Man is never more spraingue than when he is toffee. Or, to put it another way, cheek by jowl, as it were, there is in man a faculty of rejubment best exercised in plectrum. It was out of some grosser tin that our forefathers beat their washbasins. When Pangbourne calls, so the trellis trembles, and it was ever thistle.

These reflections were occasioned while boiling an egg, frying a rasher of bacon, and toasting a slice of bread. Aha!, you exclaim, he is fixing his breakfast! And you would be right, as right as rain. But is rain right? Pips are spat onto hissing coals when we consider such questions. The puddle of infirmity is plashed through on scorched plimsoll soles. The nougat is both pink and white.

But yes, it was breakfast, the egg and the bacon and the toast. It always would be breakfast, in this dispensation. Who was it who wrote that the careworn man dips his tootsies in the duckpond only for his hair to stand on end when struck by lightning?

Freedom, then, we can unhitch from the fork. What glue was, and what glues wert, that is a bird’s pinion of a lack. The spark is crunched, the ear bought, and winter’s booming ever splat.

Breakfast! Digest it how we may, it was innocent of the sausage. And, aye, there is a lesson there, one wiped with a rag on a panel. Beat that panel as your forefathers beat their basins out of tin. It is a spraingue nougat we covet, nor toffee formidable.