I’m on the lam. A fugitive from the State and its capricious application of “justice”. The “one armed man” has nothing on me.

My crimes are manifold, and like all habitual offenders I started small. Ignorance is no excuse but I genuinely was unaware that in 21st Century Britain it was an offence to change a light bulb without the appropriate state-approved certification. What can I say? My baby needed feeding and the main light had blown.

Criminality is a habit like any other, and it was not long before I had changed all the light bulbs in my flat whether they needed changing or not. I consoled myself with the fiction that what I was doing was some form of protest, against the war in Afghanistan perhaps, or the cancellation of the 24 hour drinking laws, or the failure of my local church to recognise the Tridentine Mass. But who was I kidding? I support the war, don’t drink, and have forgotten most of my Latin.

Before long I was irredeemable: mixing the recyclable rubbish with the household waste on collection day; driving my god daughter to school without submitting myself to the requisite criminal records check; cycling on a public road without a helmet. On one occasion I activated a speed camera on an empty dual carriageway at three o’clock in the morning. I even broke my “no dinner party” rule in order to announce my version of climate change scepticism. I had dipped my toe into the murky currents of the underworld and every time I thought I was out….they dragged me back in.

And so I have fled, pausing briefly to throw together a bag of clothes and to grab my well-thumbed copy of Paul Feyerabend’s autobiography Killing Time. Feyerabend understood the mindset of the outsider, but as his anarchism was formed on the Eastern Front rather than in the harsher context of 21st Century Britain, my empathy with him is somewhat abbreviated.

As I write this “they” will be searching the flat. Doubtless by now ”they” will have found my copy of Anarchy, State and Utopia with the indiscreet marginalia decrying the extensive nature of Nozick’s “minimal state”. Will “they” be able to use that against me at the inevitable trial? Fortunately I have hidden my Roger Scruton: A Reader underneath the floor boards. As agents of the State are forbidden to attack floorboards (on health and safety grounds) I am confident that it will remain undiscovered.

I am reconciled to eventual capture and interrogation. I have accepted that some form of “re-education” will be inevitable. Possibly in the form of a “driving awareness” course, or compulsory enrolment in a bicycling proficiency course. Any incipient recidivism will be stamped out, ruthlessly.

The best I can hope for is “urban hero” status, but I suspect my crimes are too common to allow for this.