The bore is the human cuckoo. He will take over anything, usurp any nest. His one outstanding feature is that he has no features. He has nothing what… - Derek Raymond

Nothing else much matters once you have achieved the hardest thing, which is to act out of conviction. Even if you have been beaten by evil, in the bitterness of defeat the battle has left a trace for the others, and you can go feeling clean. I recognise that I am a minor writer; but this does not affect the depth of my convictions.

'You're not very good at it, are you?' said Gust, 'they ought to have sent heavies in.' He thought the man very likely could have got a job playing Hess in this new TV series they were doing on the war, and he would have had a word with a few directors he knew in Soho if he had been a mate of his. But, as he wasn't, Gust kicked him in the stomach as he tried to drag himself up on one leg with the help of the bar-rail, then turned back to the other man. 'You all right?' he said. 'How are you feeling now? Chipper?' He took one of the man's ears in his thumb and forefinger; the ear was tiny, considering the size of his head, and it had little hairs inside it. Gust picked up a cocktail stick out of a dirty glass on the bar and jabbed it down into the eardrum as far as he could; when he pulled it out the stick was half-way red, and there was some grey stuff in it as well. He shouted down his ear: 'I think I just broke your foot!' but the man wasn't making sense any more; he was wailing with his hand clapped to the side of his head, swaying up and down from the waist like a bereaved widow, or else perhaps he just didn't hear, or maybe the music was too loud. Gust realised then that he had pushed the stick in too far and that the man would probably die. Dirty cocktail-stick in the brain? What a bleeding way to go! Now the man with the broken leg tried another naughty stroke; although he only had one hand free because he was using the other one to hold onto the rail, he still managed to smash a glass and try putting it in Gust's face. 'This is just self-defence after all,' Gust said to himself. He stamped on the man's feet again; this time he definitely felt bones go and the man screamed, dropped the glass and let go of the rail; but instead of letting him fall Gust took him round the waist, ripped his fly open and searched inside his pants until he found his testicles, which he yanked right out into his hand. Their owner can't have been much into baths because they smelled like something tepid from a canteen counter. Gust wrung them like the devil having a go at a set of wedding bells with all the grip he had, until the man was shrieking on the same D minor as the music. 'It's nothing personal,' said Gust, 'but I'm afraid you're going to have to learn to fuck all over again.' He wiped the blood off the man's prick down his face, then pulled the face towards him and drove his nose into his brain with his head. The music boosted into E major on a key change, and the man doubled up under a bar-stool, leaving a lot of blood behind him while Gust receded into the half darkness towards the black drapes on the walls.

It seems to me that no matter whether you marry, settle down or live with a bird or not, certain ones simply have your number on them, like bombs in the war; and even if you don't happen to like them all that much there's nothing you can do about it – unless you're prepared to spend a lifetime arguing fate out of existence, which you could probably do if you tried but I'm not the type.