Somewhere in the middle of the desert he never rode through, on a train he never caught, young Bob Dylan was thinking about what old Bob Dylan would say to a roomful of people in ______ on ______ for 30 minutes. He had it memorised by the time he got to the Café Wha? and by the time he stood in the recording studio in New York, New York in Colombia Records he was struggling to sing his songs instead of simply reciting the 30 minute speech he would give in ­­­­­______ in ___ year’s time.

Bob Dylan didn’t fall off his motorbike because he was drunk or high or got a flat or cause he thought he saw a goose step out from the bushes, no. Bob Dylan was reciting this terrific speech he was going to give and coming up with snide remarks to make about ___, ____ ____ and _____ who were going to cover songs he hadn’t even written yet in his honour. Bob Dylan isn’t a folk singer or a country balladeer. Bob Dylan is a transcendent figure of history whose previous incarnations have been Rasputin and Joan of Arc and who lent his mythological likeness to J.K. Rowling for a unspecified figure rumoured to be in the region of $___,____,___.

All the while people were reading about Dumbledore they didn’t know that every other line he had, spelled backwards, and reading alternate letters was simply Blowin’ In The Wind for seven or eight books or however many the contract stipulated. All the while Blowin’ In The Wind was secretly rattling round the heads of a billion children, Bob Dylan was lighting cigarette after cigarette, penning line after line to his infamous 30 minute speech. He would start with a joke, maybe the one he knew about ___ ______ and the incident with the inflatable ____. He would poke fun at ____ as well as Catholicism and end with a rhyme he had stolen from the diary of a prisoner of the Holy Roman Emperor, written in blood in the year 1216. ‘They don’t write forced confessions like they used to,’ he would snigger and spit into the microphone, handing it to Ed Sheeran, walking off stage to famed wrestler The Big Show’s entrance music.
 

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Philip Swann is 27, from England and all of his worst thoughts can be found at @ThePhilipSwann