Tommy couldn’t understand any of it. He had moved here from Cardiff and his parents were full of it, determined that the whole family would learn the customs and language and try to fit in.

A one horse town with a single road in which didn’t even continue out of the other side but just disappeared into the town square.

His days were mostly a blank. Tommy could make neither head nor tail of the anything uttered by these hicks with their silly voices and impossible pronunciations. Painfully tall and thin, he was teased constantly by the short, squat, ugly locals who thought themselves and their hometown so important and wonderful. In his view it just a sad rural backwater but there was no point in saying this and antagonising them further. Tommy missed his friends, the braying laughter of the townsfolk rang cruelly in his ears. “You aren’t like us” it seemed to say, “why don’t you go home?” He would gladly would have done this given an opportunity.

These freaks prided themselves on their relaxed attitudes but in reality they weren’t tolerant at all. Tommy quickly formed the opinion that everyone in this weird world was a hypocritical tosser.

How he longed to get away to somewhere else, anywhere else.

Above everything else it was so boring. There was nothing to do except hang around the town square in gangs with stupid names all containing too many ls. The Wifi signal was virtually non-existent and it was typical of his hippie parents not to have a telly.

The only thing he liked about the place was the wooden house.

This was an abandoned and dilapidated building in the town centre. Despite being boarded up and weather damaged and his parents orders not to set foot in it because of its poor foundations, he ignored the ridiculous warnings from the villagers that witches lived there, and was called to explore whenever the opportunity arose, Crawling in through a hole in the slats. He loved to look at it’s rooms full of Victorian Corsets and up-turned wheelbarrows and other extraordinary pieces of venerable bric-a-brac and chintz. It had a strange black and white kind of feel.

On one rainy Saturday afternoon whilst Tommy was exploring a room he hadn’t been in before in the dark, he accidentally dislodged a piece of cobwebby shelving. A disturbed crow, which must have been trapped in the room, flew out squawking violently and a piece of masonry fell from the wall which knocked Tommy out cold.

The next thing he was aware of was movement, the house was spinning through the air. Tommy was looking out of the window of the house at the village square as it receded. Watching in amusement as the gangs of tiny locals waved angry fists and pitchforks at him.

He must have drifted off again because when he awoke he was home in his own bed in Cardiff having left the Lollipop Guild and The Lullaby League far behind him. It took him a few moments to realise that it had all been a dream and that Munchkinland had never been his home. If indeed it even existed outside his dreams.