[Rob Stuart]

He reassured her that their relationship was still as solid as a Boxing Day stool.

The Christmas pullover from Aunty Mabel was as loud as Brian Blessed being spayed with a shovel during a nuclear war.

Her answer was about as coherent as a set of flat-pack furniture instructions that had been translated from their original Finnish into binary code by a cross-eyed moron writing left- handed with a leaking fountain pen filled with invisible ink.

The mortar shell exploded like a schoolboy’s water-bomb balloon, only with a casing made of red-hot shards of metal instead of brightly coloured rubber and full of fire instead of water.

On the day of the wedding his head felt like it was a burnt drum full of rusty ball bearings being played by a deaf psychopath with a couple of concrete hammers.

The etherised patient lay spread out on the table like an evening.