--The Revenger's Tragedy, I.i

"I am a man gripped by temporary obsessions. Novelty rules my tastes and dictates my waking hours - even my sleeping ones. For what are dreams, if not the efforts of the brain to assimilate all the events of the day into some New pattern dictated by electrolytes and flaps of adipose tissue; rather than causes and effects, which are infinitely more random. Dreams are the Ikea furniture of perception and experience; using a groaning allen-key to assemble planes of sensory MDF into new and fantastic shapes, in an attempt to replicate what was once glimpsed in a booklet marked 'Instructions' used to line the cat basket long ago. Hell, they were written in Finnish anyway.

Suffice to say then, novelty is nothing new to me. Until two years ago, I never had to look for it; novelty rudely banged into my room every morning whilst I was still trying to shake of the hang-over she'd left me with the night before. She came to me in all kinds of forms; tincture, powder or bleached blonde. On the rocks or down the phone at two in the morning. However, my supply soon began to dry up. After all, there are only so many sins a man can commit, and if like me you were born a Roman Catholic - well then, the big ones have already been committed for you. So I had to turn somewhere else to get my fix, like a junkie robbing an old granny. Except eventually even that began to get boring.

I tried my hand at everything; through myself out of planes, ran away to sea, even tried treachery and teaching. All in an effort to find a career which would keep me tripping on the grade A novelty I needed (wanted) to survive. And every day I went without the prospect of ending it all with pills or a pistol became more appealing. The undiscovered country beckoned; I probably would have done it too if I could think of the conclusive way to go out in style, but if was going to do it a clichéd way then I wanted to try them all. Then I found it.

Call me Mark Anthony. I'm a hair-dresser now; it's like hedonism but the hours are better, and the only time you have to pick hairs out your teeth is when you sneeze on someone's new box-cut. Not only do I get my novelty now, I'm selling it second hand for £45 an hour. New people come to see me everyday; and when I'm finished with the scissors then they're someone else. I get two faces for the price of one, and they're paying. I couldn't even find as many call-girls in a day - let alone afford them. And even when the same customer returns; well, they're not the person they were two months ago. They've grown, just like their hair; new hairs, forced up by angry follicles that will persist in outrage at the indignity of their castration long after their owner has seen their last blue-rinse and perm.

I'm novelties' master now, not the other way round. I was getting tired of playing submissive anyway; the Romans had it right all along. In sex, like everything else, it's better to the master than the slave. In fact, the Roman's knew a lot of things - like the importance of good grooming. Barbers, baths, and a shave once a day; hair pomade and oil; and using a pumice stone on the chin to scrape away the dead skin and reveal the new stuff beneath. A new face to greet each new day and to strip away the marks of iniquity."