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The Peripatetic Threat

  Eleanor, who'd been a River's Bend resident since the spring of Princess Anne's divorce, didn't think that a psychic evening there would be quite the thing. 

  'But, Caspar,' she remonstrated with the landlord, 'think where this might end.  Remember the thin end of the wedge over the switching off of the heated towel rail at the height of summer? Clothes pegs?  The Danish organist?  If Serena is allowed to have her peripatetic witches’ coven, there’ll follow peripatetic harpists, cake decorators, walk-in bath demonstrations, magicians, life-drawing classes, stair lift uprisings, tax advisors, taxidermists, computer experts, actuaries, string quartets, retro-nit nurses, One is Fun cookery demonstrations, lecturers on molluscs, sales of defunct library stock, cashers-in on mis-sold PPI, An Evening with Noel Coward with the inevitable three Nicaraguan lesbians dressed as the Lygon sisters who render the verses of “Matelot”, “Mrs Worthington and Conversation Piece” into varying sizes of tuneable copper bucket by passing synchronised water.'

  The psychic evening went ahead as planned at River's Bend. 

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