That’s not really long and irrelevant. I mean, I told you above about General McCully who was always talking about really irrelevant things. Once he told me a story about myself (I’m not sure why I’d never been told it before by my family, but there you go, that’s families for you – not that I wish to make disparaging remarks about my family, they were quite nice, only you’d think that they’d tell me important things like this thing that General McCully told me).

Anyway, this story went as follows (of course, it being a long time since I lived in Fifestead, I won’t get it absolutely 100% word perfect, but I’ll get the plot details correct, which is all that matters in the long run, and in the short run too, probably):

Once, I went to tea with a girl called Sophie (to fully appreciate this amusing, and I may add, most relevant anecdote, you must realise that there was no romantic interest between myself and Sophie: in fact, we were both only four or five at the time; these ages are, you will no doubt agree, far too young for any real romantic interest to be taking place). Anyway, for reasons General McCully couldn’t quite remember (I was at least ten at the time, and being a fairly old man, General McCully didn’t have a fantastic memory), this girl Sophie (you may remember – she was the one towards whom I had no amorous intentions) put her spoon in my hair. Now, at this point in the story, you may well be saying to yourself, “So what?” But, the problem was, the spoon had a fairly large amount of yoghurt on it.

So this was, as you’ll no doubt appreciate, quite a difficult situation, and in the confusion I couldn’t help noticing the slightly random (and, I’ll have to admit, irrelevant) fact that the screws on which Sophie’s mother’s pictures were attatched to the wall required a flathead, rather than a Phillips, screwdriver (when I say flathead, do not use this term in its most obvious, literal definition, but as the DIY term in fairly common use).

Anyway, there was me sitting with yoghurt coursing down my face, examining the screws on my hostess’ mother’s pictures, and casting dark aspersions, and eventually I just walked out and went home, all on my own.

Now, when I make all these claims about being very friendly with a General, he may not actually be a General: the British Army (the army in which he had served) had several ranks containing the slightly bizarre, random and irrelevant term “General”, including Major-General, and I don’t know if he was simply one of these, since they’re usually addressed simply as “General”, as was the citizen of Fifestead General McCully.

Come to think of it, there even used to be a Brigadier-General rank and even a weird-sounding Captain-General rank in the British army, though I believe the rank of Brigadier-General still lives on in the United States Army, existing under some obscure, weird, bizarre, random and irrelevant star rating too, such as “three-star general”, though this almost certainly (speaking with an unfirm knowledge of that field of mathematics known as probability) isn’t the right term for the rank of Brigadier-General.

Anyway, being a busy person, I can’t waste any more of my valuble time on this, unfortunately.