Life can be very strange, and a concomitant of too trying hard, no pun intended, has to be the side effects. My mate Bernhard gave me a packet of Just Lust, a ‘pro-sexual stimulant’ that according to the packet ‘amplifies performance and heightens sensuality for both him and her’. “Go on, Mate,” he said. “Give it a go over the weekend you might surprise yourself. Beats the hell out of Viagra. It worked miracles for me.” My girlfriend at the time, who was affectionately known to all of our circle as Leg-over Lulu, her real name was Susan, was more than up for it on the Friday night.

We left the Hac early to go back to Susan’s place because my car was parked outside, and knocked the pills back in the taxi with a bottle of Pils, one of the six I’d got in my overcoat pockets. The Hac, it’s pronounced Hass, is the Hacienda, a bit of an infamous rave club at the end of Whitworth Street, in Manchester. Look it it up on the internet, it was quite a place in its day. Anyway the reason we left early was Susan lived right out in the sticks in a little village called Glazebury a few miles outside Leigh. It was getting on for twenty miles out of the city and was a thirty minute journey even if the cab driver was a lunatic, and most of them were.

Bernhard was right, they worked as soon as we were through the front door. A jack hammer had nothing on me, and I thought we’d have neighbours knocking on the door as Screaming Susan, another affectionate nickname, gave it everything she’d got. At eight in the morning she was spaced out dead to the world with a smile on her face and unavailable for more, and although I did think about it I’ve never fancied necrophilia. However I was wide awake and needed to work off my needs.

So I got up and decided to wash the car. I did the lot, valeted it, body work, wheels, windows. Then I remembered that sticky crap that had glued the old tax disc holder to the window when I bought it. You youngsters won’t remember them, tax discs, properly referred to as vehicle excise licences, had to be displayed in any car that was on a public highway. They had to be displayed in the ‘appropriate position’ which was on the windscreen in the bottom left hand corner. It was an offence to display it anywhere else, and folk were prosecuted who’d paid for one, but it was late in the post, for having one in the wrong place and most heinous of all for having one drop off the windscreen onto the floor, so people glued them on to the windscreen.

Sorry about that rather rambling explanation. I was just trying to explain the glue on the windscreen. So I went into the kitchen and looked about to see what was available. I found a bottle of white spirits under the sink. Try as I would I couldn’t shift the stuff on the windscreen. I reckoned maybe white spirit ages, you know like petrol for lawnmowers and the like over winter when they aren’t in use, anyway it was no damned good. I decided to get some fresh from a hardware shop in Leigh when the shops opened.

Susan got up at eleven to make breakfast, which we had in bed because the stuff was still in our systems. It would have been getting on for six when, finally sated as we were getting dressed to have a quiet, unenergetic evening in watching a couple of videos, I told her about the white spirits. She asked me to get the bottle. I did, and that was when I found out it contained holy water her aunt Mary had brought back from Lourdes. Bloody Catholics! When I want a miracle I’ll give Bernie a ring.