As is customary at this time of the year, the idea that rust and a swoop of magpies infested Simpleton Braithwaite has been floated. “Fungal anthology” and “Speed, bonny boat,” the Ibsen twins have suggested, heedless of the pickle and the nascent hegemony to which this will inevitably give rise, and all is as a carapace-shielded wasplet. (Magnanimous wasplet.) Heh heh heh! Mboti fo “wospu”.

















Since I begin to blog nineteen of your Earth months ago, I receive literally trillions of inquiries about my noble bearing in the most pleasing profile photo. “Please to say, Mr Mbashta,” they ask, “where can we acquire for ourselves such breathtaking attire?” I laugh aloud thus: “A ho ho ho!” and brush a tear from my eye, for well I remember the seemingly endless nights spent in preparation for the Babudi Opku ceremony, when all the village folk gathered around the hummock to sing, in celebration of my coming of age, the babudi-fudi:

Oh, the natterjack toad and its silly deeds
Are easy to detect
Within the mass of reeds and weeds
With which my head’s bedecked.*

Yes, my friends, it takes many years before one has earned the right to don the garb of a true tedoga mobo; why, the very thought of a cheeky chappy entering an emporium of some description – let us imagine your Boots The Chemist Esquire by way of example – and purchasing such regalia would be enough to, as we say, make a gnu cover its tracks with the bark of the bolanga tree! An unlikely occurrence indeed, I am sure you will agree.

The gnu is revered in Mhutu for its wisca tomobi ("whiskers of wisdom")

“We live in perplexing times, Mbashta my son,” my cockney spirit guide used to tell me, “so gi's the dosh by Monday and no-one gets 'urt.” Failing to understand his words at such a tender age, I took them to indicate particles previously predicted by “Popinjay” Prendergast and her peculiar penguin-predicated Peanut Pageant in Penge. “The minions of Tibbles,” Tel, the aforementioned guide, would point out sagely, notifying Randolph of any impending gleam.

The pageant in full swing, Prendergast looking typically vivacious

* I have opted to use, as Mhutu-philes will have noted, doubtless with mixed reactions, Bohumir Smeral’s controversial 1924 translation.