Those of you who have read the comments following my Paddington post will already be familiar with Flea Bag, the perennially constipated dog I first encountered when on holiday aged 12.
In the very womb of midnight, whence grotesque prodigies of the mind are spawned and terrorise the pyjamaed, I arose like the fabled Russ Abbott for a covert glass of lemonade. Scarcely had I sat up when I sensed two tiny jaundiced eyes squinting at me and through me in the darkness. A growling, grunting sound, such as might be emitted by Anna Kournikova if she were to give birth to a full grown bear, accosted my ears. It was Flea Bag. Somehow, he had made his away across the Mediterranean and located my humble northern home. Perhaps he had arrived stowed inside a businessman’s egg salad sandwich. Perhaps he had hitched a lift atop a narwhal’s tusk. Whatever the explanation, he had arrived and he was constipated.
Or so I thought. It seems that Flea Bag had a very special reason for visiting me in the dead of midnight: he was about to do his first shit in fifteen years and, naturally perhaps, wanted to share it with the bony, wistful English youth who had taken pity on him all of those years ago. When the long-anticipated movement arrived, the very earth shook as if in the grip of a seismological cataclysm. Megatons of dogshit spilt out into the suburban night, covering half a county and blocking out the sun. I was smothered to death.
Flea Bag cried for his old friend, the one human who had taken pity on him. He buried his frayed mongrel snout beneath two melancholy paws and mourned, low and deep. He had expected to feel relief but instead learned an immutable fact about the universe: from the cradle to the grave there can be no release from the cycle of pain and suffering; from the woeful merry-go-round of constipation and guilt there can be no escape.

“Do it”, my Comic-Con buddies urged, “do it and verily your name shall be spoken with awe at science-fiction and comic conventions for years to come”.
With my faithful sword Wyrmslayer poking valiantly out of my gauntlet and my habergeon opened to the cool enchanted breezes, I set off in quest of a dragon. My plan was to steal one of its eggs, fry it and then eat it in a gigantic sandwich to win the favours of my beloved Princess Swine-Master. Gratuitous culinary extravagance was always the way to my sweetheart’s sweet heart.
I pass by all of the creeps and chumps besieging the wooden façade of J. D. Salinger’s house. They grip their notepads and frown at me as I saunter past in a pair of free-flowing canvas slacks. The hem of my left trouser leg whips up and stings a fat doughy youth in horn-rimmed spectacles right in the eye, via the small aperture between the rim and his plump white face. “Creep” he shouts. “Creep” I reply. We reach a conversational deadlock. I continue past the garden gate and make my way to the front door. “Hey, we’re not supposed to go in there” he yells. “I got clearance, creep” I say without turning round. “Salinger’s granted me an interview”.