As a child my Gran taught me a number of prayers. I became obsessed with them and had to repeat them all perfectly every night in order to feel safe.

As I hit my teens I was able to reason myself out of this, but the prayers are clearly still entrenched in my memory because today, totally out of the blue, I recited the Lord’s Prayer. But my version had shifted to a different deity – the lamp-post.

“Our Lamp-post who art on the corner
Hallowed be thy thighs
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done on street
As it is in Devon
Give us today our daily sheep
And forgive us our bins as we
Forgive those that pee against us.
Lead us not into Kettering
And deliver us from squirrels
For thine is the glow,
The pigeon shit and the glory
Now and forever
Arhorse”

As with any prayer, who knows if the lamp-post heard it?