When I was Merboy I lived in a cottage overlooking a creek in Noss Mayo, in Devon. One day when I was eleven, after the bus had dropped me at the top of Back Road, a group of boys came out of the garden of a house nearby, looking sly and brutal. I knew them, knew they were dangerous, slow-witted and vicious. I began to trot down the steep hill towards the creek, my bag bouncing on my back, as they lurched behind me, cat-calling. I jogged on, the gradient hurting my knees, the thought of swimming in high-tide waters pulling me down the hill, knowing I could easily out-sprint the bullies. Then one of them, Martin Sawyer, thin as a bulrush with buck teeth and acne, who thought that a feather was heavier than lead, yelled, ‘Who’s yer mother been fucking today, then?’ The question flowed down the valley, through the open stable-door of my mother’s cottage, across the dog-leg of the river and over the sea as Eddie Lamble, fat half-wit, wheezed his approval.

‘It ain’t yer father, is it?’ Eddie Lamble crowed, his voice like sour milk.

Drawing level with the church, my breath jolting out of me, I could see the river filling the creek but I stopped running. I turned back to face the pack and shrugged off my bag as they thundered towards me.

The sound of Martin Sawyer’s nose breaking was extraordinary — the shattering of a pane of glass hidden in a pillow.

Bristol is a city calling for, in fact querulously demanding, decks. Unlike Rome it has more than seven hills; it seems to have an endless number of them, as many as anyone could possibly require. I have staggered up St Michael’s - known as Cardiac Hill because of the conveniently placed hospitals — with a belly full of Smiles’ Best. I have toiled up Totterdown and, on occasion, sweated my way up Ashton Court Road to Pill. I have even dragged myself up Constitution Hill, drunk at Christmas midnight, when the street was iced over, by hauling myself up on car bumpers. I was feet from my goal when my hand slipped on the steel bumper of an old blue Triumph Herald and, buttery-safe drunk as I was, I slithered down the length of the hill, spinning and giggling, clutching at ice-sleek cars, my coat snagging and tearing. I hurtled through Jacob’s Wells and came to rest at the foot of Brandon Hill, fitting neatly into the deep gutter. I lay there stunned and stared at the stars.

It was on Constitution Hill that I built my first deck, a simple, ham-fisted affair. Cheap Malaysian rubber-tree wood, artlessly devised to hold the weight of a stout family as they sunned themselves after Sunday roast. It was a neighbour who saw that pitiful effort and asked me to do the same at the back of his house. If a city is perched on hills, if it boasts shaming wealth built on blood, slaves and tobacco, then decks are good business. A long-windowed Georgian house of two storeys, even-eyed and finely balanced from the street, will be four storeys at the rear. Dropping down with a vertiginous swoosh to an untended garden. How pleasant, how convenient, to have a deck at the kitchen level. This was the notion that seeped into my addled brain as I lay in the gutter at the bottom of Constitution Hill. I didn’t know then that it would make me rich and lazy and heartless.