Hunchback (Dialogue)

(album: The Storyteller - 1998)

And as I walked round those tidy streets I thought to myself "How can anybody be at all unhappy in such a perfect world?" How wrong I was!

There's a little hunchback man, he used to walk round the streets of North London. His head was bowed, forced to look at the ground by this cruel, debilitating hump on his back. And all of my school friends had a name for this hunchback. They called him the freak. And every time the freak walked down the street my friends would laugh and I laughed with them. Now my dad was a sports fan. But in order to achieve all the ambitions my father had for me, I trained really hard and eventually I became the captain of the school team, until one cold winters afternoon I sustained an injury. Actually it was kick up the arse, but... hey. I was sent to a specialist and he took x-rays of my back, examened me and he said "Well you're gonna have to give up all sport for all time, otherwise you're going to end up a hunchback like that man I see you laughing at". Maybe that was meant to scare me, I don't know, but all of a sudden I started to look at that freak in a new light, because in him I saw my future. I would become a freak. But we all know that ugliness, like beauty, is only skin deep.