by Lord Edmund Bryll, inventor of Brylcreem.

In straightened economic circumstances, not unlike those which have recently manifested themselves owing to some extraordinarily poor planning on behalf of some of my lesser colleagues in the banking industry, and shamefully exacerbated by their inability to remain excessively wealthy, one must occassionally turn to the lighter side, not to say humour, in an effort to distance one’s thoughts from the aforementioned economic maladies, though I pause here to reassure you, knowing full well that said reassurance should be unnecessary, that I remain laudably rich. Right, yes, hmm.

So, not to say therefore, I shall present to you, my multitudinous readers, a simple but, as you shall no doubt agree upon its completion, effective story of humourous intent and effect. “Tragedy is easy. Comedy is hard,” once opined a distinguished thespian acquaintance of mine, whom I shall refrain from naming here out of a sense of modesty, not to say a reluctance to raise the spectre of the sordid circumstances of his death, which I assure you involved significantly less transvestism than is generally believed. Quite so.

The joke, which I am confident you will find to be of sufficient quality, begins with the death of an unnamed man, whom one should assume had lived his life with some degree of virtue, since he did in fact go to heaven upon shuffling off this mortal coil, not to say shitting the bed. Upon reaching the aforementioned divine afterlife, and here I trust one can employ one’s imagination to conjure the suitable Christian imagery required to properly visualize heaven, particularly as regards clouds and angels and the like, including naked cherubs, the man, who we have established had recently expired, espied a surfeit of timekeeping devices, not to say clocks, adorning a wall behind the Pearly Gates. The particular clock brand is unimportant to the present humourous tale, though one assumes that, owing to the heavenly location of said wall, the clocks are of sufficient quality as befits the home of Our Saviour, as I certainly cannot conceive of Him permitting any excreble third-world craftsmanship.

The man, expressing an admirable curiosity given his situation of having only recently died, asked St. Peter, who I neglected to mention in the previous paragraph was also present, owing to his customary position as the gatekeeper of Heaven, “What are all these clocks?” St. Peter, demonstrating the saintly quality of resisting a biting, sarcastic response to a question he had no doubt heard many thousands of times, replied, “Those are Lie Clocks. Every time you lie, the hands on your corresponding clock move.”

The aforementioned gentleman, if indeed we may presume his gentlemanly bona fides, if not in reality then for the purpose of this altogether amusing tale, pointed to a particularly shabby clock, owing no doubt to its place of origin and not, I trust you will understand, the person to whom said clock is attributed. “That clock belongs to Mother Theresa,” exposited St. Peter. “As you can see, the hands have barely moved, indicating that she never told a lie.”

“Zounds!” exclaimed the recently expired gentleman in an expression of both frank incredulity and measured admiration, and one may safely assume that the gentleman in question proceeded to elevate his eyebrows appropriately, not to say like two caterpillars scrambling away from a glowing red bedwarmer wielded by one’s more vigorous manservants. “And whose clock is that?”

“That is Abraham Lincoln’s clock,” St. Peter replied earnestly, which, indeed, we may safely assume is his customary mode of communication, owing as it is to his saintly comportment and proximity to the divine Creator, not to say his employer of record. “It has moved two minutes, which rather implies that Abe told exactly two lies in his entire life.”

The deceased man, being of a rather curious, not to say precocious character, asked “And where is Lord Beaverbrook’s clock?”

St. Peter responded, “It is in God’s office. He uses it as a ceiling fan.”

Ha! My old rival and thorough-going applicator of feminine hygiene fluids certainly receives his comeuppance in the preceding tale, which I trust has brought a small ray of sunshine into your otherwise grey and insufficiently wealthy lives. Naturally, owing to my lengthy history with the aforementioned, but certainly not esteemed, Lord Beaverbrook, I have numerous tales of his baser character and peculiar romantical inclinations, not to say dray animals, but it is beneath me to engage in such gossip and ill-speaking of the deceased, despicable, reprobate that he undoubtedly was. Also, I once had it off with his wife at a charity function. Ceiling fan, indeed!

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