Pulling out the stops

Goodness but Megadik has loyal employees, prepared to sacrifice everything in their quest to prove total product efficacy. Today it's the turn of lovely Leila L. Bledsoe to tell us that she, too, is endowed with a piano-sized member.

She also adds that chicks no longer laugh at her in toilets. I fear this is because they are simply too amazed and possibly rather scared. Or she's been on too many farm open days.

Should I try to alert her? Or is she better off living in blissful ignorance?

Blissful ignorance would certainly be better than the bizarre attempts at communication I experience on a train today. Bored with the mindless predictability of commuter travel, the soft-voiced announcer is doing the journey in reverse order to the passengers.

As she ignores all the stations still to come in favour of those long since past, imploring us to mind the doors, keep our luggage close and never, but never, travel without a valid ticket, I feel increasingly that I'm with a descendant of Hal, the robot in '2001, A Space Odessey'. Summary of plot: 'Computer says no.'

When she runs out of lyrical descriptions of stations we will never see again, at least on this trip, the announcer fills her idle moments by warning us that pigeons sometimes board the train and should on no account be encouraged with gifts of money. Their guitars get stuck in the doors, too.

The sense that everyone else is living in a more exciting, parallel universe is heightened later that evening when I listen to a short story on the radio. It talks about a little courtyard, filled with dappled sunshine and shaded by..........daschunds.

Is it hearing problems, mental health problems - or just wishful thinking?