Important news from Reuters’ Berlin bureau:

A badger in Germany got so drunk on overripe cherries that it staggered into the middle of a road and refused to budge, police said yesterday. A motorist telephoned police near the central town of Goslar to report a dead badger lying in the road – only for officers to turn up and discover that the animal was alive and well, but drunk. Police later discovered that the badger had eaten cherries from a nearby tree which had fermented and given the animal diarrhoea as well as a hangover. Having failed to scare the animal away, officers eventually used a broom to chase it from the road.

What the report fails to mention is that the “animal” in question was Little Severin, The Mystic Badger. How in heaven’s name do you think he is able to make all those devastatingly accurate mystic prognostications? Painting him as a simple drunk is a travesty. Little Severin had, of course, gorged on fermented fruit as a trusted method of inspiring a shamanistic – or rather, shabadgeristic – hallucinogenic trance. I must admit it is not entirely clear why he then chose to sprawl in the middle of an Autobahn, imperilled by the products of the mighty Teutonic car industry, rather than engage in his usual scrubbling about in the muck, but far be it from me to question the ineffable wisdom of Little Severin. After all, the last person who did so was turned into a toad, and not just a toad, but a blind toad with rickets and pins and needles. As, indeed, was foretold, by the Mystic Badger himself, during an earlier cherry binge.