Spine

John Patrick Higgins has been told he's spineless for as long as he can remember. But if that's true, why is he obliged to leave an armchair with the nervous trepidation of someone dipping a toe into a piranha tank?

John has a bad back. His skeleton's turned on him like an angry dog denied, ironically, a bone.

As he embarks on a six-week course of Pilates to iron out his kinks—years of Freudian analysis having not even touched the sides—he finds himself in a world of Lycra-clad pensioners farting in Warrior Pose. During this long-teased vertebral correction, he finds the time to save a dog's life, admire a woman backflipping off a rock into the sea, embark on a one-sided feud with a man in an off-licence, and drunkenly attempt to explain what kissing a ghost might be like. Based, it should be said, on very little empirical evidence.

Will he become lithe and lissom again? Or face an uncertain future of walk-in baths and just leaving anything he's dropped on the floor, because life is now very definitely too short for any sort of bending. Touching his toes? Maybe his toes don't want to be touched. Did you ever think of that?

Spine, tingly and chilly in turn, is illustrated by the author and, like his previous book Teeth, features a glossary of useful terms though, as his definitions are equally baffling, the glossary may require a further glossary.