It’s a dilemma

I carry a hell of a burden… Not a heavy load on my back, but a real dilemma in who I am. The problem is I was sixty-six years old in nineteen-fifty-six (1956) but only conceived in twenty-twenty-two (2022) as COVID-19 took a grip. I’m not real, you see… I’m a character in a novel based in the Hulme area of Manchester around that time. The book called ‘Percy’s Pawnshop’ was written by Brian Cummings. My name is Percy Grove, and it relates to the goings on in and around my shop, a second-hand-furniture-cum-junkshop I also use to trade my licence as a pawnbroker. The chap who wrote the book (And this.) thought it was a good idea to promote sales of the book by telling backstories that compare life as it was then with modern-day living. So, instead of letting me rest in peace in nineteen-eighty or something; he’s kept me alive… I should be around a hundred-and-thirty, but they say ‘there’s no rest for the wicked’, don’t they?