"The Clock"

William Fryer Harvey was a writer of quintessentially English weird tales. Usually one cannot pin his work down as ghost stories, or horror stories, so much as the sort of off-kilter yarn spun around the same time (the '20s and '30s) by John Collier or A J Alan, or earlier by Saki, or later by Rod Serling, that would so perfectly unsettle the reader precisely because there is never anything quite so substantial as a ghost there to put your finger on.

His most famous tale is "The Beast with Five Fingers", remembered today because it became a movie starring Peter Lorre. This story, "The Clock", is one of my favourites, a little masterpiece of understated unease:

THE CLOCK
by W. F. Harvey

I liked your description of the people at the pension. I can just picture that rather sinister Miss Cornelius, with her toupee and clinking bangles. I don't wonder you felt frightened that night when you found her sleepwalking in the corridor. But after all, why shouldn't she sleepwalk? As to the movements of the furniture in the lounge on the Sunday, you are, I suppose, in an earthquake zone, though an earthquake seems too big an explanation for the ringing of that little handbell on the mantelpiece. It's rather as if our parlour maid — another new one! — were to call a stray elephant to account for the teapot we found broken yesterday. You have at least, in Italy, escaped the eternal problem of maids.

Yes, my dear, I most certainly believe you. I have never had experiences quite like yours, but your mention of Miss Cornelius has reminded me of something rather similar that happened nearly twenty years ago, soon after I left school. I was staying with my aunt in Hampstead. You remember her, I expect; or, if not her, the poodle, Monsieur, that she used to make perform such pathetic tricks. There was another guest, whom I had never met before, a Mrs Caleb. She lived in Lewes and had been staying with my aunt for about a fortnight, recuperating after a series of domestic upheavals, which had culminated in her two servants leaving her at an hour's notice – without any reason, according to Mrs Caleb, but I wondered. I had never seen the maids; I had seen Mrs Caleb and, frankly, I disliked her. She left the same sort of impression on me as I gather your Miss Cornelius leaves on you — something queer and secretive; underground, if you can use the expression, rather than underhand. And I could feel in my body that she did not like me.

It was summer. Joan Denton — you remember her; her husband was killed in Gallipoli — had suggested that I should go down to spend the day with her. Her people had rented a little cottage some three miles out of Lewes. We arranged a day. It was gloriously fine for a wonder, and I had planned to leave that stuffy old Hampstead house before the old ladies were astir. But Mrs Caleb waylaid me in the hall, just as I was going out.

“I wonder,” she said, “I wonder if you could do me a small favour. If you do have any time to spare in Lewes — only if you do — would you be so kind as to call at my house? I left a little travelling-clock there in the hurry of parting. If it's not in the drawing-room, it will be in my bedroom or in one of the maids' bedrooms. I know I lent it to the cook, who was a poor riser, but I can't remember if she returned it. Would it be too much to ask? The house has been locked up for twelve days, but everything is in order. I have the keys here. The large one is for the garden gate, the small one for the front door.”

I could only accept, and she proceeded to tell me how I could find Ash Grove House.

“You will feel quite like a burglar,” she said. “But mind, it's only if you have time to spare.”

As a matter of fact I found myself glad of any excuse to kill time. Poor old Joan had been taken suddenly ill in the night — they feared appendicitis — and though her people were very kind and asked me to stay to lunch, I could see that I should only be in the way, and made Mrs Caleb's commission an excuse for an early departure.

I found Ash Grove without difficulty. It was a medium-sized red¬brick house, standing by itself in a high walled garden that bounded a narrow lane. A flagged path led from the gate to the front door, in front of which grew, not an ash, but a monkey-puzzle, that must have made the rooms unnecessarily gloomy. The side door, as I expected, was locked. The dining-room and drawing-room lay on either side of the hall and, as the windows of both were shuttered, I left the hall door open, and in the dim light looked round hurriedly for the clock, which, from what Mrs Caleb had said, I hardly expected to find in either of the downstairs rooms. It was neither on table nor mantelpiece. The rest of the furniture was carefully covered over with white dust-sheets. Then I went upstairs. But, before doing so, I closed the front door. I did in fact feel rather like a burglar, and I thought that if anyone did happen to see the front door open, I might have difficulty in explaining things.

Happily the upstairs windows were not shuttered. I made a hurried search of the principal bedrooms. They had been left in apple-pie order; nothing was out of place; but there was no sign of Mrs Caleb's clock. The impression that the house gave me — you know the sense of personality that a house conveys — was neither pleasing nor displeasing, but it was stuffy, stuffy from the absence of fresh air, with an additional stuffiness added, that seemed to come out from the hangings and quilts and antimacassars. The corridor, onto which the bedrooms I had examined opened, communicated with a smaller wing, an older part of the house, I imagined, which contained a box-room and the maids' sleeping-quarters. The last door that I unlocked (I should say that the doors of all the rooms were locked, and relocked by me after I had glanced inside them) contained the object of my search. Mrs Caleb's travelling-clock was on the mantelpiece, ticking away merrily.

That was how I thought of it at first. And then for the first time I realised that there was something wrong. The clock had no business to be ticking. The house had been shut up for twelve days. No one had come in to air it or to light fires. I remember how Mrs Caleb had told my aunt that if she left the keys with a neighbour, she was never sure who might get hold of them. And yet the clock was going.

I wondered if some vibration had set the mechanism in motion, and pulled out my watch to see the time. It was five minutes to one. The clock on the mantelpiece said four minutes to the hour. Then, without quite knowing why, I shut the door on to the landing, locked myself in, and again looked round the room. Nothing was out of place. The only thing that might have called for remark was that there appeared to be a slight indentation on the pillow and the bed; but the mattress was a feather mattress, and you know how difficult it is to make them perfectly smooth. You won't need to be told that I gave a hurried glance under the bed — do you remember your supposed burglar in Number Six at St Ursula's? — and then, and much more reluctantly, opened the doors of two horribly capacious cupboards, both happily empty, except for a framed text with its face to the wall.

By this time I really was frightened. The clock went ticking on. I had a horrible feeling that an alarm might go off at any moment, and the thought of being in that empty house was almost too much for me. However, I made an attempt to pull myself together. It might after all be a fourteen-day clock. If it were, then it would be almost run down. I could roughly find out how long the clock had been going by winding it up. I hesitated to put the matter to the test, but the uncertainty was too much for me. I took it out of its case and began to wind. I had scarcely turned the winding-screw twice when it stopped. The clock clearly was not running down; the hands had been set in motion probably only an hour or two before.

I felt cold and faint and, going to the window, threw up the sash, letting in the sweet, live air of the garden. I knew now that the house was queer, horribly queer. Could someone be living in the house? Was someone else in the house now? I thought that I had been in all the rooms, but had I? I had only just opened the bathroom door, and I had certainly not opened any cupboards, except those in the room in which I was.

Then, as I stood by the open window, wondering what I should do next and feeling that I just couldn't go down that corridor into the darkened hall to fumble at the latch of the front door with I don't know what behind me, I heard a noise. It was very faint at first, and seemed to be coming from the stairs. It was a curious noise—not the noise of anyone climbing up the stairs, but — you will laugh if this letter reaches you by a morning post — of something hopping up the stairs, like a very big bird would hop. I heard it on the landing; it stopped. Then there was a curious scratching noise against one of the bedroom doors, the sort of noise you can make with the nail of your little finger scratching polished wood. Whatever it was, was coming slowly down the corridor, scratching at the doors as it went. I could stand it no longer. Nightmare pictures of locked doors opening filled my brain. I took up the clock, wrapped it in my Macintosh, and dropped it out of the window on to a flower-bed. Then I managed to crawl out of the window and, getting a grip of the sill, ‘successfully negotiated’, as the journalists would say, ‘a twelve-foot drop.’ So much for our much abused Gym at St Ursula's. Picking up the Macintosh, I ran round to the front door and locked it. Then I felt I could breathe, but not until I was on the far side of the gate in the garden wall did I feel safe.

Then I remembered that the bedroom window was open. What was I to do? Wild horses wouldn't have dragged me into that house again unaccompanied. I made up my mind to go to the police station and tell them everything. I should be laughed at, of course, and they might easily refuse to believe my story of Mrs Caleb's commission. I had actually begun to walk down the lane in the direction of the town when I chanced to look back qt the house. The window that I had left open was shut.

No, my dear, I didn't see any face or anything dreadful like that... and, of course, it may have shut by itself. It was an ordinary sash-window, and you know they are often difficult to keep open.

And the rest? Why, there's really nothing more to tell. I didn't even see Mrs Caleb again. She had had some sort of fainting fit just before lunchtime, my aunt informed me on my return, and had had to go to bed. Next morning I travelled down to Cornwall to join mother and the children. I thought I had forgotten all about it, but when three years later Uncle Charles suggested giving me a travelling-clock for a twenty-first birthday present, I was foolish enough to prefer the alternative that he offered, a collected edition of the works of Thomas Carlyle.

How to put the reader on the edge of their seat

The story’s hotting up. Your characters are in trouble. You pile on more and more things to make their lives difficult. But gradually it starts to dawn on you that these extra dangers aren’t making the story any more gripping. The hero is in a canoe, he’s lost the paddle, he can’t swim, and now the rapids are coming up. That ought to be exciting, surely? Aren’t you doing everything you’re supposed to? So why is your reader stifling a yawn?

“Out of the frying pan into the fire.” Notice that we don’t say, “Keep it in the frying pan but turn the heat up.” You can’t ratchet the tension simply by shovelling more problems onto your characters’ heads. When you do that, the reader just sees a string of obstacles that have to be dealt with and they project forward: “Okay, so once the hero has done A, found B, discovered C, it’s all over.”

Knowing that, the reader will relax. So you need to throw in something completely from left field: a plot point that leaves the reader’s head spinning: “Whoa, I didn’t see that one coming!” Oh yeah, you can bet the character wishes he was back in that frying pan now.

Your story has a threat. An alien mothership over the capital, say. The hero has a plan to deal with the threat; he’s going to fire himself out of a circus cannon up into the ship’s waste disposal tube. But if you want to keep your reader’s interest, that plan cannot work perfectly. Right at the climax, we have to see the hero faced with an unexpected twist. Something that blows his plan to shreds. And the more unexpected that twist, the better.

There’s also a bait-and-switch variant. Have the hero’s plan work just fine to deal with the main threat, but then throw in a new danger just when we caught our breath and were starting to climb down. The new threat is a surprise we couldn’t possibly prepare ourselves for – it comes out of the blue just when you thought it was all over.

Here’s an example from the movie of My Favorite Martian. Tim has to prevent a video of Uncle Martin being broadcast on TV, which would expose him as an alien. Martin can’t help because he’s literally going to pieces. Meanwhile, Martin’s spaceship, which is set to explode, has been shrunk to toy-size with Tim’s girlfriend on board and left in the garage, where the neighbour picks it up for a jumble sale. With a bit of fast-paced rompy action, all these chaotic problems are resolved: they get the video, Martin is reassembled, and they catch up to the neighbour’s car and retrieve the miniaturized spaceship. So far we’ve had a bit of fun, but everything got tied up pretty much as we expected. But then, just at the moment of triumph, the government agents who were chasing Martin and Tim turn up and zap them with a tranquilliser gun. Unconscious, they’re hauled off by the men in black to a remote army research base. And now we have no idea what’s going to happen next.

That’s an example of how to keep the reader guessing on the overall narrative. But, as we always say here, stories are fractal. The same techniques for escalating tension work on the level of an individual scene. There’s a good example of that in Red Chamber, a yet-to-be-published thriller by James Wallis and his extreme writing team.

In this scene, the hero, Tom, is a newspaper reporter who is on the run from the police. He needs to get on board a Tube train at Sloane Square but there are coppers on the platform. His first plan is to climb over the wall from the street, the Tube line being open to the air at that station. Of course that isn’t nearly difficult enough to impress the reader. But Tom also needs to get across to the further platform, which requires him to walk along a narrow iron conduit that runs above the tracks. (The conduit really is there at Sloane Square; it carries a river from one side of the station to the other.) It’s snowing, so the ironwork is slippery, and as an added complication Tom has to be careful not to dislodge any snow that would alert the policemen below. Reaching the other platform just as a train pulls in, he lowers himself down onto the roof of a carriage, intending to swing down inside as the doors are closing.

All of that sounds like nail-biting stuff, sure, but even so it’s still what role-playing gamers would call a “skill roll”. The reader knows that the writer can just decide if Tom pulls all this off. To get our pulse racing, we need to see him face a problem that we didn’t foresee. All this business about clambering around on frozen pipes has merely been a precursor to that, establishing that Tom is doing some really difficult and dangerous things so that we are feeling the stress along with him.

That was the frying pan; here comes the fire. Tom looks down and sees a copper right there on the platform beside the doors. So he can’t swing down into the carriage after all. Okay, he thinks, I’ll ride on the roof until we get to the next station. So he, and we, start to relax - but too soon, because as the train moves off, Tom sees there is only about a foot’s clearance on the tunnel ahead. Scrabbling backwards, he falls between two carriages and hangs onto the bellows between the carriages with his shoes just inches from the live rail. Then at the next station he climbs onto the platform and makes his getaway. And boy, do we feel he’s earned it.

Death and the maiden over

Death, along with Jack Frost and the Moon and other entities of nature, in folktales appears in person - not the divine ruler of the realm of death, as in mythological stories, but the very embodied spirit of mortality. In Norwegian tales it's often a specific death, a given plague that is seen as an old woman going from village to village. Sometimes Death can be tricked - though usually not for long, and at great cost, for if folktales don't ultimately tell the starkest of truths then what are those stories for?

Italo Calvino was partial to Italian folktales, and the last story in his collection Fiabe Italiane is "Jump into my Sack", in which a crippled boy acquires a magic sack in which he briefly traps Death. There's no comeback, and he releases Death almost at once without prompting - just the sort of rough edge you expect in folktales.

Arthur Ransome's story "The Soldier and Death" is structurally much tidier. There the sack belongs to a Russian soldier who uses it to snare Death when she comes for the Tzar:

From that time on there was no dying in the world . There were births every day, and plenty of them, but nobody died. It was a poor time for doctors. And so it was for many years. Death had come to an end, and it was as if all men would live for ever. And all the time the little old woman, Death, tied up in a sack, unable to get about her business, was hanging from the top of a tall poplar tree away in the forest.

In time the soldier realizes the consequences of a world in which no-one dies, so he sets Death free. But she's thoroughly frightened and won't take him now, so he goes on to harrow Hell and finally meet a fate that is affecting, but far too authorial and elegant for me to believe that Ransome has presented this story just as he came across it in some woodland hut beside the samovar.

"The Soldier and Death" was published in 1920. Nineteen years later, the story put on new clothes in the form of On Borrowed Time, a movie with Lionel Barrymore as an old man who traps Death, now male, up an apple tree. He finally relents when his grandson falls trying to climb the tree and is paralyzed but unable to die. This version ends with Gramps and young Pud (sic) following Death up to a shining light in the sky. What can I say? Paul Osborn, the screenwriter, was perhaps not quite the storytelling genius Ransome was.

Early in 1962, in the pages of Amazing (Adult) Fantasy #9, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko revived the story as "The Man Who Captured Death" - a classic Lee/Ditko title, for sure. Death here looks like Bengt Ekerot and is caught in "an electronic ray". Beetles become immune to DDT and eat the crops; rats breed and infest the cities; antibiotics stop working; the incurably ill suffer but cannot die. So the old scientist who designed the ray turns it off: "You were right, grim one! No man may alter the mysterious scheme of things!" To which Death replies, "Thus has it ever been... Thus must it ever be..." Okay, still not on a par with Ransome. But it has Ditko drawing Death, and if anything could equal the dark brilliance of Russian folklore it's that.

Whether Death is stuck in a sack or a beam of light, good stories never die, especially when deadlines loom. And so we have a new spin on the story for television in the form of Torchwood: Miracle Day. I'm doubting that Death will actually be personified in this show, as that kind of concept belongs to fairytales and not to science fiction, but it will be interesting to see how the writers develop it. Because if Death is not a person, or at least a fantastic force of nature, then what process could systematically stop everyone dying throughout the world? In ten weeks we'll know.

In Mirabilis we have our own take on the story, "Death and the Maiden Over", in which Death arrives at Lord’s for the end of the cricket season. In a curious wager, he pads up and faces each of England’s fast bowlers. Until somebody can get him out, no-one in the world is to die. Finally, after a long afternoon that sees hospital wards filling up to capacity, W G Grace is called out of retirement and gets Death leg before wicket from his bath chair. Appropriate for a doctor, I think.

Do you want to climb the beanstalk?

A decade ago, a phone was still just a device you used to call somebody up. Then people in games and television started to take an interest. After all, here's a little gizmo stuffed with electronics that people carry everywhere. The developers started to think of what kind of games you could play on that - a route to the holy grail of casual gaming, then only dreamed of. Television folk noted the way that audiences were engaging with shows like Big Brother, their interest piqued probably not so much by the opportunity to create new and interesting formats as by the chance to milk more money from the viewers.

Leo and I were working in that unmapped border country between games and TV. We got to go to lots of meetings and conferences where people would get excited by ARGs and ways of delivering content as a finger buffet across multiple media. Where there are no maps, dragomans grow sleek and fat. Nowadays you'll hear the word "convergence" less and the words "curate" and "transmedia" more; otherwise those conferences haven't much changed in the intervening ten years.

As Leo and I were not equipped with the lavish budget that broadcasters give to the people who jaw-jaw, we had to focus on rather more modest goals than setting up a citywide game funnelling attention towards a reality TV show. One of the technologies we looked at was WAP. Crude by the standards of a modern smartphone, the phones back then allowed text and very simple graphics. "Aha!" we thought. "Gamebooks."

We realized that the sub-sub-Tolkien brand of fantasy popularized in the gamebooks of the 1980s were not going to grab a broad, casual, all-ages market. Instead we focussed on various types of family entertainment. One of our projects was Tell Me A Story, a series of mother-&-me interactive stories on a phone. Say you miss the bus, it's raining, and you have to wait twenty minutes for the next one. Twenty minutes - that's a yawning infinite gulf of boredom to a preschool child. These WAP gamebooks gave you an interactive fairytale that you could read to your kids, helping them with the choices - none of which was ever a wrong choice, of course. The pleasure of interacting was to see where the story would spin off to.

You can see how one of our Tell Me A Story gamebooks would have worked over on the Fabled Lands blog. As fairytales are such archetypal story forms, and most of us learn our storytelling grammar from them, kicking in a bit of interactivity seems to make a lot of sense. Now that we're into the era of apps, I'm thinking that Leo and I ought really to get back to this project. Um, just as soon as we finish the remaining 540 pages of Mirabilis, that is.

A curious manifestation on the Strand

As the green comet looms ever-nearer in the sky and the world gets stranger, the Fellows of the Royal Mythological Society (Cyril Clattercut and Bampton Bromfield; that's them above) are busy answering queries about extraterrestrial etiquette, fairy faux pas, and how to live with a minotaur next door. You can read their collected correspondence in A Minotaur At The Savoy, which for this month only is priced at just 99 cents for more than fifty mini-stories like this:

Dear perfessors

I hope that you may help me with my Trouble and do not object to a letter from one as does not know you. I have the agreeable position of regular employment at a public house by the Strand, name of The Three Gypsies. My duties there in the main being the stabling of horses, polishing brasses, & co. I also do in the taprooms and some private bedrooms that are kept for travellers, though not so frequent as in former days, now that the coach stand is not there no more. In the morning I rake out the fires and carry the ashes in a pail, which I have been in the habit of tipping down the drain that is in the street near the entrance to the yard. Only the other morning I went out that way and saw what had the look of two sooty, or I should say ashen, footprints on the pavement outside. Scuffing at these with my foot had no effect to remove them, and thinking no more I went and poured the ashes down the drain as per usual. Then on the next day I found two bare feet standing there. Just the plain feet, you understand, and not with no body above them, the feet being grey and looking to my eye to be made of ashes. Subsequent to that, having visited the drain on my purpose some other times, the feet have now been joined by ankles and the lower part of the legs, that is the calf. Mr Bardley, him being the landlord, says not to be tipping the ashes that way no more, but I have become quite driven with Curiosity to find out what will come. Today I tipped out another pail of ashes and in the morrow I’m in expectation of a pair of knees. Do you gents think this is advisable, or is Mr Bardley right?

Yours, Joe Gammock, Raven Row E1

Dr Clattercut replies: Mr Gammock, I have no direct experience of exactly such a phenomenon as you describe, but I implore you to consider all the ways that it could turn out if you continue as you have. One does not have to be an avid reader of the works of Mr Bram Stoker to foresee something rather chilling. There are many bad endings to the story and few good ones.

Prof Bromfield: Hmm. You do not say as much in your letter, but I surmise that the pedal extremities in question are feminine, and reasonably shapely. For once I have to agree with Clattercut. If this goes on, Mr Gammock, I feel it could be a case of curiosity killing the cat.

Writing with pictures

When early filmgoers saw the first close-ups on there on the big screen, many were baffled. “What is this giant face?” they wondered. And, “Why did you show a man looking horrified and then cut to a new image of a baby's pram bouncing down some steps? Is there supposed to be a connection?”

Cinematic storytelling. The grammar of moving images. It didn’t take long for audiences to learn the rules. Or to discover how they work, I should say, because visual grammar, like linguistic grammar, is wired into us as the way we process the world. The mark of good cinematic storytelling is that the meaning comes from the whole sequence of images. There is no “telling”. Each image is a single brick; it’s only the whole that has to look like a house.

One hundred and ten years on from the birth of cinema, everyone on the planet understands how to read a montage of images. So it surprises me that many people are unable to extract meaning from a comic story unless there are plenty of captions and word balloons (lots of text, in other words) to carry them along. Yet you can perfectly well read a classic sequence like the opening five pages of Spider-man #33 without looking at the words. Or look at this page of the Tintin story Black Island (analysed in depth here on Peter Richardson’s excellent Cloud 109 blog). You don’t need to speak one word of French to understand what’s going on.

Comics are not movies. But their great strength is that they can use visual grammar as well as linguistic grammar. The reason many people find it difficult to read a comic visually is, I think, because of the way they see comics. Rather than taking the comic as a montage of images and words combined to tell a story, those people think of the comic as a kind of illustrated novel. In books at primary school, you might have an image of a big guy in chains rising up from behind a gravestone to terrify a little kid, and the caption would read, “Magwitch surprises Pip in the churchyard”. If you come to a comic with that preconception, you won’t expect the pictures to tell the story, you’ll just expect them to illustrate what the words have already told you.

This may be a particular problem in the UK, where we have no mainstream tradition of comics storytelling and our movies are mostly like television drama (70% words, 30% images according to McKee) rather than cinema (vice versa). So British audiences are accustomed to having the words carry the story, and any images are just there as eye candy. Well, Britain is just one island (actually it’s around a thousand, including the Outer Hebrides, but only one and a half big ones) so it wouldn't matter that much if the British never get hip to comics. Europe, India, the USA, Japan and Korea add up to a pretty fair market to be going on with. Yet I do find it a shame that most of my British friends, unless they were reared on American comic books as I was, are not able to appreciate le neuvième art. So I can’t share my love of Sandman or Watchmen or B.P.R.D. with them, much less get their feedback on Mirabilis. Somehow I don’t see any UK government putting comics on the national curriculum, so homegrown comics may face the same kind of future as the UK film industry. Which would be a great pity.

From Paddington Station to the helium mines of Phobos

It's the Fourth of July and there will be fireworks even here in London. To mark the occasion, Leo and I are knocking a whopping $4 off the price of the Kindle edition of The Year of Wonders for one month only. So that's fifty whimsical vignettes of green comety weirdness for just 99 cents.

The stories range from a mysterious giant hand found in a wood in Yorkshire to the best way to deal with a dragon that's taken a shine to the gold reserves of Fort Knox, and although it's hard to pick one that can be described as typical, this will give you a taste of what to expect:

Dear human savants

Following a motion of no confidence in the prime minister, I find that my Martian Party has enough seats in the House of Commons to form a new government in coalition with the Liberal Unionists. The only sticking point is that, as you may know, my prospective allies are committed to a very specific agenda. Their three-point plan entails establishing a minimum wage, giving women the vote, and maintaining the unity of the British Isles - whereas the Martian Party is pledged to subjugate the planet Earth, replace corn with red weed as the staple carbohydrate dietary supplement, and ship a million slaves to the helium mines of Phobos.

As a compromise, I have agreed to defer mass enslavement for the term of the current Parliament, concentrating instead on domestic transport policy as an area of common ground on which our two parties can agree. For example, to alleviate the growing problem of “rush hour” congestion at the major London rail terminuses, we propose loading commuters onto massive catapults which will fling them across the city to land in collection nets near to their place of work. We estimate this would save at least seventy thousand man-months of labour per year. However, some of our advisors believe that it will not be a popular measure and could lose us votes at the next election. What do you counsel?

Yours, the Right Honourable Xangovar the Merciless, OBE, c/o the Palace of Westminster

Prof Bromfield replies: It would be very popular with small boys. Unfortunately, they don’t have the vote. Might be a better world if they did, if you ask me.

Dr Clattercut: Oh yes. Because resolving international disputes with conkers matches is obviously the way to go. Pulling girls’ pigtails when they demand enfranchisement. Declaring the whole of January a national tobogganing holiday. Making marbles the official currency of the Bank of England…

Prof Bromfield: You think you’re being wittily scathing, Clattercut, but in fact you’re just proving my point. So that’s what I’d suggest, Mr – er, Xangovar: shake up the Cabinet a little. Bring in some schoolboys and artists and poets and whatnot. Be more radical with your reforms, if anything. This is the Year of Wonders, so what’s wrong with sprinkling a bit of magic on the tired old machinery of politics? Trust me, the electorate will thank you for it.

Dr Clattercut: Those that land in the nets, anyway.

You can get The Year of Wonders from the Amazon Kindle store in the UK and in the USA. But just till August, remember. Happy landings.