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Zig Zag often used sit on the bonnet of a yellow Citroen parked between the castle and the storey. The beardy man from Folly said you could see him from outer space, on Google earth, a grey pixel-smudge asleep on a dark rectangle.

A man who’d stayed at the prison told me that Zig-Zag had given him hope. Whenever he was taken in and out of the prison, he would see Zig-Zag lying on the car bonnet and he used to say to himself, if that fat orange freak is still there when the van brings me back, the day is going to be OK. To him the Storey looked like another institute of correction and he imagined it was a parallel prison in which there lived another version of him and that whatever happened to him in the castle, the opposite happened to him in The Storey, so when he was in a fight, he imagined the Storey Institute version of him lying in a hammock eating grapes with soft music playing.

The poem. I’m sure Fern talked about the poem I sent her. I’m sure she amused her university friends by reciting it at dinner parties with a comic Lancaster burr in her voice and referring to me as the lino poet. But a lot happened before the poem. The grammar school never worked out for me and I ended up at The Storey as well. But not the Storey Institute. The storey factory, with the spread coater, with the transprints inspection area, with the substrate for vinyl, the heat transfer paper, the gravure cylinders. Borden decorative products and imperial home décor. Storeys was a better name. Wallpaper and carpets tell stories - soothing motifs, over and over, like fairy tales - and for people who like somewhere neutral to aim their eyes, are a place of refuge.

Shift work at Storeys, long dead afternoons to fill; that’s when I saw Fern McCaulay again, on Meeting House Lane, wearing a green floaty dress with red Dr Marten boots, and dashing into the storey institute, and I knew it was Fern, and I don’t know what happened but the Storey Institute seemed to breathe me in off the street and suddenly I was in its vast foyer with Fern McCaulay and I don’t think she remembered me from school, but she caught me staring and said, ‘are you here for Dragons unicorns and their ilk: marvellous monsters from the medieval bestiary to contemporary imagination? Its free.’ and I said, ‘well, it would have to be,’ and a small smile deepened her dimples.

I watched her perform. A Storey institute girl lecturing for Lancaster university, and me the grammar school boy, stuck with my subsrate for vinyl and gravure cylinders.

I didn’t fall in love with Fern McCaulay until much later. I knew a lot about unicorns by then.

Find Zig-Zag - THE CHILDREN ARE CRYING.

(I can’t believe that in Fern’s blog she brings up Dave, that dickhead plumber who bodged the job on my dad’s kitchen. Have a look.)