WHILE moving house a few months ago, I absent-mindedly broke apart my desk as I couldn’t be bothered with it and had no room for it anymore.

As I sent the pieces of it flying through the air into the great void of the dump at Queenslie, I thought to myself, “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

I’d had it since about 2012 and every single thing I’ve ever written was while sitting at that desk.

It was just a cheap flatpack thing from Argos that I built myself so it was quite shoogly.

I thought, maybe quite arrogantly, as bits of it landed and broke apart, that I should’ve kept it and it’d maybe be worth something one day if I ever made it big.

Maybe it could’ve sat proudly in a museum or something.

Maybe it was imbued with some kind of creative power and now I’m going to lose my writing ability.

Then I realised it’s been almost three years since I last had a book published and I should get a grip.

Most of my time spent at the desk in the months before getting rid of it was just spent on a frustratingly bad run in charge of Celtic on the Football Manager game.

Managing, somehow, to do even worse than we’re doing now.

I used to get quite attached to my possessions, especially when I was a wee guy.

I was, it has to be said, a bit of a hoarder.

I loved having hunners of stuff and refused to part with any of it.

Wee toy motors, action men, plastic soldiers, books, it didn’t matter that some of them were broken or falling apart and that I was told I needed to get rid of at least some of them if I wanted new stuff at Christmas, it all had to stay.

My maw eventually talked me into giving some stuff, grudgingly, to the charity shop.

I did grow out of it eventually and soon tried to live my life as minimally as possible.

Keeping possessions to a minimum and making sure I wasn’t cluttering up the house with needless junk.

A year or so ago, my pals were talking about how we seemed to all be neat freaks compared to the average guy.

I showed them a picture of my room and they described it as “serial-killer clean”.

One of my pals gave me a reference when I was moving into a rented flat a wee while ago and wrote on his letter that I was a “very neat and tidy individual”.

I thanked him for this, and he said he only said that because he didn’t want to write that I was “freakishly” tidy on the letter in case the letting agents thought that I was weird.

There were some things I couldn’t bear to part with though.

I remember when Jurassic Park first came out, I was gifted with a stuffed, almost life-size version of one of the smaller dinosaurs, the one with the frill around its neck.

I believe it came from a car boot sale and was bigger than I was at the time.

I named him Deano.

For a couple of years, it was by my side constantly.

This vicious looking beast always lounging on my bed or sat next to me on the couch.

Soon, it became frayed around the edges and a bit honking. Stuffing started to fall out from the disintegrating seams, leaving a trail behind me as I dragged it about the house driving my maw mental.

Coming home from school one day, Deano was nowhere to be seen.

“How could he have done this to me,” I thought.

He was supposed to sit and watch me eat my dinner then watch the telly with me.

How could he have just left?

I enquired with my maw as to his whereabouts. She looked sheepish and shrugged her shoulders. She’d gotten rid of him, I knew it.

My bedroom window looked down onto the midden out the back and there was Deano.

Sodden from the rain, eyes glazed over, looking up at the sky, surrounded by black bags, flies buzzing round him.

“DEANO!” I shouted as I ran down the stair to try and save him, try to bring him back to life.

I held him in my arms as my tears dripped down onto him. He was filthy, discoloured and absolutely stinking.

A real stench of decay coming from my poor boy.

I dragged him by the tail up through the close, his limp head hitting off each step on the way up with a wet slap.

“How could ye dae this?” I said to my maw who was waiting at the door, Deano’s broken body lying draped over my arms.

She tried not to laugh. “It’s his time to go,” she said. “Put him back.”

I took him back down and laid him to rest.