The wild years were over. Curtis was no longer the Big Mouth of Ladbrokes or the Big Brain (sic) of the Skittles team. Andy was no longer a loner-about-town, wandering the Bus Station, chasing stray dogs on the pavements stained with chewing gum or climbing roofs to better see the stars (or at least so he told the coppers when they came for him). No. All that life had left for them was the house, garden and quick trip to off-licence, Curtis truly drifting along to meet up with the end of his days and ‘Andy’ headed to a way way stupid and premature retirement at age not even 13.

The informal cellar chats of them two (in a back drop of old paint pots, spider webs, rusted tools and rotten stacks of polystyrene packaging) were wide ranging in topics -from the merits and demerits of football to the twisted plot of Insane Asylum 5 and the complete and searing injustice of a six-month ban on the two of them by one particular fat bastard local publican. The fact that Andrew was an illegal drinker in any case and that Curtis for his part had a tab behind the bar he could already never hope to repay in the course of his natural life was from their consideration a total irrelevance, the ban itself against all moral, natural law and custom of the land – an outrage in short, like getting a parking ticket right outside your own house, assuming you even had a car (which obvs neither of them did).

Mostly tho, for their late-night cellar chats the unlikely duo loved to pontificate concerning the philosophy, advanced physics, structure and actual system of the universe. On this latter topic grey-haired Curtis, wise in his long years and pedantic in his more-or-less permanent drunkenness was a more fearsome expert than most might have expected from a bloke off the formerly nationalised railway. Indeed, after a few of the cans mentioned above Curtis would often declare (and sometimes by complex argument prove) that the world was just a illusion, a shadow of a figment in a mirror underwater like a dream.