Doubtless there will be those of you who, having got this far, will be thinking something along the lines of: ‘This village looks like the type of village where an inventor might live. Surely there must be someone there who spends all his spare hours beavering away at some secretive project in the potting shed he built himself at the bottom of his garden. No one bar this man has ever been inside the shed, not even his friends, not even his wife and children. Wait, does he have any friends? Yes, a few close ones. And his family? Yes, he does have a wife and, let’s say, two children. All the neighbours wonder what on earth he is doing in there as they hear bangs and clunks and tinks and quongs at all kinds of bizarre hours, such as four o’clock in the morning. The police have been called once, but the man was able to explain everything and was left alone, but with a warning to keep the noise down. Every other month he unveils a new gadget. Every six months there is a massive explosion and the shed has to be rebuilt. Somehow or other the inventor almost always emerges unscathed from the wreckage, albeit his face is blackened and his hair is standing on end. No, hang on, he’s old now and he doesn’t have any hair. But it did stand on end when he had some. The inventor has suffered one very serious injury as a result of an experiment that went wrong: he has lost an eye. Did this slow down his stream of production? Did it check his ingenuity? Not a bit of it; it acted as a spur, and even as he was recuperating on his hospital bed he was designing the glass replacement he wears, which doubles as a miniature camera.

Yes,’ some of you may be thinking, ‘surely there must be someone in this village like that.’

And there is. It’s ‘Mad’ Roy Boffin. And those of you who were thinking along the lines of what’s written above were right down to practically the last detail. The main thing you didn’t get is that Mrs Boffin is now dead. Mr Boffin himself is in his late eighties. He actually has four ‘children’ (the word is in inverted commas, because all are pensioners), plus nine ‘grandchildren’ (again the word is in inverted commas, because all are middle-aged, or approaching middle age) and sixteen great grandchildren (none of whom is over eighteen, so the word is not in inverted commas).