It must have been a hot summer around 2008, but I was hanging out with some kids when I saw a thin wisp of smoke tickling the sky, dancing and weaving in the haze of a heat only produced by sticky tarmac after a full day of baking in the sun. Long story short, I followed the scent and found myself standing next to a small, naturally started fire, that just so happened to be next to a church or chapel of some kind.

It's important to note this, because backstory is everything, especially when being questioned by the responding firemen and police community support officer the following day. Nothing was ever formally put against me, perhaps due to me being a literal child, but I could tell what they were thinking. That little arsonist set that church on fire, that's what I could read from them, I could hear it in their minds from across the room before I even got close enough for a skin-on-skin reading of their electrical pulses.

The trouble with being implicated in some eclectic arson in a small village at a young age is everyone around you remembers, and it follows you further into life. Those rumours spread like, well, a smouldering pile of dried leaves and pinecones piled up as kindling next to a church would after weeks of no rain and, so unfairly, have affected me ever since.

I won't deny it. I fed the fire. I may have been singing burn-baby-burn whilst mincing about in a circle, happy and gay, throwing a faggot in here or there of bundled dried pine and fir from the local woodland, but I stand by it that I did not start that fire.

To my future employers, I hope this transparency is no cause for alarm. I am a reasonable chap.