as one evening a rather drunken and worryingly depressed Ben Holland stumbles across two men fighting what should be an impossible battle, as lightning bolts shoot across a dark Soho street and one of the men nearly dies. After Ben attempts to help the severely injured man he discovers that his newfound friend George Hartman is a magician and several hundred years old, and after the two bond George offers to make Ben a magician himself. There is a catch however as the British government are aware of the existence of magic and it looks like they wish to wipe it out, but George doesn’t think that this will happen for a year or so, giving Ben a good twelve months to do as he wishes before he’s called upon to join the battle against those in authority. That first year allows Ben to have the time of his life, to fall in love and take new girlfriend Karoline on an increasingly strange number of dates, to befriend a surprisingly still alive Orson Welles, and to spend a lot of time transforming in to dogs so that he can get free food. But not all of the choices he makes are good ones, and some, Christ, they were alarmingly terrible ideas indeed… This is my first novel but I have been writing online for the past twenty years, including for The London Film Festival, The Official Big Brother Site, Garbled Communications, The Friday Thing, and Comedy To Watch, and I now work teaching both English as a Foreign Language and Creative Writing lessons. The website for the book is: https://severalmomentsofmadness.com/ - where I intend to regularly add new content, including deleted scenes from the novel, and short stories set both before and after the events in the book.