It’s 4:13 am on a Monday morning, and the domestic disturbance in the flat below mine has long since banished the prospect of my sleeping through the night. I’ve had about an hour’s shut-eye, and I can faintly remember a dream in which I ate dinner at the house of a stranger, a man who spent the whole time describing how he was going to kill me: hanging me naked from the ceiling and severing my genitals with a pair of garden shears, slicing off my face and sending it to my mother in the post et cetera. I was excited by his suggestions, so I didn’t resist when he took me by the hand and led me to his basement, but in the end his chosen method was quite mundane: he simply cut off my head. For some reason this didn‘t prove to be fatal, so he put my head on a high shelf and left it there; I watched with clinical interest as he tortured and dismembered his subsequent guests.

But enough about dreams.