Morning delivery

I awoke early this morning with the sound of strange birds calling to each other outside the small street level grill high up in the basement wall. Imagine my surprise when I reached up from my bedding and found that I wasn't in my pied-a-dungeon but inside a packing crate.

Using my cranium for what God intended (no not thinking, but as a battering ram) I broke out of my wooden prison and was greeting by an even more surprising sight. I appear to be in a foreign country. I can only deduce this because as I wandered around the dockyard where my crate had been deposited, I saw numerous small pale dark haired fellows who all looked very similar to each other and were speaking in a peculiar tongue. Many a slip betwixt cup and lip but I could swear I was in France.

The French written language appears to consist of meaningless little drawings of houses, heaven knows how they can make any sense with these strange scribbles but I will trust that there is some kind of system at work here. I shall investigate further and keep you informed as to my discoveries.

Now as to how I wound up in Calais or Dieppe or whither, there is clearly only one answer. The good Doctor decided I needed a holiday and kindly sent me 3rd class shipwise to this rather cold and windblown dock. His kindness knows few bounds, for I discovered after breaking free from my timber cage that he had had the great heart and foresight to pack the rest of the crate out with a number of decomposing rat corpses, no doubt gathered from the myriad traps and poison plates that Herr Doktor Nostrum scatters about his living quarters. I shall not go hungry!

Now I must sign off for a group of wiry little stevedores approach holding numerous wrenches and suchlike and are shouting loudly in their peculiar French dialect. Some of them appear to know Kung-Fu, I trust we shall get on famously.