Dear Mr Key : As someone with sausages on the brain, I was dismayed to note that you listed this condition as among the characteristics of the contemptible scoundrel who stole Dobson’s blotter. We are no more likely to turn to criminality than any other common or garden person you might encounter among the teeming masses, and to suggest otherwise is deeply unhelpful. I run a support group for people with sausages on the brain and am proud to say we do a lot of good work. We have organised sponsored archaeological digs, for example, and also other sorts of digging, with spades and shovels and special little forks, in loose soil, with prizes donated by wealthy television personalities, some of whom are newsreaders, who give their time freely, or almost freely save for small administrative fees, for the greater good. It might surprise you to know that some of these magnetic personalities have sausages on the brain themselves, and they are proving successful in life rather than languishing in prisons after being convicted of blotter theft. Digging up the ground in pursuit of archaeological knick-knacks, or just for the fun of it, is not the only activity we sponsor. Last month we held a fund-raising event at the perimeter of a remote airfield. There were balloons and ice cream wafers and clay pigeon shooting and a bran tub and scale model trench warfare novelty sing-songs and inflatable cloud chamber daredevil rides and all sorts of other things, hosted by Jimmy Savile, and the whole event passed off without any police involvement whatsoever, apart from a couple of cases of moral besmirchment. You can check the police log for yourself, and you will find not a scintilla of evidence that anyone with sausages on the brain thieved as much as a scrap of blotting paper, let alone an entire blotter. It is true that the stationery department at Hubermann’s has installed a state-of-the-art electronic security system with bleepers and klaxons and magnetic resonance panels for the exclusive detection of people with sausages on the brain who might find themselves wandering in a footloose and shabby manner therein, but that is just a sensible precaution in this disgusting world. Our support group was happy to provide advice to Hubermann’s management team, when a delegation visited our headquarters here on the atoll. Our single rowing boat plies back and forth to the mainland twice a week, by the way. Stories that the boat’s captain has to be bribed with frankfurters are completely baseless, as is the vindictive tittle-tattle suggesting there is a leak in the boat and that constant baling with buckets is required in order not to drown. The sea hereabouts is not always wild and dangerous, and attacks by shrieking demented guillemots have become much rarer, with only a handful of lacerations to passengers’ heads reported last Thursday. Uninvited visitors to the atoll are never beaten insensible with heavy cast iron frying pans, as has been reported in the scummy end of the press. We abandoned this custom some weeks ago after a plenary vote. Of course, if a wayfaring stranger turns up without a gift of boil-in-the-bag sausages for the welcoming committee, that is construed as unforgivable bad manners and the culprit simply gets what’s coming to them. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and sometimes you just have to be cruel, cackling like a maniac as you enact your cruelties. That has always been my motto. In fact, I had it tattooed across my chest and my back, in vivid empurpled Gothic lettering, with flamboyant curclicues and bloodstains. Just try telling me I am wrong, and I will meet you at dawn at a place of your choosing, somewhere out on the moors, to engage in hand to hand combat, providing you do not try to enhance your musculature with chemical boosters. Here at the sausages on the brain support network we fight ferociously but fairly, as you will be able to see at first hand if you attend one of our daily rehearsal bouts. Daubed with the blood of goats and wearing special contact lenses to give them hallucinatory visions, the best of our warriors would curdle the fluids of the most jaundiced observer. Even Jimmy Savile swooned when we laid on a display for him, and I am not sure he has ever fully recovered. So by all means make your spiteful little remarks about us, but be warned that our vengeance will be immediate and savage and utterly, ridiculously disproportionate. Yours faithfully, Sausages On the Brain Person.