Nothing happened personally to me except that a funny thing happened to me at the Pistol and Rifle Club which I always attend on the first Thursday of the month.

I had decided to give my old and beautiful .455 Smith and Wesson Military and Police Model of 1902 an airing. The men there teased me about it as ever; most of them have amazing small-bore weapons with tailored handles and changeable sights, but they know that I can still make the pop-up man-sized target look pretty sick at standard Olympic range. Although I say it as shouldn’t. It weighs 2¾ pounds fully loaded and the barrel is 6 inches long; using the high-load, nickel-jacketed military ammunition it can punch holes in a brick wall and it makes a deafening and highly satisfying noise. Everyone with an organ-inferiority should have one. (Like, say, Bach?)

A nice police-sergeant made his usual joke about it, saying that if I bought it a pair of wheels I could get a commission in the Royal Artillery, and then the funny thing that happened to me was that he asked me if I had my bullets specially cast.

‘Yes, a nice chap in London,’ I said.

‘Lead?’ he asked. I was puzzled.

‘Of course, lead, what else?’

‘No, nothing, just asking. There’s a bloke here on the Island who’ll cast them in anything, if ever you need it.

‘Well, thanks,’ I said, still puzzled.

That was the funny thing that happened.

I didn’t give it any more thought. I was too preoccupied with what always preoccupies me on the First of May: the essential swindle of all English months and May in particular. Why have we let the poets and, no doubt, politicians, sell us all this rubbish about the months? I mean, May conjures up the vision of happy, sun-burned maidens prancing on the village green and retiring at dusk to the nearest hedgerow to be turned into happy, sunburned, unmarried mothers-to-be; but the truth is that the pallid and pimply village maiden of today is waving her lumpish hips in a discotheque in the nearby town, munching a contraceptive pill while the rain roars down outside and the Babycham fizzes in its glass. Anyone braving a hedgerow in an English May, even in full oilskins, courts both pneumonia and insecticide-poisoning. Perhaps the only month which one can depend on is January, when the cold is always as promised and one can still sometimes hear the ring of skates on the frozen tarn and, if one is lucky, the shriek of a drowning skater.

When I say that nothing happened that day, I did not mean to suggest that nothing happened that night. Much did.

Johanna was watching lovingly as I mopped up the gravy of one of the finest coq-au-vins (coqs au vin?) of my life with a huge crust of crusty bread when the telephone rang.