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And then, of course, there’s the question of the evolutionary future of pigeons.

A few months ago I reported in these pages that through a series of unfortunate circumstances my editorial consultant had to be confined to the house for reasons of prophylactic hygiene. Consequently, he and I have spent the daylight hours of the last eleven weeks like a pair of isolated lighthouse keepers, which is to say composing sea shanties, threatening to murder each other and periodically going mad.

Today, finally, was his day of release. We parted company after breakfast, I with a promise to stay in touch, he with a placatory wee on the door mat.

In fact, watching him reacquaint himself with the non-carpet universe, I was reminded of how editorial consultants divide their world into four kinds of thing: things to eat, things to kill, plants, and things with which to perform acts which the vet had confidently assured us he could no longer perform, but which every lonely lighthouse keeper dreams of, late at night when the fog is thick and the seaways clear.

It’s possible to forget some things very quickly. Specifically, it occurred to me as I watched him scarper over the back fence that I had forgotten about my consultant’s past habit of turning up to editorial meetings with a pigeon in his mouth.

My first reaction in this situation is always reflexively to wonder if I should have brought a packet of Tim Tams or something.

Then I tend to get angry. Not with my consultant, who is after all only following the natural consultative urges that served his ancestors so well on the savannah, where the editorial consultant roamed free, sating their hunger among the herds of wild, galloping desktop publishers.

No, I get angry with the pigeon. My consultant wears a bell and a number of tinkly metal medallions, and is in any event an appalling hunter (upon spotting his prey, he tends to slink cunningly into plain view, crouch sleekly in an open patch of ground and then spend five minutes excitedly wiggling his bottom and pivoting on alternate back feet, in an outstanding impersonation of Elvis Presley circa 1956. He is, in this respect, the only known mammal to perform a victory dance before actually catching his victim.)

Under what circumstances, I fume at the pigeon while it stares dumbly at me from the hallway floor, could this hip-swivelling nitwit have caught you? I couldn’t have made him more obvious had I fitted him with halogen headlights and a siren.

And yet here you are, lolling about on my carpet with a roughed-up wing, filling me with all the surging guilt with which ten thousand years of civilisation has amply furnished my Anglo-Celtic genome. I was just enjoying a pleasant cup of tea and a bit of light Bach when in you swan to remind me that the last time anyone in my family tree had the hunter’s instinct, it was snowing in Egypt.

Because now, weak-chinned as I am, I am faced with the Decision.

To be continued...