Now this appealed to me right down to the ground. Think about it. It’s not like a game of football where you just try your best. You’re given handicaps right from the start. Like, for instance, elves are rubbish at magic. Alright. And then you go along with that. You’ll need to figure it out without magic, in that case. Then you have a guy upstair called The Dungeon Master. This is the guy what creates the entire scenario. Only he doesn’t get to make the final call. That comes down to the roll of a dice. And not any normal dice, mind. You get four-sided dice and six-sided dice and eight-sided dice and ten-sided dice and twelve-sided dice and twenty-sided dice; all these dice. I thought the roll of a dice was simple. I was kidding myself. The reality is that you roll the dice and you roll the dice again. And you can’t lose, really, as long as you play your part. But see as soon as you quit doing that, see as soon as it’s all about getting ahead in the game, regardless of what gamers call your characteristics, which is the map of your dungeons, which is the home of your dragons, then the game is up, and it’s a bogey.

*

I look up at Tommy and Barney, sitting there, reading the comics. Tommy takes a piece of chewing gum out his mouth, sticks it underneath the desk. He looks up at me and he winks – did you see that, did you see him there? – then he goes back to reading. I hope to fuck we’ve got a dice that’s big enough, is what I says to myself, when I first seen that.

Part Two: The Best Decade What Ever Lived

Once a month me and Pat would go on a night out, just the two of us. It always cost a fortune because Pat would make us get a taxi there and back and we’d go to these expensive bars and then a discotheque afterward. There was this place he liked to go, The Diamond in the city centre. There were some cracking birds in there, to be fair, dancing in the leotards and with the high heels and the leg warmers and the pink lipstick. To this day it’s the look that I go for the most, but nobody dresses like that anymore so as all I’m left with is the internet and some fucking unplayable videos from the seventies, so that’s me snookered, in real life.