I loved the place.

I elbowed my way through the crowd of youths and edged towards the bar. These were the days before black T-shirts had become an acceptable form of gig wear. These were still the days of the cheesecloth shirt. You don’t see cheesecloth shirts any more – which is a shame, because I really liked them. No shirt fits like a cheesecloth shirt. Really tight across the shoulders and under the armpits, where they soon get a big stain going. And the way they pulled at the buttons, leaving those vertical eye-shaped slits so your chest and belly showed through. And those huge floppy collars.

And everything.

I’ll say this for the seventies. People really knew how to dress back then. I’d looked hot as a mod. And later as a hippie, but I looked my best as a seventies groover. My platform soles were three layers high. And would have made me the tallest bloke in the pub if everyone else hadn’t been wearing platforms too.

The landlord in those days was Kimberlin Malkuth the Fourth, Lord of a Thousand Suns. His given name was Eric Blaine, but Eric Blaine possessed a certain gift. It was a gift that was his own. The gift of the True Name Knower.

According to Eric, the names we are given at birth – the surnames we inherit from our parents and the Christian names they choose for us – are not our real names. Our true names. The names that we should be called.

It didn’t make a lot of sense to me at the time, but it did to Eric, or, rather, to Kimberlin Malkuth, Lord of a Thousand Suns, as he was known, having changed his name by deed poll. Because Eric had had a revelation (possibly involving the use of hallucinogenic drugs back in the sixties) whereby he became aware of his true name and the fact that he had the ability to recognize the true names of others, just by looking at them. It could be argued that, as the landlord of a pub, this might have put him in a certain peril with more truculent patrons, who might well have taken exception to him renaming them. But it didn’t.

This was, and is, after all, Brentford. Where tolerance is legendary and minds are as open as a supermarket on a Sunday.

And also, and this may well have been the big also, the names the enlightened landlord bestowed upon his oft-times bewildered patrons were so noble and exotic that few were ever heard to complain and most, indeed, revelled in their new and worthy nomenclatures.

“Lord Kimberlin,” I hailed him. “Pint of fizzy rubbish over here, when you have a moment free.”

“’Pon my word,” said the landlord, casting an eye in my direction. “If it isn’t the Honourable Valdec Firesword, Archduke of Alpha Centuri.”

“That’s me,” I said. “Any chance of a pint, all-knowing one?”

“Coming right up.” Lord Kimberlin did the business and presented me with my pint. “Haven’t seen you for a while, Archduke,” he said to me. “But you’ve come on a good night. Not only is Quilten Balthazar, Viceroy to the High Grandee of Neptune, playing here tonight but Zagger To Mega Therion, the master bladesman of Alphanor in the Rigel Concourse is on lead guitar.”

“Should be a show worth watching, then,” said I, accepting my pint and paying up promptly.

“You’re not kidding there,” said the landlord. “And what a crowd in to watch, eh? See there the Baron Fidelius, slayer of Krang the Cruel?”

I followed the direction of the landlord’s pointing and spied Nigel Keating the postman.

“And with him the Great Mazurka.”

I spied Norman from the corner shop.

“And there is the legendary Count Otto Black.”

I glanced over my shoulder and there was Count Otto Black.

“But …” I said.

“The exception that proves the rule,” explained the barlord.

I took up my pint and pushed my way back through the crowd to chat with Count Otto, whom I’d known since a lad.

The count’s family had been émigrés during the Second World War. They came from some place or other in the wilds of Europe that had “vania” on the end of it, but I could never pronounce it properly, having been poorly educated and always having a note that excused me from geography on religious grounds. The count’s father had been the other Count Otto Black – the one who ran the Circus Fantastique, with which my Uncle Jon used to perform.

The count worked as a packer at Brentford Nylons. In fact, it was he who’d alerted Sandra that there was a vacancy coming up there. She’d been first in the queue and now was the employment officer at the factory. In charge of future hirings. A sudden thought regarding my present circumstances entered my head. But the bar was noisy and the thought left as quickly as it had entered.

“Count Otto,” said I. “Hello.”

The count stared down upon me. He was very tall, the count. Always had been. Even when he was small, he was tall. Tall people so often are.

“Gary,” said Count Otto. “I hear that you’ve taken employment once more. Tough luck, old fellow. You have my sympathy.”

“I need it more than you know,” I said.

“I think not,” said Count Otto. “I’ve heard that you’ve taken the bulb man’s job at the telephone exchange. You really need all the sympathy I have. It’s yours; take it with my blessings.”

“I’m in the dog muck,” I said. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You should look on the bright side,” said the count. “It will soon be Saturday.”

“I think I need a bit more than that. How am I going to get out of this?”

Count Otto shrugged. “I’ve no idea at all,” said he. “If you paid a little more attention to what goes on around you, you’d have noticed that you were the only applicant for that job.”

“The dole office sent me,” I said.

“But you should have known. Everyone in Brentford knows about that job. You don’t inhabit the real world, do you, Gary? You dream your way through life. It’s not quite real to you, is it?”

“It suddenly seems very real,” I said. And suddenly it did.

“That’s the way with life. It has a habit of catching up with you.”

“So, tell me, what should I do?”

“Learn,” said the count. “That would be my advice. Knowledge is power, as the old cliché goes. The more you learn, the more you know. The more you know, the more options will open up for you.”

“So I should take an Open University course, or something?”

“Or learn a second language.”

“Sandra said that.”

“Well, she would. We were talking about you today at the factory. I was saying what tough luck it was that you’d taken the job. She just kept laughing.”

“I think I’ll smack her when I get home.”

“Can I come and watch? I love that sort of thing. Back in the old country, you could smack servants whenever you wanted. And torture them, of course, and pull all their clothes off and put them out in the snow.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because you could,” said the count. “And if you can, then you will. That’s also the way with life. But only with the life of the very privileged.”

“Buy me a drink,” I said. “I’ve finished mine and I’m really short of money. I’ll pay you back at the weekend.”

“Certainly,” said the count and he went up and bought me a drink.

“I’ll tell you this,” he said, on his return. “You want to have a good old think about this job of yours. What it’s all about and things like that.”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” I said.

“Well,” said the count, “it seems like a very strange job to me. Switching a bulb off whenever it comes on.”

“It’s a stupid job,” I said.

“Oh yes,” said the count, nodding. “But most jobs are ultimately stupid. There are certain jobs – say, butcher, or baker – that make sense. They’re necessary jobs. People need butchers and bakers. But what about all those other jobs, like quantity surveyors, say. Does the world really need quantity surveyors? What does a quantity surveyor do anyway? Does he look at things and say, ‘Oh, there’s a lot of that. But there’s not too much of that.’”