Once upon a time there was a little kingdom in the middle of a little continent ruled over by a very small king, who was so small that he had hired the greatest mechanical minds of the age to come up with a system of lenses and mirrors, to make him look properly imposing when he was seated on his throne being rude to the common people (this is what kings are for). Unfortunately, the greatest mechanical minds of that age really weren’t all that great, and instead of looking imposing, he looked overweight and a funny shape, and all his subjects spent their whole time failing to try hard enough not to giggle and then getting beheaded. Because he was a king, nobody could actually tell him why people kept giggling, for fear of getting beheaded along with the gigglers, so he just sat there on his small throne, looking squished and elongated in various inappropriate places, and getting increasingly frustrated.

Now this king had a chief counsellor whom he trusted more than anyone else, a man named Sidevarnish who came from a land where everyone was squished and elongated in inappropriate places and no-one had a sense of humour, so he was the only person in the kingdom who didn’t giggle at the king. This was one reason he was chief counsellor; another was the fact that the king thought Sidevarnish was a really funny shape and enjoyed laughing at him, especially as the man was so humourless.

‘Sidevarnish,’ said the very small king one morning, ‘I’m not enjoying being king any more. It gets so boring having people beheaded for no good reason. What do you suggest I do about it?’

‘Let me see, Your Majesty,’ said Sidevarnish. ‘How about embarking on a major program of fundamental currency reform?’

‘Boring!’ yelled the king.

‘But it could be done in stages!’ insisted Sidevarnish earnestly. ‘First of all you’d make notelets, soap and chocolates legal tender for the duration of the Christmas holidays, then you’d abolish money, then you’d abolishing things to sell, then...’

‘Enough!’ screamed the king, whose attention span was shorter than he was, and only a bit longer than his loyalty to friends. ‘You’re fired, Sidevarnish! I’m sick of being king, I’m going to run away and join the circus.’

So the king went off and auditioned for the circus and didn’t get in, so he auditioned for a boy band and didn’t get into that either, so he auditioned for breakfast television and got that, but he hadn’t sunk quite so low, so he became an estate agent and hated it. Meanwhile Sidevarnish (who was either too idealistic or too unimaginative to usurp the throne) returned sadly home to his little cottage in a clearing in the wild forest, nursing impractical schemes about interest rates, antelope manure, and curious combinations of the two not previously envisaged by economists, at least not reputable ones.

Now ever since Sidevarnish had left his cottage to go the not-very-big city and make his fortune, his lovely young daughter Bug had remained all alone in the forest, where she scraped a living by gathering roots, nuts and berries, and then throwing them at travellers until they gave her some money.

‘At last,’ thought Sidevarnish as he rode the last mile towards his old home, his head spinning with a new theory on the interrelationship between wage inflation and the boiling point of feta cheese, ‘at last I will see my quiet little cottage again, and my lovely young daughter, to whom I haven’t given a second thought these last five years.’ But when he reached the clearing, he discovered that it was full of cranes and scaffolding, portacabins and industrialists, who were busy constructing that week’s Next Week’s Wonder of the World, a multi-storey car park with so many storeys that the top of it would touch the moon. Sidevarnish’s hut had been flattened, and Bug was nowhere to be seen. He never did find out what happened to her, and nor have I.