I have always done my not-insignificant best, to make of my time on Earth, an example which might prove beneficial to the young, whom, I am given to understand, embody the future of our species and, dare I say it, race, upon this globe which, as a mighty poetaster has observed in time of golden memory, [illegible] damn it my pen has blotted.

Very well, I shall continue. I should like to state at the outset, that the price my stationer charges for a simple steel nib is a travesty, and a blight upon the name of commerce. Also, and I say this with due consideration, I believe it is unarguable that he does, in fact, water his bottled ink. If this continues I shall be reduced to scratching upon foolscap with a goose quill and oak-gall ink.

Plot? Maybe. Anachronisms? Yes. Plot mechanics? Don’t make me laugh.

I didn’t plan for Ashford to be entirely amoral. He isn’t. He’s just differently-moraled.

Our story so far.

‘Ashford!’ Pomfritz’s voice echoed from the ceiling. ‘What are you doing out of your hole?’ Inwardly, I cringed. Outwardly, I attacked.

‘Detection, Lieutenant. Have you heard of it?’

‘That’s my job, Ashford. I asked about you.’

‘Who poo’d in your pudding, Lieutenant?’ You may as well know, Pomfritz brings out the schoolboy in me, to an inconceivable degree. He had already caught me on the back foot, and no good would come of it.

There is a story missing here, dead and buried. I wanted to try something with a plot, spent a lot of time on it, and found I couldn’t do that and write things that amused me at the same time. However, some of the inchoate longing for plot ended up here. The cliffhanger at the end came out awkwardly.

It was a dark and stormy night, followed by a dark and stormy morning, and leading directly into a dark and stormy day. In early afternoon the clouds abated for a period, but by evening the weather had returned, and continued d. and s. throughout the night-time hours. The second morning was dark, but not stormy.

Decided we could use a murder-mystery parody. Still unsure if “making sense” was part of my métier. Written with American spelling and punctuation, as were the previous two, and converting even a short piece is harder than it looks. Spelling likely still defective.

It was in the evening of the 22nd day of Octobuary, 18__, that I attended a popular lecture given in the auditorium of the Royal Society. The speaker, Sir Hubert Thumberberry, was a renowned expert in the field of theoretical agrostology, speaking on a subject close to my heart: the intersection of didactics with dialectics (or, as it is sometimes called, Dianetics).

This was written when I thought of the first line and needed something to attach to it. The name Deane didn’t sound right (it was the name of a 19th-century gunsmith) so I asked Claude.ai for suggestions. I didn’t like any of them, but some showed up here for no explicable reason. I figured that writing a story that made sense was an advanced technique, and I wasn’t ready for it.

This started as one joke and half a page. Then I added another joke. The first joke stopped working, so I took it out and was back to one. It’s still awkward, but you have to quit some time. The title has nothing to do with the story.

‘Yes, Mr. Deane’, he said, his bow tie wabbling beneath his mutton-chops, dewlaps, and flews. ‘Those “in the know” were limited to a select few: you, Harry, and I. But, as you may know, three can keep a secret only if two of them are dead. And the total is still wrong by one!’ He produced, like a stage-magician, an enormous horse-pistol.