The weather came out and Bryrtle was ready to change the world. It always happened the same way. Sunshine. Dreams. Sunshine. Dreams. This time? Gin was the answer.

He bought a distilling kit. Anyone can buy one. He set up shop in his grandmother’s outdoor lavatory.

“What’s going on in there?” Shouted the old mother master, waving her stick erratically in the air.

“Shut your webs and go back to knitting,” shouted the mottled dreamer. Once he got going, you couldn’t stop him.

Two days later he emerged with five bottles of gin and a very grave hangover. He looked wearily up at the house of his old grand mother master. She was stood in the window glaring down at the grandchild she had never asked for. It’s a shame the mother had died in a freak muffin accident. Now she was stuck with this weirdo lad when all she wanted was a cheap and easy retirement getting stoned and knitting the tea cosies.

The dreaming gin boy went straight to market. No one would return his calls or answer his emails, so he set up shop in the city centre. He called himself The Gin Wizard. Days went by. His gin made people wretch. Someone ended up with a fattened ankle (against their wishes, of course).

As he watched his seventh victim being wheeled into an ambulance, the gin wizard boy felt the hope abandoning him, much like a helium balloon on its way out. It was a cruel world and it kept teaching him cruel lessons and he was, once again, a very deflated being.

Back home to grand mother master he scurried. At least she’d have the kettle on. But unfortunately, she had copped it.

He stared at her lifeless body.

“Typical,” he muttered under his breath.

What now?

But the gin wizard boy didn’t possess answers, so he ordered a pizza and got stuck into some astrophysics.

There was a knock at the door.

“Hello?” He said, unsure of the future.

“It’s your grand mother master,” came the impatient reply.

“But you’re dead on the rug,” he said.

“You’ve had too much gin, boy. Now unlock that latch and let your fucking grandmother in before I shit on the step.”

And like all good Catholic boys, he did as he was told.