In my final year at university, I was virtually friendless. One guy on my course, Rich (short for Richard), must have taken pity on me because he started inviting me to the pub to hang out with his friends, Colin and Rob, who were also in our course. Rich’s girlfriend, Sarah, often joined us too.

Rob, however, didn’t seem to like me much; in fact, he almost seemed to resent my presence. One night, when I got up from my chair and announced I was heading home, Rob let out a cheer, as if his favorite football team had just scored a goal.

Sarah was one of the most attractive women I've ever seen. She had blonde hair, soft eyes, and a girl-next-door vibe. She looked a bit like Sheridan Smith, but without the air of council estate menace that said if you got on her wrong side, she'd smash you in the face with a Tesco's pork shoulder. No, Sarah was an angel straight from heaven. How Rich and her were a couple, I'll never know, as Rich was the complete opposite of her: whereas her hair was golden, his was greasy; her face was glowing, his was chubby; her eyes were gentle and soft, his were bleary and bloodshot. Plus he had this enormous chin like Jay Leno's, he wore XXL shirts and I heard this one time, he broke a children's swing just by sitting on it. It was like Scarlett Johansson dating the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine. Like Princess Fiona and Shrek. Beauty and the Beast. These things may happen in movies but they just don't happen in real life. I once told Rich I thought his girlfriend was hot, and he grinned as if understood perfectly what I meant. Then he said, "You should ask her for a shag. She'd probably say yes." I never did ask his girlfriend for a shag, but who knows? Maybe she would have said yes. If she fucked a whale like Rich it wasn't too far a stretch to imagine she'd fuck a weirdo like me.

One night we went to the pub where we each drank roughly six pints of beer. Then we drove to a strip club in Rich's car. The memory of that car trip is strangely clear to me. I was in the back seats with Rob and Colin. Rich was driving. Sarah was next to Rich, in the passenger seat. Rich, Rob, and Colin (the "lads") were chatting away to each other about the upcoming strip club. Meanwhile, I was silent, as I almost always was back then. I knew I should talk but I felt anxious, as I did in most social situations, and I could never think of a single thing to say. But I've Got a Feeling by The Black Eyed Peas was playing on the car's stereo and I had the alcohol from six pints of beer coursing through my veins. It was the perfect song for that night because indeed I did feel that it was going be a "good good night".

We pulled up in a car park in Birmingham city center. The strip club was called Legs 11. It didn't look like a strip club. The building was part of Birmingham's Chinatown and as such, it was in the style of a Chinese pagoda, with multi-tiered sloping roofs the colour of jade, and elaborate red patterns on the outside walls. It looked like a place Buddhist monks would come to pray.

I'd passed this strip club many times in my life, as I'd grown up in Birmingham and often passed it on my trips to the city centre. But I've never dared to go inside.

First, we had to pay a ten-pound entrance fee. This was not ten pounds between us. This was ten pounds each. But I thought it must be worth it, and besides, I'd never been to a strip club before so at least it'd be a new experience.

Then we were in the strip club proper. My eyes fell first on a woman walking down a flight of stairs, a woman who was unusual in that she didn't have any clothes on, apart from a pair of knickers.

Rich saw me looking and nudged me. "I love strip clubs because whenever I walk in, there's like a pair of tits in your face. And it's like, whoa! A pair of tits!"

Unfortunately, I didn't share Rich's enthusiasm. I'd had one beer too many at the pub earlier and now was feeling rather strange. On the one hand, I felt surprisingly sober, but on the other hand, I felt completely devoid of any emotion, as if a surgeon had injected local anesthetic into the part of my brain that produced joy, fear, anger, sympathy, and all the rest of the emotions, and had left me feeling dead and numb inside. I felt nothing. It's a strange reaction to drinking six pints of beer, as you'd think I'd be drunk-dancing instead, pinching the girls' arses, causing a scene and generally having the time of my life, as drunk people do, but no.

The next thing I knew, I was being handcuffed on one of my wrists. I looked up to see a woman dressed in a bikini and a police hat. She didn't seem to be a real police officer, but if she was, then she should have been reprimanded for failing to wear her uniform because she was basically naked except for a few pieces of fabric covering her rude bits.

The woman gently tugged on the handcuffs to indicate she wanted me to go with her. I looked around at my mates for help. They were all watching and laughing. The woman tugged again, harder this time. So I smiled, shrugged, put my drink on the bar, and went with her. I decided to go with it. I thought my mates must have paid her to do this. I thought they must have slipped her some money and told her to come and give me a lapdance.

She led me behind a curtain to a private room, except it wasn't private because there was already a rich-looking guy in a suit getting a lapdance from one of the club's other dancers. He paid no attention at all to me as the bikini-clad police officer led me into the room and pushed me down into the chair.

And thus began my first-ever lap dance. I felt no emotion at all - no desire, no lust, not even any good-natured "this is all a bit of fun" type of feeling. I felt completely dead inside. The stripper removed her bra, revealing her boobs and nipples. Instead of feeling aroused, I just thought, "There's some boobs". I was ready to call it a night and go to bed. But the stripper had other ideas. She rubbed herself up against my crotch. I felt awkward and sat there, pretending to smile and enjoy it.

"Do you want me to keep going?" she asked.

Her question took me by surprise. Had she sensed I wasn't in the mood for a lap dance? I didn't want to hurt her feelings so I replied, "Sure." Besides, my friends had already paid for it. So she carried on.

At one point, she put her crotch near my face and moved her g-string out the way to show me her vagina. And there it was. The brownish, meaty outer labia; the pink, tender inner labia; and the vaginal opening itself, an ugly old man's lips. Do other men really find these attractive? I thought. It was just about the least sexy thing I could imagine. It was a turn-off, not a turn-on. Her vagina resembled the fatty part of a raw whole chicken from Tesco, like the part you'd cut off and give to your dog. Weren't vaginas just supposed to be holes you put your dick inside? Why did it have all these disgusting, fleshy flaps around it?

"Do you want me to keep going?" she asked again.

It seemed weird that she repeated that, so I said, "I'm sorry? Is this paid for?"

She looked surprised and then laughed. "No," she said.

My heart sank. I thought my friends had set this up for me and paid for it. It turned out I was wrong.

"How much is it?" I asked.

"Forty," she said.

"What?"

"Forty pounds."

Forty of the Queen's pounds just for a fifteen minutes lap dance? Jesus Christ. It would have taken a minimum-wage worker labouring for an entire day to earn the same amount of money I'd just blown in fifteen minutes. Luckily I had my student loan, but still; even that was finite, and in theory, I'd have to pay it off someday.

I stumbled up from the chair. "Can I pay now?" I asked. She led me back outside the private room and to the main bar area, where a big, bald tough-looking guy who might have been a bartender entered 40.00 into a card reader and then plonked it down in front of me. I swiped my bank card through the reader and then entered my PIN, making sure to shield the numbers.

Finally, I went back to my friends. Rich gave me a high five. "How did it go?" he asked.

"It cost 40 pounds," I said.

He laughed. "Yeah, they're expensive," he said.

"I thought one of you'd paid for it," I said. "Because she handcuffed me, like one of you'd paid for it."

But Rich had stopped listening to me and was now staring at a pair of breasts across the room.

A few more girls approached us after that, sensing my money like sharks smelling drops of blood in the water. They were like those charity people on the street who ask if you have a minute to talk about ending famine for a direct debit of just five pounds a month, except these girls were wearing a lot less clothing. I'd already spent a small fortune, wasn't that enough? I wasn't spending any more money here. It was too expensive. Even the drinks were ten pounds each.

"So, do you want a dance?" she asked. She had long blonde hair and fake eyelashes and she wore a weird, unflattering bikini thing that had strings wrapping around her waist several times, like a dominatrix.

"Sorry," I said. And then I said, "I'm gay."

"Really?" she said in surprise. "You're gay?"

"Yep," I said, and took a sip from my glass.

"I can't believe it," she said. "You don't look gay."

My hair was a mess, my clothes were ugly, and I had no effeminate qualities whatsoever.

I smiled and shrugged.

She walked away. After she'd gone, Rob said, "What were you talking about? You're not gay."

"Yeah, but they don't know that," I said. "And like this, they won't pester me for another lapdance."

Rich laughed. "That's a good idea, that."

Anyway, Rich drove us all home and I woke up the next day with a hangover.

The Legs 11 closed a few years later. A police raid uncovered that the staff were spiking the drinks of men with methadone and then charging thousands of pounds on their credit cards, like in the movie Hustlers. Plus the owner was also linked to Albanian organised crime gangs.

Rich and Sarah? They got married, had three kids — Wilfred, Rupert, Penelope — and are still together now. I really wish the best for them.

Sometimes, I'm convinced the best song ever recorded is Blink 182's Adam's Song. This is a song about spilling a cup of juice on the floor and tracing a cord back to the wall to find it wasn't plugged in at all.

It's a completely different song from the rest of Blink 182's discography, which includes songs about prank phone calls and fucking a dog in the ass. It's sad, restrained, emotional, and all the things that bands like Blink 182 aren't known for at all. This was the band whose members stripped down naked and ran around Los Angeles, their willies and pubic hair for all to see, for a music video.

The lyrics of Adam's Song are a young man's suicide note, describing how he's too depressed to go on living and to give all his things away to his friends. The song begins with these lines:

I never thought I'd die alone

I laughed the loudest, who'd have known?

I trace the cord back to the wall

No wonder, it was never plugged in at all

I took my time, I hurried up

The choice was mine, I didn't think enough

I'm too depressed to go on

You'll be sorry when I'm gone

It's all very depressing. And that line "The choice was mine, I didn't think enough" hits me especially because I had opportunities and choices as a youth that I squandered in favour of staying at home at playing video games instead. Those goddamn video games. Is there anything I couldn't have done if I wasn't addicted to video games??

Then the chorus begins:

I never conquered, rarely came

Sixteen just held such better days

These lines hit hard with me, someone who is a perineal loser whose own life has amounted to nearly nothing. I still remember those teenage days, when summer seemed endless and adult life was full of possibility. If only I could return to the age of sixteen. I'd still be a loser but at least I'd have the foreknowledge to buy Bitcoin back when it was still 1 cent.

After the chorus begins the second verse:

I couldn't wait 'til I got home

To pass the time in my room alone

I feel this line describes me perfectly. As a young adult, all I wanted to do was live alone, never venturing outside my flat. My ideal life was to play computer games 24/7 and never have to talk to anyone. I even had a rope and pulley system invented so I wouldn't even have to interact with the delivery men. In hindsight, this was a poor lifestyle to aim for and luckily it never came to pass; I've always had friends or flatmates. But that line, "To pass the time in my room alone", gives me the shivers now, because I know the allure of isolating yourself, especially during times of depression. I think of the summer days I wasted indoors instead of, I don't know, starting a band or meeting up with friends.

Next comes a trio of lines that I call the Holy Trinity of Adam's Song. These are lines that will always haunt me, even to my deathbed. The first two lines are:

Remember the time that I spilled the cup

Of apple juice in the hall

Yes, it's lines about spilling apple juice in the hallway. Apple juice. In the hallway. Why are these lines important? Well, to say these lyrics are genius would be an understatement. Remember that time he spilt a cup of apple juice in the hall? Of course you don't. But everyone's family has an incident like the apple juice incident. Something dumb that sticks out in your mind, some minor thing that happened that no one will ever forget due to how funny or strange it was. Mentioning the time he spilled apple juice is genius because it tells you that this is a real person, from a real family. I imagine him telling his mom, "Remember the time with the apple juice?" And his mom laughs between tears, and says "Yeah, yeah I remember" and their bond is a little closer.

And then the next line:

Please tell Mom this is not her fault

Christ, the feels. He feigns with a sucker punch of a line about spilling apple juice and then he slams his fist full on into your heart with a line about his sad mom! It's the old one-two. The line comes right at the end of the verse too, so there's nothing after but the sad sound of fingers plucking a bass string to accompany you as you're confronted with the image of his mom, tear-stained and distraught, on hearing the death of her son. And that's not all. "Please tell Mom this is not her fault," tells you that he loves his mom, and cares about her, despite his own pain and depression.

By now you've decided this song's pretty depressing. Maybe you've even decided to grab a razor blade yourself, run a bath and write your own suicide note, just because of the mood this song's put you in.

But here's the thing I always forget about this song: it has a happy ending. Because, right at the end of the song, just when you think it's over and you're about to choose which rope you want to hang yourself with. there's a message of hope. A message of optimism. You see, the words in the chorus change ever so slightly so instead of looking to the past, he's looking to the future.

The lyrics at the start of the song were these:

Sixteen just held such better days

Days when I still felt alive

We couldn't wait to get outside

The world was wide, too late to try

And the lyrics at the end of the song are these:

Tomorrow holds such better days

Days when I can still feel alive

When I can't wait to get outside

The world is wide, the time goes by

It's truly astonishing. This is a band that wrote a song about wanting to fuck a dog in the ass, fuck your dad in the ass, and fuck a pirate in the ass. Whereas in "Adam's Song", they've covered the mature topic of depression and ended the song on a note of optimism too. Well, I guess this is growing up.

It's a sweet way to end the song, and it tells you not to give up hope because there's always the possibility of a better future.

In fact, now that I'm looking at Blink 182's discography, there are more songs like this, like "I Miss You", a song where a guy misses his girlfriend. Maybe Blink 182 are softer than I thought.

Covers

By the way, for real Adam's Song aficionados like me, someone who's been listening to the song on and off over the past twenty years, sometimes vanilla Adam's Song isn't enough. In fact, I find the original version of the song, the official version by Blink 182, too loud and too brash. It's all drums, shouting and electric guitars.

What I want is something slower, quieter and soothing. I currently enjoy an acoustic version by a girl called Maggie Antope. Then there's a piano version by someone called Nick Ward which is also good.

Weirdly, the first time I listened to Adam's Song, I had downloaded it from the internet illegally using Limewire, but when I clicked on the song to play it, it wasn't the official version that came out the speakers but an acoustic cover sung by some guy with a nasal voice. He sounded like Weird Al with a bad cold. I didn't even know it was a cover at the time; I thought it was the official version by Blink 182. I went on thinking this for years until finally, one day, I listened to the actual original version and realised my mistake. But by this point, that acoustic guitar cover was the real version. At least, it was for me. It was the version I had grown most attached to. And I've never found that cover again. Oh well.

It was all going so well. I was exercising six times a week, putting on muscle. People complimented me. They said I looked bigger, stronger. I was making progress towards being a chad.

It was all going so well. Too well.

It could have happened to anyone. Anyone that does bouldering that is. You see, in mid-October, I was at the local rock climbing centre, scaling up and down the walls like Spiderman. I'd been there for an hour, climbing up and down the walls. I was exhausted and covered in sweat. In hindsight, I should have stopped and gone home. But I didn't stop: "Just one more," I told myself, like a gambler putting his last coin into a slot machine.

I picked a hard wall to finish on. The climbing holds barely gave my feet enough space to stand on. I'd almost reached the top when what I now refer to as "The Event" happened — my foot slipped and I fell. I looked down and saw the ground rushing up to meet me. Now, I wasn't that high — the fall was only three metres — and when I landed, it was on a soft mat. But I landed awkwardly and fell partly on my arm. I felt a krrt in the top of my arm which I immediately knew wasn't good. To continue the slot machine metaphor, all the reels had finished spinning and each one had landed on the tiny faces of Doctor Robotnik from the Casino Nights Zone in Sonic 2, a metaphor which won't make sense if you haven't played Sonic 2.

I stood up. My arm felt a bit weird but otherwise fine. I experimented by stretching and rotating it. There was no pain, just a sensation that something wasn't quite right.

When I went to bed that night, I half-expected that by the next morning, my arm would be swollen to the size of a watermelon and locked completely in a half-bent position.

But no. The next day, my arm seemed fine. There was no pain, swelling or inflammation. As far as I could tell, I was lucky, and my arm was 100% okay.

Days 1-3

My arm was not 100% okay. But I didn't know this. So I immediately went back to doing exercise. I hurt my arm on Monday. On Tuesday I did the following:

• Gym class (Bodycombat)
• Swimming for 10 minutes
• Barbell bench press (10x50kg, 10x50kg, 10x50kg)
• Upper back machine (10x45kg, 10x48kg, 10x38kg)
• Close grip pull down (10x25kg, 10x25kg, 10x30kg)
• Arm curl twisting alternating (20x10kg, 20x15kg, 20x13kg)

Yes, I did all that with an injured arm. But, in my defense, my arm still felt 100% fine.

On Thursday I went rock climbing again. At first, it went okay. But after just ten minutes or so, my arm got tired. Then I had to stop climbing as my arm was becoming painful.

By the way, when you tear your muscle, you're supposed to follow the RICE protocol: rest, ice, compression and elevation. You stop exercising (rest), you put ice on the injury (ice), you wrap the injured area with a bandage to prevent swelling (compression), and you keep the injured body part above the level of your heart (elevation). By doing this, you reduce pain, swelling and inflammation. The injury heals faster and it minimises the formation of scar tissue.

There's this good picture which demonstates the difference between following the RICE protocol and failing to follow it. Unfortunately the quality's low, but it's the best quality I could find:

I didn't know about the RICE protocol. Well, I guess I must have heard about it during my thirty-five years of existence, but my brain had filed it away under "facts only sports people need to know" and didn't bother to bring that information out when I needed it. If it had, then my injury might not be as bad as it is today. It might even be healed.

Weeks 1-4

When you injure a muscle, it's during weeks 1 to 4 that you should do physiotherapy and rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is simple, pain-free exercises that help you to regain strength and motility.

What you should definitely not do is return to the exercises you were doing before, as this could reinjure the muscle.

So what I did, like an idiot, is try to return to the exercises I was doing before. I went rock climbing with my injured arm. At one point I was hanging from a rock solely from my injured arm, my entire body weight stretching it, for several seconds. I was still going to Bodycombat classes, classes that involve punching the air in front of you with as much force as possible.

I couldn't imagine stopping doing exercise; exercise was as much a part of my life as breathing or masturbating into a fleshlight. Exercise was my life. It was how I managed anger. And I had goals I wanted to meet. And the Bodycombat classes were my favourite part of the week; I couldn't stop going to those!

In my head, my arm was healing nicely and was getting better every day.

In reality, my arm was getting worse every day. At the end of the fourth week, the underside of my arm felt like it was sunburned, even though it couldn't have been sunburned as I never exposed it to the sun.

I made the decision to stop exercising. It was a drastic decision, but for the best. I knew that from now on, my arm would slowly get better.

After that

During the next week, my arm got worse. Yes, it actually got worse. I lost motility. Bending it or stretching it resulted in pain. I had the sensation that I should keep my arm in a half-bent position as if I was wearing an invisible sling. So I did that. I walked around the home with my arm up to my chest. I thought about actually buying a sling but didn't; whether it would have been a good idea or not, I don't know.

I became depressed. I had the bleak feeling that my arm would be injured forever. In my mind, my days of doing my favourite thing, Bodycombat classes, were over. I'd have to quit the gym and never return. I'd be one of those people who's always complaining about some pain in their body, like their knees or their back. The kind of person who declines a game of frisbee in the park because it would make their elbow tendinitis flare up. The kind of person who says things like, "I pulled a muscle five years ago and I still get pain today". My Wikipedia page (when I become famous and have a Wikipedia page) would say something like, "At the age of 35, Paul suffered an arm injury that never fully healed, and left him with life-long debilitating pain."

Doctor's appointment

My girlfriend encouraged me to see a doctor. So I went to the health clinic to make a doctor's appointment. There, the receptionist told me that the soonest possible appointment was in two weeks. Fucking hell. Two weeks of waiting to see a doctor. But I made the appointment because that's all they had.

But soon enough, my doctor's appointment came around. I told the doctor I'd hurt my arm six weeks ago while rock climbing. He was shocked and angry that I'd left it so long to see him. Apparently, I was supposed to go see him straight away, or at most three weeks after injuring myself, not six weeks after. He also glared at me angrily as I told him I'd still been doing exercise since then instead of resting the arm.

"Well there's nothing I can do now!" he said, in a bluster of anger. "You should have seen me weeks ago! Not six weeks after you injure yourself!"

But he reluctantly scribbled a prescription for rehabilitation onto his pad, before tearing it off and handing it to me. It was for ten sessions at the local physiotherapy clinic. Although before I left, he added, "It probably won't do anything now as you've left it too late!"

But I was feeling chipper, and replied, "With a bit of luck, my arm will be fine." He just glared at me some more from behind his desk as I left.

Physiotherapy

So I started rehabilitation. I imagined I'd be lifting some light dumbells or doing range-of-motion exercises while under the kindly supervision of a middle-aged man who would say things like, "That's it, just a little more," and "Well done Paul, you've done excellent work today. I'm really proud of you."

But no. What rehabilitation consisted of was me lying on a massage table while a physiotherapist used three things to try to make my arm better: electrical muscle stimulation (EMS), massage, and heat. Every time I went to a rehabilitation session, it was those three things: EMS, massage and heat. There was almost no deviation from these three things. Sometimes the order would be different, and sometimes they'd use a special ray instead of heat, a ray that was supposed to make my arm heal faster. But that was it. There were no light dumbells, no range-of-motion exercises. I felt a bit let down.

And honestly, I don't think the rehabilitation helped much. I didn't see any major benefit. Besides, it's all stuff I could do at home. At home I had a hot water bottle (heat), I could massage myself (massage), and I had a EMS device I'd bought years ago in the hopes it'd give me a six-pack (it didn't).

Day 67 — the water jet

The day before Christmas Eve (so Christmas Eve Eve), I was at the swimming pool and I stuck my arm into this pressurized jet of water that's supposed to give you a massage. I kept my arm in the jet of water for a few seconds, letting the water pummel and batter my arm like a Swedish physiotherapist, in the hope it would make my arm better.

But the water didn't make it better. No, the water made my arm worse.

Because the next day, I was sitting down and I accidentally brushed the back of my arm against a book on my lap, and I got a shock of severe prickly pain in my tricep that made me actually gasped with pain. I'd never felt this type of prickly pain before.

Another day soon after that, I was at the library doing work on my laptop, and the back of my arm just ever so slightly brushed the chair behind me and I felt the prickly pain again as if I'd brushed my arm against a cactus instead of a chair.

I stopped getting the cactus pain a few days later, but I never put my arm into that water jet again.

Day 100

Before I knew it, one hundred days had passed since I'd hurt my arm. This meant my recovery period was now in triple figures. To give you some perspective, pulled muscles are supposed to take no more than 6 weeks (42 days) to heal. Already, twice that amount of time had passed. The pain had changed though. Now it wasn't prickly anymore. Now it was duller, which was a good sign, but also sharp, but was a bad sign I guess (?).

That said, my arm felt stronger. Whereas before, my arm felt weak, like I couldn't use it in a fight without making it worse, now my arm felt like I could use it to lift a heavy box onto a shelf if I had to. So I was making progress.

On day 101, I woke up with like an annoying sensation in my armpit, so I had an idea: I got a rolling pin from the kitchen drawer and used it to massage my arm. The next day, my armpit felt 100% better. So I started using the rolling pin on my tricep too.

UPDATE: Today, five months after the injury, I'm glad to say my arm is 100% fine. Push-ups have helped me regain basic strength and I'm back to using gym machines.

All's well that ends well.

Saying that, I did injure my other arm two months ago from lifting heavy dumbbells at the gym.

[This happened in 2013, back when I was a shoplifter]

One day, I decided to steal cologne. My reasoning was that women like cologne and therefore if I stole cologne then women would like me too. If I wore cologne, then my attractiveness would slide up a notch, women would notice me, and maybe I'd pull a girl in Toronto. Never mind that I was a jobless immigrant living in a hostel and sharing a bunk bed with a Chilean man named Felipe. In my mind, cologne was all I needed to get a girlfriend, maybe even multiple girlfriends.

So I left the Canadiana Backpackers Inn and walked down the concrete steps onto the quiet side street outside. It was a chilly day in mid-Spring. The sky was overcast. The trees were still dormant and brown. But there was not a single trace of snow anywhere, no slush, no snowdrifts, no anything. In fact, I hadn't seen any snow since I'd arrived in Toronto a week earlier.

The shop I was walking to wasn't far; just a couple of blocks away. On the way, I passed a homeless man. He cradled a polysterene cup in his hands and smelled of alcohol. As I passed, he raised his cup, causing the coins inside to jingle, and said, "Any change?" The change is coming, I told him. Can't you see? Summer's on its way. I didn't really say that, of course. I just muttered, "Sorry" and walked on, as I do to all homeless people. (When I'm rich, I'll share my money around like a Jewish man doling out challah at Shabbat. But while I'm poor, I can't afford to give money to the homeless.)

I walked passed several bags of garbage that were just dumped there on the street, and then turned the corner and there it was: Shoppers Drug Mart. I knew this because the words SHOPPERS DRUG MART were in huge white letters above the doors. People were entering through the automatic doors, presumably to buy their "drugs" (not actual drugs but the Canadian word for medication).

Shoppers Drug Mart is a big Canadian pharmacy chain you can find in every town and city in Canada. They sell everything — makeup, nappies, dog food, the aforementioned "drugs" (read: medications), a wide selection of colognes, and much, much more. It's your one-stop pharmacy chain. And it was from there I planned to steal the cologne.

As I approached the Shoppers Drug Mart, the automatic doors slid open, welcoming me inside. If the doors had known I was a shoplifter, then maybe they wouldn't have been so welcoming; maybe they would have refused to open, or maybe they'd have opened at first to give me a false sense of security but then slammed shut when I was halfway through, cutting me in half or trapping me until the police arrived. But thankfully, these doors were non-sentient and I walked through them without losing a single limb.

Inside, the air was warm due to the store's central heating system. To the right were the checkouts, where an elderly woman behind the till was slowly scanning tins of baby formula for a mother with a pram. To the left, there were aisles and aisles of first-world, capitalist abundance: dozens of different packets of breakfast cereals, crisps, and chocolate; gift cards in various denominations; and every shade of lipstick imaginable.

An ill-advised rendition of Frank Sinatra's I Did It My Way, featuring a bongo drum solo and questionable hip-hop beats, drifted from the store's speaker system as I made my way into the store. Due to the store's layout, I was first forced to walk down the feminine hygiene aisle, a euphemism for tampons, douches and pads. Then, after passing a poster advertising leg waxing cream, I found the cologne in the skincare aisle.

There were dozens of brands of cologne available, something that made the task of choosing a cologne much harder task than it should have been. In the end, after much deliberation, I picked up a box labelled eau de homme by Giorgio Armani. At $89.99, plus tax, it was one of the most expensive colognes on the shelves.

I carefully turned the box around and over in my hands, inspecting the sides for security tags. And there, hidden away on the bottom of the box, I found one. It looked like a thick black sticker, but due to my considerable experience as an amateur shoplifter, I knew immediately that this sticker was in fact a security tag. Trying to leave the shop with that security tag on the box would trigger the store's alarm, causing SWAT teams to rappel down from the ceiling, guard dogs with sharp teeth and foaming mouths to leap out of concealed doggy doors, and police helicopters to circle around the building, which point I'd be dragged kicking and screaming to prison.

But what I wanted was not the box itself but the cologne inside. The box was unsealed, so I simply opened the flaps and pulled out the expensive glass bottle from inside. I turned the bottle around in my hands, examining it for security tags, and found none. It's ridiculous, really. They went to the trouble of tagging the cheap cardboard box but forgot about the expensive cologne inside.

The liquid inside the bottle had a very slight yellow tinge to it, almost like urine. I didn't have any experience with cologne and this bottle could have contained the piss of the great Mr Giorgio Armani himself for all I knew. But at $89.99 it probably wasn't urine but some sweet-smelling sex pheromone that would make me irresistible to girls, causing them to scream and chase me through the streets, like the hordes of young women screaming for The Beatles. I glanced left and right furtively to make sure no one was watching, and then I stuffed the bottle into my coat pocket. Finally, I closed the flaps of the now-empty box, which now felt a lot lighter without the bottle of cologne inside, and put the empty box back on the shelf.

At this point I should have left the store, thereby minimising the time in which I could get caught. That would have been the smart thing to do. But instead of doing the smart thing, I decided to walk around the aisles first. This way, I hoped the CCTV cameras would see me as just a normal shopper doing a bit of browsing instead of an amateur shoplifter scared out of my wits. Also, I needed time to build up enough courage to walk out of there with the stolen cologne in my pocket.

So I walked away from the skincare aisle and started browsing the wares of the baby aisle. A giant picture of a baby looked down at me, smiling a toothless grin. The shelves were full of nappies, baby food and those tins of baby formula I'd seen earlier. I pretended to be interested in a packet of dummies, two for $10, but the only thing I could think about was the stolen bottle of cologne in my coat pocket. I could feel its weight pulling my coat down on one side, yelling for attention like the beating of Poe's Tell-Tale Heart.

I hung around in that aisle for a while, trying to build up enough courage to walk out with the stolen bottle of cologne. I was examining a packet of adult diapers, wondering if I should steal some of those as well in case I shit myself from fear, when a middle-aged woman approached me. She looked angry. She had a name badge and wore the employee uniform of black trousers and a grey polo shirt. And in her hand was the empty box of cologne.

She walked up to me and held the box out as if to say, "I caught you, you thieving bastard." Perhaps, in this situation, other shoplifters would have made a run for it, vaulted over a closed checkout sign and flipped the security guard's cap off his head before dashing through the automatic doors just as they were closing, with just enough time to reach back in and grab a bag of Cheetos, like Indiana Jones reaching for his hat in The Temple of Doom. But I wasn't that type of shoplifter. I was more of a timid kind of shoplifter, more likely to apologise than to make daring escapes. So I sheepishly pulled the cologne out of my pocket and handed it over to her, like a guilty schoolboy relinquishing a catapult to the headmaster. Then I said the first lame excuse that came to my head: "I just wanted to try it". As an excuse, it didn't even make sense. If I just wanted to try the cologne, then why was I carrying it around in my pocket? My excuse had about as much evidential weight as Bart Simpson claiming "I didn't do it" with a can of spray paint in his red-painted hands.

The woman glared at me some more but that was all. She was like a teacher who just stares at you angrily when you do something wrong instead of giving you a detention or a bollocking. So I turned and walked to the store's exit, albeit shamefully, with my head down low and my feet dragging behind me.

For some reason, I grabbed a packet of nuts on the way out and got in line to pay for them. I guess I wanted to show the store that I was a real, paying customer. As I was queuing, I saw the woman from earlier go up to a security guard. She showed him the cologne and pointed me out to him. I froze like a deer in headlights. The guard looked at me with surprise.

I paid for the bag of nuts. When I left the store, with the packet of nuts and receipt in my hand, the security guard didn't stop me. He didn't even look angry. He just looked surprised.

So I never did get any cologne. I never did find out if the cologne would have made me as irresistible to women as the shirtless builder in that Diet Coke advert, the one where all the ogling office women bite their lips in lust. Somehow, sadly, I imagine it probably wouldn't have. But at least I didn't go to prison.

When I was a kid, every so often we'd go visit my nan and grandad. They only lived just around the corner, less than five minutes' walk away, but we only visited them once a month, or even less frequently if we could manage it.

No one enjoyed visiting my nan and grandad. It was a chore. We'd all sit there on the sofas, bored, while my nan made comments about the weather or recanted to us the gory details of the latest ghost story she'd read in a murder magazine. Sometimes she'd get a photo album out with pictures of when we were younger. There'd be my brother with a bowl-shaped haircut and me with a missing incisor, dressed in the uniforms of a school we didn't go to anymore.

My grandad would be there too, sitting in his chair (no one else was allowed to sit in his chair). He was a Polish immigrant and he didn't speak much. I always assumed it was because he had a poor grasp of English making it hard for him to communicate with us, but thinking about it, he had hearing problems as well. Anything you said to him had to be said loudly and clearly, or else he'd just give you a lost, confused expression.

My nan

My nan was a typical old person. She had a perm. Her back was hunched over and went she went out (to go to church or to take the dogs for a walk) she wore a big pink coat that was several sizes too large for her, even on hot summer days.

She had this trick where she'd take her top teeth out her mouth. Then she'd wave her teeth in the air at us. I always loved it, and I still do today.

Then there were her toes. When she took her shoes off, which thankfully wasn't very often, her second toe on each foot was horrendously twisted. Her toes overlapped her big toe. She explained her toes were twisted from wearing shoes that were too tight when she younger. I made a mental note to always wear shoes that fit me.

The sight of her twisted toes scared me and her false teeth grossed me out. Maybe I should have been worried about what would happen to me when I got old like her. But I didn't as I knew I'd never get old.

Whenever a plane would fly over the house, which was often because we lived near an airport, Nan would point at the sky and call me over. “Look Paul, quick!" she would say, ushering me to the garden to witness this modern miracle. “Quick, it’s going!" I'd come and look, and it was just some Ryanair flight to Benedorm or a British Airways 747 on its way to Dublin. But my nan never got used to the sight of planes, and every plane caused her joy.

My grandad

My grandad was twenty when World War II broke out. The Nazis invaded Poland and captured my Grandad. They forced him to work on a railroad, and he had to wear the letter P on his clothes to identify him as a Pole.

At the same time my grandad was building railroads for Nazis, the Nazis were flying planes over England and dropping bombs on major cities. One of these cities was Birmingham and one of the bombs landed on my nan's house. The house was blown to smithereens. Fortunately, my nan, only four years old at the time, was hiding in the bomb shelter at the end of the garden, along with her brother and her mom. Her dad was at away at war so fortunately, none of the family was hurt.

I have this photo of some of the bomb damage to houses in Aston, Birmingham:

My nan has always claimed that the man dressed in black and staring at the camera was her grandfather, or my great-great-grandfather:

And he may well have been. Who can say? What matters is that my nan survived the war, as did my grandad. My grandad go came to Birmingham, looking for work and a better life. I don’t know much about Poland but I do know it must have been pretty bad over there for people to actually think Birmingham would be an improvement.

My grandad met my nan, and I guess it was love - you know how the story goes - and they got married and had two children, one of which was my dad. My granded had children at a late age, in his 40s, and as a result, he was already old by the time I was born. So I always knew him as this strange little wrinkled old man. He couldn’t speak much English, it seemed all he could say was our names – “Paul” he would say, in a hoarse old man's voice, while becoming with his finger for me to come closer – “Paul” – and he'd motion again for me to come even closer, to come and stand right next to him - “Paul” he'd say a third time, and I'd come and stand so close to him that I could smell his old man breath, and then he'd stuff a £5 note in my hand and make a shushing noise, as if to say, Don't tell your brother and sister or they'll want £5 notes too. It was our secret.

When he got very old, his only hobby was growing sunflowers. My grandad loved sunflowers. He would grow these great towering sunflowers, easily 6 feet tall, 7 feet tall, even 8 feet tall, taller than Michael Jordon, tall enough to reach the sky. Every year he would be out in the garden, front and back, tending to these monstrous sunflowers.

But eventually my grandad grew too old to tend to his sunflowers anymore. One year there were no more sunflowers, and the next year he died, aged 85. There were no more sunflowers in the garden since then.

My nan lived alone after that. Alone, except for the animals.

The animals

My nan owned a whole menagerie of pets, including, throughout the years, dogs, rabbits, mice, hamsters, tortoises and birds. It was like Dr Doolittle's house. She could have made money calling her house a zoo and charging people money to come to see it.

She had these canaries in a cage on the table. There was a green and yellow one and a blue and white one, and all they'd do all day is chirp incessantly. The noise would have driven me mad but my nan must have been used to it (either that or she didn't have enough brain left to become mad). Then there was a tank of fish. The fish didn't seem to do anything except stare out of the water. They would swim away, frightened when I put my hand next to the tank.

It seemed that most of the animals suffered health problems. I don't know if that's because my nan adopted sick animals or if the animals became sick from the poor living conditions at my nan's house. Whichever one it was, my nan would always be saying things like:

"Blinky got into a fight last week and lost an eye. I’ll have to change his name to Winky.”

"I think the dogs ate one of the rabbits last night."

"Flopsy's moulting. I think it's because of the trauma she had in a past life."

"She's allergic to grass but she keeps eating it. I can't stop her."

"Most of the tumour has gone, but he'll always be blind in one eye."

And the bills for visits to the vet were astronomical. Vaccination? £51.75. Tooth extraction? £369 One time, a dog ate a plastic figure, resulting in an x-ray (£369) and intestinal surgery (£929). We joked that most of her pension went on vet visits, something that may not have been far from the truth.

The dogs

Then there were the dogs. No one else wanted these dogs because they had health problems or behavioural issues. Some of them had been kicked and abused by their previous owners, and now they piss on the living room floor periodically. Others had weird injuries ("he lost his eye after the fight") or health issues like diabetes.

My nan always owned one or two dogs. When one dog died, she'd just get another to replace it. Her house reeked of dogs. The stench would hit you as soon as you walked through the door: the smell of fur, congealed dog food, and the slight stink of shit, a smell I've come to realise is common to all of God's animals. The smell reminded me of a farm or a sewage treatment plant. And the chairs always had dog hair on them, so if you sat in one of the chairs, the hairs would stick to your clothes.

Whenever I visited my nan, I'd knock on the door of my nan's house and immediately from inside came the sound of barking. You could hear the dogs inside, barking, yipping and growling themselves into a frenzy. The smaller dogs only made annoying high-pitched yips but the larger dogs made quite scary deep barks and growls, which always made me feel nervous.

Then I'd hear my nan scolding the dogs from inside the house. "Stop yer barkin'! Stop it!" Her angry words never did make the dogs stop barking though. If anything, it incensed them to bark lounder. Finally, she'd open the door, just a crack to stop the dogs from escaping outside. "Ohh, Paul, it's you!" my nan would say.

I'd go inside, and the excited dogs (usually two dogs, one big and one small) would jump up at me, almost knocking me off my feet. Their claws would dig into my coat and their hot, fetid breath would stink my face. Then the dogs would then run around the living room wildly as if they hadn't seen another human being for years. Finally, my nan would lock them in the back garden, where they'd howl for attention.

It was thanks to the visits to my nan's house that I learned how to deal with dogs. First, you have to do is put your hands up as if in surrender (so the dogs can see your hands and also so the dogs can't bite your fingers off). And then you start stroking the dogs, stroking the dogs on the head and on the back, stroking and stroking as if your life depends on it (which it probably does). If all goes well, you'll become the dog's best friend.

I've always imagined that in the scenario of a guard dog chasing me, perhaps a Doberman Pinscher with a mouth full of sharp teeth, I'd know exactly what to do: stop, put my hands up, and then stroke the dog. Like that, I'd befriend the dog. Then I'd make a quick getaway by climbing over a chain-linked fence while the dog watches, its head tilted quizzically. And I'd have my nan to thank for my escape.

Maybe I should be more afraid of dogs. My aunt's dog (this was an aunt from my dad's side) once bit a pensioner so hard on the face that he was left drinking through a straw. There was a news article about it:

A PENSIONER has been left drinking through a straw after a normally ‘lovely’ dog sunk its teeth into his face. [...] As a result of the attack, the 69-year-old had four puncture wounds, 32 stitches, loss of muscle, tissue and saliva glands and damage to his nerves. He also has permanent numbness meaning he has to drink through a straw and doctors said he may never recover from his injuries.

To the credit of my nan's dogs, they never attacked anyone, as far as I know.

The biscuit cupboard

My nan was always complaining of constipation. "Oooh, I've had terrible constipation," she would say. "I haven't passed my bowels for five days now," or something like that. I suspect the reason she had constipation her diet, which consisted of nothing but biscuits, cakes, and chocolate. That's all she ate (or so if seemed to me). If you asked her for an orange she'd give you a chocolate orange. If you asked her for fruit she'd give you fruit gums.

Ironically, all the digestive biscuits she ate did nothing to help her digestive system. In fact, they made it worse.

There was a cupboard in her living room where she kept all her snacks and treats. Things she kept in this cupboard included:

Garibaldi biscuits

Garibaldis are thin hard biscuits with fruit in the middle. The only person who bought them was my nan, as far as I knew.

I didn't know where the word "Garibaldi" came from so I thought they were named after a bald man called Gary.

Cadbury's Roses

A tin of Cadbury's Roses, expired ten years ago, that no one would eat except my nan. Now, if she had Celebrations, that would have been a different matter. Those I would have eaten.

Crisps that you salt yourself

My nan had these weird crisps where you had to add the salt yourself. They came with a little blue packet of salt and you had to pour the salt on the crisps yourself. The idea was that you could salt the crisps to your taste.

My brother never got to try them and he has always regretted it. He wants to know what crisps taste like before they're salted.

Paranormal magazines

My nan loves ghosts. She had stacks of ghost magazines in her house that she would pull out whenever I visited her.

"Paul, there's a good story in this one about a man burned to death in his flat and came back as a ghost."

"Thanks, Nan, I might read that one later," I'd say.

She likes telling stories about ghosts too. She would say things like, "Your great-grandad used to work as a night watchman at an old manor house and one night, he heard banging coming from the attic. He went up to the attic and opened the chest and he saw the ghosts of two little boys in the chest. The boys had got trapped in the chest and died."

She also had loads of magazines about crime. They went into great detail about murders, describing all the limbs and blood.

What I want to know is where did she get them from? They aren't the kind of magazine you can find in shops so who is her supplier? Who was were supplier for her ghost and murder magazines? I don't know.

The last time I visited my Nan's house

The final time I visited my nan's house was in 2015. As I walked down the path, I discovered, with a mild jolt of shock, there was a sign in Arabic above the door. I couldn't read the sign but I imagine it was some blessing from Allah. Given that my nan was a die-hard Christian, and would never convert to Islam, I took this to mean that my nan had moved away. She didn't live there anymore. I walked away, in shock.

No one had told me my nan had moved house. I found out later she'd gone to live with her daughter, Dawn. But I'll never be able to step foot in my nan's house again. And that makes me feel like part of my life has gone.

At least the smell of dogs will still be there though. I don't think that will ever leave.

Oh man. Oh God. Oh Christ. My fucking hair. It's been 9 months since the hair transplant and my hair still looks shit.

From the front it looks alright, I guess:

But from the side, it looks awful, like I've started a trial of an experimental drug that makes your hair fall out:

In various places you can see my scalp underneath, showing through.

But I see your bald scalp

Showing through

I see your bald scalp

And that's why I love you

So don't be afraid to let it show

Your bald scalp

Is beautiful

Also, on the back I still have a massive bald zone.

And from the top it's very clear that I'm balding.

My only hope is that I can have another hair transplant. I'll happily fork over another €6,000 to get that bald spot covered up. It's hair that I want, it's hair that I need.

Also also, I had this conversation with my uncle-in-law, someone I haven't seen for ten years:

Me: "I had a hair transplant."

Wilf: "Oh really? Has it started working yet?"

Me: *Stunned* "What? Of course it's started working. I was bald before the transplant. Now I have hair."

Wilf: "Maybe you should just embrace your baldness. You know, just shave your head."

Okay, first of all, I tried embracing my baldness. I shaved my head FOR TEN YEARS. So I've done that already.

Second of all, embracing your baldness is the opposite of what you should do. Because what you should do is fight your baldness with everything you have. Like Dylan Thomas's poem "Do not go gentle into that good night", except instead of fighting death, you're fighting baldness.

Do not go gentle into that bald head

Rage, rage against the dying of your hairs

Because baldness makes every man look worse than when they still had hair.

My hair has grown a lot over the past couple of months. As you can see in the photo below, I currently look a bit like Tintin, if Tintin had a beard.

So I've gone from bald to having a strange quiff.

I resemble a cress head: an eggshell with cress 'hair' that kids love to make.

Sides

The sides are looking better. They still objectively look bad, but at least there's been an improvement.

Back

It's when we get to the back of my head that the horror reveals itself.

The back of my head looks awful. There's a big, white, bald dome protruding from a forest of hair. It looks like the top of an egg.

The growth of my hair hasn't done anything to make it look better; in fact, it's worse, because the long hair on the back of my head contrasts with the empty, featureless, landscape that is my head's dome.

From behind, I must look like Friar Tuck.

Top

Finally, here's my head from above.

What's that you say? I should just accept getting bald and shave it all off? No fucking way. I'm never being bald again. Even the shit hair I have now is better than being bald.

Most guests only stayed in the hostel for a few days. A week or two, max. These were the normal guests.

But then there were the long-termers. These were strange people who lived in the hostel for months and months, setting up little dens in their rooms in the hostel and slowly accumulating piles of junk, skulking around in the shadows, as they subsisted on their pitiful savings and were forced to take on humilating jobs in the hostel to make ends meet. What kind of life is that?

I was one of these people. I'd been living at the Alexandrie hostel for months now, ever since I'd arrived in Montreal in spring. Since then, the leaves had turned green and then brown, and I still had no plans on moving out. Simply put, I was staying put.

But unlike the other long-termers, I did no work and paid no rent. I was a deadbeat parasite. The only way I'd leave the hostel is if the owner kicked me out, which would definitely, definitely never happen, because he liked me too much.

There were other long-termers like me. There was Kuan, a Chinese woman who lived in a ground floor room like mine. Surprisingly, everyone liked Kuan, perhaps because she was friendly and spoke to everyone. I didn't like Kuan though. Her friendliness seemed false and I was suspicious of her. Why was she so friendly? Why was she staying in the hostel for so long?

Then there was a young, gay Canadian man called Michael. Michael was from Vancouver and he was also vague about why he was in Montreal — something about wanting to get away for a while? He always wore a blue baseball cap, backwards (and he never took this cap off by the way, not even to shower or sleep). He'd sit at the hostel table, with his baseball cap on (backwards), and bitch about the other hostel guests, pausing every few minutes to apply lip balm.

Montreal was the ideal place for gay men like Michael. It's a gay-friendly city, and we were in a gay-friendly hostel. Many people there were gay. Even the owner, Luc, was gay.

At one point, it seemed like everyone in the hostel was gay. One night, I asked a group of gay people: "Am I gay?"

A gay guy called Inyigo laughed. "You're not gay," he said.

Phew! I was relieved!

I didn't want to be gay. Not because I'm homophobic, you see. No, the reason I didn't want to be gay is because I wasn't attracted to men. I was attracted to women. So I'd prefer if I was straight.

Even so, I thought I should experiment with a man to make sure. So, one night, Michael and I went out to a club together. I had an idea that I could kiss him in the toilets to experiment with my sexuality. But when we got to the toilet cubicle, someone else was in there, so we left. I felt disappointed but relieved.

On the way back to the hostel, it was 2 am and the streets were deserted. The only movement was the flaps of an empty cardboard box fluttering in the breeze. The only sounds were our footsteps on the concrete, the wind, and the distant, faraway wail of a police siren.

The street was lit by the eerie glow of streetlamps. As we crossed the empty street, a thought occurred to me.

"Hey," I said.

"What?" Michael said.

"I know where to buy cocaine," I said.

"What?"

"Cocaine," I said. "I know where to buy some."

"Wait, what? You know where to buy cocaine?!" Michael said. "Dude!! Let's buy cocaaaaaaaaaiiine!"

"Shh, not so loud!" I said. But I needn't have worried. No one was going to hear us. The streets were empty.

I was only trying to impress him. I didn't think he'd actually want cocaine.

But now Michael was whining on and on about cocaine. He had cocaine on the brain. "Can we get cocaine? Let's get cocaine!" He was like a little kid who wants to go to McDonald's on the way home. Except instead of a happy meal, he wanted cocaine.

"Okay fine!" I snapped. "We'll get some cocaine!"/p>

We neared the park. By day, Place Émilie-Gamelin is a small park; a nice place to sit and enjoy the sun. But at night, it becomes a terrifying drug-dealing hotspot.

We looked down at the park. It was a stretch of darkness somehow untouched by the light of the street lamps. The dark trees whispered menacingly, their branches swayed in the breeze. I began to have second thoughts. And third thoughts.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked Michael.

Michael giggled nervously. "Let's do it!" he said.

So we left the safety of the well-lit street and approached the park.

A man stood there. He was a Black man, maybe in his 40s, and wore trainers, sweatpants and a hoody. I knew right away he was a drug dealer. Not because he was Black but because who else would be standing in a park at 2 am? Not Tickle Me Elmo, that's for sure.

I walked toward the man. He looked up.

"We're looking to buy some... cocaine?" I said.

"How much?" he said.

I was right! He was a drug dealer! My confidence soared. I was good at buying drugs!

Or so I thought.

"Um..." I said. "Thirty dollars worth?"

“What, only thirty?” the drug dealer cried with disgust. “Look, I don't even do bags that small. The smallest bag I do is fifty. Buy that."

But I saw through this sleazy attempt to extract more money from me and I stood my ground. "I only want thirty dollars worth," I said firmly.

Michael was watching the scene with interest. He must have thought I was an expert at negotiating with drug dealers. I wasn't. The only time I'd bought drugs was online, while in the safety of my home and dressed in nothing but my underpants. And now Micheal and I was a long way from home.

"The smallest bag I do is fifty," said the drug dealer firmly.

"Thirty," I said.

The drug dealer sighed. "Okay, fine," he said, finally giving in. "But first, give me the money."

I wasn't stupid. So I said, "No, I want to see the drugs first."

"Money first," he said.

I could see we'd be here all night negotiating at this rate, but I wanted to get home at some point, so I pulled thirty dollars from my pocket and handed it to the drug dealer. He carefully counted and recounted the notes (all three of them). Then he nodded, satisfied, stuffed the notes into his pocket and said, "Follow me."

So we followed him deeper into the park. The drug dealer stopped at a low wall and produced a small bag of powder from one of his pockets. "Aw man, why couldn't you just buy the whole bag?" he said. "I’m gonna have to split fifty dollar bag now. You could've just bought the whole bag."

I don't know why splitting the bag was such a big deal. It's not like he had more important things to do. Why, just a couple of minutes before, he was standing alone in a park, doing nothing at all!

“Keep a lookout for cops!” he urged us. Then he tipped the bag of cocaine onto a ledge.

Right at that moment, there was a sudden gust of wind. The wind blew most of the powder away. We all watched helplessly — me, Michael, the drug dealer — as the powder took flight and was gone into the night.

"You see what happens when I have to split the bag!" cried the drug dealer.

Wait — this was my fault? He was blaming me for unpredictable weather conditions?

After a lot of swearing and grumbling, the dealer finally finished dividing out the cocaine — or at least, what was left of it now the wind had taken its share.

You would think that would be it: deal done. But no. Because the dealer had another dilemma: he didn't have a bag to put the cocaine in.

"You SEE what happens when I have to split the bag?" he spluttered in anger as he rummaged around his pockets for something to put my cocaine in. Now he was blaming me again — this time for a lack of prepackaged thirty-dollar cocaine bags.

Finally, he pulled out a little white envelope from one of his pockets. He put the powder in the envelope and handed it to me.

Michael and I walked quickly home, like two excited schoolboys with a stolen packet of sweets. I kept looking over my shoulder to make sure no one was following us. But we were alone. My Nokia was safe.

Finally, we reached the hostel and hurried to my room. I tipped the cocaine out onto a shelf. Michael watched over my shoulder. He was practically dancing in anticipation.

We both looked down at the powder.

It wasn't white.

"What is it?" said Michael.

My heart sank. Whatever the drug dealer had given us, it wasn't cocaine. No, it seemed to be metallic shavings; like what you'd get from drilling into a chunk of metal. The pieces were tiny and grey. They reflected the light of my bedroom lamp.

There was no way I was snorting that. You'd have to be the Tin Man to get high off it.

"Wait," I said. "There's something else here."

Michael's eyes suddenly got their gleam back.

Inside the envelope was a passport photo of the drug dealer. There he was, in the photo, glaring at us. A photo of the guy who had just ripped me off.

So, to recap: instead of receiving cocaine, we had received

• some shit metal shavings
• a photo of a drug dealer

Whoever the man had been, he was probably laughing to himself now and fanning himself with my thirty dollars' worth of banknotes. Maybe he hadn't even been a drug dealer. Maybe his name was Clive and he worked in software development, and he did fake drug dealing as a side hustle. And he wasn't even a competent fake drug dealer because he'd given us his passport photo by mistake.

Michael went to bed soon after, unconcerned about the money I'd wasted and oblivious to the danger he'd put us through just to get some shit metal shavings. He probably fell asleep with his thumb in his mouth and a smile on his face, dreaming of cocaine and drug dealers.

I stayed up for another couple of hours, in the cold glow of a computer screen, before going to bed at the break of dawn.

Things weren't all bad, however. Because a few weeks later, I noticed that an annoyingly quiet French guy called Remy seemed spaced out.

"Je suis super high," he said.

I badgered him non-stop until he agreed to sell me drugs. He sold me an LSD tab for ten dollars. It was a small blue square, about the size of a pinky fingernail. It had an ominous yellow smiley face on it.

YES! I had a DRUG! I tucked the LSD tab safely into my wallet for another day.

I should have used that LSD tab or stored it somewhere else because a month later, a policeman searched my wallet and found it. But we'll get to that.