Gus was pipped at the post. It was one of those huffington posts, recently erected at strategic points across the land, by diktat. They were named in honour of Puissance Huffington, the tiny orphan child who, by some inexplicable chain of accidents, now reigns over our realm. Nobody expected frail little Puissance to rule with an iron fist, but she does, and then some!

Like so many citizens, Gus had assumed that Puissance would be a benign queenlet. It was perhaps this naivete which led to his undoing, when he entered a contest in the weekly children’s comic The Terrible Wrath Of Christ Our Saviour. Readers were asked to supply a caption for a drawing which showed an innocent farmyard scene, typical of our country. Mischievous Gus wrote something disobliging about a hen, unaware that every single caption submitted to the comic would be scrutinised, personally, by Puissance Huffington. She could not read, of course, so pressed into service a man of letters who loitered somewhere in the bowels of the palace. When this sickly one-legged fellow read to Puissance the words written by Gus, she was outraged.

“I am very fond of hens,” she is reported to have said, “And I will not have disobliging things said of them, no siree!”

And she told the man of letters to aim his crutches in the direction of the Palace Git, conveying instructions to have Gus arrested. And so within hours of writing his unwise words, Gus found himself chained to one of the huffington posts in one of the less salubrious parts of the country, populated for the most part by ne’er-do-wells, halfwits, and Corbynistas. Eagerly, they pelted Gus with pips, as Puissance Huffington decreed.

In retrospect, we can appreciate just how fortunate Gus was to have committed his crime in the early days of the reign of Puissance. For her power made the little orphan child ever more vindictive and cruel, and it was not long before she declared that miscreants should be pelted, not with pips, but with plumstones.