His argument seemed to be riding along the rails of logic quite well, a few squeaks as he rounded some hairy corners. His line seemed to be beginning to creak and rattle though, and then it was if a freight train had just blown its whistle at a crossing. The bells began clanging people were tooting on their horns of indifference as he delivered a class A, alpha contradiction – without even realising it. Perhaps he felt the wave of disbelief wash in from the auditorium or something because, for a moment – his river of speech hit a dam wall, but then he just kept going, as if what he had just come out with was a ‘fact’, a ‘reality’ that could not be challenged.

He was emboldened with a juggernaut of confidence, and I wondered how his debating opponent was going to make use of his sore thumb of a point he had unknowingly made. His bumble bee thoughts continued to hover impossibly in the cavern for another minute before he relented the podium.

His opponent calmly strode to the lecturn and began throwing the contradictees’ argument against the back of the hall, but she was saving up his smelly inconsistency for the end. Her acidic barbs were waiting to hatch until the last possible moment – surely this was going to bring home the debate for the home side. The imagined victory smelled as sweet as a pineapple, unlike the rotten sewer of words he had released by so obviously violating the ‘facts’ and yes, she turned to look him in the eye with the arrow of her intellect just before releasing the bowstring of words that plunged the shaft straight into the depths of his now illuminated and sharply failing unconscious mind…..