sneedl’bodja takes a drink

Sneedl’bodja stormed off in a sulk, disappearing in the direction of the village without a single backward glance.

Shunshelstinx was about to call after him, but then he decided that this would not be a particularly worthwhile action to take. By the time he’d made one decision and changed his mind, you can be sure that Sneedl’bodja would have been so far out of earshot as to be coming back into range from the opposite direction. Shunshelstinx and Qumfl’quelunx trudged disconsolately back along the lane leading to Three Foxes Wood, cheered by the thought of sitting in front of a roaring fire drinking cocoa and knowing, or hoping at least, that Sneedl’bodja would catch up with them very soon. In fact, he was probably ahead of them already, because he usually was, but that did not stop Shunshelstinx worrying about him. Shunshelstinx always worried about Sneedl’bodja, because he always worried about everything, and he was not hopeful that Sneedl’bodja could restrain his natural impulse to act first and think not at all. But, he thought, perhaps he knows what he’s doing.

“Even if I don’t,” he concluded.

Sneedl’bodja did indeed know what he was doing. And where he was going. The village inn. Many years ago, he had discovered that the public house in the village stored vast quantities of a large variety of brown liquors, most of which he found very pleasant to drink. He particularly enjoyed a liquor that came in clear glass bottles and tasted like a mixture of fire and water. He would take the most hair-raising risks for a drink of that, especially tonight, but he would have to be at his very quickest.

The lights were still on in the drinking rooms, and Sneedl’bodja peered carefully through the window to spy out the terrain, although carefully and Sneedl’bodja are about as far from being natural bedfellows as it is possible to imagine and still be in the same story. In other words, he shot a perfunctory glance through the window. Inside, he saw several gadgies†, some of whom were leaning on the bar in various degrees of instability. Others were standing unsteadily, and all were talking animatedly.

“Did you hear that Old Man McScranagan’s garden shed burned down tonight in mysterious circumstances?” said one, taking a long drink from his mug of foaming ale.

“I heard that it was spontaneous combustion,” said another, who had already drunk too much foaming ale to have any idea what he was talking about but who did not want to be left out of the conversation.

“Bah!” thought Sneedl’bodja irritably. “When I need that pot-bellied poltroon Qumfl’quelunx to provide one of his sound effects, he isn’t here. That is so typical of that vacuous waxwork! I shall just have to think of another plan.”

His ‘other plan’ would see Sneedl’bodja at his most reckless, but it was also what he was good at. Speed of movement, that was the key—well, that and confining those movements within the narrow zone of the gadgies’ peripheral vision. But although he was unwilling to admit it, he relied on Qumfl’quelunx’s bizarre repertoire of sound effects to provide the vital distraction. Without his portly friend, he could not be sure that he would not be seen, but after all, a drink of fire water was a drink of fire water and was surely worth the modest risk involved.

That was it! Yes, it was worth the risk. And with that question answered, Sneedl’bodja sprang into action, his judgement clouded only very slightly by a fondly anticipated glass of fire water. And he knew his way into the drinking rooms, having been there on more than one previous occasion. Shunshelstinx, we can safely assume, is totally unaware of this backsliding behaviour by his frenetic friend. He certainly wouldn’t have approved.

Anyway, in one continuous springing movement, Sneedl’bodja was at the door, which had one of those new-fangled contraptions that allow the door to be pushed open easily from the outside. But then it thoughtfully closes the door behind you automatically, thus saving you all that inconvenience. It must have been a very lazy gadgie who invented that one.

However, unknown to Sneedl’bodja, the innkeeper had attached a bell to this outer door since his last visit, having for some time been puzzled by the speed with which his whisky was being drunk. He was convinced that his customers were coming in quietly while he was in the cellar and sneaking the odd tipple while pretending to wait patiently to be served. Early one evening, before his regular customers arrived, he had marked the level of whisky in the bottle with a red pencil. Shortly thereafter, also before the regulars arrived, Sneedl’bodja, who just happened to be in the neighbourhood, had seen his opportunity, slipped in quietly through the front door and helped himself to a large whisky. A very large whisky. The innkeeper was not pleased to discover a discrepancy of almost an inch between the red line and the level of the whisky, but at least he had confirmed his suspicions. Someone really had been drinking his whisky, as he had thought. But in answering one mystery, he had created another. The bar was empty. Nobody was waiting to be served. He had identified the offence but not the culprit. It wasn’t one of his regulars, after all. Well, yes, it was one of his regulars really, but it was a regular of whose existence he was unaware.

Anyway, Sneedl’bodja pushed slowly at the door. If his hope had been to enter quietly, that hope was dashed by a sudden urgent clanging overhead. Sneedl’bodja’s lightning-fast senses picked up the alarum a fraction of a second before either the innkeeper or his customers, and in a blur of motion he was crouching under a blackened oak settle in the darkest corner of the main drinking room. That split second later, half a dozen pairs of eyes turned to the door, saw it close mysteriously all by itself, and nothing else.

“Must’ve been the wind. It’s pretty gusty tonight,” said one drinker.

“Poltergeists!” exclaimed the one who had already drunk too much foaming ale to know what he was talking about.

A third gadgie sat down suddenly, pushing a half-drunk glass of foaming ale across the table as he did so.

“That’s enough ale for me landlord,” he said emphatically. “I’ve just seen a pixie dressed in a dark brown jogging outfit run across the floor.”

“I’d better get you home George,” said his friend, who knew that pixies do not exist.

By this stage of the evening, all the gadgies had drunk far too much foaming ale to make any connexion between a door that appeared to open by itself and eye-witness evidence of pixies.

“Excellent!” thought Sneedl’bodja. “This is my chance, while their backs are turned.”

He leapt up on to the bar counter, found an empty glass, picked up the whisky bottle, pulled out the cork, poured himself a more generous helping than usual (a far more generous helping than usual), replaced the cork and drank it down, all of it, in less time than it takes to tell how the feat was accomplished. And then, wobbling unsteadily, he started to run back down the counter, but at that moment he caught sight of a strikingly good-looking gelgin in the long mirror on the wall behind the bar.

“Who is that handsome fellow?” thought Sneedl’bodja, stopping suddenly. “Why, he’s almost as good-looking as me!”

Stopping suddenly may have been his intention, but, thus distracted, he skidded spectacularly in a pool of stagnant ale and disappeared over the edge, arms flailing wildly. Regaining his composure in mid-air, he landed athletically on the floor behind the bar, fell over, stood up again and staggered out into the passageway connecting the drinking rooms. How to escape? That was now the problem.

As luck would have it, at that precise moment, the innkeeper noticed that the whisky was still swirling in the bottle. That is how fast Sneedl’bodja can be. Anyway, the landlord had enough time to confront his customers before the eddies died down.

“Not me!” said one, very positively.

“Me neither!” said another, equally positive that he was not responsible.

“And certainly not me!” exclaimed a third, who positively glowed with indignation at the very thought that he even drank whisky, certainly not without paying for it.

“Count me out!” added a fourth, who only ever drank whisky when someone else was paying for it.

“Perhaps the tide has gone out!” interjected the one who had already drunk too much foaming ale to know what he was talking about but who was determined at all costs not to be left out of the conversation.

“Perhaps your brain’s gone out!” said the landlord in exasperation.

Meanwhile, Sneedl’bodja half ran, half crawled along a second corridor, terrifying on the way a small and very yappy terrier. Or was it the other way around? Whichever interpretation you choose to believe, we can safely infer that Sneedl’bodja did not pause momentarily and stoop down to stroke the unsuspecting dog behind the ear, although he may have kicked it. On the other hand, if he did aim a kick at the dog, he probably missed. Anyway, Sneedl’bodja did not stop. He simply kept running, helter skelter, side to side, staggering really more than running. Turn left at the end of the corridor. Miss the turning and hit the wall. Through two open doors. Crash! Ooops! That should have read ‘open two doors’. Up one step and down three, he slipped, slithered and slid until, finally, without quite understanding how he was able to do so, and with a more than generous admixture of sheer luck, he reached the back of the inn. Drawing further on his luck, his judgement not being available for consultation for most of the evening, he found a half-open sash window through which he could probably wriggle, although it would be rather a tight squeeze.

At the opposite end of Sneedl’bodja’s erratic trajectory through the building, the innkeeper was unconvinced.

“Poltergeists indeed!” he said contemptuously.

footnote
† This is what gelgins call people.

shunshelstinx receives a summons

Between 2000 and 2002, I wrote a comic fantasy novel about imaginary creatures called gelgins that are responsible for everything that unexpectedly goes wrong in the world. I’d had the idea many years earlier, but when I started to write, for some inexplicable reason, instead of chronicling the clever stunts that gelgins can pull off, I found myself describing the exploits of the three most incompetent gelgins in the history of their kind.

The first publisher that I submitted the completed book to thought it ‘funny and well written’ but ended their letter with ‘…but we don’t publish comic fantasy.’ Obviously, I was encouraged—all I needed to do was find the right publisher—but after two years, I’d run out of potential publishers. The book remains unpublished, although I have posted extracts on this blog from time to time.

What follows is the opening episode in the book, and you will need to know that there are three types of gelgin—rajas, tamas and sattvas—each with distinctive habits and personalities. A honka (a gelgin word) is a food item, only ever prepared by tamas gelgins, that is nauseatingly smelly.

*  *  *

Shunshelstinx sat stiffly upright in the hard chair beside the fire. It was his favourite chair, given to him when he was a callow young gelgin, although he had long ago forgotten the donor’s name. He had never been very good with names, but now that you come to mention it, it was probably his mother. He was toasting his teatime crumpets and his short, fat toes, but as he waited for the crumpets to brown, he allowed his thoughts to drift aimlessly, and he quickly became lost in the uncharted depths of a wilderness of enticing daydreams about his important contributions, real and imaginary, but mostly imaginary, to past and future practical jokes. He was therefore not paying close attention, which really was a silly thing to be doing, and if not silly, then at least not sensible, given that during the aeons that Qumfl’quelunx has lived next door, his sense of smell has become so dull that he couldn’t find an open bottle of scent in a dungheap, let alone a steaming pile of cow dung in a perfume factory, unless, of course, he stood in it.

Anyway, despite such severe shortcomings in the basic olfactory capacity that every gelgin should possess, which means that for more years than he cares to remember he has been unable to perceive even the slightest difference in aroma between fried mushrooms and cheese on toast, he was roused abruptly from the distant depths of his peripatetic reverie by a sudden and startling smell. It was the unmistakeably acrid stench of burning hair, although ‘stench’ is not the kind of word that would spring immediately to mind if the mind referred to was in any way whatsoever associated with Shunshelstinx. Niff! Now that was his favourite word, or one of them at least, because there were so many to choose from.

“Ouch! Oow! Ooow! Oooow!” he squeaked, each squeal longer and louder than the last.

Shunshelstinx has an exceptionally low pain threshold, so low that a brisk buffeting about the temples with a felt-tipped ostrich feather has been known to provoke a bout of uncontrollable hysteria, while a head-on collision with a fly whose navigation system has been malfunctioning often results in a call to the doctor. And gelgins don’t have doctors, so you can imagine how hysterical that must be. And a nettle sting could cause a dead faint and result in a summons for the funeral director, who is unlikely to be pleased to discover that the ‘corpse’ is not dead. A dead loss, probably. Dead stupid, certainly. But not dead.

However, had any other gelgin been present to witness this farce, Shunshelstinx would have clenched his fists and silently bitten his lower lip, not so that it might hurt, you understand, but merely as a reminder that he should conduct himself in an appropriately seemly manner at all times. Sneedl’bodja would not have been in the least sympathetic. He would have thought the entire episode side-splittingly funny, despite it being regarded as the abyss of poor taste to laugh at the misfortunes of another gelgin. But it was only the hairs on his feet, after all. Shunshelstinx had overreacted, as he often did, and he was not hurt at all. Not even a gnat’s fraction of his entire person had been harmed, even in his imagination, limited as that was.

“Bother!” he exclaimed to nobody in particular. “This is rather, well, er, none too pleasing.”

Just then there came a sharp rap-tap-rat-a-tat on his front door. That would be Sneedl’bodja, the impatient urgency of whose ‘open this door immediately’ knock was quite as distinctive as his staccato laughter.

“Bother,” said Shunshelstinx again, this time referring to the unexpected interruption and not to his feet. “I must calm down. I can’t possibly allow Snee to see me when I’m not at my best. What would a great leader of gelgins do in this situation? What did I do last time? Now, think. Oh dear! That’s difficult. What should I think about? Help! Help! Don’t panic! Now, panic…!”

He tailed off, very nearly on the verge of hysteria, but then he stopped and slowly took a deep and self-important breath.

“Now concentrate!” he continued quietly to himself. “That’s it! Concentration. Self-discipline. Iron resolution. Determination. Works wonders. I’m glad I thought of that.”

At least the arrival of Sneedl’bodja had taken his mind off his feet, and the realization began to dawn on him, albeit not until shortly before midday, that he had merely been startled and not slightly incinerated, as he had first assumed. Brain not functioning properly, he concluded, as indeed was often the case. In fact, there have been occasions when his friends have suggested that his brain is not functioning at all, either properly or improperly. And it turns out that these occasions when his brain has not been performing according to its official job description are so frequent that you could be forgiven for assuming that it is the default state of affairs. No need to assume. This is the standard interface that Shunshelstinx presents to the world. He is as dim as he sounds. Really. He is so dim that, by comparison, a firefly would think itself ready to take on the Pharos of Alexandria for the title of Seventh Wonder of the World. Denser than material normally only ever found in the core of a black dwarf. Hang an ‘out of order’ sign on his brain and, well, you get the picture.

At least the interruption had been impeccable in its timing. To his great surprise and absolute delight, he discovered that his crumpets were not too hot, not too brown. And not too crisp either. They were just right, which is how he liked them.

“Do come in Snee,” he called firmly, but not too firmly, and certainly not too loudly.

Crash! The door flew open, and in leapt Sneedl’bodja with a florid flourish and an exaggerated bow. Always the show-off. All he needs is an audience, even if it is only Shunshelstinx. But close on his heels came a faint niff, which proceeded to intensify with the speed of a sneeze from a bull elephant that just a few seconds earlier had carelessly snuffled its trunk into a plastic bucket full of freshly milled white pepper. This malodorous stench ruthlessly clawed, barged and elbowed its way into the nostrils of the unsuspecting Shunshelstinx in the desperately frantic style of an aggressively jostling crowd of morning commuters battling to board a suburban train on which room to breathe has already been changing hands for sums of money that are impossible to comprehend without the aid of a qualified accountant. The rank odour quickly enveloped his larynx like the tendrils of a supercharged beanstalk that has overdosed on high-potash fertilizer and was now attempting to throttle him from the inside, outwards, almost as if someone had casually opened an umbrella inside his throat.

“Qumfl’quelunx?”

“Qumfl’quelunx!”

Neither question nor response required any elaboration, but Sneedl’bodja is a typical rajas and as such isn’t likely to refrain from stating the blindingly obvious just because it is obvious. In fact, stating the shriekingly ‘look, I’m over here!’ obvious is part of Sneedl’bodja’s stock-in-trade.

“That seriously dim tamas, who couldn’t outrun the digestive juices of a sloshed slug, who has less wit than the slime trail of a snacking snail! Who couldn’t make a crocodile cry! And who couldn’t think his way out of a room with only one door and fewer windows! Whose brain—and we’re assuming here that he has a brain, which is not a proposition, let me tell you, which I would accept without insisting that evidence be produced—whatever brain he might once have possessed must have been consumed by maggots, confiscated by the magistrates, or perhaps it was purloined by a passing thief when he wasn’t looking! He’s cooking! Again!” he spluttered, barked and coughed in a voice that to the practised ear may have sounded just ever so slightly more irritable than it usually did, although you will quickly discover that there is rarely enough scope for increasing his irritability much beyond its usual tectonic level.

When he had reached the end of his tirade, he made a rapid survey of the room, followed by an equally rapid change of subject.

“Ah! Crumpets I see,” he added. “Any for me?”

He did not really need to ask, because Shunshelstinx always prepared some extra crumpets for him, but he liked to make sure, just in case. Shunshelstinx did not react to his visitor’s question at first. Although he was desperate for a lungful of fresh and wholesome air, and although this urgent need had almost destroyed his concentration, he was firmly determined to maintain at least the pretence that he, Shunshelstinx, was in charge, well knowing that Sneedl’bodja would not take any notice. Unless food was on the table. He was much more easily persuaded then, and therefore more manageable. Persuaded of what? You might well ask, although you would be unlikely to receive a sensible reply unless you were prepared to hang around for a depressingly long time. And even then no guarantees could be offered.

Shunshelstinx, meanwhile, had managed to leap up and slam the door shut. He then collapsed against the inside of the door, gasping for air, having held his breath for far longer than was sensible, even in these dire circumstances. And as dire circumstances go, the stench generated by a honka is among the most dire imaginable.

“What a honka! That was even worse than the last one, although my memory is not what it was,” he spluttered. “What’s he cooking up this time?”

“I don’t know, but it smells like a mature mixture of rotting fish offal, burning blubber, rancid yak’s milk cheese and putrefying snails’ entrails,” screeched Sneedl’bodja, whose sense of smell is not merely keen, it is unbearably enthusiastic, which is why, presumably, he can discern each of these disgustingly malodorous ingredients from the general background stench.

“But it’s what he calls his ‘secret’ ingredient, whatever that is, that makes the stench so awful. This reek is much worse than even….”

Even Sneedl’bodja was unable, for once, to find the words he wanted, although such a failure is uncharacteristic, because most of the time he has harrowing harangues and tub-thumping tirades queuing up to take their turn, caustic comments trying to jump the queue, and several arguments and even a few fights breaking out all along the line. However, even without this clue, Shunshelstinx formed the impression that his rajas friend was being less restrained, if that were possible, than he had been on any of the previous, but mercifully infrequent, occasions when Qumfl’quelunx had been busy in the kitchen.

But whatever had made his friend perhaps just a little more annoyed with Qumfl’quelunx than he usually is even Shunshelstinx could guess, having just experienced at first hand the fumigatory properties of the latter’s latest honka in all its virulent nastiness. Mind you, this would be about the limit of Shunshelstinx’s ability to guess anything sensible—he has more than enough trouble guessing his name—while Sneedl’bodja needs no excuse to be annoyed about anything. He is never annoyed about nothing. In other words, he is always annoyed about something or other, or both. In fact, being annoyed about only two things at once counts as a monumental exercise in restraint. And Sneedl’bodja may have been called quite a few unkind things over the years, usually by Qumfl’quelunx under his breath, but ‘restrained’ is unlikely to have been one of them.

“However,” he added as he regained some measure of composure. “I say that we form a neighbourhood committee to ban this sort of behaviour! It shouldn’t be allowed! It is an utter, utter…”

And here he coughed, spluttered twice, coughed twice more and continued.

“…utter outrage! There should be a statute against it! There should be an ordinance! There should be a bye-law! There should be a regulation! There should be a rule! There should be grounds for a claim! There should be grounds for an action!”

“Well, Snee, you’re the man of action,” interjected Shunshelstinx from his uncharacteristically untidy sprawl against the front door, where he had remained during Sneedl’bodja’s outbursts.

The manner of his delivery, one assumes intentionally, had much in common with a deadpan stand-up comedian who has just cracked the worst joke in the world in the firm conviction that he has related the funniest ever told. Or perhaps Shunshelstinx’s joke really was that funny. It’s just the way he tells them. Anyway, if, on this evidence, you were to judge that Shunshelstinx has a poor sense of humour, you wouldn’t expect to discover that you were wrong. But you would be wrong. His sense of humour is so penurious that a merely poor sense of humour would think itself wealthy beyond rational belief by comparison. However, even this typically, characteristically, lame sattvas jest, which was well up to Shunshelstinx’s usual standards, was so unexpected as to stun Sneedl’bodja into sudden silence.

“I remember when I was very young, my uncle always used to say that porridge is best cooked in an iron pan, and not to add too much salt, so I use hardly any,” continued Shunshelstinx, standing up and puffing out his chest. “And cocoa is best drunk piping hot, or so I’ve been told, but it depends on how hot the piping is. Mustn’t be too hot, I would have thought. And it should be served with not more than a soupçon of sugar. I can remember how much sugar to use because when I’m in my kitchen, the soup’s on the stove, so I obviously need a soup ladle. Although for what I can’t remember. I’m not sure if we were ever told. And it’s always best to toast crumpets on a fire that has almost gone out but can still singe the hairs on the palms of your hands. Brings out the wholesome goodness. I also understand that there’s been a severe shortage of dolly mixtures recently, and all our top gelgins are working on the problem even as we speak. So why wasn’t I asked? Don’t you know it’s what’s important that counts?”

We can all agree with that last statement, but why did it take so long to get there? The simple answer is that Shunshelstinx does not so much beat about the bush as bash and batter his way around an entire jungle of overgrown herbiage. Or should that be ‘overblown verbiage’? At least, he would do if his friends gave him half a chance, which they don’t, unless they aren’t paying attention, which is a common enough state of affairs when the object of that missing attention is Shunshelstinx himself.

“Anyway, don’t expect me to deal with the problem,” he added. “I think that the best tactic is to keep him well supplied with leftovers, but not too well supplied of course, because then he’d be sure to keep some until it has gone mouldy. And after all these years of living next door, I’m almost used to the reek, as you call it….”

And here he paused to reflect on Sneedl’bodja’s earlier choice of word to describe what both gelgins knew no word can possibly describe with any useful degree of accuracy, the stench of a honka. He would have much preferred to use ‘pong’, because it is a more genteel word, more dignified and less violent on the ear. If he had been in a sniffy mood, he might have chosen to say ‘niff’ instead. He might even have plumped for ‘offensive effluvium’, which has the distinct advantage of concealing its meaning from mere casual users, who can therefore introduce the phrase into polite cocktail party chatter with little or no risk of embarrassment.

“However, thank goodness he’s such a dandy,” he concluded. “He usually changes his socks every other day at least, so he rarely manages to mature a suitably cheesy pair in which to cook his dreadful honkas. And if he wasn’t so lazy, we’d all have more to endure than I even dare to imagine.”

And even Shunshelstinx, who has now used up his ration of imagination for the entire story, shuddered inwardly at such a depressing notion—just once a year was more than once too often. He then walked slowly over to the cupboard in the corner of his parlour, rummaged around in a battered cardboard shoebox on the middle shelf and took out a wood-and-wire clothes peg to show Sneedl’bodja.

“This is my latest method. It’s very clever,” he said smugly. “With you crashing in the way you did, I didn’t have a chance to prepare properly, but usually, when Qumfl’quelunx is cooking, I put this on my nose before I open the front door. He caught me by surprise this time. And you weren’t expected.”

He demonstrated the required technique with the clothes peg, which is sufficiently obvious not to require further description.

“Only trouble is, I can’t hear myself speaking properly, so I don’t know what I’m talking about. Or perhaps I can’t remember what I’m talking about. Or maybe I’m talking about something I can’t remember. Or possibly I’m remembering something I’m not supposed to talk about. Or else I’m talking about something I know nothing about. I’m good at that. I think. It’s definitely at least one of those. If not more. I think. I’m not sure. I can’t remember,” said Shunshelstinx confusingly.

“How’s your ulcer today,” he continued, changing the subject. “Painful? Oh dear! I am so sorry to hear….”

“No! No! My ulcer is perfectly fine! In fact, I do not have an ulcer,” interrupted Sneedl’bodja rudely and not quite truthfully. “It’s this! It’s for you!”

He brandished a large, gold-coloured envelope, across the front of which was written the single word ‘Shunshelstinx’, a word that Shunshelstinx read twice. He was sure he recognized it from somewhere, but where he couldn’t be sure. Well, it wasn’t a birthday card; he could work that out straight away. And the bold, ornate script that the envelope bore is only ever used by a small and very important group of gelgins. As if the distinctively official colour of the envelope with the oddly familiar word was not enough of a clue.

Ding! Shunshelstinx was transfixed by a sudden thought.

“Oh dear!” he muttered.

Surprisingly quickly, he had realized that the letter, notice, invitation, summons, advertising circular or whatever it was could have come from only one source. A source that could not be ignored, although he would have done almost anything—within reason, in moderation—to be offered any chance to take the do-not-disturb option.

“Oh dear,” he thought anxiously, “what could the Grand Council for the Determination of Correct Conduct possibly want with such a loyal, dedicated, lifelong servant of the most noble cause of gelginity?”

This is actually how he sees himself, even if no one else does.

“Well open it THEN,” rasped Sneedl’bodja impatiently.

The last word was shouted with some passion. Sneedl’bodja was clearly in more pain than he was prepared to admit, even to Shunshelstinx. Shunshelstinx held the envelope carefully up to the firelight to try to see through it, but without success. In fact, his only success was in giving Sneedl’bodja the distinct impression that he was dithering for what seemed like an unnecessarily long time doing nothing useful.

“Open it and stop faffing about!” he screamed, the exasperation in his voice amplified by the paroxysms of white-hot lightning that suddenly exploded through his digestive system as the acidity in his stomach rose, switching on a hitherto unsuspected level of intense agony.

This was a degree of pain equivalent to the noise level that would be generated by a Chinese gong struck three inches from your ear by a gorilla with an explosive temper and a sledgehammer.

Shunshelstinx carefully, nervously, levered off the imposing wax seal holding down the crisp flap of the envelope. Unlike Sneedl’bodja, he was careful. He was clever. If he could open the envelope without tearing it, he could use it again, although for what he wasn’t quite sure. He had not thought that far ahead. He never does.

“Why would you want to use anything again anyway?”

Sneedl’bodja had cleverly anticipated Shunshelstinx’s next comment, a most exceptional feat given that Shunshelstinx himself had not yet thought of that comment. But Sneedl’bodja runs his life at such a speed that he is in a constant state of irritation, which at times reaches truly volcanic proportions, either at the seemingly aimless approach, the infuriating lack of urgency, of Shunshelstinx or the vulgar stupidity, the chronic idleness, of Qumfl’quelunx.

Shunshelstinx slowly slid his short, chubby fingers under the flap of the envelope, pulling out a large piece of paper. It was indeed a summons from the Grand Council. Slowly, deliberately, he unfolded the paper and began to read:

“I shall have to sit down,” said Shunshelstinx weakly. “Oh dear! Oh misery! This is rather, well, er, none too pleasing. What are we to do?”

Why worry?” interrupted Sneedl’bodja,

He continued more reassuringly: “That Garkl’klunx couldn’t run a red light on a pinball machine, let alone win a free game, so you’ve nothing to worry about.”

“You’re only being critical out of jealousy, because no rajas, thank goodness, has ever been elected to the esteemed office of High Gelgin,” replied Shunshelstinx. “In any case….”

He stopped, distracted by the sound of a gentle tapping, almost more like a scraping, on his front door. No, he was sure it was a scraping sound. Just a minute, he thought, as the muffled but violent sound of a ton of bricks crashing to the ground from a considerable height just outside could be heard through the closed door. This was followed by an insistent, enthusiastic honking, interrupted at alarmingly frequent intervals by the quasi-musical tinkle of another breaking plate, the kind of scenario that would be the inevitable consequence of an ill-advised decision to entrust the washing up to a friendly troupe of willing but totally untrained sea lions.

It could only have been Qumfl’quelunx, you might have expected Shunshelstinx to realize had he paused for even half a moment’s thought, but then you would be making the assumption, unjustified in the case of Shunshelstinx, that half a moment is sufficient to produce a worthwhile quantity of thought. And you would, therefore, be making a mistake. He would have realized who it was in time, but, regrettably, we don’t have that amount of time at our disposal, so it is better simply to get on with the story.

Before investigating the odd events that may or may not have been taking place outside his front door, he retrieved his clothes peg and placed it firmly on the end of his long, thin nose. He glanced in the tall mirror above the fireplace, and once he had satisfied himself that he looked suitably masterly—apparently unaware that, in fact, his appearance was closer to silly than to masterly, and closer to ridiculous than to either of these—he marched across to the door, hesitated, then opened it carefully. There, as he would have known had he bothered to invest that necessary minimum quantity of thought, stood Qumfl’quelunx.

“Must you always make such a dreadful racket outside my front door. A simple knock, knock will suffice,” complained Shunshelstinx. “I suppose it would be too much to ask for you to use the knocker in future. That’s what it’s for, believe it or not.”

He pointed to the heavy brass door knocker, wrought into the shape of an elephant’s head by someone who clearly did not number many elephants among their close friends—it was not a very good likeness. In fact, it looked more like a rhinoceros with a trunk and big ears. But that was not the point. It had magical properties, or so he had been firmly assured by the previous occupant of the house. Unfortunately, he had seen no evidence of these properties, but he had been assured that this evidence did exist, which he was happy to accept. And if Shunshelstinx wants to believe something, he is unlikely to be deterred by something as simple as a lack of proof. For example, he is convinced that sows’ ears are the raw materials for silk purses, even though a pig’s ear is what he frequently makes of the planning of an elaborate practical joke.

“You’d better come in though,” he continued. “I’m afraid there’s been some rather bad news. I’ve just received a summons from the Grand Council.”

“Hello Stinky,” said Qumfl’quelunx to his host, ignoring the latter’s ominous piece of news and strolling cheerily into the room.

Shunshelstinx glared at him.

“I’ve told you and told you and told you,” he said crossly. “My name is, my name is, my name is, er….”

“The record’s stuck, the record’s stuck, the record’s stuck,” said Sneedl’bodja in a cruel parody of his friend’s forgetfulness.

“My name is, er, what is my name?” continued Shunshelstinx, ignoring the rude interruption.

“Stinky!” shouted Qumfl’quelunx, responding gleefully to Shunshelstinx’s question.

Where Sneedl’bodja had failed to disturb his friend’s equilibrium, Qumfl’quelunx was right on the mark.

“I will not be insulted in this manner, and in the parlour of my own house,” said Shunshelstinx pompously. “Kindly address me by my proper name, whatever my name is. Look here! Let’s face it, we, all three of us, we know that we have not pulled off many successful tricks recently. Something always seems to go wrong. We all need to improve our teamwork, and to improve it rather dramatically, or the Grand Council might decide to revoke our pranking licence. And then where would we be?”

“Outer Mongolia?” said Qumfl’quelunx, who has always firmly believed that the wrong answer is preferable to no answer at all, and who would not have recognized a rhetorical question if it had jumped up and buried its fangs in the seat of his iridescent satin breeches.

“It was him!” said Sneedl’bodja accusingly, pointing a long, bony finger at the unsuspecting Qumfl’quelunx, whose skin is far too thick for any accusation, allegation or simple insult to penetrate. “He completely messed up the timing of our last practical joke. Why is he so slow?”

“And you weren’t in too much of a hurry, I assume?” asked Shunshelstinx. “We are supposed to be a team, and we’re not working as a team. For example, you never follow my instructions. And you never pay attention. Surely it’s obvious that nothing is ever going to work if you keep ignoring my instructions. How many times do you need to be told? I’m in charge. And now we’re all in trouble. Deep trouble. How ever am I to explain all this to the Grand Council?”

He sat down glumly at this point, having suddenly realized that with all the distractions of the past few minutes, his crumpets had gone cold. Stone cold. He really did find it difficult to think about more than one thing at a time, even if one of those things was food.

“Now I really am very cross,” he said. “Can’t a gelgin eat his crumpets in peace without being interrupted?”

“I can help,” said Qumfl’quelunx hopefully, trying very hard to conceal his more than usually bulging waistline, the result of having eaten a whole honka without sharing even a single slice with his two friends, who would not, in any case, have accepted an invitation to luncheon. Only a fool would accept an invitation to such a lunch, you might think, but then you would be obliged to devise some other explanation for the non-attendance of his friends or concede that perhaps they are not quite as foolish as they appear to be. And you’d be unlikely to unearth much evidence in support of the second hypothesis.

“I can help,” repeated Qumfl’quelunx, in case his first offer of assistance had gone unheard.

There are several things that you should know about Qumfl’quelunx and food, which is about as natural a pairing as bubble and squeak. Where food is concerned, any type of food, he does not know the meaning of the word ‘full’. And his friends are unable to recall the last time he uttered the phrase ‘I’ve had enough’. If indeed he has ever uttered such a self-denying phrase. It is unlikely that he even understands the concept of ‘enough’. Whoever coined the proverb ‘enough is as good as a feast’, it certainly wasn’t Qumfl’quelunx.

“Go ahead!” said Shunshelstinx gloomily. “I’ve lost my appetite anyway.”

“Brrr!” said Sneedl’bodja, suddenly shivering. “Is it my imagination? Or is it cold in here? No, it is cold. Can I put another dried cow pat on the fire?”

“If you must,” said Shunshelstinx, looking anxiously at the dwindling heap of fuel in the bucket beside the fire.

He was cold too, but as the stingiest gelgin in Three Foxes Wood, a character trait for which he is well known even beyond the boundaries of the wood, he would have waited patiently until the fire had almost gone out before adding more fuel. Especially if he was alone. He reasoned, rather cleverly he thought, that it is better to have some fuel in the bucket, because then you can have a fire whenever you want. But once there is no fuel in the bucket, you can no longer have a fire. Once burned, the fuel cannot then be recovered without contravening both the first and second laws of thermodynamics, a feat that he is not capable of achieving, although any gelgin of average competence ought to be able to do this backwards with his eyes closed. However, as you will already have guessed, Shunshelstinx is not a gelgin of average competence. He is so far below average that average is a minuscule speck on the distant horizon from where he stands on the ladder of competence. It would not be unfair to those of average incompetence to reveal that Shunshelstinx does not meet even their most abysmally dismal standards.

Anyway, while Sneedl’bodja and Shunshelstinx were thus distracted, Qumfl’quelunx quickly scoffed the remaining crumpets, cramming them into his mouth as if he was competing in the final of a crumpet-eating contest, which he often is. The crumpets disappeared into his mouth even faster than he could swallow the chewed fragments.

“You gluttonous globule!” screamed Sneedl’bodja as he caught a brief glimpse of the last piece of crumpet disappearing rapidly into the bottomless pit of Qumfl’quelunx’s open mouth. “Your manners would disgrace a herd of hippopotamuses doing the samba in a mud-wrestling arena! You have less shame than a turtle in a tutu performing a pas de deux with a toucan in tights! Your behaviour would embarrass an avuncular aardvark dancing a rumbustious rumba with a clumsy camel! What’s more, you have all the elephantine elegance of a pair of waltzing wart hogs showing off their flashy footwork during the quickstep segment of a ballroom dancing competition for beginners! And, allow me to point out, you have less subtlety than a ravenous cannibal selling tickets for a dinner dance!”

Sneedl’bodja paused for breath as Qumfl’quelunx looked up, startled. The fat one was baffled by all this talk of dancing, which was much too energetic a pastime for him to contemplate at all seriously. Even thinking about it was exhausting enough.

“I have an idea,” said Shunshelstinx, hurriedly changing the subject. “It will be dark soon. Why don’t we go down to the human village and see if we can find somebody to prank?”

Unfortunately, this suggestion evoked absolutely no response in his disputatious companions, whose focus was solely on crumpets, or more accurately, the complete absence of crumpets now that Qumfl’quelunx had polished off the last one.

“I have an idea,” said Sneedl’bodja suddenly, growing tired of haranguing his fat friend. “It’ll be dark soon. Why don’t we have some crumpets and then go down to the village and see if we can find somebody to prank?”

“Yes, let’s,” said Qumfl’quelunx gleefully. “I wouldn’t mind a few more crumpets.”

“And who, may I enquire, is to provide the crumpets?” asked Shunshelstinx stiffly. “You’ve already eaten all of mine.”

This, of course, was an exaggeration, but he was no longer in a sharing mood. Qumfl’quelunx had eaten all the crumpets that he had toasted earlier. He’d had not a single mouthful. And on top of all that, there was still the summons. He’d worked out that he had less than a week to think of some suitably convincing excuses for the failures of the team, which was a start, but now came the hard part: he hadn’t worked out the actual excuses. Consequently, he was not able to convince himself that he could convince anyone else.

Sneedl’bodja, for example, was not convinced, believing that Shunshelstinx had not been entirely truthful when claiming that he had no crumpets. No gelgin ever allows himself to run out of crumpets, or so by a process of what he would claim was flawless reasoning he had been led to conclude. And Sneedl’bodja is not easily led, except, perhaps, when crumpets are on the menu.

“I reckon you must have hundreds in your larder,” he said.

“I do not keep my excuses in my larder,” replied Shunshelstinx, whose wandering attention had been detained elsewhere and who’d therefore not been following at all closely the finer points of the discussion.

However, he was quickly reminded of the said finer points by Sneedl’bodja.

“Crumpets! Crumpets, you prevaricating penguin!” he screeched, working himself up from a gentle simmer to a vigorous boil in response to his host’s inattention. “Why am I surrounded by idiots and imbeciles, dullards and dunces, moribund morons and fogbound fools?”

“Crumpets? Yes please!” said Qumfl’quelunx, who had not been following the conversation either but who could not fail to react to Sneedl’bodja’s frenzied cry of “Crumpets! Crumpets!”

Shunshelstinx capitulated, reluctantly but well aware of the dangers of asking Sneedl’bodja to explain what he meant a third time.

“Very well,” he said unenthusiastically. “Crumpets first, pranking second. Cocoa anyone?”

*  *  *

Wow! You actually read this far. Here are three other extracts from the story that you might want to read:

A Problem with Hats
The Great Dolly Mixture Robbery
Open the Box

Open the Box is actually a serious analysis of Bertrand’s box paradox to which I appended an extract from the book that incorporates a version of the paradox.

open the box

I briefly mentioned the Monty Hall problem in an earlier discussion of probability, but because so many people cannot accept the problem’s conclusion, I thought that it might be worth taking a closer look.

In fact, the Monty Hall problem is a variant of Bertrand’s box paradox, which was first proposed by Joseph Bertrand in his 1889 book Calcul des probabilités. Imagine that you have three boxes, one of which contains two gold coins and one of which holds two silver coins. The third box contains one of each type of coin. You reach into one of the boxes, selected at random, and without looking inside, take out a gold coin. What is the probability that the remaining coin in the box you selected is also gold? The answer is not 1/2.

This is my analysis: the gold coin that is withdrawn is one of three possible gold coins. One of these possible gold coins will be from the box where the other coin is silver, while with the other two possibilities, the second coin in the box is also gold. In other words, the probability that the second, unseen, coin is also gold is 2/3.

This fact makes for an interesting, if dishonest, game, especially if played against people who have a poor understanding of probability. The ideal environment is a bar or pub. Take three beermats, which must be identically printed on both sides. Use a marker pen to draw an X on each side of the first beermat and an O on each side of the second. The third beermat should be marked with an X on one side and an O on the other.

Now shuffle the three beermats behind your back or under the table. Then place the three beermats on top of each other on the table. If you plan to play this game for money, it is probably a good idea to get someone else to do the shuffling. At this point, you announce that you can predict whether the mark on the other side of the top beermat is an X or an O.

Of course, you cannot do this every time, but if you say that the hidden mark is the same as the mark you can see, you have a 2/3 chance of being correct. In total, there are six marks, three X’s and three O’s. If the visible mark is an X, it will be one of three X’s. But two of those X’s are on a beermat where the other mark is also an X, and only one is on a beermat where the other mark is an O. Hence the probability of being correct of 2/3.

If you do plan to play this game for money, you may like to know that if you play a ‘best of three’ series, you are twice as likely to get it right twice as you are to get it wrong twice, and you are eight times more likely to make three correct guesses as you are to be wrong three times. In fact, the longer you play, the more the odds that you will come out ahead increase in your favour. Even with a best of three, those odds are already 20/27, which is more than 74 percent, although with a longer sequence you’re likely to be accused of cheating, especially if your victim thinks that it’s a straight 50/50 choice.

I will now return to the Monty Hall problem, which is named after a US gameshow host of the 1950s. Imagine that you are a contestant on a gameshow. There are three boxes, one of which contains £10,000. The other two are empty. You are asked to choose one of the boxes, and if you select the box with the money, the money’s yours. However, before you are allowed to open your chosen box, the host, who knows which box contains the money, steps forward and opens one of the other boxes to show that it is empty. Now comes the question: do you want to stick with your original choice? Or would you prefer to switch your choice to the other unopened box? You’d be foolish not to. There is a probability of two-thirds that you will be wrong with your first choice, and when you are wrong, the host has only one box that he can open to reveal its emptiness because the other one contains the money, as he well knows.

This marks the end of the serious stuff, but I did write a comic fantasy novel about 15 years ago that features an eccentric version of the Monty Hall problem. If you plan to read on, I should warn you that it is extremely silly.

As the evening drifted aimlessly onwards, the levels of hilarity, jollity and merriment rose and rose. There was only one possible cure. A late friend of the fat one used to say, disapprovingly, whenever the level of seriousness in a conversation looked likely to become dangerously high, that there are three subjects you should never discuss at parties: science, politics and religion, although it is difficult to see what the problem is. After all, scientists know the truth, priests tell the truth, and politicians hide the truth. Everyone knows that, but only Qumfl’quelunx himself could contrive to fashion all three into a perplexing, party-pooping pronouncement.

“I have a poseur!” he announced loudly, and then repeated himself, even louder, just in case anyone hadn’t heard him the first time.

No wonder his friend was always late. Word must have passed around. There was a stunned silence, in various combinations of shock and disbelief, topped off with a liberal sprinkling of horror. But Qumfl’quelunx had reached a bizarre conclusion. He had decided that there must be some question that the Grandmaster couldn’t answer. However, it couldn’t be something that he, Qumfl’quelunx, already knew the answer to, because then he’d know something that the Grandmaster didn’t know, which didn’t seem likely, so it would have to be something that he didn’t already know. And for that he interrupted his own party?

Anyway, the fat one has clearly been taking lessons in show business presentation (and bare-faced impudence) in his spare time from Dweebl’gulja, because this is what he announced to the less than expectant throng.

“A scientist offers you a wallet that, he says, he has proved contains one thousand pounds,” he began. “A priest offers you a wallet that, he says, contains one thousand pounds, but only if you have enough faith to believe that it does. A politician promises that he will show you a wallet at some unspecified date in the future, but he never mentions specific sums of money.”

“Now, here’s the difficulty,” continued His Plumpness majestically. “Only one wallet actually contains one thousand pounds. The other two are empty, which means that only one of the three actors is actually telling the truth. The problem is to choose the right wallet.”

“Excellent!” exclaimed Dweebl’gulja, although having made major inroads into his fifth glass of firewater could well have had some hand in the making of this serious error of judgement. “Party games? Now this is what I call a party!”

At any rate, this was the sort of perplexing poser that the Grandmaster usually dreams up, and it did not seem to be too difficult. But before Dweebl’gulja could offer his valuable opinion on this monetary mystery, Shunshelstinx insisted on pointing out that the politician’s promise was empty, as you would expect, because he had seen it being manipulated from behind a curtain.

Sneedl’bodja was even more peremptory, because he could follow the logic of the situation and the truth of the logic. He could? Must have been the firewater. He selected the scientist’s wallet.

It took Qumfl’quelunx to demonstrate the necessary leap of faith by selecting the priest’s wallet, but then he realized that he had posed the question and was thus not required to provide an answer. Never give an answer to a question that you’re never asked, he said to himself, in the process misremembering one of Dweebl’gulja’s favourite saws. So he waited for his guest to make a suggestion, which was the best the Grandmaster could do. Guess, in other words. And guess what? He also chose the priest’s wallet. If in doubt, he may have suggested, always take the priest’s wallet.

It was now time for His Plumpness to challenge the perspicacity of this pre-eminent pranking master, to assess the appropriateness of his analyses, to evaluate the exactitude of his estimates, to induce the incisiveness of his intuitive insights, to measure the magnitude of his mental machinations, to rule on the rectitude of his reasoning, to triangulate the thoroughness of his thinking. Or bemuse, baffle and bamboozle him with bullshit, more like.

“Now!” he announced with a flamboyant flourish, anxious to move on quickly before he could be overwhelmed by another avalanche of alliterative allusions. “Before you open your chosen wallet, I happen to know which wallet contains the money and which two are empty, so I’ll just open one of the empty wallets.”

With these words, he plucked a virtual wallet from the air, the one belonging to the scientist, and demonstrated that it contained nothing. No money. Not even enough for the bus fare home. And not even an explanation for why it had been wasting everyone’s time. But, then, that’s science for you.

“Now!” said Qumfl’quelunx, beginning to like the sound of sounding important. “Do you want to keep the priest’s wallet? Or would you rather believe the politician’s promise?” Now, presumably, you will know that in ordinary circumstances (no lying, in other words) the correct strategy if you want to maximize your chances of pocketing the money is to believe the politician’s promise and switch your allegiance. It is clearly to your advantage to change. If you cling on to the priest’s call to have faith, and to his wallet, your chance of being correct remains at a paltry one-third, not the half that you may have been led to believe by Shunshelstinx is the new probability. However, the probability is that you will have spotted his weakness in matters mathematical by now.

“Is it a trick question?” he asked for the twenty-seventh time.

But by exposing the obvious limitations of science, Qumfl’quelunx had somehow allowed the probability of a politician keeping a promise to surge to two-thirds, which isn’t very likely, as Dweebl’gulja was quick to point out. Unfortunately, the only explanation being offered is that the politician changed the rules halfway through, claiming despite damning evidence that no promises had been made in the first place, and that if promises had been made, it was all the fault of the previous party, which, we have been assured, did finish before midnight. But as a result of this perfidy, the politician’s party never recovered.

And neither did Qumfl’quelunx’s, although it does leave one small mystery unexplained. Just how did His Plumpness manage to evict his erstwhile ersatz erudition and replace it with the sort of cerebral conundrum that you would be more likely to associate with Dweebl’gulja? To avoid having to incorporate another coincidence into the already interplanetary preposterousness of the story, the management has decided that this curious oddity will have to remain unexplained, although if you must know, it has been rumoured, on very good authority, that Qumfl’quelunx has been up to his old tricks. Well, you wouldn’t expect him to be trying new tricks, he being like an old dog in that regard. And if he really has been meddling with the story again, it is certainly up to his usual standards of unsubtlety and very much of a piece with his lurid fashion sense. In keeping with his over-the-top style, he wouldn’t have been satisfied with the label ‘not stupid’, which even he could have been expected to carry off if he really tried, even though the only thing he can carry off with anything approaching panache is food. No, he would have to choose to masquerade as an ‘intellectual’. But perhaps the really odd thing is that he thinks nobody notices.

If, in spite of my prior warning, you have reached this point, you may possibly also enjoy A Problem with Hats from the same novel. It incorporates a well-known logic puzzle.

the great dolly mixture robbery

Between 2000 and 2002, I wrote a comic fantasy novel about mythical creatures called gelgins, based on an idea I’d had more than two decades earlier but not acted upon. However, after two years of trying to find either a publisher or an agent, I gave up, because the book clearly wasn’t good enough overall, although there are passages that I still think are funny. What follows is one such passage, which is the opening ‘episode’ in the tenth and final chapter of the book. Key previous events in the story should be obvious, apart from the complicity of sheep in the robbery that is the climax of the story. So, if you’re fed up with turkey and the rest of the traditional festive comestibles, if you can’t find anything worth watching on TV, or if you simply want to read something utterly daft, here you are. Some background information on gelgins can be gained by reading Chaos Theory. You may well conclude that no publisher in their right mind would want to be associated with such drivel.

*  *  *

The daring daylight dolly mixture robbery was an immediate sensation in the wider world, where it abruptly replaced a scandal about a black labrador called Judy and a gadgie’s* bag of sticky treacle toffees as the hot topic of conversation at the nation’s breakfast tables. The BBC, with one eye on the calendar, had initially decided that the whole thing had been an elaborate hoax, so the tabloids were the first to run the story, although in their news treatments ‘gallop’ would be a more accurate term. As you would have expected, there was heavy bias towards the alien visitor hypothesis, but neither the broadsheets nor the heavyweight weeklies nor the local village gossips were far behind in their promotion of this explanation.

The BBC, perhaps to atone for its earlier oversight, even condescended to discuss the circumstances surrounding this brass-necked effrontery to civilized behaviour on respectable Radio 4, where the presenters on the Today program, not being required to keep straight faces as they would, presumably, on television, were assigned the task of interviewing all the usual suspects. Senior police officers presented purportedly factual accounts, but they were unable to establish any credible motive, although the opportunity had been obvious, and there were other notable gaps where the evidence was a bit thin. Important scientists, led by that redoubtable Dr Rhadamanthus McLott of earlier newsworthy notoriety, offered what they claimed were logical explanations, but these were also founded on a paucity of proof, in solid, liquid or gaseous form. And, as we have come to expect, all the country’s leading politicians provided the usual vapid evasions, although there were earnest assurances that everything was being done to combat this sort of thing.

But to counterbalance all this objectivity and to maintain the program’s near legendary, bend-over-backwards reputation for even-handedness and fair play, an arresting array of scintillating cynics and sympathetic psychics, eclectic eccentrics and inimitable mimics, mysterious mystics and rumbustious rustics, and men who keep score at cricket because nobody else wants it were allowed their turns at the microphone, and between them they offered every conceivable theory, and some that you wouldn’t have thought were within touching distance of being conceivable this side of the next millennium. In fact, so many came forward that the statutory minimum duration of a period of fame had to be slashed from the fifteen minutes originally stipulated by that nice Mr Warhol to twenty-seven seconds.

There were grave financial repercussions. The collapse of international futures markets in dolly mixtures led to massive short selling of liquorice allsorts and even shorter selling of jelly babies. Many leading economists predicted huge flights of capital into fruit pastilles and the immediate closure of unprofitable sherbet mines with the loss of hundreds and thousands of jobs. In the ensuing confusion, several toffee-nosed financiers attempted to fudge the issue by selling their contingency reserves of gold nougats at less than market price. All right, own up! Who’s behind this? Who’s responsible for all this uninvited confectionery? And so far nobody has been able to butterscotch the rumour that a very small country with a surprisingly large army of chocolate soldiers has cornered the market in oil of peppermint. Now, that’s enough! Enough humbug, that is. Can we get on with the story?

The official police investigation was hampered from the start by several problems, although they did have some clues. There was the bucket of petrol that the escaping gelgins had left in the car park and the plastic tubing that had been used to tie up the driver, both of which were identified as having been stolen from a car in the same car park late in the evening before the robbery. The owner of that car hadn’t bothered to report that someone had nicked his bucket, but he soon came forward when he heard about the large reward being offered for information leading to the apprehension of the thieves. And everybody was hugely relieved that nobody had kicked the bucket while it still contained the petrol, or during the remainder of the madcap chase, for that matter. Now that really would have been beyond the pail.

There was also the plastic ketchup bottle that Sneedl’bodja had so thoughtlessly tossed into the hedge. There were no fingerprints, and the mysterious smudgy marks that were discovered by the fingerprint expert offered nothing on which to base a hypothesis. Apparently, though, the bottle had once contained an unknown explosive substance, and this was quickly identified by the forensic team, although no details were made public at the time, so we’ve only their word for it. In any case, not one of these items provided any firm leads, which meant that the police were in distinguished company, because no one else had any ideas about this business either, although, somehow, it didn’t seem like a meticulously planned operation. This was about the only thing that the police got right in the entire investigation.

For example, the driver gave highly misleading descriptions of the robbers. They were not inaccurate, exactly—the driver had an uncanny memory for faces—but he did exaggerate their heights. Rather a lot, actually. Mainly to avoid being thought a fool, he neglected to mention that the robbers were not of average height. And, by the merest coincidence (not another one) he just happened to be the only gadgie to have seen our bold buccaneers in all their menacing swash and buckling, all their dastardly do and derring, so the police thought they were hunting three gadgies. And his descriptions may have been full of detail, but—and here’s the really clever part—the disguises that were worn by the robbers were so obviously and transparently counterfeit that they attracted all his attention, and he was able to describe them in minute detail, but he forgot to notice anything else. There were many scores of other eye-witnesses too, all of whom were prepared to swear that the devilish driver was wearing a mask, but not one was able to furnish a single concrete detail of his real appearance. Strange. Well, yes, he probably did look strange.

There was another mystery. The police couldn’t understand why the robbers had made off with the wagon’s entire load of dolly mixtures but had left behind a leather satchel containing twenty-five thousand pounds in used banknotes, which was in the wagon’s cab. However, by way of consolation, and to demonstrate that the investigative powers of the police are all they’re made out to be after all, this satchel turned out to be the first clue to the existence of an international money-laundering operation with its headquarters in a Chinese laundry in Bethnal Green, although it did take the police team rather a long time to find that out, and they did lose several shirts in the process.

In desperation (ewe will not believe this), the police decided that they would round up scores of sheep† from the fields and fellsides in the immediate vicinity of the stolen wagon’s final journey on suspicion of going on the rampage, or perhaps of being ram raiders. The ramifications of this sinister development were not clearly understood at the time, but it led to the sheep being interrogated by a ramshackle panel of experts in strange behaviour, who threatened that non-cooperation would mean a one-way trip to the abattoir. This, of course, is strictly against the Geneva Convention, but nobody squealed, or, to avoid the porcine connotations of this word, not a single sheep bleated, even though some of the younger ones were threatened with the notorious rack of lamb. They all pretended to be mutton.

A massive reward was offered to anyone who could provide a convincing explanation that did not invoke crop circles, but eventually the investigation ground to a halt, reached a dead end, came up against a brick wall, ran out of steam, hit the buffers, petered out, and switched off the light and retired for the night. Nevertheless, there was a fall-back position, as the detective superintendent left in charge of the case pointed out at a packed press conference several weeks after the heist. Alien visitors. Alien visitors? Sherlock Holmes may have said that once the impossible has been eliminated, that which remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But neither the illustrious Baker Street consulting detective nor his partly baked modern counterpart had ever heard of gelgins, and as Holmes also said, on numerous occasions, it is impossible to build a watertight case unless you are in possession of all the relevant facts. And the perplexed detective leading this investigation had a case that was leakier than a string bag. A purportedly rigorous proof that the Earth is flat would have been more likely to convince, especially when any alien visitor could have told you, if you had only bothered to ask, that it is in fact pear-shaped. Isn’t it?

In his earlier flirtation with celebrity, Dr Rhadamanthus McLott had quickly discovered that no one was interested in his theories once it had become clear that he had no little green gender-neutral entities to spring upon his audience, but now that his carefully assembled hypothesis had become official police policy, he was overwhelmed by demands for interviews from all and sundry, amateur and professional, anyone, in fact, with a boredom threshold high enough to be able to tolerate the tedium of a typically tortuous scientific exposition. And as this particular strain of long-windedness goes, Dr McLott’s explanations were more circumlocutory than a bypass for Birmingham that goes via Bristol, Exeter, Plymouth and Penzance, not necessarily in that order.

Although a handful of investigative journalists between them interviewed every single gadgie in the entire valley, they unearthed no evidence that would support any kind of explanation for the abrupt disappearance of three tons of dolly mixtures, seemingly into thin air. The editor of UFOria, a magazine for the seriously loose of slates, was especially disappointed not to be able to confirm his own pet theory, which was that some friends of his from Alpha Centauri were responsible for the heist. Some reporters did hear a few tales of poltergeists, but no more than the national average, and Crazy Maisy did tell several that the gelgins were responsible, but they had been forewarned that she was quite a few boats short of a flotilla, so nobody believed her. There was also an odd tale about ‘whisky that drank itself’, but that had happened so long ago and was of such doubtful reliability that nobody bothered to follow it up. It seemed more like a pathetic ruse to relieve gullible city slickers of the price of a double whisky rather than an important clue.

With nothing concrete to feed the initial media frenzy, interest quickly ebbed, and the tabloids soon went back to their more usual fare, world exclusive ‘revelations’ about gadgies who think they’re famous, handy pull-out guides to the healing powers of crystals and other such tosh, and interviews with gadgies who claim to talk to flowers. The presenters of Today were hugely relieved to be able to return to their stock-in-trade, interviewing gadgies who think they’re important, and they were most severe on anyone who so much as dared to mention the Great Dolly Mixture Robbery.

* gadgie: the gelgin word for a human.
† a flock of sheep provided crucial assistance during the robbery.

the problem with hats

If you have read Chaos Theory, you may not have been aware that this piece was originally the introduction to an (unpublished) comic fantasy novel. More about Gelgins introduced the three principal characters in that novel, and the following story is a rather silly reworking of a well-known logic puzzle from the novel.

For those of you who have wondered how well I’ve been convalescing after my recent accident, the good news is that the plaster on my leg comes off in two days, and I should then be able to sit comfortably long enough to be able to get back to more serious writing. Meanwhile, I hope that you find the following piece of ‘daft crack’ amusing.

*  *  *

The regular morning debate as to who was going to cook the porridge was interrupted by a sharp knock on the door. There might easily have been another debate as to who should answer the door, but there was only the briefest of pauses before the door was opened by the previously unseen knocker, who marched confidently into the parlour and stood rigidly to attention before the trio with an air of supreme self-importance.

“A minor functionary,” thought Sneedl’bodja.

“Grandmaster’s orders! Report to the training halls in ten minutes! Do not be late!” announced their unexpected visitor in a loud staccato bark.

He turned on his heel and marched smartly out of the door.

Qumfl’quelunx was too hungry to even think of taking out his pocket watch. “His idea of timekeeping is to keep time waiting!” is Sneedl’bodja’s latest patronizing comment on the subject.

However, Shunshelstinx, as eager as ever to impress, calculated that they would have to leave immediately in order to ensure that they were on time, even though the venue was next door. It wasn’t an idea that found favour, even with Shunshelstinx himself, because they were all hungry, but viable alternatives were as scarce as lions in Antarctica.

And thus the three gelgins found themselves awaiting the arrival of Dweebl’gulja in the central hall of his famous pranking academy. They did not have long to wait. As each of the three looked around nervously, the Grandmaster appeared from a long tunnel at one end of the hall and walked slowly towards them.

“Ah! Qunzl’bowza’s challenge!” he said softly.

“Right! Remedial training, lesson one. Deductive reasoning!” he continued more loudly.

Shunshelstinx and his friends were directed to fetch three wooden stools from a corner of the hall, which they did.

“Now! Place them in a line here, like this, about two paces apart,” ordered Dweebl’gulja.

He left to the three gelgins’ collective ingenuity the insignificant matter of whose paces were to be employed, well knowing that this level of accuracy would not be needed for the lesson he had in mind. However, what he did not know was the degree of confusion that this apparently simple instruction would cause. Sneedl’bodja, because he is always first, placed his stool firmly on the ground. Shunshelstinx, because he is in charge, took two paces forward and did likewise, if a little less firmly. Qumfl’quelunx was in unknown territory as regards both counting and measuring, so he simply stood there, motionless, unaware that he was still holding the stool.

“Mmm!” mused the Grandmaster, his face betraying nothing of his dismay. “This could turn out to be even more difficult than I thought. Surely, it won’t be necessary to enrol these fools in a foundation course before they can be admitted to remedial training? Why, I’ve seen better teamwork between two boxers in the same ring. I’ll give them just one more chance.”

With the Grandmaster’s close supervision, Shunshelstinx and his friends were able to arrange the three stools precisely according to the original instruction, and as expected, whose paces were used to measure the intervening distances really was irrelevant.

“Now! Which of you is the cleverest?” enquired Dweebl’gulja softly.

Shunshelstinx thought that a rather obvious question but at the risk of having two thoughts in quick succession thought it better not to say so.

“I am!” he announced confidently, pointing with both index fingers towards his chest.

“Right! Sit on the stool at this end so that you are facing the other two stools,” instructed the Grandmaster, sensibly pointing to the stool in question to reinforce the point, not wishing to see a repeat of the earlier confusion. “Now! Who’s next?”

Sneedl’bodja was not sure how Shunshelstinx had beaten him to the previous question, but he was quite sure that he did not want it on his training record that he, Sneedl’bodja, was not as clever as Qumfl’quelunx. Surely, he thought, nobody is not as clever as Qumfl’quelunx.

“I am!” he spoke up.

As it happens, he had no need to worry. Qumfl’quelunx was still pondering the first question.

“Okay!” said Dweebl’gulja. “You sit on the middle stool with your back to your friend so that you can see only the empty stool.”

“Now!” he continued, turning to Qumfl’quelunx. “Sit on the last empty stool, facing away from the other two.”

“I’m not sure I like this academy,” thought Qumfl’quelunx as he tried desperately to settle comfortably on to the stool and quickly decided that he wasn’t prepared to settle for the meagre level of comfort that it is possible to achieve on a hard wooden stool with only three legs and no padding (and not even a cushion). “This is a hard lesson.”

“Now, stay there until I return. I won’t be long. And on no account turn around to look at the gelgin or gelgins behind you,” said Dweebl’gulja.

Shunshelstinx was the only one to turn around, a waste of time in his position, although you can never be sure, as he might have said in justification.

The Grandmaster returned clutching five almost identical hats. He positioned himself in front of Qumfl’quelunx and a little to the side, so that Sneedl’bodja and Shunshelstinx could also see Dweebl’gulja and his hats. As hats, they were unremarkable. The only difference between them, it seemed to each of the three, was that three were black. The other two were white. That much was obvious.

“What horrible headgear!” thought Qumfl’quelunx, quietly outraged. “I wouldn’t be seen dead wearing such a boring bonnet, such a calamitous cap, such a hideous homburg, such a horrid hat, such a passé panama, such a terrible titfer, such a….”

“Shut up you fool!” hissed Sneedl’bodja. “You’re thinking aloud again!”

The Grandmaster walked along the line until he was standing behind Shunshelstinx. When he reappeared a moment later, he was holding only one hat, which he placed on Qumfl’quelunx’s head from behind, with the fat one’s not so silent disapproval. He produced a second hat, which he placed on Sneedl’bodja’s head, also from behind. A third hat was soon in place on the head of Shunshelstinx, who could see that both Qumfl’quelunx and Sneedl’bodja were also wearing hats. Sneedl’bodja could clearly see that Qumfl’quelunx was wearing a hat, but he couldn’t see Shunshelstinx, let alone his hat. Qumfl’quelunx could see nothing, including the point of the exercise. None of the three could see his own hat.

“Now think carefully,” said Dweebl’gulja.

He paused for a moment before addressing Shunshelstinx.

“Now! O cleverest one,” he said in a voice dripping with enough irony to keep a medium-sized foundry going for a week. “What is the colour of the hat you are wearing?”

“How could I possibly be expected to know that? I can’t see it,” thought Shunshelstinx. “Still, perhaps I should think about it for a while, to create a good impression, you know. And who knows? Perhaps an answer will turn up. You never know. They often do.”

He continued to deliberate in this preposterously optimistic fashion for what he deemed to be an appropriately polite interval, by which time he had forgotten the original question. That did it. He had only one answer to offer.

“I have no idea…,” he said.

“Excellent!” interrupted the Grandmaster, a smile beginning to break out over his face, no doubt in relief that some progress was being made. “That is the right answer.”

You may feel that the Grandmaster’s interruption was more than a little fortuitous. After all, what Shunshelstinx had intended to say was this: “I have no idea what you’re talking about!” Fool’s luck. It’s the only plausible explanation.

Still, Shunshelstinx was pleased to have made such a worthwhile contribution to the exercise, even if the value of judgement in the luck/judgement equation was zero, and everyone knows that you can’t divide by zero. Everyone but Shunshelstinx, that is. However, he had no time to shower himself with self-congratulations. Dweebl’gulja turned to Sneedl’bodja.

“What is the colour of the hat you are wearing?” he asked.

“Well, that’s easy,” thought Shunshelstinx. “I can see the answer from here.”

“That’s a stupid question!” thought Sneedl’bodja contemptuously. “How does he expect me to answer that? I’m not a clairvoyant. I’ve as much chance of finding the right answer as that fat fool in front of me will have when he’s asked the same question.”

He allowed barely enough time to elapse to avoid the impression that he was being too hasty before speaking up.

“I don’t know…,” he said.

“Excellent!” interrupted the Grandmaster, smiling broadly. “That is the right answer.”

You can be sure that the anonymous author of the proverb ‘lightning never strikes twice in the same place’ never had any contact with gelgins. What Sneedl’bodja had meant to say was this: “I don’t know why I bother to put up with this!” Double fool’s luck. And they do say that things always happen in threes. But therein lies the problem. That would require Qumfl’quelunx to be correct too, and you would get long odds at your local turf accountant against that happening in the remotely near future.

“Now!” said the Grandmaster, turning to Qumfl’quelunx. “Tell me, what is the colour of the hat you are wearing?”

Dead silence, as you might have expected. What else were you expecting? Miracles? Try the shop down the road. And then, just as hope was fading, Qumfl’quelunx spoke up.

“That’s easy!” he announced confidently.

When Sneedl’bodja heard these two words, he was unable to restrain a loud, heartfelt groan. But if you thought that this sounds like dismay, then the only way to describe the feeling occasioned by Qumfl’quelunx’s next words is dismay multiplied by itself an absurd number of times. It was like being thwocked over the head with a large, wet and presumably dead fish (also an absurd number of times).

“I’m wearing a black hat,” he continued in a tone that you would swear was a vocal swagger.

Sneedl’bodja stared blankly at the black hat perched jauntily atop his friend’s head and was unable to contain his astonishment.

“How could you possibly know that?” he gasped.

“That’s easy,” thought Shunshelstinx, warmly congratulating himself for getting three questions right in a row. “I can see that his hat is black from here.”

“That’s easy!” said Qumfl’quelunx for the second time. “If me and Bodge both had white hats, Stinky would know that he must be wearing a black hat, because there are only two white hats….”

“Now why didn’t I think of that?” thought Shunshelstinx.

“…But he couldn’t say what colour of hat he was wearing,” continued Qumfl’quelunx, in the process ascribing a quality of reasoning to Shunshelstinx that was, well, unreasonable. “That means that Stinky can see at least one black hat. Now, I assume that Bodge also worked this out….”

Sneedl’bodja failed to notice the unjustified assumption on which Qumfl’quelunx was basing his argument and silently congratulated the latter for his astute insight.

“…So he would know that if the hat I’m wearing is white, his hat must be black,” concluded Qumfl’quelunx. “But he didn’t know, so it must be my hat that is black.”

“Excellent! Excellent!” said the Grandmaster, chuckling to himself as he spoke. “But perhaps Qunzl’bowza has underestimated your special talents. It would be just like him. By the book. Follow the rules. He never learns. That is all for now. Return here at the same time tomorrow for lesson two.”

There is a mystery to clear up here. Where did Qumfl’quelunx find the wherewithal to answer the Grandmaster’s question, let alone answer it correctly? And that reasoning. Surely he must have deducted when he should have deduced, but you can’t take anything away from him this time. One highly implausible explanation for this unexpected display of mental acuity that is currently doing the rounds is that his brain has been taken over by some awesome alien force, unknown to science or anyone else, that transforms dullards, dunces, dummies, dolts, dopes and dimwits, all of which terms adequately describe Qumfl’quelunx, into scholars, savants and sages, none of which describe, adequately or otherwise, our fat friend. But Qumfl’quelunx is unlikely to be able to offer any definitive guidance on the subject, so you must draw your own conclusions.

more about gelgins

This post will make no sense unless you have first read Chaos Theory. For those of you who have already done this, you need to know that edited out of the earlier instalment was the information that there are three types of gelgin. Now read on...

So much for theory. Now meet Shunshelstinx and his two friends, who between them are three of the inkiest gelgins in the entire history of these troublesome creatures. Inky, that is, as in incomparably incompetent, or incalculably incapable. As understatements go, saying that they aren’t very good at anything is akin to describing the detonation of a thermonuclear device as ‘rather a loud bang’.

Shunshelstinx is a very officious sattvas with a prodigious memory for trivial facts and other generally useless information. For example, he can tell you what he was doing three years, nine months and twenty-seven days ago—and what he ate for lunch the day before that too, given half a chance—but in other matters he is so forgetful that he sometimes has to be reminded that his name is, well, Shunshelstinx. When he decides to lecture his friends on something or other—in other words, frequently—he invariably thinks that it will be necessary to provide some background information for his listeners so that they will not be confused when they hear what he really wants to say. However, by the time he has finished this preamble, he has forgotten the rest, so his friends are already confused. “Just what was he talking about?” they think. And they never do find out.

Sneedl’bodja is a rajas who can never resist the temptation to open a closed door, or someone’s refrigerator when they are not paying attention. Even for one of his race he is remarkably short-tempered, but when he does lose his temper, the result is a comic opera, a high-tempo, half-demented frenzy like a short-circuit in a fireworks factory, which neither of his friends finds possible to take seriously; in other words, he barks loudly and often but does not bite. Well, not much. And he is widely acknowledged to be a grandmaster of harangue, ridicule, invective and finely barbed one-line insults—and so he should be, because he’s had plenty of practice over years too many to count, especially with regard to the shortcomings, real and imaginary, but mostly real, and most of the time, of the third member of the trio.

This is Qumfl’quelunx, who from his elaborate but inelegant shoes to the tip of the feather in his ludicrously silly hat is a typical tamas, with all the showy vulgarity of a peacock—and the equivalent brain power, not all of which will be in use at any given time. Or, as Sneedl’bodja might say, not much of which will be in use. He is at his most cerebral when setting his friends little ‘poseurs’, as he calls them, unaware of the true meaning of this word. However, there is a difficulty. His friends are at least as likely as he to know the answer. And he probably doesn’t know the answer. He rarely does. But he does like to feel important, part of the team, and it is sometimes useful to know the question, bearing in mind that someone else may know only the answer. Or so he tells himself.

Shunshelstinx is the team’s ‘director’, as he styles himself. Self-appointed? Naturally. There to keep the team on the ‘straight and narrow’—the ‘direct’ approach, as the name implies. In other words, he’s in charge. At least he’s in charge—provided that he remembers that he’s in charge—during their escapades. It’s just that neither of the other two takes any notice of him unless they happen to agree with his ‘instructions’ in the first place. Much to his obvious annoyance. They should show more respect for such a ‘charismatic leader’. His description? Naturally.

However, Sneedl’bodja, who is by his own reckoning the most handsome of the trio and not at all vain, has never felt it necessary to accept any kind of advice from anyone, only pickled onions. And Qumfl’quelunx is much too stupid to recognize sensible advice, even when it grips his shoulder with bony fingers, slaps him briskly on the head with a wet fish, prods his podgy stomach with a pointed stick, kicks him sharply on the shins with hand-made concrete clogs and says ‘hello!’ in twenty-seven languages, only one of which is English. However, he is also lazy, and he does find it hard to decide for himself what he should do next. There are so many options—sleep, eat, snooze, eat, doze, eat—the permutations are endless, and it is so difficult to choose. In the end, or so his scheming mind concludes, it takes less effort to accept the decision of Shunshelstinx as to what he should do and then give no further thought to the matter.

At this point, you may be beginning to wonder just what talents Qumfl’quelunx does possess that can possibly be of any value to the team. After all, there’s no premium on the value of stupidity, as Sneedl’bodja is certain to mention if he hasn’t already. Actually, he’s the team’s sound effects expert, able to reproduce many sounds, from the squeal of the tyres of a speeding motor car as its driver suddenly realizes that he should have started to brake fifty metres earlier if he was going to have a realistic chance of safely negotiating the bend that he has just entered at much too high a speed, to the high-pitched drone of a death’s head squadron of homicidal mosquitoes flying in tight formation for a precision biting raid on succulent earlobes, to the high-pitched screams of a legless frog being tortured to death by the neighbour’s cat, with uncanny accuracy. There is a slight problem though: he has an annoying habit of using a completely inappropriate sound effect when called upon, the only effect of which is to confuse everyone involved.

All three live, with about a hundred other gelgins, in a network of ancient tunnels under a wood in one of the larger valleys of the English Lake District. However, no further clues to the precise whereabouts of this wood will be provided. And all place names have been changed for added confusion. After all, if gelgins were to disappear as a result of mindless persecution by ignorant humans, who else could we possibly blame when events failed to proceed according to some carefully prearranged plan? The local council?

It may be worth pointing out here that the changing of place names is not part of a deliberate policy of secrecy but in fact follows the standard naming system used by sheep for places in the Lake District. Most people will be aware that sheep cannot read, which makes human signposts quite useless as aids to navigation if you happen to be of a sheepish disposition. While this may seem like a statement of the painfully obvious, it has been made to pre-empt speculation about the possible reasons why sheep might know, or even want to know, where they are on the high fells. But know they do, although the reason for this may not be readily apparent.

It so happens that, many years ago, the gelgins learned that Lakeland sheep have quite a taste for dolly mixtures. Their owners never guessed this and therefore never fed them the desired sweetmeats. But the gelgins did know, and they did provide the dolly mixtures—at a price. The price was that in exchange for a supply of its favourite candies, a sheep was required to give the gelgin offering the sweeties a ride to a destination of the gelgin’s choice. It may have been a slow way to travel, but it is how gelgins have been able to move from one valley to the next without getting totally lost. All this takes place very discreetly, and the farmers who actually own the sheep are unaware of what is happening, because the only evidence of this odd practice is the occasional discarded liquorice allsort. You may believe that you know the difference between dolly mixtures and liquorice allsorts, and sheep certainly do, but some gelgins are sufficiently stupid not to be aware of this distinction, and they don’t realize that sheep detest liquorice allsorts as much as they enjoy dolly mixtures, which explains why they may try to feed liquorice allsorts to a sheep if dolly mixtures are not available. Naturally, the sheep spits them out.

In the recent past, there was a considerable network covering most of the Lake District, with strategically located waystations where the long-distance traveller could change sheep, and with carefully hidden caches of dolly mixtures to keep the sheep happy. But this network was expensive to operate—a journey by only a single gelgin from west to east across the entire district required hundreds of dolly mixtures and the services of as many as twenty-seven sheep. It should be the calculation of a moment to determine that such a communications structure would be unsustainable over time, and so it has proved. It is still possible for a gelgin with a large bag of dolly mixtures to go far, or even to go west, but the organized system of earlier times no longer exists.

Which is where the story begins, more or less. More waffle and less sticking to the point, that is. Ask Shunshelstinx. On second thoughts, don’t.

chaos theory

Have you ever seen a gelgin? Probably not. But before you decide that the only reasonable answer to such a mystifying question is ‘no’—or you take the more cautious option and ask, warily, ‘what’s a gelgin?’ before submitting your answer—consider the evidence. Carefully.

Did you ever set something down somewhere, a pair of spectacles or your house key perhaps, or a piece of paper on which you’d written something important, only to discover later, when you needed it again, that you couldn’t remember where you’d left it? And did you assume that you must have forgotten where you’d left it because it was no longer where you’d been so sure you’d left it in the first place? Of course, you do eventually find the missing item, but when you do, it always turns out to have been where you’d convinced yourself it couldn’t be. Or where you were certain you’d already looked. Does this sound familiar? Well, it should, because it’s happening all the time. But, and this is the awkward part of the puzzle, just what happens to the item you can’t find? Inanimate objects don’t have free will in the matter of whether or not to move, or so you have been taught to believe. So what exactly is happening here? Could it be that our conventional systems of explanation are wrong?

You may well conclude that someone moved the item when you weren’t paying attention. But if so, then who? Or what? Well, try this: it may have been moved by a gelgin. A gelgin? A what? This is not a notably promising line of enquiry, you might suggest at this point, but a hopelessly inadequate theory with a serious shortage of solid evidence to back it up. Nevertheless, there is more proof of the existence of gelgins than you can even begin to imagine. Yes, they do exist. What about that fugitive, barely audible, hard-to-identify murmur, almost entirely drowned out by the soft, staccato patter of raindrops against the glass, that you can sometimes hear outside your bedroom window on those dark, stormy nights when everyone in lawful possession of the basic, government-recommended, minimum allocation of common sense is tucked up safely in their beds with the lights on, the curtains drawn tightly and all the windows and doors securely locked, bolted, shuttered and barred? That was the wind, wasn’t it? Or was it?

There’s more. Did you ever catch the briefest hint of movement out of the corner of your eye? And, presumably, you turned your head to look. What did you see? Of that fleeting movement there was no trace. Nothing. Wrong again! That was also a gelgin—and this time you were simply too slow to see it with both eyes at once, or it was too quick. But if you missed such an obvious clue, then the question being begged here is whether you have even a remote idea of what is going on, right now, behind your back. Well, do you?

Still not convinced? Have you forgotten that feeling, a moment before tripping over something that you were sure you had already seen—a broken paving stone, perhaps, or a carelessly misplaced chair—the feeling that your attention had been distracted by something, but you immediately put that thought out of your mind when you realized that your senses were being diverted towards another focus of attention, the rapidly approaching pavement, ground, floor, whatever? The original distraction is easily forgotten under the pain of such an impact.

And, strangest of all, have you ever noticed how often something that you know needs to be repaired—and should have been weeks ago—breaks, tears or otherwise gives way on the very day you planned to do the repair? Uncanny, isn’t it? What’s more, the failure of the object in question always results in discomfort for someone, and if you think about it, potential for great hilarity so long as you don’t happen to be the victim. Someone must be responsible.

You might suspect that if gelgins are such masters of mischief they would be very elusive, and this time no one would doubt that you are right. In fact, it has been suggested that they have devised a way to overturn the laws of physics as we understand them, because their incredible speed of movement and remarkable agility exceed, by several orders of magnitude, what their physical appearance suggests they are capable of achieving. How they are able to accomplish this feat has not been determined, making this alleged control of time and space something of a mastery mystery, but you might want to remember that gelgins cannot fly, pass mysteriously through solid walls or distort their bodies so that they can squeeze through narrow crevices, even if, sometimes, it does seem that way.

Some gelgins are addicted to making a noise. When the mood is upon them, which is almost all the time, they are unable to resist the temptation to practise ‘interesting’ animal noises—usually in the most inappropriate of places—but they are extremely adept at this skill, to the extent that no human could possibly spot the difference between a gelgin mimic and the real animal, although the sound of a sheep in your attic or a wildebeest in your garden might seem a little out of place, if you stop to think about it. At the same time, the sibilant hiss of a snake in the grass is too obvious to be unexpected, and the choking croak of a frog in the throat cannot fail to be overheard, while any noise made by a toad in the hole is likely to be something of a giveaway. In this climate of deception, it would clearly be a big mistake to let the cat out of the bag, but it should be pointed out that anyone who has ever been taken in, even briefly, by the crocodile-in-the-bathroom gag must be quite a few coins short of a bus fare, unless, that is, the bath is where they keep their pet alligator whenever the ornamental duck pond has been taken over by invading gaggles of garrulous geese. But for those whose pet-keeping habits follow a more orthodox pattern, or who live far from any duck pond, much less a landscaped boating lake, the deduction is obvious. Come on! It was probably the plumbing, wasn’t it? Or was it?

Some gelgins are very inquisitive, poking their long noses into matters that are none of their concern. This could easily land them in more trouble than they could possibly handle, if only we knew they were there in the first place. However, because we don’t know they are there, or, rather, because we think we know they aren’t there, it doesn’t occur to us to take even the most elementary anti-gelgin precautions. Not, it might be mentioned in passing, that this would be anything less than a complete waste of time.

But it is the third characteristic of gelgins that is the most significant, the one for which they are known, the one whereby they leave their indelible imprint upon the world. They are utter, utter nuisances. They simply love to play elaborately planned little practical jokes, although this should not be taken to imply that they will eschew the opportunity to cause some spur-of-the-moment mayhem, should such an opportunity arise. In any case, they are so highly skilled at their sneaky pranks that even the most vigilant of victims never suspects the real perpetrators, blaming instead, if not their own clumsiness, then mysterious markings on the palms of their outstretched hands, the planet Mars in an undefined role, the government advisory committee on card games for three, even the theory of relativity. This last hypothesis turns out to be close, as it happens, although this isn’t because the explanation has anything to do with hard sums about time and the speed of light, or even with the odd notion that it’s possible to have third cousins twice removed (to where, one might ask). No, it’s because international finance, like wealth itself, is a relative concept. One person’s idea of extreme penury is another’s vision of the ultimate in luxury, just as one person’s fierce and dangerous dog is another’s yapping little terrier, barking unendingly for reasons that should now be clear.

This, in fact, is a clear demonstration of the brilliance of gelgin tactics—by appearing not to exist they confuse their victims, who cannot point an accusing finger at what they are unable to see and must therefore look elsewhere. As a result, when trying to determine who to blame for a series of mishaps, or who to hold responsible when a carefully thought-out plan has failed to work, a victim will offhandedly dismiss the only genuinely plausible theory available on the terminally weak grounds that somehow they had been led to believe that gelgins do not exist, forgetting that this deliberately misleading notion had originally been implanted into their subconscious minds by the gelgins themselves using the esoteric techniques of Japanese flower arranging for beginners, painting by numbers and letter writing without a pen to create a grand illusion of non-existence.

This may also help to explain why gelgins are so relentlessly annoying—and why they are so good at it. If ever a world championship were to be staged to decide the best, that is the most accomplished, annoyer of people, all human competitors would be eliminated well before the final stages of the tournament. Think of the most annoying person you know. How irritating is that? Well, double it and add the number you first thought of. Gelgins are much, much worse. Time after time, a gelgin would win in the final, and what’s more, win without having bothered to train. Being a large piece of sharp and abrasive grit in the otherwise well-oiled clockwork of human existence comes as naturally to a gelgin as, well, eating, which is what they most enjoy doing after playing practical jokes, and which is what they were doing, most likely, instead of training for that annoying world championship.

Although you will find no direct evidence of gelgin activity in the historical record, there are a few linguistic clues. For example, it is well known that crows are woodland birds, yet sailors named the look-out post at the top of the main mast of a sailing ship ‘the crow’s nest’. Why? One can speculate about this story, but no more. It may be that when look-out platforms were first used on sailing ships, most sailors did refer to ‘the seagull’s nest’. But one sailor, originally from a country village but press-ganged into service aboard a large sailing ship while on what became the last of his previously regular visits to the midsummer fair that was held every year in the nearest large town, which just happened to be a seaport—naturally, this is all conjecture—may one day have overheard a gelgin practising its squawking crow routine in what at that time was still known as the seagull’s nest. But, having recognized the sound despite the length of time since he had last heard a real crow, he began to refer to the look-out platform as ‘the crow’s nest’, because, he said, it reminded him of home. To humour him, his shipmates began to do the same—as a joke, you understand—but its use spread, presumably because it was for a short time a very funny joke. After all, a crow doesn’t spring to mind as a natural seabird, just as a puffin masquerading as a bird of prey would fail to convince, and a vulture is a poor substitute for a budgerigar.

Gelgins are gregarious creatures. They make their homes in vast networks of halls and tunnels that have been excavated over many generations in river banks, grassy knolls and the sides of wooded hillocks cloaked in brambles, briar and sundry other thorny things. And this is where you realize that gelgins are consummate masters of the arts of concealment, because every gelgin knows instinctively that the true art of concealing an object lies not in hiding it, much less in camouflaging it, but in placing it in plain view and making its presence so screamingly obvious that nobody notices it, even if they are looking for the object, and especially if they have been searching for the object for some time. This artistry is what makes their tunnels so difficult to locate, although the occasional well-contrived malfunction in the laws of physics does help.

Although gelgins live as far away as they possibly can from places frequented by humans, they venture far and wide to play their practical jokes. All the funniest are ones that require elaborate preparation, as you might expect, but many a gelgin will casually jog a man’s arm as he hammers in a nail just to watch his reaction as the hammer hits the thumb of the hand holding the nail. The man neither sees nor hears the gelgin and therefore blames the mishap on his own clumsiness. This is not to suggest that there are no clumsy people, merely that many people who have hitherto thought of themselves as clumsy may have been plagued by gelgins more frequently than is usually the case. The same argument can also be used to explain why some people have acquired a reputation for absent-mindedness, for forgetting where they leave things, when in truth the problem is a gelgin furtively moving (or removing) the items in question. And this is where the discussion began, with objects being moved mysteriously when nobody was paying attention. But in coming full circle, has anything been established beyond doubt? Not really, except that gelgins are no joke.