I had wept a salt river and asked my dearest parent why she was depriving her own child for deprived children she had never met, she had raised her hand and struck me a blow across the side of my delicate cheek, and called me by a name that I hadn’t heard since those terrible days of school, and one I will not sully the page by writing down. The memory caused my sphincter to loosen, and my daily cleansing of my private bowels commenced, despite the odious presence of Mr Burberry, who immediately began to make amusement at my expense.

"Fuckin’ hell, what the fuck’s that smell?", he asked, making exaggerated gagging noises and holding his nose.

I explained that I was merely distilling my colon of faecal sediment.

"Really? It smells like you’re having a shit", he replied, and laughed at what he considered to be the apotheosis of wit. I sighed, and prayed for him to vacate the room (or praise be, this Earth) so I could complete my anal task. I also made a mental note to ask Forbes to fit a new lock to the bathroom door.

"When you’ve wiped, I need you to do something for me. I need you to take a message to Darth at my Cymm shop. It’s bloody urgent, and if you forget or lose it, I’ll kneecap you. I’d go myself, but... well, y’know... duty calls."

From down the landing, I heard my Mother baying for him like a crazed wolfhound, guttural noises with no meaning save the basest of intimation. He winked at me, made a lecherous gesture with his right hand and left forearm, and dashed from the bedroom like a rampant rhinoceros, purloined dressing gown billowing out behind him like the cape of the superhero bear whose sweet, compassionate face adorned it. Once again, I felt a deep empathy with the bear who had been thrown away like a piece of rubbish. How often I longed for my very own Spottyman to come along and take me to a magic cloud, where Mother Nature could give me some special powers. Once, in the dead of night, I had awoken from some half-remembered dream, believing that I had been blessed as Superted had, and leaped from my open window to fly around the yard, crying and laughing, and thanking Mother Nature herself for granting me my deepest secret. Unhappy reality washed over me just as I cleared the window sill, and I crashed to the ground, spraining my ankle and bruising both my testicles. The terrible memory turned me hot and cold, and was so bitterly clear I almost forget to wipe my posterior clean of remnants.

With the sound of the flushing lavatory ringing in my ears, yet utterly failing to mask either the rain falling steadily outside, nor the disgusting sounds of Winthrop Burberry and my Mother’s loveplay, I made my way downstairs and found an envelope upon the mantle shelf in the drawing room, addressed to Darth Hansen, BOOBS, Cymm. This, without doubt, was the urgent missive that Mr. Burberry wished me to deliver. Resigned to my task, stoically reminding myself that all great writers must endure hardship to lend authenticity to their work, I sheathed myself in a cagoule and rubber trouserage, and threw open the door, my heart stout and my soul prepared. I strode out, bellowing a war cry that emanated from deeper within me than I have ever dared search – my menial task would not break me – never.

Within the hour, I was standing outside the Cymm branch of Burberry’s Officially Ordained Betting Shops. I had never yet ventured into one of Mr. Burberry’s establishments, nor had I any wish to. According to my Mother, gambling is a sin punishable only by a public flogging, followed by immediate execution. Many times during my troubled youth, she would tear the racing pages from the Bendaton Bugle, calling them pornographic. If ever she happened upon me watching Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon, she would banish Desmond Lynam’s moustached visage from the screen, berating me for my blasphemy and fetching me upsides the head with the nearest object that came to hand. She had described betting shops as the apotheosis of hedonistic evil, a place where all morals were flouted, and all laws were broken. Orgies of depraved behaviour were the norm, she said, and those who entered such places deserved eternal damnation and hellfire. Oddly, since her liaison with Mr. Burberry, her tirades against speculation for financial gain had cessated, but the memory of them still lingered on. Summoning up an ocean of resolve, I opened the door and walked into Babylon.

Inside the shop were but two people – a bored looking youth of the female persuasion behind the counter at the far end, and a vaguely foreign looking gentleman, portly and bespectacled, who was gesticulating at a large television screen set high in one wall. Alongside it were several other, smaller televisions, all showing the same thing – a horse race, which was, it seemed, reaching its conclusion. Along another wall were sheets from newspapers, all containing miniscule lines of writing and small coloured pictures. From somewhere, a disembodied voice was discussing the race that had just reached its conclusion. The foreign looking gentleman staggered towards me.

"Donkeys – Queen’s horse – bastards", he spluttered, clearly in a state of high dudgeon.

I briefly pondered whether to ignore him, or smile tolerantly at him as one frequently does with foreigners and the mentally infirm. But before I could make a decision, he came closer, clutching a small piece of paper.

"Look at this, here" he said, pointing at what was written there. Amid some meaningless numeration, I could read "Blair’s Fanny" and "The Vicar Is Ovulating". Could this be some secret code, I wondered.

"Blair’s Fanny – Uttoxeter, ten past two. Big favourite. Don’t bother, it’s the shit", he whispered in a confidential tone, crossing out the two words. "But The Vicar, he’s a bitch, three years old, carrying extra weight, Queen’s horse, robbed me many times. But today, over the jumps at Plumpton, two o’clock. Fifty to one, put ten pounds on him to win, and you will be happy."

And with this valediction, he thrust the paper into my hand, stumbled over a chair, and left the building, muttering incoherently.

What was the meaning of the strange words he had spake unto me? I studied the piece of paper I was holding, turning it over and looking at it backwards to try and divine some meaning from it. Then – halloa! – the answer came to me like swallows on the wind. The man had been trying to give me advice about betting some money on a racehorse! Suddenly, I wasn’t in a bookmakers on the Crampdale Road, I was stood on the road to Damascus, and the shackles had fallen from my eyes like rain from the desert skies. I could earn myself some money by winning on the horses – no more kow-towing to the soulless scum at the Job Centre, pimping myself like some woe begotten prostitute to the menial nonsense they thrust at me. No more living with Mother and her coarse and foul-mouthed excuse for a lover. I, Ernest R Soul, writer, could be my own man at last!

Trembling with anticipation, I dashed to the counter, and fumbled in my pockets for my purse, which, I knew, contained twenty pounds that I had intended to spend upon new stationary tools. With a bold stroke, I cast asunder my need for a new pencil case, and thrust the money and the slip of paper from the foreign gentleman into the hands of the woman behind the counter, who looked utterly devoid of interest in anything but the gum that she was suggestively chewing.

"Do you want to take the price?", she asked between mouthfuls of mastication.

I waved aside such trivial questions, and just said I wanted to win money. She gazed at the heavens and muttered an oath. I glanced at the digital clock upon the wall, and saw that it was two o’clock – the race at Plumpton was about to begin! Feverishly, I studied the field for The Vicar Is Ovulating, and finally spotted the stallion, garbed in the colours that, a chart on the wall explained to me, indicated it came from the stable of the Queen. With a puff of smoke and a startling report, a gun was fired, and the race was off!

The next few minutes were, without doubt, the most nerve-jangling of my short existence upon meagre globe, from the off, my horse was leading the way. He ran like an Olympian athlete, perhaps the champion of the great Zeus himself. He leaped over the large hedges that somebody had inconsiderably grown upon the course like a nubile teenage acrobat. For two miles, he fought on, and on, and on, forging a distance between himself and his nearest rival that was unassailable. In my mind, I could feel hundreds of glorious gold sovereigns raining down on my lucky head, sliding down the tresses of my hair, and into my welcoming palms. But then, with the winning post in his beady little eyes, The Vicar Is Ovulating betrayed me like Judas betrayed our Saviour. Attempting to leap the final hedge, the wretched animal caught his foot, flailed in the air for an eternity, then crashed to the ground, much as a young man who thought he was Superted had once made hard, unrelenting contact with the ground. As the vile creature writhed helplessly, and his diminutive halfwit rider dashed away in mortification, one of its pursuers leapt over it, and was, in racing parlance, first past the post. It’s name, I noticed, in a bitter irony that turned my heart to stone, was Texas Pete. It was a final, possibly mortal blow, and my spirit could take not a single second more. I stumbled for the door, my eyes blurring with a shimmering rainbow of tears.

I had lost twenty pounds of my hard earned pecuniary fund in a moment of shameful, ridiculous madness. As I slunk home like a miserable reptile, my Mother’s wise words about gambling rung in my ears like the tolling of the division bell. After an eternity trudging through the rain and misery, I finally arrived back at my homestead, aching in heart, body, and soul. All I wanted was to curl up beneath my bedspread, and pray to the Lord for some forgiveness, in a hour of quiet contemplation.

But alas and alack, ‘twas not to be. As I opened the front door, I was confronted by the towering figure of Winthrop Burberry.

"Did you deliver that message to Darth, you little tossbag?", he greeted me.

In the agonies of my loss, I had forgotten to pass on the letter that was still in my Cagoule pocket. I draw a veil over the terrible scene that followed, for it is too terrible for me to ever set into tablets of stone. Instead, may I conclude this humble offering by giving my readers one solitary word of advice – Never gamble.

Yours sincerely,

Ernest R Soul, writer