If you can swallow four Myprodol capsules without even a sip of water, then swallowing a single 9mm will cause you no discomfort. I can swallow four and even more at one go with no problem. I think my salivation glands have superpowers and are easily overexcited, and so now, each Friday afternoon, I swallow a single 9mm hollow point bullet.

They have not always been the hollow points, which, if shot through a gun, cause more damage and thus cost more to buy. I started with Sellier & Bellot’s standard but lovely gold and rounded 9mm.

I have been doing it so long now that there is no challenge in it anymore. Now after work on Friday, I wash it down with my one whiskey of the week because life is too short not to have any vices, and anything in moderation is ok except a large comet strike and incest.

I will admit the whiskey is on the large side, a double flirting with a triple, but again I must emphasize that it is one once a week and on a full stomach and at home; there is no driving involved. I am very particular about being responsible and safe in order to protect the innocent.

I bought a very trendy ice block maker, one that makes the blocks round. I sometimes like to wear my Viking helmet when I glob it down.

Looking closely at the casing of a Myprodol capsule, it is easy to think that the casing is made from plastic. The shiny green and robust rash red look so synthetic that they could not possibly occur naturally in nature.

In the old days, vegans could not take capsules because they were made of gelatin, and gelatin is made up of dead farm animals, similar to polony but with a better social standing. Now they make the fake plastic out of Hydropropyl Methylcellulose, which is a bit of a mouthful, I know, but it is more commonly known as Hypromellose (which is still a bit of a tongue twister), or it is abbreviated to HPMC, which sounds like an old British warship to me. For those posh vegans who prefer products that are more free-range, there is Agar-Agar which is extra posh because it originates from a seaweed that has a double-barrelled name, but I digress. I swallow painkillers daily, and then once a week, I have an ambitious double whiskey and one 9mm.

I have always wondered why they chose to make the Myprodol capsules in red and green. What about colour-blind people? I know I always like to put each Myprodol green side first into my mouth. It just feels like the right thing to do. What happens if you are colour-blind? There is another type of colour blindness where the poor simple sausage of an afflicted soul struggles to tell the difference between blue and yellow. That would be a real problem if you were Ukrainian and had to put your flag up each day. It would be very difficult to know which way up it went, but I am sure they have some sort of way to deal with this. I seem to know alot about colour-blindness, but I’m not colour-blind – pinky promise – but I do think of the plight of others more than most, maybe.

I swallow bullets because I want to be taken more seriously. I want to be edgy, slightly dangerous and maybe, perceived to be slightly unstable. I want to be a cat’s whisker on a razor blade – a hair trigger away from detonation. I want people to sense it without me ever saying a word. I want an aura of danger like a bright-coloured spider.

I’ve been swallowing things since I was about 5. First, I swallowed marbles and ironies – I was very regular then, and each morning it would plink out again against the porcelain with the sound of a tin xylophone in an empty church.

Now in my fifties, I’m not as regular, and I don’t hear music in other things much anymore. I’m not sure the bullets all come out, but the process of checking is…well, complicated, and nobody likes stocktaking. I used to help in the weekly random stock take my father did for his warehousing business when I was young. My father could add up things quickly in his head, and he could pick up heavy boxes. His hands were the size of Christmas turkeys, and they could take your breath away when they were bundled up tight into soccer balls and blasted into the goals of your stomach. I remember him often saying as I gasped for air that “If you did it right, you’d leave no marks.”