The stresses and strains were quite striking
All my vigorous years as a Viking.
In a subsequent life
As Napoleon’s wife
Things were frankly much more to my liking.

There are lines, all up the stairwell at home, of suckers waiting to be fleeced by my hypnotist neighbour who – in exchange for fat wads of greenbacks – claims to ‘regress’ them to previous existences. Almost invariably they were once men of action, ladies of leisure, persons of consequence. Almost inevitably his lies plunge them into deeper and deeper disenchantment with the daily greyness of their workaday worlds. So I harangue them from the bottom landing: ‘Get a grip, people! There’s another life you can live for nothing! You’re in it, now: make a move, take time by the horns, burn down the haystack while the cuckoo crumbles.’ And as they bustle off home, equipped – by my visionary rhetoric – with destinies colorfully reimagined, they almost instinctively press fat wads of greedy greenbacks into my outstretched paws.