Des Marshall

Journal of an Urban Robinson Crusoe: London and Brighton

Saxon Books, 2002.

7 December [1994]...I was walking over Primrose Hill feeling really low and ugly, not aware of people properly, even avoiding them, when a beautiful little girl unexpectedly came up to me and said, "Please, sir, would you be my Valentine?" giving me daisy and buttercup flowers. I said something like, "Oh yes, thank you", and as I walked away I saw her mother give me a brief smile. I had to walk quickly away because I was so overcome I thought I would break down in tears. I'm sure she must have been an angel, because it was exactly what I needed to break the black mood I was in. I didn't even know it was St Valentine's Day until later

At the start of this book Des Marshall tells us that he didn't write it: the real author was a 'small, nervous, thin faced' man he met on a Mental Health Day Workshop in Camden, who asked if he could help him get it published. 'I exist on an Island of Urban curiosity, with no Girl Friday...I live my separate reality', the journal begins. His outsider status makes him highly sensitive to other people's behaviour, although anyone who has walked along a canal towpath will identify with the experience recorded a few days earlier:

I was thinking of walking to Regent's Park along the canal but the weather is very changeable. It's December and there is going to be hail and heavy downpours. Why I am undecided about it is that people zoom down the path on their bikes. They don't seem to care about people walking. A week before I broke my arm I heard a bell tinkle. I looked behind me and couldn't believe what I saw - a man on a bike with two huge Doberman pinschers running alongside him, bearing down on me, racing along like a man possessed. Now I'm sure he was insane and maybe Jeffrey Darma was normal after all, because I doubt he would do that

Darma was a serial killer who had just been pronounced 'sane'.