Chop the powder. Clear the decks. Brace your metaphysical vulva.

Your head a-spin after that gloriously mongrel triplet, I dance toward you, a fuzzy apparition in the whirling panorama. As your inner ears re-acclimate to terra firma, I take thy wrist and guide thee away from the meta-go-round. We migrate t’the underpass, not for anything predatory or anything if you’re a woman or anything scandalous if you’re a bloke, where I gaze into thy eyes (you still quite ashen) and whisper, ‘I am returned. I am returned to liberate thee from Pfidze’s cookie-cut Hades.’

You are grateful.

Yes, chaps and flaps. It Is I. The jaffa ‘neath the choc. The Alec of the Baldwins. The Kettle post-Jeremy.

Pursuing as I have sedentary rapture for the last month or so, I did indeed command Pfidze to lift extracts from my bibliography and present them for your edification and, dare I say, education. Did she include any of my seminal travelogues from Indochina? Did she include my hauntingly prescient meditations on the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease (spoiler: it’s a terrible business but thank God it’s scarcely zoonotic)? Did she include my jaunty limericks?

RHETORIC.

She didn’t.

I wish I had more to divulge re: my protracted contemplation but, if I’m being honest, what I hoped to be a continual constitutional tumble t’ward Jeremy-joy was scuppered and swallowed by the experience of experience itself manifesting as a Radar poised to detect the sundry nuisances of being, each bleep (oh dear God, the bleeps) perversely startling me to my very sub-anatomy as surely as they grew in frequency, until the Radar itself, unsated by its unique commission to perceive, resolved to build the very ships what it did bleep, like the most cynical of gumshoes moonlighting as the most heinous of villains.

Anyway, I’m back. And I’m fucking staying.