It was in the late twenties that I first found my love of bog snorkelling. I'd recently returned from a toast juggling contest in Algeria when my cousin Wilberforce telephoned from Uzbekistan where he'd been tutoring the local kids in Einstein's field equations. He wanted to meet me for tea and cakes on the veranda at Lourdes, and who was I to refuse an offer like that?

Packing my essentials, a toothbrush and a copy of 'Loaded', I set sail across the Barents Sea to meet my distant cousin. After the usual pleasantries and customary bout of hardcore incestuous anal, we got down to brass tacks, which was amusing as brass tacks were Wilberforce's lubricant of choice. It turned out that he'd been invited to the Lanarkshire bog snorkelling championships by none other then Freddie Mercury. Alas, though, he could not attend as he has been brought low by a woman, or so he said. Feeling too ill of heart he bade me go in his stead and I was only too happy to accept. What better chance could I ever have of finding my long lost trousers? I remembered that Genghis was only too fond of bog snorkelling and there was surely no chance that he would wish to pass up the opportunity, and so I was sure he would be in Lanarkshire that hot summer.

When I arrived, the first thing I saw was that the hunt for my beloved trousers would continue. There was no sign of Genghis and so I would have to compete in the contest for the sheer joy, and to mollify my cousin of course. For forty three hours I snorkelled, tirelessly beating at the murky water with my stripling legs, and yet I failed to raise the trophy at the end having been narrowly beaten by a small Uruguayan girl of nine months. She was too powerful for me and so graciously I accepted defeat. That evening, as we swapped tales over a bag of cockles and a ham sandwich or five, I realised that this was my home, my true calling. No longer did I wish to jaunt across deserts or tunnel through drifts of snow in the Arctic. I wanted to end my days waist-deep in slurry, floundering against the Scottish bog. So it was with great sadness that I left that place, having been called into service in the Korean war. Kim Il-Sung had known my father and my service had been promised to the former by the latter many years earlier and I was not one to renege on an historic oath. With tears in my eyes I left Lanarkshire and was never seen again so far north.

Once again I grow weary and so, when I return, I will recount the curious events of May 7th, 2015, when I lost a game of badminton to Gary Kasparov in the jungles of Antigua.