According to the old adage, “the best banisters are the sturdiest banisters”. There is a great deal of wisdom in this simple phrase, as many unsteady persons who may otherwise have toppled to their deaths can attest. But it is a saying which has been wilfully ignored by trendy banistermaker Tim Snap, who is peddling his latest design, a banister rail made of crepe paper thickened with cow gum. We sent a roving Hooting Yard reporter to interview Mr Snap.

Reporter : I am astonished to see you leaning insouciantly against your crepe paper and cow gum banisters, Tim, given they are all that stands between you and a yawning stairwell down which you could plunge to your death.

Snap : You should add, for the benefit of your readers, that I am leaning my full weight against the banisters.

Reporter : If you don’t mind me saying so, Tim, you are quite a chubby banistermaker, so there must be quite a bit of weight for your banisters to support.

Snap : That is indeed so.

Reporter : If I were to give you a shove, in a joshing sort of manner, as between a couple of pals, would your banister withstand the added pressure suddenly put upon it?

Snap : I certainly hope so.

Reporter : Let’s test it shall we?

Snap : Well, before you do, please note that this new banister rail, like all my banisters, is primarily decorative.

Reporter : Are you trying to wheedle your way out of my shoving test?

Snap : Quite frankly, yes.

Reporter : I think that tells us all we need to know.

There is, you see, a point to those old adages, and a reason why they have survived. They express truths, both big and little truths. So when next you come upon a snaggle-toothed peasant sitting on a fence chewing a piece of straw and mumbling a litany of folk wisdom, do not dismiss what they say. Sometimes their sayings may seem to be blithering nonsense, as for example “A pig on the lane can cause you a sprain” or “When you see a door ajar, tug your forelock to the Master up at the Big House”. If you reflect for long enough even upon the most ludicrous-seeming utterance, you will eventually bow to its wisdom. And you will be much less likely to fork over your cash to a pretentious git like Tim Snap who, our reporter revealed, was supported over that vertiginous stairwell not by his crepe paper and cow gum banisters, but by a system of invisible winches and pulleys. Let that be a lesson to you.

You will almost certainly want to know more about cow gum. The great Tim Hunkin tells us this:

and you should refer to his majestic  Rudiments Of Wisdom Encyclopaedia for much else besides.

Between the Gubbinses and the Bevellings there has been, since time immemorial, a blood feud. But only just. In English law, time immemorial is defined as any date before the third of September 1189, and the incident which prompted the blood feud happened on the evening of the second of September in that tempestuous year. It was, we are told, an altercation, next to a pond, and involved a Gubbins, a Bevelling, and a cormorant, or possibly two cormorants. Blood was shed, but to this day arguments persist about whether the blood was that of the Gubbins or of the Bevelling, or both, or of the cormorant, or cormorants.

Nigh on a thousand years is not a particularly long time for a properly constituted vendetta. By definition, intergenerational hatred and vengeance takes many generations to take root. By some accounts, it was only in the fourteenth century that members of both the Gubbins and Bevelling clans first spoke of their enmity in terms of a blood feud. Before then, it was seen as a bit of a spat, or whatever word people of those distant times used for a spat. By then, of course, cormorants were no longer the casus belli. It was simply that, if you were born a Gubbins, you hated the Bevellings, and vice versa.

Any members of Bournemouth Council who are reading this piece, and are offended by my use of Latin in the last two sentences, can go and boil their own heads.

The boiling of heads, incidentally, was a favoured tactic of both parties in the blood feud, as was the slicing off of limbs, the evisceration of infants, and the impalement upon iron spikes of any Gubbins wandering absent-mindedly into Bevelling territory, or, again, vice versa. Those were gore-splattered times to be sure.

Indeed, so blood-drenched had the feud become by the sixteenth century that certain figures in both clans, of a modernist and civilizing cast of mind, decided to strike a pact. Such an initiative was unpopular with the mass of their clansfolk, for whom the feud was a mere fact of nature, like a beating heart or a hooting owl or a drooling pauper. But the modernisers dismissed their protests, as modernisers always do, from that day to this, in all walks of life, and proceeded to sneak about in the gloom, working away to seal the pact.

Now at this time, the Gubbinses were, like the Parkinson family in H G Wells’s 1933 novel The Bulpington Of Blup, a sandwich-inventing clan, while the Bevellings were, like Theodore Bulpington’s Aunt Amanda, the life and soul of a bandage-making organisation in the Town Hall. I hasten to add that it was not Bournemouth Town Hall, which has today become a Latin-free bastion of ignorance. Actually, I am not sure which Town Hall it was, for both the Gubbinses and the Bevellings had fanned out across the land in the centuries since their vendetta began, next to a pond, on that September evening in 1189. The modernisers on both sides sensed that if they could find a commonality of purpose in the inventing of sandwiches and the making of bandages, they could convincingly press the case for the pact they dreamed of.

But is there any demonstrable connection between sandwiches and bandages? They must have discovered something, because the pact was eventually struck, with a nod to historical resonance, on the evening of the second of September 1589.

It met immediately with a retort, from a disgruntled Gubbins and an enraged Bevelling. The modernisers from both clans were rounded up, and bound with chains, and drowned in the very pond where once a cormorant, or cormorants, had sparked the vendetta in the first place. And ever since, the blood feud has continued and deepened and intensified, and it is likely that it would have overwhelmed the entire land by now, were it not that both the Gubbinses and the Bevellings were such insular clans that they were riddled with inbreeding, leading to an ever-shrinking gene pool, and they have almost died out, save for a few halfwit survivors, many of whom can be found sitting in the council chambers of our seaside resorts, dribbling.