When I was eight years old, my life up to that point had been so sheltered that I had never heard the word 'cunt'. The national curriculum was shit in those days.

This spell of innocence was broken when I took an afternoon's trip to the local disused railway line, to look at nature and that. An old bridge crossing the line was under repair, and the contract work was being carried out by a local firm, 'G E Raynault'. This name was advertised, as is traditional, by a hoarding. Only their advert had been subverted by someone I can only describe as a wag.

They'd added, quite simply, "... IS A CUNT".

Was this the case? I don't know. I was eight years old, and had no experience of what I now know to be a litigous engineering firm that checks its Google results. I doubt the graffiti writer knew, either: the handwriting didn't look like it was written by the kind of person who'd had high-level dealings with industrial contractors. It was just someone who knew what I had just learned: that adding "... is a cunt" to any proper noun is an amusing and edgy form of free expression, whether it was true or not.

It was a life-changing experience.