Dextrose had clearly lived. The eyes said ‘early 40s’, the features said ‘add ten’. Stuff the Walter Raleigh of history books, who returned to these shores fawning and proffering root crops. Here was a real sea-faring hero, ravaged by alcohol and sexually-transmitted disease, who probably couldn’t remember the name of the ruling monarch. Were his parents alive, I felt sure they would have long since disowned him. Was there anything of me in him, I wondered? I liked beer and had always been an embarrassment to my parents.

  Inside, the publication date: 1973. My 18th occurred in 1983, a full decade later. I sought the Foreword:

I would always hook up with Livingstone Quench when I returned to England from my ground-breaking travels. It beat talking to Mrs Dextrose and inevitably took in a public house and lechery. We also shared a sense of humour. I saw plenty of myself in Quench, by which I am not suggesting that we mated. Besides myself, Livingstone Quench is the only human being I admire. What made him disappear off the face of the earth, I do not know.

  We had been imbibing in The Crock of Shit, niggled as usual by the crackerjack barnacle Wilson Niff, who could not take his alcohol. Friend Quench had

had a trick up his sleeve to relieve us of the bowler-hatted mink†. That morning, he had bottled his pungent first urine, treacle-coloured and of a similar consistency, and had lightly carbonated it in his Sodastream. When Niff excused himself, Quench swapped this foul brew with the minker’s scrumpy.

  We could barely control our glee. Disgracefully, Niff sank the full pint in one and demanded to know whose round it was next. Quench took umbrage and stormed out and that was the last I saw of him.

  No rumour, no postcard, nothing. Eventually, I heard tell he had opened his own hostelry in Aghanasp, in the middle of nowhere, and had named it Gossips.

  Gossips?! Unutterable twaddle! Only a goose names his bar after the idle chatter of women! I assumed that devils were abroad and set out to find Quench myself, to void this slander.

  Thus began my great Dextrosian Quest.

† Editor’s note: without wishing to curb the author’s way with words, in the interests of non-offensiveness, we have substituted Mr Dextrose’s multiple profanities with the word ‘mink’, which seems harmless enough.

  The edges of the pages were brown and gently undulating. On the cover was a black-and-white photograph of the author’s head. Harrison Dextrose stared defiantly into the camera, eyes alive with rancour. What manner of man was this? A full, dark beard festered around his jawline and encroached on his cheeks. His hair was a mop of curls, greased down in a futile attempt at neatness. Tiny broken blood-vessels coursed between the blackheads on his nose.

  Flaunt the imperfections – I loved Dextrose on sight.

The back-cover blurb read:

Harrison Dextrose is the last of the great British explorers. This is his first book, a cornucopia of strange incident, concerning his journey from Blithering Cove in England to Mlwlw in Aghanasp, tracking down his former acquaintance, the

philanthropist Livingstone Quench.

  Dextrose names this his Dextrosian Quest, a justly grandiose title. It will take him through lands rarely written about, because they are considered unfashionable. However, the author never ceases to find colour, even if he must inspire it himself. Which he often does.

It was my 18th birthday when I chanced upon Harrison Dextrose’s The Lost Incompetent: a Bible for the Inept Traveller, little knowing that it would one day lead me to kill a man with a dead penguin.

  I regularly visited Second-Hand Books in Glibley, my hometown, being a voracious reader of anything from fiction to manuals on making furniture (though I never actually made any). Each time, I would rifle discreetly through the vintage pornography tucked into a hidden corner – dog-eared copies of Girl Illustrated and Lost in Bloomers, their covers featuring demure girls with dark curls and wry smiles who had forgotten to wear any clothes.

  It was while flicking through the familiar magazine covers, as a birthday treat to myself, that I found Dextrose’s book. Perhaps someone had changed their mind about

buying it and had dumped it there. Or they had had

insufficient funds and All Gussets and Garters had won.

I picked it out, realising that fate had meant me to read it.  

  Fate did not let me down.

Doctor Who, Dalek I Loved You, Dalek, Memoir, Nick Griffiths, Gollancz, Orion, seventies childhood, david bowie, radio times, tom baker, david tennant, jon pertwee, patrick troughton, william hartnell, peter davison, colin baker, sylvester mccoy, christopher eccleston, harrison dextrose