And so it came to pass that I discovered Little Frigging in the Wold :

The tadpoles are laughing at us, Maureen, and the large unwieldy device you used to organise the arrangement of our store of pickled onions lies slowly rusting at the back of the garage.

What has become of us?

Where has the magic gone from our lives?

Once we used to stay up late into the night, sometimes as late as seventeen minutes past nine, talking passionately of the uses for home-made rhubarb crumble and tabulating the amount of custard we used each week.

But now we sit here, each in our own chair, silently watching the TV muttering its own peculiar inanities to itself. Neither of us able to overcome the inertia long enough to curtail its empty ramblings.

You sit there quietly knitting penile restraints while I carefully lubricate several of the smaller furry mammals, but both of us know – deep down – that the naked traffic warden poised so artfully upon the trifle-strewn dining table in the far corner of the room waits in vain for us to begin the machinations.

Soon the clock will strike nine and it will be time to put the light out on this forlorn scene once again.

Both bizarre and quite sad at the same time.