Lars Talc, Lars Talc, took a snifter, took a snifter, then he revved up his jalopy, his jalopy he revved. With his foot on the pedal he vroomed away, he vroomed away ’til he was out of sight. As soon as he was out of sight, he screeched to a halt and fell out of the jalopy and into a puddle.

That is where they found him, sitting in a puddle, his hat fallen and craneflies hovering around his now bare head. They found him, and they discussed exterminating the craneflies but could not think of a method of doing so without causing collateral harm to Lars Talc. And Lars Talc had to be protected at all costs, for, snifters or no, he was privy to secret details of the dustbin of history.

So they placed a cordon around the puddle, an electrified cordon, using electricity and cables and chickenwire. They stole the chickenwire, provoking the wrath of a nearby poultryman. Now Lars Talc and this particular poultryman had never seen eye to eye. They had Biblical differences, also Talmudic ones. Yet physically, they could not have been more similar. They might have been identical twins.

They were identical twins! They had been separated, Lars Talc and the poultryman, at the age of ten when, orphaned, the one had been sent to a Schloss and the other apprenticed to a big bellicose brutish British butcher famed for his cocktail sausages. There were no sausages at the Schloss. It was a spartan Schloss run on vegan lines by a vegan Schlosser of great untidiness. The boot, now, was on the other foot.

There may be several sentences missing from the foregoing, sentences which might make more sense of it, even if you are paying only haphazard attention, distracted, as you are, by a march past of Corbynistas with placards, spitting and shouting, sockless, dreary, spitting and shouting, marching, marching, past Lars Talc and his craneflies in their cordoned-off puddle, on a Wednesday afternoon at the height of summer, far from the Schloss, and farther still from Lars Talc’s nest, now populated by birds, a nest in a tree in a forest.

When we are done here, we shall drive to the forest in a Japanese car.