A letter arrives from a cove I know at the Natural History Museum – he spends his holidays in the village and gets excited and waves his arms about when Ruttie puts in an appearance. This morning’s screed is full of speculation about a “high-pitched, warbling mating call” and gives the old girl a rather grand Latin name.I think this rather farfetched: if I had had any reason to think that Ruttie knows Latin I should have sought her assistance when I was a schoolboy. Believe me: a chap needed all the help he could get with the dratted language in those days. Anyway, I acknowledge his letter with a postcard and forward the whole thing to the Professor of Cryptozoology at the University of Rutland.
Then Meadowcroft appears, muttering and cursing. It transpires, as best I can make out, that something has been “a-trampling his botanicals” around the potting shed and snapped his hollyhocks clean off.
In the midst of all this, the telephone is brought to me and I find the Deputy Prime Minister on the other end – he often calls when in want of advice. Today he is worried that he is in a bit of a fix: committed to five years of coalition with a Conservative Party committed to taking bread from the mouths of widows and orphans and all that.
I am able to reassure him that it is often possible to get out of what appear to be a quite impossible predicament. Why, I tell him, I once saw the great Houdini! The fellow had himself bound hand and foot and then sewn into a mailbag which was wreathed in chains and hung upside down in a tank of water.
Just as I am telling him how the illusionist got out of it, I drop the receiver. By the time I retrieve it from under the sideboard, Clegg has gone.
Earlier this week
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