I had left a baking tray in the oven that morning and by now it should have become a miniature Death Valley of hard-baked morphine granules .sx I opened the oven door to find a dark brown ruckled surface , gratifyingly broken here and there into regular patterns of scales , like the skin of some moribund lizard .sx I used a steel spatula to scrape the material up and placed it carefully in a small plastic bowl ( the one decorated with a sequence of leaping bunny rabbits ; after the divorce , my wife divided the chattels :sx she took the adult-sized plates and cutlery , leaving me with our children's diminutive ware) .sx Although I've had no formal training in chemistry , I have , by a process of hit and miss , developed a method that allows me to precipitate a soluble tartrate from raw morphine granules .sx But there's a problem .sx Because I obtain my morphine supplies from bottles of kaolin purchased in sundry chemists ( if the bottles sit for long enough most of the morphine rises to the top ) , the stuff still contains an appreciable amount of chalk .sx Months of injecting have given my body an odd aspect .sx With every shot , more chalk has been deposited along the walls of my veins , much in the manner of earth being piled up to form an embankment or a cutting around a roadway , mapping out the history of my addiction .sx Having methodically worked my way through the veins in my arms and legs , turning them the tan colour of drover's paths , then the darker brown of cart tracks , until eventually they've become macadamized , blackened , by my abuse .sx I can now stand on my broken bathroom scales and see a network of calcified conduits radiating from my groin .sx Some have been scored into my flesh like underpasses ; others are raised up on hardened revetments of flesh :sx bloody flyovers .sx I have been driven to using huge five millilitre barrels , each one fitted with the long , blue-collared needles necessary for hitting the arteries .sx Should I miss , the consequences for my circulatory system could be disastrous .sx I might lose a limb ; there could be tailbacks .sx I wonder sometimes if I may be losing my incident room .sx And can you blame me ?sx There is , moreover , the matter of the thesis .sx Not only is the subject obscure ( some might say risible ) , but I have no grant or commission .sx Why am I doing it ?sx It would be all right if I were some dilettante , privately endowed , who could afford to toy with such things , but I am not .sx Rather , I have both myself to support and the maintenance to keep up .sx If the maintenance isn't kept up my ex-wife will become as obdurate as any consulting civil engineer .sx She has it within her power to arrange bollards around me , even to insist on tolls .sx There could be questions in the bungalow - something I cannot abide .sx But last night none of this troubled me .sx I was lost in the arms of Morphia .sx Around I swept , pinned by g-force into the tight circularity of history .sx In my reverie I saw the M40 as it will be ( still no services ; all six carriageways and the hard shoulder are grassed over ; only shallow depressions visible from the air ) , perhaps some twenty thousand years from now , when the second neolithic age has dawned over Europe .sx Relative " Can I pay for these ?sx " .sx " Whassat ?sx " .sx " Can I pay for these - these de-scalers ?sx " Time is standing still in the hardware store .sx It is dark and scented with nails and resinous timber .sx I had no idea that the transaction was going to prove so gruelling .sx The proprietor is looking at me the same way that the pharmacist does when I go to buy my kaolin .sx " Why d'you want three ?sx " Is it my imagination , or does his voice really have an edge of suspicion ?sx " I've got an incredible amount of scale in my kettle , that's why .sx " I muster an insouciance I don't feel .sx Since I have been accused , I know that I am guilty .sx I know that I lure young children away from the precincts of the model village and subject them to appalling , brutal , intercrural sex .sx I abrade their armpits , their knee pits , the juncture of their thighs , with my spun mini-rolls of wire .sx That's why I need three .sx Guilt dogs me as I struggle to ascent the High Street .sx Guilt about my children .sx Ever since my loss of sense of scale , I have found it difficult to relate to my children .sx They no longer feel comfortable visiting me here in Beaconsfield .sx They say they would rather stay with their mother .sx The model village , which used to entrance them , now bores them .sx It was the boy who blew the whistle on me , grassed me up to his mother .sx At seven , he is old enough to know the difference between the smell of tobacco and the smell that comes from my pipe .sx Naturally he told his mother , and she realized immediately that I was back on the M. In a way I don't blame him - it is a filthy habit .sx And the business of siphoning off the morphine from the bottles and then baking it in the oven until it forms a smokable paste - well , I mean , it's pathetic , the DIY addiction .sx No wonder that there are no pleasure domes for me , in my briccolage reverie .sx Instead I see twice five yards of fertile ground , with sheds and raspberry canes girded round .sx In a word :sx an allotment .sx When my father died he subdivided his allotment and left a fifth of it to each of his children .sx The Association wouldn't allow it .sx They said that allotments were only leased rather than owned .sx It's a great pity , because what with the subsidies available and the new intensive agricultural methods , I could have probably made a reasonable living out of my fifth .sx I can see myself :sx making hay with a kitchen fork ; spreading silage with a tea spoon ; bringing in the harvest with a wheelbarrow ; ploughing with a trowel tied to a two-by-four .sx Bonsai cattle wend o'er the lee of the compost heap as I recline in the pet cemetery .sx .. It was not to be .sx Returning home from High Wycombe , I add the contents of my two , new bottles of kaolin and morphine to the plant .sx Other people have ginger beer plants ; I have a morphine plant .sx I made my morphine plant out of a plastic sterilizing unit .sx It would be a nice irony , this transmogrification of taboo , were it not for the fact that every time I clap eyes on the thing I remember with startling accuracy what it looked like , full of teats and bottles , when the children were babies and I was a happier man .sx I mentioned the dividing of chattels following the divorce .sx This explains why I ended up , here in Beaconsfield , with the decorative Tupperware , the baby bouncer , sundry activity centres and the aforementioned sterilizing unit .sx Whereas my ex-wife resides in St John's Wood , reclining on an emperor-sized bateaulit ; my vessel , when I cast off and head out on to the sea of sleep , is a plastic changing mat , decorated with a regular pattern of Fred Flintstones and Barney Rubbles .sx It's fortunate that the five 'police procedurals' that I wrote during my marriage are still selling well .sx Without the royalties I don't think I would be able to keep the members of my ex-family in the manner to which they have become accustomed .sx I cannot imagine that the book I am currently working on , Murder on the Median Strip , will do a fraction as well .sx ( I say that confidently but what fraction do I mean ?sx Certainly not a half or a quarter , but why not a two hundredth or a four hundredth ?sx This is certainly conceivable .sx I must try and be more accurate with my figures of speech .sx I must use them as steel rulers to delimit thought .sx Wooliness will be my undoing .sx ) .sx In Murder on the Median Strip ( or M on the MS as I refer to it ) , a young woman is raped , murdered and buried on the median strip of the M40 , in between Junction 2 ( Beaconsfield ) and Junction 3 ( High Wycombe) :sx a howdunnit , rather than a whodunnit .sx The murder occurs late on a Friday evening when the motorway is still crowded with ex-urbanites heading for home .sx The police are patrolling , looking for speeders .sx Indeed , they have set up a radar trap between the two principal bridges on this section of road .sx And yet no one notices a thing .sx When the shallow , bitumen-encrusted grave is discovered , the police , indulging in their penchant for overkill , decide to reconstruct the entire incident .sx They put out a call on Crimewatch UK for all those who were on the motorway in that place , at that time , to re-assemble at Junction 2 .sx The public response is overwhelming and by virtue of careful interviewing - the recollection of number-plates , makes of car , children making faces and so forth - they establish that they have managed to net all the cars and drivers that could have been there .sx The logistics are immensely complicated , but eventually , by dint of computer-aided visualizations , the police are able to re-enact the whole incident .sx The cars set off at staggered intervals ; the police hover overhead in helicopters ; patrol cars and officers on foot question any passers-by .sx But , horror of horrors , while the reconstruction is actually taking place , the killer strikes again .sx This time between Junction 6 ( Watlington ) and Junction 7 ( Thame) .sx Once more his victim is a young woman , who he sexually assaults , strangles and then crudely inters beneath the static , steel fender of the crash barrier .sx That's as far as I've got with M on the MS .sx Sometimes , contemplating the MS , I begin to feel that I've painted myself into a corner with this convoluted plot .sx I realize that I may have tried to stretch the credulity of my potential readers too far .sx In a way the difficulties of the plot mirror my own difficulties as a writer .sx In creating such an unworkable and fantastic scenario I have managed , at least , to fulfil my father's expectations of my craft .sx " There's no sense of scale in your books , " he said to me , shortly before he died .sx At that time I had only written two procedurals , both featuring Inspector Archimedes , my idiosyncratic Greek Cypriot detective .sx " You can have limited success , " he went on , " chipping away like this at the edges of society , chiselling off microscopic fragments of observation .sx But really important writing provides some sense of the relation between individual psychology and social change , of the scale of things in general .sx You can see that if you look at the great nineteenth-century novels .sx " He puffed on his pipe as he spoke ; observing his wrinkled , scaly hide , his red lips and the yellow teeth masticating the black stem , I was reminded of a basking lizard , sticking its tongue out at the world .sx A letter arrived this morning from the Municipality , demanding payment of their head tax .sx When I first moved here a man came from the borough valuer's to assess the rateable value of the property .sx By dint of quick work with the trellises , I managed to make it look as if Number 50 , Crendon Road , was in fact one of the houses in the model village .sx To begin with the official disputed the idea that I could possibly be living in this pocket-sized manse , but I managed to convince him that I was a doctoral student writing a thesis on 'The Apprehension of Scale in Gulliver's Travels , with special reference to Lilliput' ; and that the operators of the model village had leased the house to me so that I could gain first-hand experience of Gulliver's state of mind .sx I even entered the house and adopted some attitudes - head on the kitchen table , left leg rammed through the french windows - in order to persuade him .sx The result of this clever charade was that for two years my rates were assessed on the basis of seven feet , eight inches square of living space .sx