I Skin a Leg

Readers, I am beginning to doubt the extent of my evilness and fear that the life of a dark lord is not to be my destiny. I cannot deny that the Pole's constant weeping has aroused my sympathy. Furthermore, I have suffered the occasional pang of guilt throughout the day as I went about the grisly business of skinning the man.

My dead mother jeered and questioned my manhood when I expressed doubts, then likened me to a 'Soho Fruit'. Such mockery spurred me on to swallow my indecision and make a start on removing the Pole's skin. How the man wept! I told him not to take it personally, but he seemed determined to do so and kept asking, "Why me? Why do you do this thing to me?" Another favourite refrain of his was, "Please stop. Please let me live. I will give you money. Please, I have a family. I don't want to die. Please." Honestly, they're a talkative lot those Poles! His pleading, irritating though it was, caused me to feel pity for the man, which was most inconvenient.

I spent the entire afternoon hacking away at the man's left leg with a breadknife and a saw. The man's skin was shiny and hard and quite impossible to penetrate - my scissors and Stanley knife proved useless in this endeavour. Try as I might, I simply could not remove the skin from the Pole's leg. The man squealed and moaned the whole time too, which only served to make the process more annoying.

When Newsround came on, I gave up, utterly exhausted.

"Dear god, man! Are you protected by some voodoo and/or hoodoo?" I asked the Pole. "Try as I might, I simply cannot remove the skin from your Polish leg."

Well, readers, between heaving sobs, the Pole admitted to me that he had lost his left leg in a threshing accident as a child. Ever since then, he had been forced to wear a prosthetic.

I thought it was most rude of him not to make this known earlier, for he could easily have saved me the embarrassment of spending four and a half hours trying to skin an artficial leg. How humiliating. What must he think of me? I have promised him that I will do better next time.

As punishment for his cheek, I have confiscated his leg and have forbidden him from watching Jonathan Ross tonight.