NanaTed hangs in the kitchen from a reinforced steel joint.

Grandfather William built NanaTed when I was three years old. Despite his emphysema he continued to smoke, and as he grew more poorly on the downstairs settee he began to make soft toys.

There was once a family-of-NanaTed. She was of course the nana, while Manfred was the father, MotherTed was the mother, and LittleTed was the boy. NanaTed’s descendants were of a more straightforward appearance than she.

I don’t know whose mother NanaTed was supposed to be, and it’s futile to think about whether NanaTed ever had a husband.

MotherTed once fell in a bucket of urine on a camping holiday. Eventually she dried out, but her head remained lopsided until her demise. In the end, the dog chewed her to bits - which is surprising, as she can’t have tasted particularly nice.

It’s an audio-visual picnic »

Ten lame mariners dance along a bar while
a single Moby makes hopscotch of a coffin, long and
both occur
somewhere
as I walk to work
through Finsbury Circus
where nothing at all happens.

Ever.

Like an artichoke’s heart,
or the velvety tip
of a black dog’s ear,
you were sweet.

I got Bonzo in 1974, the same year I got my train set, and I remember immediately thinking that the monkey was uglier than the train set. However he scored over the train set in that he didn’t need batteries and he emitted only a tiny volume of ozone.

It wasn’t long before I was sleeping with Bonzo. This improved my life drastically, as I’d always thought it unfair that my parents shared a bed and my sisters shared a room, while I had to sleep in my own room and the dog had to sleep downstairs in the hall, beneath the telephone table. I’d asked if I might drag the telephone table up to my room in the hope the dog would follow, but Dad told me he’d measured the phone line and it wouldn’t reach.

I liked to chew Bonzo’s ears as I fell asleep. Some nights they reminded me of toffee apples; other nights they made me think of those candy shrimps you get in the pick and mix tray - a most bizarre confectionery I’ve always thought, though not perhaps as odd a confectionery as Bonzo’s Ears would have made.

Mam startled me one morning by suggesting I might like to store my pyjamas inside Bonzo. What on earth could she mean? She showed me that the golden zip that ran the length of the monkey’s back - which I’d always taken to represent his bra - gave access to a silken pouch deep within, which was currently stuffed with balls of crepe paper.

I shuddered at the thought. Although Bonzo had no entrails except for the crepe balls, I didn’t want to keep my pyjamas in his intimate space. Besides, the cavity was so small that I’d have struggled to get even a singular pyjama in there - never mind the plural form.

As Bonzo and I grew older together, the crepe balls within him slowly turned brown, as though they were peeled onions left in the wind. I knew this because once a year, on Christmas Day morning, I’d unzip the golden zip while the beast still slept and allow myself a peek at those fake organs of his, which occupied the stuffy void where my pyjamas were meant to be.

It wasn’t just Bonzo’s insides that disintegrated with the years - his outsides also took a battering. As my friends grew towards boisterous adolescence, each one felt compelled - for some reason - to beat the stuffing out of the poor fiend whenever he was in the same room. They’d smack him in the mouth, try to rip off his shrimpish ears, throttle him by his gold chain, throw him up in the air and drop-punch him, and sometimes they’d even hold his arms out straight and wind his body round and round, head over heels, until they let go and he unwound at dizzying, blurry speed like some drunken primate ice-skater.

I did so little to protect him, and grew used to picking up his stuffing from the carpet whenever my friends went home for their teas.

Bonzo still lives with my dad. I don’t know why I never took him with me. I show him to my daughter each time we visit her grandad’s, and although she always feigns interest she’s never asked to take him either.

How strangely unappealing he really is.

Every evening at dusk, a tiny bat flies in large, frantic circles around the tall conifer that sits in the middle of our back gardens. As it describes its orbit, it emits a barely-audible whistle like a small, unpierced potato in a microwave oven. There may be a reason for this similarity, but I don’t know.

When I was about four, my Dad asked me what I’d most like to see, so I told him that I’d most like to see a dinosaur. All the other children were doing it at the time.

So we drove for about an hour away from the suburbs and off into the woods. We reached a country lane where there were no other cars, and we got out and walked through the thick, bare trees, down a steep bank, and stopped by a lake that had frozen over. There were gnarled old branches resting on the ice. When I looked up I saw my Dad was pointing to the other shore of the lake where a really old tree trunk had years-ago fallen and had its branches stripped by time.

“What’s that?” I said.

My Dad said, “It’s a dinosaur.”

We stood and looked at it for a short while, then we drove somewhere else and my Dad bought me an ice-cream – but it was too cold for that and I only ate the cone.

A few years ago I was back in those suburbs as a middle-aged man whose ginger beard was turning grey. I drove myself out to the woods and found that country lane again. It was the middle of summer, but still there were no cars. Despite the thick vegetation I eventually found the path down the bank and came across the lake, which now had a few ducks but no branches.

There, across the lake, stood a huge, perfectly-formed Diplodocus, frozen in wood. My eyes couldn’t blink; I felt the years melt away, the ice fall from my heart.

For a tiny moment the dinosaur completely filled the overwhelming silence, and then I quickly turned and hurried back to the car.

How I wish I’d seen that dinosaur when I was about four.

To me, California always meant onions. These were soft onions, frying in butter, not hard onions, baking in the sun, or onions growing green shoots in a grocery basket. Soft onions. Of course California was also the sun, and the sea, and a man in a big hat talking about dogs and flowers.

When I first flew over California, and the Captain announced this was California, I looked down and saw cake-yellow desert and a few snowy peaks. The ground was deeply and widely fissured, which was news to me. I realised that this, more than anything, now meant California to me. I was not surprised at the lack of onion smell; if anything, the missing onions reassured me and told me that this was real, that I was there, albeit still at 24,000 feet and descending.

So, when they say that California is a state of mind, I can now add with confidence that the California state of mind is “a lack of onions”.

Paddy always looked so odd in the mirror. It was as if his head were inside out, or the tectonic plates of his furry face had slipped and scraped cataclysmically together before finally choosing to ignore one another.

I brushed my hair, earthing the static with a hand on the radiator beneath the mirror. Paddy whined with the expectation of going out. The hall smelled of cheap talcum powder masking foisty dog smell.

I turned to get my coat and saw Paddy jumping up and down on the spot. Three feet in the air, three feet down, over and over again. I reached out my hand to stop him then drew it back with a preternatural fear. He was the size of an Alsatian – he just shouldn’t have been jumping so.

“Cash register! Cash register!” he chanted. “Cash register!”

I turned back to the mirror and screwed my eyes shut. The shouting suddenly stopped. I squinted at Paddy’s reflection. He was just looking up at me quizzically, his patched head on a slant.

I put on my coat and grabbed his lead from the windowsill. He exploded into a fuzzy orb of excitement and we set off for the beach.