Hitchcock awoke with a dream hard-on and no-one to use it on.

Facing my reflection in the full-length mirror of the bathroom at half-past seven this morning and wearing nothing but an old navy-blue T-shirt bearing the word TROUBADOUR in white copperplate lettering, the bottom part of which was distended by a sizeable but perceptibly declining erection, I recited the abovementioned sentence—the opening gambit of my long-meditated work of fiction—seven times, theatrically modulating my voice with each iteration and ending with an hysterical falsetto I judged totally inappropriate.

Contemplating the felicitous congruence between the erection deforming my T-shirt like the centre pole of a miniature circus tent and the undeployed ‘boner’ in the seven-times-rehearsed opening sentence, I spared a thought for just how autobiographical literature can be. A reflection that naturally implied some degree of identification with Hitchcock, who in an initial incarnation had been christened Hardwood and then—less obviously—Harwood and then Hancock and then Hitchcock and then Hancock again and then finally (?) Hitchcock. And yet this identification could only be schematic at best, given that H-cock’s virtual existence was so far confined to this single sentence, the derisory fruit of a project I had embarked upon five weeks earlier with the firm resolution and sole purpose of giving literary form to a jostling congregation of inner demons (vaguely delineated storylines, thumbnail characters, scraps of dialogue, phrases, images…) whose exorcism ideally consisted in their being automatically and instantaneously converted into alphabetical characters, as if the throbbing cobalt-blue head from some migraine-medication commercial were to suddenly flip open and spill its volatile contents flush onto the printed page.

But there was no page. There was only the virtual white rectangle of the word-processing document and on this surface the fourteen derisory words of the opening sentence brought to a halt by a full stop beyond which the cursor stood patiently pulsing, awaiting the next bout of so-called inspiration, the next visitation. But when the Muse finally descended upon me as I sat nursing my laptop on the terrace (a monumental gin and tonic enthroned on the chair beside me to supplement her dubious bounty), she proved herself to be a tease and an Indian giver. After caressing the keyboard with nimble fingers of fire for anywhere up to half an hour, doubt set in and I ended up maniacally erasing everything letter by letter using the backspace key, deleting with the same implacable motion as the incoming tide eating away at an insubstantial fringe of sand. Everything, that is, except the stiff precision of the first sentence which, far from existing in a vacuum, was somehow resonant—at least to my sensitive ears—with the numerous hypothetical sequels I had tentatively typed in and then finally obliterated, just as an amputee is haunted by the continuing existence of a phantom limb.