FT268

Over the last 15 years, the writer who adopted this name often wrote to Fortean Times, on such subjects as koala handprints, buried telephones, magic squares, the OTO in Weston-super-Mare and lookalike competitions. He claimed to be living in Glasgow. Much of what follows is based on his online memoirs, and may be fanciful.

He was born in Perthshire, maybe as a twin, but soon moved with his working class family to Glasgow. Rejected by his alcoholic parents, he was placed in an orphanage in Cardonald. “Effect­ively, my parents aborted me after I was already born,” he wrote, “although they decided to keep my nine siblings.” In the mid-1950s, he was shipped out to Australia as part of the infamous UK child migrant scheme, and incarcerated in “slave-labour camps that masqueraded as orphanages”.