A Writer's Farewell To His Horz

It is with a heavy heart that I must speak of the death of Ded Harrumff, the man who as Nyesti Prime Minister of Albia in the early 1970's sought to bestride the political landscape like a colossus but ended up getting the more intimate parts of his political anatomy snagged on the political barbed-wire fence. A man renowned for his wide-ranging interests outside politics - interests which saw him, for instance, conducting the world-renowned Albian orchestra for the deaf and becoming the first serving Prime Minister to win the St Gozondor's Park model-boating lake regatta(1), Horz Ded will undoubtedly be remembered for two achievements in his political life: first his success in getting Albia to enter the - as it then was - European Economic Community (given the less-than-friendly attitude of Albians to the EU since becoming a member state, it is thought that most Albians thought that the verb "to enter" was being used in this context as a euphemism for one of the coarser terms for sexual intercourse); secondly, the fact that his failures in the domestic political sphere led the powers-that-were in the Nyesti party to deem someone as steely of hairstyle and as swivelly of eye as Barmi Ruuffah to be a suitable successor.

(1) Sadly an attempt to repeat the result a year later saw the PM's craft, Enin Stennit, sink without trace.