It was a white rabbit with pink eyes. I walked all the way home with it held in a makeshift sling fashioned out of my jacket. Even now I find it incredible to think that I would have walked all that way with it. I am no fan of small mammals. I have given it a temporary berth in the bath. In the bath the enamel turns its white fur a yellower hue. Strange how the act of comparison can suddenly transform one clearly defined object into something else altogether. Life has a nasty habit of doing that.

I noticed that there was a tiny hole in the bathroom window. Later on I found an even tinier stone in the toilet bowl.

But that was not all I found. Oh no. The bin, the missing bulb, the hole in the window (all serious, in their own way, admittedly) were as nothing by comparison (that rabbit in the bath phenomenon, remember?) with the thing I found in my bedroom. I say ‘thing’, but it was more than a mere ‘thing’, it was a performance, a staging, an extravaganza. It was a complete one-act drama. I hate to oversell it, but … come with me. Enter the room. Push open the door and then grimacingly recoil. There is a smell … Not even a smell, a stink, a vile, ungodly odour. Something so foul, so rank, that mere words – simple, uncomplicated language – cannot do justice to its offensiveness. A slap in the face. A physical reaction. A gut reaction. A violent recoil. An existential shudder. A withering of the soul. A shrinking. A boring at the nostril. A tearing at the throat.

But where? From whence doth this rancid odour hail, pray tell? (I’ve fallen into Olde English in a pathetic attempt to try and encompass how primordial this smell is, how primitive, how base, how … how medieval – and how fearful I am, how confused, how repulsed; but still pretending, nevertheless, to be bold, pretending to be jocular; call to mind, if you must, a cheery fifteenth-century soldier – a Man of Fortune – or, better still, a palsied whore or cocky jester.) I search the room, a shirt over my face. My forehead is instantly dripping with sweat. My hand is a claw. I am a zombie. My body is panicking. It’s instinctive. The smell is so … so engulfing.

Eventually I settle on my suitcase, my empty suitcase (old leather, a gift from my maternal grandfather when I went up to Cambridge). It lies under the bed. I drag it out by its handle. I am so full of dread. Hands shaking. Palms wet. I steady myself. My heart is pounding. One, two, three – Come on, Franklin! Grow some balls, man! – I throw open the lid.

NNNAAAAARRRRGGHHHH!

So much worse – so, so much worse – than I could possibly have anticipated! Several hundred huge, buzzing bluebottles swarm out of the case and into my face. It is as though the devil himself (I’m an atheist, but bear with me) has been compressed in that small space. And now he is free. And he is angry. The sound! The intensity of that roar! The violence of those wings! The sense of un … un … unexpurgated filth! And remaining? In the case? The putrefying corpse of a dead shark. A dead sand shark, no less.