So, you’re wondering why I told you I was dead? Firstly, because you didn’t read it properly. I never said I was certain I was dead. I took ‘oratory precautions’, as they say when you bust a gut trying to speak like in a book on Greek mythology. I did say, I think. And that was true. Honestly, I don’t know where I was all that time. I told you, there were the lorry’s headlights, then a sort of black hole, and I could definitely tell that, afterwards, I wasn’t in real life any more. Even though I continued to think, to reflect. Like in a long dream, but without all the weird stuff. No images of me flying through the air doing backstroke, no three-headed ghost pursuing me down the corridors of Sleeping Beauty’s castle, no sex with Jennifer Preston-Conwell – nothing, zilch, niente, nada – simply normal, everyday thoughts.

You’re quite rightly asking how I know I’m not dead. I’d like to tell you that I saw the tunnel, a white light, that God called me to Him, that He was beautiful, that He was big, that He had the fragrance of warm clouds, and that He said to me, ‘Your time hasn’t come, young Louis; go back down to Earth and don’t come back for around a hundred years.’ Except that, in reality, it wasn’t at all like that. In reality, I was in my dreamworld-that-wasn’t, I could no longer feel my body, I was no more than a spirit, a thought. No, I’m not mad, I promise you – I mean, I don’t think I am – but you’ll have sussed by now that you have to be wary of my I thinks.