The Appointed Pointy Panel of the Pointy Town Institute of Pointiness was rocked to its foundations yesterday by explosive revelations of malfeasance, perfidy, and pelf. Unnamed sources suggested that the entire edifice could be brought crashing to the ground.

“Let there be no mistake,” said the source, “There has been malfeasance at the highest levels, as well as perfidy and pelf, and not only at the highest levels but at several lower strata. Quite how we go forward following these explosive revelations is unclear. But go forward we shall, pointedly.”

The revelations first threatened to become combustible shortly after breakfast time, and exploded immediately thereafter. So explosive were the explosions that trees, including planes, poplars, pines, larches, sycamores, and yews were flattened, and birds dropped dead from the sky. An eerie orangey purply yellowish mist o’erspread Pointy Town, rendering most of the pointiest bits barely visible.

“I have not seen anything like this since that business of the illegal picnicking hoo-hah of yore,” said one old-timer, a grizzled stoaty fellow leaning against a wall in a pointy part of town. So ancient was he that nobody else had a clue what he was talking about.

Other Pointy Towners were more, or less, circumspect. Some were not circumspect at all. Several had difficulty grasping the concept of circumspection, and of pointiness, and even of malfeasance and perfidy and pelf.

“Personally I can’t see what all the fuss is about,” said a man who gave his name as Unanugu, standing hopelessly at a decommissioned bus stop, “I am just waiting for the 666, even though the little dwarvish familiar perched on my shoulder, invisible to all but me, tells me it will never pass this way again. But if I believed everything it told me I would not be a salt of the earth citizen of Pointy Town, would I?”

Markets reacted in juddering fashion to the explosive revelations. The pane dropped precipitously, then sprang back up, and kept on springing, until it settled, just before dusk, at parity with the grebe.

Emergency coat hangers and tea strainers have been drafted in. The entrails of a slaughtered albino hen will be read today at midday by a haruspex with a klaxon on a balcony in a thunderstorm.