Seen while out walking in Thornton Heath, north Croydon: an advertisement for Fosters Scuba, canned lager containing a compressed gas cannister which introduces bubbles into the liquid – ironically, like coming up too quickly from a deep dive would give you the bends, gases released from dissolution in the blood.

I once had a dream in which an old-fashioned aqualung, which looked something like a fire extinguisher, was forced into my throat. My face was battered to pieces, rags and flaps of bleeding flesh. The top of my head was pushed back and back, my jaw dislocated, then broken. Through my skull, the sound and feeling of my neck vertebrae crushing and cracking. The caustic electricity of visceral panic, which in real life would be silenced by death. Metal gouging gullies in my larynx, my lungs torn and pulped. Gargling, spraying blood and mucus, bone fragments driven through tubes and membranes, ribs splintering.

The morning after, I wondered whether I’d been lying on my back, felt some compression in the back of my neck, fantasised a violent misexplanation of those feelings and been carried away with the imagining. But when I asked a dream analyst about it, some time later, he suggested that the dream represented a self-imposed terror of fellatio, that I was programming the suppression of homosexual urges.

Fosters Scuba: slips down like a dream.

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