I was more paranoid than ever then. A shitting seagull would be the least of my bad luck in a town filled with soul-sucking granddads and windowless churches where people couldn’t see what the priests were doing to you. I stepped back from the gutter, fearful of a crawling demigod appendage or half-munched cupcake begging for the sweet release of consumption.

But nothing happened. And, despite all the devils in the woodwork I had rather accidentally unearthed, nothing ever would really, because Raughnen was just another Yorkshire down-and-out living off the odd middle-class gawper come to see how those awful miners used to live before good old Thatcher put an end to it all. Well, those and me.

Standing there on the pavement, I slowly realised I still had a day out to have. I hadn’t come all this way to scarper at the first sign of an anti-social ghost. I was a Boro lad, born and bred, and because of that I had to take every opportunity to savour somewhere slightly less crap than home.

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But where could I go? There was a huge sign to the Demon Museum off down the road, and a charity shop with a display of flaky old dolls in the window. A bloke in a suit waving at me from the open door of a limousine with tinted windows, yelling out a pretty sweet deal for the Demon Museum. A crumpled leaflet left on a bench for the largest collection of twentieth century jet pipes in the county. There was also a radio playing a jaunty little jingle for the Demon Museum over at a paper shop opposite, a filthy old used appliance store painted vile lime green, in which a dozen or so knackered tellies were simultaneously showing slideshows of the Demon Museum, a distant yet disturbingly firm tug at the back of my mind urging me on towards the Demon Museum, and a scab-riddled arm writhing out of a bush in a long-forgotten planter by the bus stop, twisting about while a raspy voice muttered something about the Demon Museum from within.

Nah, I thought. Pull yourself together, man. Me mam hadn’t raised me to give in to wankers. I was my own man. I wasn’t going to give these nasty narrow-minded yokels what they wanted. And besides, if I did, I’d be off home to her right now and then I’d end up on the couch sobbing into a bowl of nachos over Antiques Roadshow before I knew it.

That’s right, I was gonna stay, whatever they said. Do my own thing.

I turned and marched away. Off to the Demon Museum.