Pansy Cradledew tells me that she has recently devised a new method of empowering her pod-on-a-lanyard. Rather than plugging it into a socket in the wall, via a recharger, she has obtained a piece of gubbins which is attached to her window with a sucker. Wings on the gubbins are exposed to the glare of that blazing mighty orb in the sky, the one John Donne rightly called a “busie old fool”, and the pod thereafter is fed from the power stored in the gubbins.

This is all very well, but it occurs to me that it could be the beginning of a slippery slope which might see Pansy becoming an Aztec fundamentalist. Now that she relies, with obvious enthusiasm, upon that burning golden disc for the empowering of her pod, can it be long before she is tearing out the still-beating hearts from the breasts of sacrificial victims upon a stone altar to assuage the angry Sun?

Before you accuse me of overreacting, bear in mind that this is the woman who gleefully announced only the other day that she had bought a DVD of The Royal Hunt Of The Sun for £3. This is the film, you will recall, in which Christopher Plummer gives a truly unforgettable performance as Captain Von Trapp Atahualpa. I rest my case.