Notice I'm using the word it here. That's because I'm not saying what sex it was. I knew all right. After two months you get to know. After two seconds you get to know actually. But it doesn't matter anyway. I moved on from dogs after Aubrey took a lump out of my scrotum, tried lambs for a while but found them unresponsive. Not as unresponsive as mattresses though, but as near as makes no difference. Which reminds me, I was sitting having a cup of coffee in Starbucks last Tuesday and I picked up this free Irish News from a rack and what do you think was down in the bottom corner of one of the inside pages beside the Footsie 100? MAN ACCUSED OF LEWD ACT WITH MATTRESS. Beside the Footsie 100. Just think of the speculators that get hit with that when they're playing at the Footsie. Or the other one, the one that's played under tables. Different kind of speculation of course.

Where was I? The Irish News. I took just one quick disbelieving look at it, wouldn't lower myself to read the small print. I'd say that particular act must have been in a public place. Otherwise how would they know? We're getting reports of a male Caucasian sleeping with a mattress at the junction of Beechwood Avenue and Laburnum Terrace. Members of the public are advised not to approach.

But anyway, most of that stuff is behind me. I'm seventy-one now, Emeritus Professor of Humanities, respectably and unhappily married, writer of the popular Steam 4 Teens site and still looking at girls a quarter my age. What am I saying? Closer to a fifth my age.

But hang on. I should have begun all this by explaining how falling on my head turned me into a genius. I'd intended to tell you about that at the very start but when you get to my age it doesn't take much to distract you. A knock at the door, a flushing toilet, people out in the street having a row. You bloody forget what was in your head. So where was I? Being a genius wasn't it? That's it, being a genius. It actually happened after I threw myself out of a second-storey window at the age of fourteen and a half. And now I have this condition known as Acquired Savant Syndrome (labelled ASS by its detractors). 

What happened was, Pappa saw me coming out of the bathroom one morning in my bullet bra and Pretty Polly panties and he ran downstairs shouting that he was going to put a stop to this nonsense once and for all. If I'd known what was in his stupid mind I'd have locked my door but I didn't and there he was, coming at me across the bedroom with a big claw hammer. There was only one way out and that was the way I went. The window. And the next thing I remember was waking up in the backyard with Pappa's rottweiler Brando lying stone-dead under me. 

Three things resulted from this. One, Pappa went into a state of melancholia which he never came out of. Two, he didn't try to interfere with my wardrobe again. And three, I was transformed into a genius. From the moment I woke up in our back yard I wouldn't have thanked you for all the back copies of School Friend, a weekly comic for snooty adolescent girls that had been my staple diet for years, and to Momma's amazement and mine I began to visit the adult section of our local library. I quickly developed an interest in a book called Anna Karenina by a guy I'd never heard of called Leo Tolstoy, devouring it in two days before moving on to Hermann Hesse who, along with the complete works of Kant, Joyce, Schopenhauer and Descartes kept me going for the next three months.