I was mad for a choc ice, but the kiosk was afar, on the other side of the lake. Several times, in the past, I had walked the path all round the lake, and I knew what a long long walk it was. From where I stood, anent Nitty’s Jetty, gazing hopelessly at the kiosk, I knew it would take me an hour, an hour and a half more likely, in my flimsy pumps, to walk that far. No man should wait so long for a choc ice – was that a saying?, or had I just coined one? The sight of the kiosk taunted me, so I shut my eyes.

It is a curious fact that whenever I close my eyes, for longer than a blink, I run the risk of falling asleep. The great French artist Delacroix held it as a tenet that the key to a long life lay in getting up early in the mornings and, most important, not dozing off again once one was awake. If that were the case, it is a miracle I am still alive in my eighty-eighth year to heaven. I doze off all the time, even here, choc ice mad, standing up straight on the edge of the lake, with nothing to cling on to. The wooden posts of Nitty’s Jetty long ago rotted to stumps.

And as I slept, so I dreamed. I was five or six, at a different lake, queuing in a line at a different kiosk, a now-redundant coin gripped in my tiny fist. Though I could not see him, I knew the kiosk was manned by an ogre, and a Cyclopean ogre come to that. He is a figure who recurs in my dreams, and though his countenance is fearsome, I feel nothing for him but boundless devotion. I do not think he is a god, this ogre, but the emotions he stirs in me are those I imagine one would feel if one came face to face with God. I shuffled slowly forward, for the queue was long, and I felt my heart beat the faster as I got closer to the kiosk. Soon, oh soon, I would reach the head of the queue, and I would look up into the one blazing eye of the ogre and I would proffer my coin and ask politely for a choc ice, and the ogre would grunt and thrust towards me his hairy paw, in which was clutched . . .

My eyelids snapped open as I awoke from my doze. The dream fell away in an instant. Scudding towards me, upon the lake, came a kayaker in his kayak. Now I knew a thing or two about kayaks, or once did, for in my long ago youth I had been a keen kayaker. I kayaked on several lakes and rivers, remote distant lakes and wide important rivers. I admired this kayaker’s technique and told him so as he came nudging against Nitty’s Jetty. We fell into the kind of easy conversation that obtains among kayakers, even when one of them is eighty eight and unkayaked.

– Do you know what?, he said, after a while, I could kill for a choc ice. How about you? Jump into the kayak and we’ll kayak across the lake together and I’ll buy a couple of choc ices from that kiosk. My treat.

I told him he was very kind, and clambered into his kayak. It must have been forty years since I was on the water. Since the terrible day of Mopsa’s drowning I had shunned it. Another lake, another time . . .

And the sky blazed blue as I was ferried in a kayak across the lake towards the kiosk.

She done him wrong, so he took revenge.
He put her on the bus to Penge.
She sat down on the upper deck
And bid farewell to Tooting Bec.
But the driver got lost and went to Hendon.
That seems the perfect note to end on.

The wool for this cardigan was spun by cretins among churns and hubbub at a revel in a barn. It has been described as a cardigan fetching and comely and Stalinist, though also, it is fair to admit, as unprepossessing. It may be pertinent that the person who considered it an unprepossessing cardigan is a wool-ignorant knave from a rival village. But it is a view, and ought therefore be registered, in the Cardigan Book.

The wax seal on the front of the Cardigan Book is stamped with an image of a sheep. It is more accurate to call it a wax blob, for it does not act as a seal. It is purely decorative, and was added to the cover by the village waxer to give the book, he said, an antique air. We have only been keeping the Cardigan Book for the past two weeks.

All villagers are required to inform the village cardiganist of the views expressed upon their cardigans, whether the views be those of their fellow-villagers or of strangers, such as the wool-ignorant knave from a rival village. It should be noted that his own village has no Cardigan Book to speak of.

Initially we kept the book in an anteroom of Fort Hoity, but we have since moved it to a locked chamber in the tower of Fort Toity. The door to the staircase of the tower is guarded by a pair of trained yet savage swans. Their honks when alarmed can be heard for miles, even in the rival village from whence the wool-ignorant knave came lumbering across the fields.

There were many sheep in the fields, so many sheep they cannot be counted. They are shorn now, and the cretins in the barn spin their fleeces into wool for the knitting of. There is hubbub in the barn, among the churns, for the revel goes on, it goes on and on and on, and will go on until all the revellers drop exhausted on the sawdust. Then, still, the cretins will spin. They will spin and spin until all the wool has been made into cardigans, and the views of each and all on each and every cardigan entered in the Cardigan Book.

Oh how hopeless is our village! We cannot see straight. We put on our blinkers and wait for the rain.