He said: ‘Beryl, I hated to do it, but I had to wake you. The head rolled eight feet from the body.’ There are various techniques for coping with people who say things like that. Possibly the most effective is to catch them just under the ear with a bronze book-end (preferably a cast of Rodin’s ‘Thinker’) and then scream — remembering always that the scream is of secondary importance to the book-end.
