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Similarly, with the trout season happily upon us, take particular care when casting for the plump speckled fellow lurking beside a floating log. The log could be out of there in a trice and have
your leg off before you know it.

On a closing note, many readers have e-mailed me to express fears that our domestic cats may be threatened by all the ocelots, lynxes, servals and so forth which have escaped into the wild, and
enthusiastically bred (an Uxbridge gentleman has written to say that the nocturnal racket has made his wife stone deaf in one ear). The answer is, I’m afraid, that not only will some of our
British cats be killed, but also that others may be, how shall I put it, compromised. If you find that your own dear tabby has given birth to kittens able to slice open a tin of Whiskas with a
single swipe of their claw, I urge you to seek professional advice at your earliest convenience.

J
UNE
6. No coincidence there, then. But I am writing this on D-Day minus 1: I do not know what tomorrow will bring. I know
what it is supposed to be bringing. I have been anticipating it for a very long time, the planning has been meticulous, the preparation exemplary; and yet, once what tomorrow is bringing is
brought, who can guess what it will bring with it? Planning and preparation can go only so far. That is how it is with D-days.

I have known for months that June 6 would be Delivery Day. Mrs Coren has it in writing. That is because it was all Mrs Coren’s idea. She wants the world to be a better place. Especially
for her, which is why she spent so much time and effort and money on getting the box fitted to our front wall. And the thing inside the box. The thing has to be inside a box, and the box has to
have a lock on it, because you have to stop people stealing what is coming into the thing. For the thing inside the box is a plug, and what is coming into it is electricity.

Why would people want to steal the Corens’ electricity? To run their electric car. If the plug were not inside a locked box, when our electric car is not plugged into it but pottering
about on the electricity from which it is now unplugged, anyone could come along and plug their own car in. Hang on, you say, you have not got an electric car. Wrong: it is being delivered on June
6. By the time you read this, Mrs Coren will have plugged it in, and I shall be staring at it.

I know what I shall see. Go to www.goinggreen.co.uk and you can see it, too. It is called a G-Wiz. That there is something of the cartoon about its name doesn’t stop there. Noddy would
love it: otherwise indistinguishable from his, this one has a roof. Mrs Coren tells me it will save congestion charges, parking meter fees, petrol costs, insurance payments, road tax, and the
planet. In that order. She tells me this while I am staring at it.

When a man says something is all his wife’s idea, you may be sure that when you look into his eyes, they will tell you that when he says all, all is what he means. Not that this is the
worst idea he has ever heard, only that he thinks it is. I have been driving cars for 50 years. All of them have been quick, all of them have been ragtops, most of them have been red. If I look
down from my attic window now, I can see the last of the line. I am lucky enough to live in a house with great views, but the greatest is the one I am looking at right this minute. I shall not be
able to look at it for long. On June 6, it will be delivered to someone else, to make way for what is delivered to me. I shall be looking at a toy with a top speed of 40 mph and a range of 40
miles. Today, I am Nuvolari, I am Fangio, I am Schumacher; but tomorrow I shall be Noddy. If I leap in and give it all the wellie there is, after an hour I shall have to knock on someone’s
door to ask if I can use their plug.

I
N
a bid to curb binge drinking, the British Beer and Pub Association is to abolish happy hour.

The small man set down the two pints on the table. The table wobbled.

‘It’s gone on me leg,’ said the tall man. He took out a handkerchief.

‘I wouldn’t do that,’ said the small man. ‘You’ll smell on the bus. Worse if you have to blow your wossname. There may be pregnant women. They will complain the
alcohol will affect the size of their baby. You will get thrown off. Arrested, possibly. My advice is to brush it off with your hand.’

‘It’s stained me trainers now,’ said the tall man, ‘you silly sod.’

‘That’s the trouble with trainers,’ said his friend. ‘We used to have proper shoes. You could widdle with impunity. Don’t talk to me about canvas.’

‘I widdle a lot more, these days,’ said the tall man.

‘Have you seen anyone about it?’

‘I have been on the waiting list,’ said the tall man, ‘since 1998.’

‘I told him not to fill the glasses right up. I can remember when this pub used to leave a good half-inch at the top. I can remember complaining about it.’ He took a sip. ‘But
at least it used to taste like beer.’

‘EU regulations,’ said the tall man. ‘Brussels has specified that chemical rubbish has to be added to British draft bitter, to protect bottled Belgian. I presume that is also
why you did not buy any pork scratchings, due to where they now have to come from more than one country of origin.’

‘You wouldn’t want to eat anything a Polish pig scratched off,’ said the small man. ‘I thought about a pickled egg, though.’

‘But then you thought, bird flu, am I right?’

‘You are not wrong. I have eaten my last Chinese. Also Indian. They put cancer in to colour the sauce.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘What with catching diabetes off of hamburgers, that
only leaves fish and chips.’

‘Not for long,’ said the tall man. ‘There’s only three cod left in the sea, and not more than half a dozen haddock. Do not even think about halibut. Any day now, we shall
all be eating jellyfish.’

‘Provided we can stop it wobbling out of the packet on the way home.’

‘I’d eat it there if I were you,’ said the tall man. ‘You wouldn’t want to walk home and get your jellyfish took off you by a mob of hoodies. Also shot, in all
probability.’

‘By a girl,’ said his friend. ‘Most violent crime is now committed by infant females. They are the ones who can afford guns, due to maternity benefit. Funny, they would be the
first to start yelling if you pulled your handkerchief out on the bus, if they lost the baby they could never afford ammunition.’

‘I blame the North Koreans’ said the tall man. ‘If I was twelve, I’d want it all now, too, before an H-bomb fell on me. Or,’ he added, ‘an
asteroid.’

‘Is that for definite?’

‘August 3, 2046. As agreed by all known scientists, nem con.’

‘Bloody hell, that is the day before my 90th birthday! I shall never draw my pension. I have worked it out and it could be as much as £4 a week.’

The tall man shrugged. ‘You lose some, you lose some. My wife rang me one day last month and said her lottery number had come up. So I went out and bought a new Rover. When I got home she
said the prize was a tenner.’ He cracked a knuckle. ‘And there were 60 of ‘em in the syndicate.’

‘I don’t know where any of us would be,’ said the small man, ‘if house prices hadn’t rocketed.’

‘We’ll soon find out,’ said the tall man. ‘According to reliable sources close to everybody who knows anything, we shall all be in negative equity by Christmas. I
wouldn’t care, but I just spent a ton of money on a major roof extension for the wife’s mother. Next thing I know, it’s only gone and slid off the roof, hasn’t it? Bloody
cowboys!’

‘Was she in it?’ enquired the small man.

‘Don’t make me laugh.’

‘Thinking of which,’ said the small man, ‘I turned on the radio yesterday morning while I was shaving, the way I always do, and instead of John Humphrys, it was Nicholas
Parsons.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said the tall man. ‘I couldn’t finish my egg.’

‘Still,
Today
was back this morning.’

The tall man drained his glass, and stood up. ‘Not before time,’ he said.

H
ERE
are a few statistics about J. K. Rowling you may not yet have read.

1. If all the published copies, hardback and paperback, in all translations, of the six Harry Potter books were laid flat, edge to edge, they would entirely cover Brazil.

2. If, however, the Brazilian rainforest continued to be reduced at the current rate, by the afternoon of April 17, 2057 there would be room only for a single-volume tower of
all the published copies of the, by then, seven Harry Potter books. It would be 48,977 miles high. It would be the only pile of books visible from Mars.

3. Had, on May 16 last, J. K. Rowling put all her income from the five published Harry Potter books on Archer’s Folly in the 3.15 at Haydock Park, which came in by a
short head at 100-1, she would have become richer than Bill Gates by £135.84. If, though, she had waited until this week’s publication of the sixth book and put all her accumulated
money on Jiminy Cricket in the 2.45 at Sandown, she would now be in a position to buy North Dakota.

4. The combined weight of all the six Harry Potter hardbacks, in all translations, is 143 tonnes heavier than Mount Snowdon. Were this to be added to the combined weight of all
the six Harry Potter paperbacks, it would be 61 tonnes heavier than Ben Nevis.

5. Of all the children, worldwide, who have bought a Harry Potter, only 32 per cent know it is a book. The largest category of those who think it is something else is the 27
per cent who think it is a box of tissues which opens at the side. The smallest category of those who think it is something else is the 0.0001 per cent located in an exclusive South Kensington
finishing school, who believe it to be a deportment aid.

6. Were all the semi-colons in all the Harry Potter books, in all translations, to be typed out in a straight line, they would circle the world twice. Bear in mind that there
are no semi-colons in Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Urdu or Inuit.

7. If all cigarette manufacture suddenly stopped in China, and the 73 per cent of the population who smoked managed to get their hands on all the Harry Potter books ever
published, in all translations, they would have enough paper to make themselves 20 roll-ups a day for the next 289 years.

8. The quantity of adhesive used to secure all the pages of the six Harry Potter volumes to their bindings would be enough to cover Wales in linoleum floor tiles.

9. Were the President of the United States ever to yield to pressure from fundamentalist Christian objectors and order every copy of Harry Potter to be burned, global warming
would increase by 2.7 per cent. Even on the most optimistic estimate, this would leave only the top 18.7 metres of the Blackpool Tower visible.

10. However, if, in the (admittedly unlikely) event of the President of the United States having signed up to the Kyoto Protocols, the books were not burned but pulped, enough
material would be produced to rebuild Falluja entirely in papier-mâché.

11. If each copy of every Harry Potter book published consisted of words different from those in every other copy, it is statistically more than likely that one of the books
could have been typed by a chimpanzee.

12. In a recent attempt by a team of mathematicians in Istanbul to work out how much J. K. Rowling had earned in Turkish lire (at 2,318.9 to the £), the university
computer blew out all windows within a diameter of 300 metres.

13. You do not have to share J. K. Rowling’s passion for necromancy to be troubled by the number 13. All you have to share is common superstition. For if all the copies
of Harry Potter ever sold were to be placed in piles of 13 around the world, the statistical likelihood of anyone walking past one of them subsequently falling through an open manhole beggars
belief.

NB. All these statistics are taken from an advance copy of
The Guinness Book of J. K. Rowling
, to be published at midnight on July 31st. Those wishing to begin queuing
outside bookshops now are advised to seek tickets for places at almost any website you can shake a broomstick at.

O
H
, to be in England – and the moment I stepped off Monday’s plane after four homesick weeks, I knew just why.
So it is no accident that I launch the first farrago of my autumn term with that hoary
cri de coeur
, since it was the uproarious stand-up Hermann Goering who, when he heard the word
culture, reached for his Browning, and his plucky Luftwaffe will shine brightly in what follows – along with the royal family, Enid Blyton, Claridge’s, the broad sunlit Cotswolds, the
News of the World
, and Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut, and you cannot get more cultural than that.

All this, because the first thing I did at Heathrow was buy
The Times
. It held two glorious stories. The first concerned MI5’s revelation of the cunning 1940 plan by some Nazi
Baldrick to parachute saboteurs into rationed Britain, who would distribute chocolate bars and tinned plums and fizzy drinks to the salivating war-deprived. The joyful beneficiaries would then
scuttle off to gobble their covert goodies, and a few seconds later, blow themselves to bits, for the goodies the baddies had slipped them were bombs: you snapped the chocolate, opened the tin,
unscrewed the bottle, and went bang.

Can it be mere coincidence that these were the days of Enid Blyton’s pomp? I think not. I think the Abwehr, Teutonically meticulous as ever in their research, believed that in her they had
discovered, quite literally, Britain’s soft underbelly. Tinned plums, chocolate, lashings of ginger beer? What is this if not
Five Go Off To Blitzkrieg
? The fact that not one booby
trap worked is only further proof: for you and I know, though Jerry somehow failed to clock, that a nano second before any human was fragged, Timmy the Dog’s keen nose would have told him to
bark a monitory ‘Arf Arf!’.

And then I turned the page, to the second story. This also involved bibs, tuckers and the Third Reich. Some time ago, Princess Michael of Kent had sat down to a Gordon Ramsay corker at Claridges
in the rapt company of a billionaire sheikh, because, though her Gloucestershire bolt-hole Nether Lypiatt was up for sale, it had not attracted much interest until the bloke in the sheet fronted up
on its doorstep and began talking serious money. And, on their follow-up date, not only money: for, despite all the Michelin-starred stuff being noisily hoovered up through the nosebags, Mazher
Mahmood still managed to persuade the mouth of the radiant vendor opposite to expound all manner of fascinating stuff about the royal family, inside dope (if she will pardon the expression) which,
it appears, she had been fatally beguiled into imagining might be a useful part of her sales pitch. Not so. She had been conned. Her lunch date did not make his money by digging up oil, he made it
by digging up dirt. He had been parachuted in by The
News of the World
with a smarter booby-trap than tinned plums.