Meet the Natives

My dearest and most curiously moist of readers, I suppose that I should tell you about some of my fellow inmates, whom, over our shared months of incarceration, I have come to regard as, if not friends, then at least as fellow inmates.

In the cell directly next to the left of mine is a slim young man who was jailed for pica. Pica is an abnormal eating disorder whereby the sufferer is driven to consume non-food items such as wax, sponges, bookmarks, convex lenses, snooker cue chalk, and Ginsters Scotch Egg Bars. This fellow eats all manner of crazy things and is therefore excellent entertainment value. Around the asylum, he will happily eat light-bulbs, Blu-Tack, bedding, forks, coat-hangers, and a poster of Rita Hayworth that I was intending to use as part of an escape plan. He was locked up because he developed a peculiar appetite for baby mice, which he ate alive and which led to his expulsion from numerous pet shops around Dundee. He also ate the kidney of a paperboy.

In the cell across the corridor from me is Elwood P. Stewart, an amiable drunk and quite the nicest, most affable chap that anyone would ever hope to meet. A favourite around the asylum, he is friendly, kind-hearted, and honest. His only real "crime" in our blinkered and judgemental society is that he claims to be accompanied wherever he goes by an invisible six foot rabbit, whom he believes is just as pleasant and happy-go-lucky as himself. When I consider how relatively well-adjusted and stress-free Mr Stewart's life is, I begin to ask myself, "Who are the real madmen in this world?" But then I remember that Elwood also skinned his sister in 1979 and the answer becomes abundantly clear.

In the cell to the right of mine, is Amy Winehouse.