After my debaucheries in the fleshpots of the east, I sought further debaucheries in the fleshpots of the west. I was sated for a time but then I grew restless, and discovered fresh debaucheries in the fleshpots of the south. Some time later I went north, but in the north I found no fleshpots, just ice and snow and bitter gales and storms so cold my eyelids were frozen shut and I could not see. I stumbled about, blind upon an ice floe, and heard the ominous grunting of bears. The wind was howling, and my brain was howling, but I made no sound, for my frozen lips were blue, and fused together.

This was not the death I had foreseen. I had imagined myself a dissolute voluptuary, sprawled on a divan, my belly full of wine, keeling over suddenly and unknowingly. The only sign of my passing would be when the resident band brought some hot carnal jazz number to an end and began to play a funereal dirge. Instead I was alone and cold in a blizzard of whiteness, about to be mauled and eaten by bears I could not even see.

Then oh joy! I heard the clatter of a helicopter above, and soon enough I was hauled aboard to safety. When my eyelids thawed enough to open, I saw that my saviour was Carruthers. Carruthers, my old mucker from long ago, before my debaucheries in the fleshpots of the east and west and south. Carruthers to whom I had confessed, back then, that the pounding of those infernal drums was driving me mad. Carruthers who comforted me when I went to pieces in the tropics. Now here he was again, at the controls of the helicopter.

“You came much too far north,” he said, briefly removing the pipe clamped between his manly jaws, “You must have overshot the fleshpots on your journey. There are indeed northern fleshpots. I shall take you straight to them so you can continue with your debaucheries.”

“No!”, I cried, as soon as my lips had thawed sufficiently to allow me to open my mouth, “I have learned a valuable moral lesson in the inhospitable bleakness of the ice-girt north. From this day on I shall shun debaucheries of all kinds, and devote my life to proper manly pursuits. Just keep me away from those drums and their infernal pounding.”

Carruthers nodded. And with that, he changed course, and took me to some corner of the earth with overcast skies and light breezes, mild and with occasional drizzle, temperate, temperate, and free of all temptations.