In 2003 I was working as a lumberjack on the foothills of Mount Doom, Mordor. I'd decided to go looking for work in the South after having become disillusioned with the hype and stage management of WWE wrestling, of which I'd been a part for so many years. Taking very little with me I left on the first train out of Rayleigh and made my way down the Grampian mountains to where my future lay. We stopped just outside Vienna one day to take on water and coal, and it was here that I first witnessed the phenomenon of goat jumping. A large number of city traders were gathered outside a small sandwich shop and, lined up before them, were thirteen large goats. Each man would pull on a pair of special cardboard sandals, take a long run up and try to leap over the goats without touching them. Very few succeeded, and by the time we left, three weeks later, there were only two goats left standing. The rest had been crushed by over zealous and under skilled stockbrokers, confined forever to limp around the marketplace begging for food. I never returned to Austria.

When I finally reached my new workplace, the Eye of the Dark Lord being a welcome change from the stuffiness of the train carriage, I set to work immediately. I hadn't yet found an employer, so my plan had been that I would single handedly cut down as many trees as I could and drag them to one of the merchants in the hope that he would tender me an offer. Well, and this is obvious in hindsight, of course there are no trees at the feet of Mount Doom. They had all been stripped to make way for the Olympic Park which now stood gleaming in the springtime sun. Not to be deterred I began uprooting any small plant or bush that I came across and, by the following summer, I had amassed a whopping eight kilograms of wood which I then carried to the local branch of B&Q, hoping to find gainful employment there. Unfortunately though, my troubles were not over as this particular branch had been closed down and reopened as a doughnut shop.

I must admit that, at this point, I was beginning to feel a little discouraged but, just as I was about to pack up my things and head off to a new life as a Geisha in Okinawa, something I did eventually do, a young man came up to me and offered to buy my wood. It turned out that he and his chums were erecting some form of play den in his father's workshop and so he offered me two pounds and fifteen pence for the lot. Well, I couldn't believe my luck. Finally, after all of the sweat, the toil and the rejection, I had made my fortune. Now I would be able to buy the luxury yacht I had been drooling over in Liechtenstein. At two hundred feet it was only a small craft, quite pokey inside, but I was a modest man in those long ago days and it was quite suitable for my purposes. So, taking my new found riches I headed back north, past Isengard, taking a boat up the Brandywine and finally washing up in Rio de Janeiro where I would take a taxi to Istanbul. From there I would take the long haul flight to London, wind surf over the Thames and eventually, after several short years of travelling, end up in the little dusty shop where my beloved boat was for sale. Making the purchase left me still with an over abundance of hard cash, so I spent the next few weeks painting the town red with the guitarist from Blur, Boutros Boutros Ghali and a hooker named Gwendoline. Such fun we had, chasing cats down the streets and throwing mud pies at pedestrians. Those were heady days and I must confess I often times shed a tear for that which is now lost.

My tale ends here today, but tomorrow, should I be spared, I shall recount the gruesome tale of the time Victoria Beckham beat me at strip poker.