This is the door into your unconscious. The door you keep locked and bolted. The door where you, Richard Desolate, keep your secrets.

You are a man who likes his privacies – not everything revealed to everyone. You live alone hoarding your memories and peculiarities to yourself, but hope to share them if you meet the right woman. You believe this might be soon on your weekly trip to the local pub. In fact you think you already know who she is.

That belief comforts you on long winter evenings sat reading books from your substantial attic library.

You enjoy romantic novels, particularly the Mills and Boone escapades. Over the years you have collected hundreds from second-hand bookshops and car-boot sales. One day you hope to write one yourself. They bring something to your fireside you have yet to get to grips with in life – intimacy with a woman.

You are 56 years of age and still a virgin. There has been Cindy, but you don’t count her. Cindy is your blow-up girlfriend. You acquired her from a Men Only magazine in the 1980’s. However, she suffered a puncture five years ago and has never stayed up since. Her one flat breast and deflated buttocks do nothing now to arouse you. In addition, you always felt there was something spiteful about her; she never seemed satisfied with your seduction plans – just sat there unmoved no matter how many scented candles you lit; however long you read to her. Eventually, having had enough of her half-capsized sour looks, you relegated her to the old blanket-chest at the back of the sofa where you keep your Light Sabre and Darth Vader mask.

Sometimes you pretend you have a wife and dress up in women’s clothes you purchase. ‘She suffers from agoraphobia’ you say to the shop-assistants of this pretend-wife of yours, and that she is ‘too afflicted to venture beyond the coal-shed’, wondering then perhaps did you go too far, was the shop-girl convinced or just humouring you when, sniggering, she moved swiftly on to the next customer.

Usually the clothes don’t fit so that now you have a wardrobe full of bras with bent hook-and-eyes, blouses with burst buttons, and hipsters with strained zips. Until recently the make-up and underwear were tricky to purchase, but lately you have taken to buying on-line with your credit card, no questions asked. This suits you. You like to be discrete. The long red-haired wig had been your mothers – a family heirloom.