Low life | 31 December 2015

For me, last year started with an appalling whitey outside a pub after swallowing a second ecstasy tablet because I thought the first wasn’t working. I was saved by a young woman yelling ‘Catch me!’ and taking a running jump into my arms — which forced me back to the physical realm — and by being violently sick. The ecstasy came in the form of small white circular unmarked pharmaceutical-grade tablets. The second was passed on to my tongue via the tongue of someone I had met for the first time two minutes before.

After that, 2015 was one tablet after another — legal and illegal. I also injected. Once a quarter, I stood beside an orange plastic NHS chair, dropped my trousers and a nurse administered a depot injection of a drug called decapeptyl into the soft flesh of an upper buttock. Decapeptyl inhibits my testosterone production to almost nothing.