Have you met the divine Mme. Sosostrus yet? She’s preposterous, and yet…..such fun. She’s quite the character, and seems unable to pronounce, let alone spell, her own name. Still, she has all this weird knowledge, she claims, from these Kookistani people that nobody else seems to have heard of. She’s pretty vague about their whereabouts, but Mme. S lives half way up a local mountain, with a troop of Capuchin monkeys for company, and only ventures abroad down the town, on Alice the bike, when out of Uisce Beatha, apparently, or when there’s a chance of some silver crossing her palm. Oh, there’s a piano half way up there, too, which, by her own account, they gather ’round in the evenings, to knock out a tune or two on.

We’ve heard her singing, unfortunately, at a recent seance we had. As a writer, I seek out these Kooks, to help me cook up new books, and Mme. S was quite the hoot, as she literally threw herself into finding the ghost myself and Mr. Poxley-Warner dreamed up. With all this free entertainment, and barely containable mirth, we almost forgot teeny Foxley Poxley’s wailing for the evening. The only dark spot on the ectoplasmic spectacles was the fact that that Donna Emerald beat me to making art out of the pig’s ear that Sosostrus made of the performance, by publishing a play of her own. The pigeon post must have been intercepted, or some malicious spirit put the evening’s entertainment gossip about via secret twitching curtain coded signals, or teatime tattling, down the local cafe. Still, there’s a book and several dramatic paintings in it still, I suspect. Plenty of time for clearing up the mouse remains from the cooker, too. One can’t rush art, and she’s such an inspiration.