A Brief History of Religion

Sometimes here it rains sluts, like elsewhere it rains sardines. They bank up in the gutters where they lie wriggling until the night comes and with it the baying men, scrumping for pussy, who catch them and bend them backwards and that is a hymn to me, my chalice and my ritual dagger. Sometimes one will leave behind a garter like a bejewelled slug and I will pick it up and take it home. Witches wear garters. I was probably a witch in another life, sucking skyclad on the devil's death-cold cock.

When I was younger I thought about making a god, and I collected toilet roll tubes and sticky-backed plastic and the pistachio nut shells that I see everywhere I go as though they have been laid out in a trail for me to follow. I cooked gods in my dingy kitchen, clambering goat-like over the mountains of filth. I whipped up a celestial smorgasbord; Hundreds and Thousands and asafoetida, cockles and offal and liquorice whips, gods scrambled or boiled down to stock, gods as the mock in my mock-turtle soup, gods salted and smoked and pickled and poached and then I licked the bowl clean.

I had gods of meat for whom I scratted in the bins, broke into butchers' shops, scarfed sausages raw and wore corsets of steak. I had deities of derelict buildings, cloaked in yellow newspapers, their eyes like boarded up windows. The winter-god came crabbed and skinning, beneath its caul of hoar frost grinning, backwards like the dead. When I worshipped winter I did it in a bath of ice, skin rucked to gooseflesh and teeth bared in a chattering rictus.

Then I decided to cut out the middle man and just worship myself. Easy peasy.