Time to catch up with some of the expected fallout from last Thursday’s Impugned By A Peasant. Over at Think Of England, Brit provided a link to what he called  “a terrifying tale”, prompting this response from Peter Burnet:

Bah! Bloody Euros! No wonder you’re in terminal decline. You get impugned by a peasant and you go all artsy-fartsy and spin it into an meandering tale of cravats, bouffants and existential turmoil. Want to know how we in the New World handle that kind of stuff? Just check out the economical prologue to Dan Brown’s new novel:

“I was once impugned by a peasant, so I shot him. It haunted me until dinnertime.”

Meanwhile, at the weekend, I had a dream in which I was impugned by a sort of seaside variety of peasant. I was sitting in a dockside cafeteria, drinking coffee with a couple of friends I have not actually seen for a decade or so. We watched as various animals disembarked from a steamship. I pointed to one, and said excitedly:

“Look, half a cow with no head!”

That is indeed what I saw. Sitting alongside us in the cafeteria was a bunch of seaside-type peasants, one of whom chortled and shouted:

“It’s a big chicken, you fool!”

Thus was I impugned, in my dream.