What changed you, over the course of your life, here on earth? What were the significant events? The big moments, good and bad? Maybe some didn’t seem so big at the time but then, later, you looked back and said, ‘Yeah, that was important, I can now recognise that nothing else was ever the same after that.’ Or maybe they did seem big at the time, and then you realised they were even bigger. I have too many to list, but one that sticks in my mind was when the first giant black legs went into me. Was it really almost a century ago? It seems like yesterday in a way, yet also simultaneously seems like the giant black legs have always been in me and I can’t really remember what it felt like to not have giant black legs in me. I can still remember the pain I felt when they went in, like no pain I’d ever felt before, a pain that was about more than just the piercing of my skin.

Can you imagine it? You’re there, the dew is fresh all over you, the sky has not long got light, and the most dystopian sights in your immediate vicinity are a mounted hay turner that’s slowly shedding its paintwork and sinking into a spinney on your pelvic girdle and Charles Bamford’s abandoned prototype Vauxhall Cadet on Riddlefoot Lane, and then suddenly these men arrive, and they appear to be erecting these giant robots on the bridges of your feet; a long line of them, marching off into the distance, towering metal soldiers that seem to presage the coming of something terrible but you don’t know quite what. And you are powerless; all you can do is stand there and watch as they are put in place, as they become an intrinsic part of you that you have never asked for, and then lines are connected between them, lines that fizz and crackle, and that is even scarier, because it’s ugly and dark, and there have been ugly and dark things forever, which it has been possible to accept, because they seem part of the natural balance of everything, but now it seems that the ugly and dark things will be controlled by machines, and that is going to be different. You don’t know how it is going to be different, but you know.