Mr Boffin’s house is full of such delights. Even before entering it, you may make use of one of the most mischievous of these: a doorbell that makes a very loud knocking sound. Another trick to do with the door is that the letter box is in the shape of a mouth and when anything is pushed through it a mechanical tongue emerges from inside and licks the lips. This is followed by a loud and satisfied burping noise.

Most of the inventions are more practical. As a pearl wedding anniversary present for his wife, Mr Boffin totally re-routed the water system so that the windows could be washed automatically, like a car windscreen. Large wipers on the inside and outside are supplied with hot water and do their work at the flick of a switch. ‘Mad’ Roy did plan to arrange the system so that the water could be directed to the houseplants after it had been used to clean the windows, but this proved logistically difficult and in any case he was unsure if it would benefit the plants.

‘Mad’ Roy has had particular joy designing musical domestic appliances. I myself have a kettle of his that plays the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah when it boils, and a toaster that performs the cancan tune from Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld when the toast pops up. It is only a matter of time before I get round to buying a fire alarm that blasts out the ‘O Fortuna’ section from Orff’s Carmina Burana. After all, if my house is going to burn down I want it to burn down in style.

Alarms were to become something of a recurring theme for ‘Mad’ Roy. Following his popular door-to-door-salesperson alarm came his even more popular market-researcher alarm, which in turn was followed by his yet more popular still political-canvasser alarm. One thing he won’t do is a charity-worker alarm. It can't be denied that very few of any of these bother with our village (unless you count the village idiot candidates), but Mr Boffin’s alarms would warn us if they did.