The rapper COVI 9ineteen wants to know why people have suddenly stopped buying his records

By Mark Sadler

Listen, I got one question I wanna ask y'all: Why ain't none of you buyin' my records no more?

Back at the beginnin' of January, it seemed like 2020 was goin' to be a billboard year for COVI 9ineteen, the reignin' king of the north-eastern US seaboard alternative hip-hop scene.

Y'all couldn't get enough of my new album 'On Perm'nent Lockdown', out now on GVR - Get Ventilated Records - filled-up to the brim on both sides of the vinyl with diamond cuts like Da Plague (featuring PaM Demic), I Wear No Mask, Fool (Carcosa Mix), Shake Hands Like A Man, Coughin' And Splutterin' an' Da Plague (slight recurrence). Seventeen rhymin' tales taken from the hood 2019 cultural exchange programme, where rappers like myself were privileged to experience life in European hoods in France an' Italy, gainin' insights into different communities, learnin' how to rhyme in a foreign language, attendin' local museums an' art exhibits, an' dinin' out on croissants an' weird-ass pasta. There ain't no vaccine been developed that will protect yo' ears from these verses an' beats risin' from the streets, leafy Parisian boulevards and picturesque Italian bowlin' courts. Or so I thought.

March rolls aroun' an' suddenly nobody wants anythin' to do with COVI 9ineteen. I'm gettin' calls from record shops tellin' me my new material is offensive and they won't be rackin' it. You were okay with it in January. Seriously, what gives?

What'd I say to piss y'all off so bad that none of you out there is attendin' my concerts? Case in point: My show at the Kinchen Brothers Peach Cannery Arena, in Augusta, Maine, where I had to unlock the venue myself, an' switch on all the vendin' machines in the lobby. Even then nobody turned up. After an hour of waitin' I walked off the stage in disappointment, convinced I musta got the wrong date.

'Nother thing: I've been readin' some real nasty sentiments expressed against me on social media. People been talkin' some slanderous nonsense, sayin' how my mother was a Chinese bat, an' wantin' to dose me up on Hydroxychloroquine. Shit, the President of the United States is sayin' he goin' to kill me with disinfectant. Word to the man in the oval office: You can't disinfect the pure truth.

Listen, if any y'all got a legitimate beef wit' me, then you need to take it to the floor. You an' me'll go head to head in a war of words, sanctioned by an acredited rulin' body like The Nevada Federation of Hip-Hop Skirmishing, or The Worshipful Company of Battle Rappers, established in 1842, in the UK - Shout out to my crew in London, tearin' it up in St Paul's Cathedral.

If I learned anythin' from the hip-hop game, it's that most problems can be solved by coupla bare-chested men, draped in layers of gold an' platinum chains, standin' six inches apart, pitchin' rhymes they created on the fly in one 'nother's face.

By the way all you social media trolls referrin' to me as COVID-19. The name's COVI. C.O.V.I.

COVID 9ineteen was my father, who was also a rapper. Rest in peace pops. I'd pour a forty out on the kerb, if the queue to the mart didn't run all the way round the block, with everyone weirdly spaced apart, an' givin' me the stink eye when I suggested bringin' it in and showin' the love.

When I think about it, all this is kinda similar to what went down in the middle of 2019, when my label suddenly got cold feet 'bout releasin' my record Wildfire Down Unda – a concept album detaillin' life in the Australian hood.

Or before then, in the summer of 2014, when I released ISIS, an' the lead single Heads Gonna Roll was abruptly bumped from radio playlists.

Even right as far back as 2007, with the unleashing of my debut record, Subprime, I was causing controversy and upsettin' people. I 'member there was all these headlines splashed 'cross the papers blamin' Subprime lendin' for sparkin' a global recession. What was I supposed to do if people were sharin' the record back and forth. I wish more people brought it!

Why y'all keep turnin' yo' backs on old COVI 9ineteen? Seriously, the situation is vexing me like an all-night lover of the matriarchy.

One of my homies tol' me the reason I keep fallin' on my face commercially, is I'm consistently ahead of my time, but only by a few weeks. Weird thing is, he might have a point: A few days ago I was sat down with a pair of gov'ment agents askin' me what I thought might be happenin' in the world a coupla of months from now and makin' notes. At the end of the interview, one of them asked me to write down what I thought the lottery numbers were goin' to be next week, and who would be winnin' the Superbowl next season, “assumin' that there is a next season.”

I tol' him that it's goin' to take some kind of global virus outbreak to stop the National Football League in its tracks.

Anyway, I hope this clears a few things up and we all friends again.

Peace. Out.

Feral populations that are currently re-establishing themselves in abandoned urban areas during the COVID-19 lock-down

By Mark Sadler

As the traditional urban fauna of discarded underwear, solitary woollen mittens, and rusting pieces of dismembered bicycle, padlocked forlornly to street furniture, recede from the urban landscape, populations thought long-banished from our cities have returned to reclaim the abandoned streets, plazas and designated municipal safe spaces.

1. Rock pools

Once a common sight on the American prairie, where they existed in symbiotic harmony alongside the thundering herds of migratory buffalo. The surging demand for stone bird baths, coupled with the destruction of their traditional habitat, has pushed these craggy, saltwater ecosystems to the literal brink. Colonies are now most-commonly observed clinging to the deserted coastal fringes of the American continent, and to the surface detail of Neil Young lyrics focusing on the lives of Native Americans, prior to the arrival of European settlers. It has taken the depopulation of major census-designated places, such as Willimantic, Connecticut, to encourage their furtive return to the suburbs, where they prey on defenceless garden ponds.

For those without ponds, who wish to entice wild rock pools into their backyards, a 3.5% saltwater / 7% small crab solution will promote a mirror-like surface, and slippery sides, perfect for catching a curious, but unwary child off-guard.

2. The Victorian romance novels of Leonard Manley

What uncanny phenomena could possibly account for hundreds of second-hand copies of these amorous bodice-ripping tales, populated by lustful highwaymen and the wandering, calloused hands of Royal Naval gunners, being strewn across a one-block area of Brooklyn?

Are these slender volumes of proto-erotica, anonymously penned by Lady Braithwaite of Northumbria, the discarded ballast of a mobile library based inside the basket of a hot air balloon?

Could they perhaps be a belated promotional effort by the Leonard Manley street team, taking advantage of their furlough from the drudgery of the Victorian cotton mill, where they would ordinarily toil for fourteen straight hours each day?

The most-likely explanation is that they are the spent ammunition in a vicious spat between Agnes Trewern and Brian Pincombe, whose once-torrid affair / book club has diverged into rival book stores, located on opposite sides of Church Avenue.

Prevented from coming to physical blows by current social distancing laws, Trewern and Pincombe have resorted to hurling these ubiquitous tomes at each other, with certain passages in the text bookmarked and aggressively underlined in ballpoint pen, often with accompanying scribbled footnotes.

3. The rose-covered, thatched cottages of the 19^th century English village of Lower Diddlethorpe

Imported in bulk to the United States from England, the American craze for these quaint rural domiciles ended abruptly on the 31^st December, 1899. Since then, disparate wild populations have been known to occupy wooded thickets. A recent sighting of the Lower Diddlethorpe vicarage, raiding trashcans in down-town Detroit, has led to breathless online speculation that Diddlethorpe Manor, and its lovable cast of above and below-stairs characters, might soon make an appearance.

4. The wild, single-use plastic bags of Telegraph Hill

A welcome to return to this San Francisco neighbourhood, these airborne predators have been spotted soaring on updraughts of Californian hot air, their mouths agape like basking sharks, inhaling the fragrant tobacco smoke and airborne virus clouds that form their staple diet.

5. Tattered newspaper front pages, bearing doom-laden expositional headlines

The published product of fictional newspapers, these urban tumble-weeds are thought to have escaped from captivity on the set of a post-apocalyptic, 1970s sci-fi disaster movie. Having survived the death of print media, they are once-more carried by plague winds through the deserted streets of our depopulated cities.

Why El Quetzal, the flamboyantly-costumed, vigilante hero of 18th century Spanish California, cannot save us from COVID-19

by Mark Sadler

1. He has renounced the mask that once concealed his true identity, and refuses to put it back on


It is said that only three people have knowingly laid eyes upon the true face of El Quetzal. The first is his rotund, but lovable, sidekick, El Tapir. The second is Helena Costilla, the raven-haired daughter of the evil Spanish governor, Enrique Costilla. The third is the governor himself, moments before he fell to his death from the open bell tower of St Martha's Church, in Sacramento. His poignant final words: “but I saw you die!” are engraved as an epitaph upon his mausoleum.

Having obtained revenge for the cold-blooded murder of his wife, El Quetzal returned to his home village, vowing that he would never again hide his face from the world.

“I cut my mask into seven pieces, which I gave to my sons to bury in secret locations,” he says. “Even during this time of quarantine, when wearing a mask in public is mandatory, I refuse to do so. For this crime, I have been confined indoors by the same villagers whose lives I once saved from bandits.”


2. El Tapir, his rotund but lovable sidekick, passed away from typhoid fever, in 1824

“El Tapir wasn't much of a fighter but he was good with logistics,” admits El Quetzal. “The truth is that, behind every great swashbuckler, there is a less-attractive man taking care of travel arrangements and hotel bookings.”

In 2016, he created the Tapir Foundation to research a vaccine or a cure for the illness that claimed the life of the man he described as: “The most loyal friend that a masked vigilante could ask for in a time of revolution.”


3. Swashbuckling is currently forbidden under local by-laws

While El Quetzal has intimated that he might be coaxed out of retirement, he would likely fall foul of current social distancing rules, which expressly forbid public sword fights.

Riding a horse out through the second-storey window of the Governor's Palace, with Helena Costilla holding on for dear life, as the building explodes into flame, is currently punishable by an $80 fine.


4. Even a true master of the blade could not defeat COVID-19

Recent laboratory experiments conducted in South Korea have confirmed that, even if COVID-19 showed an interest in duelling, it is impossible to impale the virus on the end of a Spanish rapier.

Were El Quetzal somehow able to learn how to defeat COVID-19 in hand-to-hand combat, possibly under the guidance of a Native American shaman, it seems unlikely that he would be able to train a rag-tag band of villagers to do likewise, prior to an impending COVID-19 attack upon their settlement.


5. The life-restoring kiss that he gave to Helena Costilla, after she was shot through the heart by her wicked father, was apparently a one-off deal

Disappointing news for anyone who had pinned their hopes on this famous kiss being patented by a large pharmaceutical company, and rolled-out in hospitals across the world:

“It was not my kiss that saved Helena,” concedes El Quetzal. “It was the great love that compelled me to force my lips upon her unconscious body, that restored her to life.”


6. The children at the orphanage need him

In a written statement to the press, El Quetzal said:

“Though I hear the voices of the people calling out for my aid in their hour of need, and feel their despair in my heart, the children in the African orphanage, to whom I donate $3 every month by standing order, for their upkeep and education, also need my help. I think they would miss the money if I were to be killed in the battle against COVID-19.


7. El Quetzal is a fictional creation of the 1920s pulp novelist, Herbert Beauregard

The third divorce of this titan of hack literature provoked a downward spiral into the authorship of grimy, shop-soiled erotica, where fleets of well-endowed interstellar wasps impregnate human women. Around this time, Beauregard also sold the rights to El Quetzal to various conflicting parties, all of whom have been fighting for legal ownership over the character ever since, in a case that has taken the civil court system of Luxembourg by storm. 

By the time the matter is settled, the COVID-19 pandemic will be over, toilet paper will be ubiquitous again, and we will be back to worrying about tsunamis, or the escalation of the war between penguins and polar bears.

Four amazing facts about Justin Timberlake's sexy back, as peer-reviewed by the award-winning local-historian and folk singer, Lisa Paget

by Mark Sadler

In 2004, Justin Timberlake, formerly of the boy band NSYNC, blew $5million on a sheet of skin taken from the back of history's sexiest man. In 2006, he recouped some of his investment with the chart-topping song, SexyBack, which was inspired by his extravagant purchase. But what of the sexy back itself? Even a cursory dive into the origins of this peculiar relic, reveals a story several magnitudes more enthralling than Joseph Logan's documentary on the making of Justin Timberlake's multi-platinum second album 'FutureSex/LoveSounds'; a story that shall be told in piecemeal fashion below.

In the interests of accuracy, the following facts have been peer-reviewed by the 2009 North-Missouri Local Historian of the Year, Lisa Paget.

Lisa first rose to prominence as a folk singer after she rhymed 'academia' with 'macadamia.' Her recent book, titled 'V is for Winston Churchill' teaches the alphabet to children via pivotal events in human history, and has been described by the Kansas City Gazette as “likely to baffle readers of all ages”.


1. The original owner of the sexy back was a 1st century holy man

Anton of Crotone was a man of hideous physical appearance, yet paradoxically he was blessed with a back so sexy that the mere sight of it would render barren women fertile. In the annals of Tacitus, he is described as a man of few joys, whose grotesque visage caused all who gazed upon him to retch involuntarily, and who was excluded from indulging in the pleasures of the flesh.

He was executed by the emperor Caligula, who ordered that he be crucified facing onto the cross, so that Roman citizens would not be troubled by his ghastly countenance. Over 10,000 weak-kneed onlookers are estimated to have been driven into throes of ecstasy by the sight of the soon to be martyred holy man's sexy back.

Anton of Crotone was canonised in 1888. In 1910, he was promoted to Patron Saint of the Involuntarily Chaste by Pope Pius X.


2. The back-skin of Anton of Crotone was briefly used as a saddle for an “unbearably sexy” lion


Again we have Tacitus to thank for the early history of the sexy back.

Following the death of Anton of Crotone, his back skin was removed and preserved using a secret blend of eleven herbs and spices. Initially it was used by Caligula as a saddle for his favourite lion. The emperor later begged that the saddle be “torn from the flanks of the unbearably sexy” big cat and destroyed. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and the sexy back was placed inside a clay amphora and concealed within a cave.

The image of Caligula's sexy lion has recurred throughout history, acting as a catalyst for renaissance art and as a muse for Da Vinci. It is made manifest in the sculptures of the British Navy lion prostitutes, which guard Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square, London. In literature, the sexy lion assumes a dominant Christ-like role in C.S.Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. In film, it is presented as a source of spiritual enlightenment in The Lion King, and is subverted as a craven symbol of impotence in The Wizard of Oz. In the Fast and the Furious franchise, Dominic Toretto (played by Vin Diesel) is plagued by visions of a sexy lion, which repesents the homoerotic undertones of illegal, espionage-tinged, high-stakes street racing.


3. Since 1912, the 'Anton' has been used as the standard unit of measurement for sexiness

The difficulty of accurately measuring sexiness has perplexed civilised society ever since the times of Socrates.

From the late 1600s, up until the early 1900s, the commonly relied upon procedure was to make use of a thought experiment devised by a Scottish philosopher named George Poplar.

The experiment required that a participant imagine the combined state of sexual arousal, and crisis of religious faith, that would be experienced by Pope Gregory XIV, when confronted with irrefutable evidence confirming the existence of the Ancient Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite. Having conceived this mental image, the participant would exchange Aphrodite for the subject or object whose sexiness they wished to measure and then recalibrate Pope Gregory's response accordingly. While many of Poplar's peers and admirers regarded this as a step in the right direction, they noted that the experiment introduced a high degree of subjectivity into the calculations and often yielded vexing results.

In 1912, professor Neil Manser of Winslow College, Oxford, rediscovered St Anton's sexy back while exploring caves in Italy. Having identified this peculiar object, he conducted a series of experiments in which his wife, Mary, was exposed to the sexy back for periods of a few seconds, during which time an electrical reading was taken from a sensor applied to the skin of her wrist. This figure was to become the standard universal unit of sexiness, and was christened the 'Anton' by Manser.

For the first time, scientists were able to calculate the sexiness of previously inscrutable objects, such as covered bridges and scones. Astonishingly, it was discovered that marmalade jars produced at glassworks in the north of England were sexier than those produced in the south of the country, and that the planets in our solar system become progressively sexier the further they are from the sun. Had the Roman emperor, Caligula, succeeded in his demented plan to destroy the sexy back, this information would have been lost to us forever.

[Lisa's Note: The previous fact is, by far, the hardest that I have ever been called upon to peer-review during my career as a local historian. I literally filled three whiteboards with advanced peering-reviewing algorithms, one of which was so new that it had only been peer-reviewed itself a week before. My thanks to professor Robin Webster at Sladden College]


4. A Nazi plot to steal the sexy back was the inspiration for the first Indiana Jones film

As anyone who has ever got drunk and then opened the Ark of the Covenant knows, trifling with holy relics invariably leads to the unleashing of supernatural forces beyond the comprehension of mortal man, followed by costly facial reconstructive surgery.

In the 1930s, the evil Nazi regime embarked upon a dark crusade in search of artefacts that would further their insatiable quest for power. Their attempt at seizing the sexy back ended with their agents reduced to smouldering piles of ash by bolts of energy, unleashed from moles on the back skin.

Sadly, this is not the last time that the sexy back has been used to realise the nefarious ambitions of its owner, to great personal cost: In 2012, Justin Timberlake, attempted to create a Turin Shroud of his own face, by lying in a steam room with the sexy back draped over his head. The following year, his album, The 20/20 Experience, sold significantly less than its predecessor and only went double platinum in the US.


Timberlake claims that he has since learned his lesson. In 2018, the sexy back was autographed by four members of NSYNC, before being sealed in an unmarked wooden crate. It is currently stored inside a cavernous warehouse that is home to thousands of identical crates, each one containing a device or artefact that, if activated, would surely result in the demise of our species.

Five things that I said to the feral cats who live at the bottom of my Twitter feed

By Mark Sadler

Life can be tough in the United States Fire Service. When the time comes to let off some steam, I like nothing more than to abseil to the bottom of my live feed on the social media website, Twitter, and gaze down upon the adorable upturned faces of the feral cats who live there.

Sometimes I dangle a few feet off the ground and let myself swing back and forth, as if I am in an amateur theatrical production of Peter Pan. I attach trailing balls of yarn to my ankles to give the cats something to swat at. Recently I got written-up by my supervisor for failing to remove this unauthorised yarn from my work pants. The woollen thread that I offer to the feral cats on Twitter is much softer than the regulation, flame-retardant yarn balls, used by the fire service to keep domestic cats from clawing at our legs while we are extinguishing blazes.

How did so many cats end up living wild and free on Twitter? People purchase these animals without considering the amount of personal time they will have to invest reading Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost to their new pets, as part of the Nancy Reagan Feline Evolution Advancement Program. After the novelty wears off, some owners attempt to store their cats digitally. When they discover that even a basic model feline requires 50tb of storage space, and you can't legally upload them into the cloud because they hunt the indigenous wildlife, many resort to turning their animals loose on social media platforms. I guess they gravitate towards Twitter on account of all the tweeting.

During these past months, this feline community has become a sounding board for my problems; an inscrutable and judgmental audience, who express their disapproval at my life choices through excessive scratching and biting. Below is a short list of the personal details that I shared with these cats, without knowledge of how this information might be used, or the third parties who might be allowed access to it.

(1) Clare will come back. She just needs some space

If it wasn't for Clare, I would have never even known there were feral cats living at the bottom of Twitter. After our break-up, when I noticed that she wasn't posting on social media, I rappelled to the base of her Twitter feed to make sure that she hadn't fallen and injured herself while using the site. At first the cats regarded me with suspicion. I felt that an explanation for my intrusion was warranted so I told them about Clare. Ever since then, I have kept them updated with the latest developments in our separation.

(2) Taylor Swift has optioned the movie and TV rights to your story

This isn't true and I regret saying it. I don't think Taylor Swift even knows that there are feral cats living at the bottom of Twitter, or, if she does, I have never heard her express an opinion on it. Come to think of it, I recall, when Clare's older sister got a kitten, she had to throw out all her Taylor Swift music because her vocals are like war cries to cats. It's why you typically get cat households or Taylor Swift households, but seldom both.

(3) Millennials don't know the proper way to serve wine

Last weekend, I went to a sit-down pizza restaurant. It was the first time that I had really been out since Clare left me. The waitress kept on pouring the half-bottle of wine, that I ordered to go with my meal, until it was level with the rim of my glass. The look on her face when I corrected her makes me think that it was a genuine mistake. I guess nobody is teaching young people how to serve wine any more.

I don't know why I told the cats this; I think I was probably just venting. Cats don't drink wine. Even in cartoons, a cat drinking wine is something that you just don't see. I suppose, if you work as a professional illustrator, you get to know how far you can push the boundaries of reality. A picture of a cat drinking prosecco is too much for the average human-being to mentally process.

(4) With every passing day, the distance between you and I increases

Every twenty-four hours, a few hundred tweets are added to my Twitter feed, increasing the distance that I have to travel in order to reach the cats. A couple of hundred might not seem like a lot until you take into account that, up close, each Tweet is, on average, five feet tall. That's only four inches shorter than the actor Seth Green. If Taylor Swift suddenly puts out a new album, the number of daily tweets could skyrocket a thousand-fold.

A day is fast approaching when I will only have time to visit the cats for short periods, on holidays or at weekends.

(5) I am burning the rope that I used to get down here

Since things aren't working too well for me offline, I thought that I might try my luck living among the cats on Twitter for a while. Maybe Clare will notice that I am not posting any more and will come looking for me.

As I was watching the flame working its way up the rope, it occurred to me that if it encounters any flammable tweets - anything containing images of dry wood, cotton wool, or petrol - then it is likely that the whole column will go up in smoke. Then I remembered that every tenth tweet on the site incorporates a sprinkler system designed to prevent exactly that kind of thing from happening. Plus a lot of people tweet fire extinguisher emojis, so I guess that everyone would be okay if there was a fire.

Even if I did set the website ablaze and they called-out the fire department, the first responder would be me! The man holding the burnt-out match, who lives at the bottom of Twitter, in a one-person tent, surrounded by thousands of feral cats.

Seven tagged whales who could easily help the Sherrington Ocean-Adjacent Research Laboratory relocate to its new headquarters, in Boston, if they weren't busy doing other things (plus the plucky spider crab who did help)

by Mark Sadler

Call me Sadler, or by my pronouns, which are Ish and Mael. The chances are that you already know me anyway, from season one of the moderately-successful reality TV show, Whale Taggers.

That was before the show-runners decided that a curvaceous blonde, with a marine science degree from Stanford, would pull-in more viewers than a grizzled, fifty-year-old, veteran of the sea lion wars, with a 5-inch scar where his nose used to be. All I can say is, enjoy the fame while it lasts, Linda. Sooner or later, everybody in this game gets their nose bitten-off by a sea lion.

In 1993, I founded the Sherrington Ocean-Adjacent Research Laboratory (SOARL) in the back-room of my parent's independent comic book publishing business. Last year, I decided to relocate to larger premises in Brookline, Boston. To keep down the cost of removals, I put out a call for assistance to the whales who we had tagged with tracking devices over the years, requesting that they each swallow a few pieces of furniture and then swim these items up the coast to our new HQ. At the time of writing, not a single recipient of these texts and emails has so much as acknowledged my appeal.

Below, I reluctantly name and shame seven of these whales, and celebrate the plucky, long-legged crustacean who has stepped-up to help in their absence.

Clive (Sperm Whale, dick)

When given the opportunity to live up to the name of his species, by transporting refrigerated flasks of whale semen to our new cold storage facility in Boston, Clive instead plunged headlong into the briny depths, where he is presumed to be stuffing his face with giant squid. Apparently, he has forgotten that it was I who personally untangled the lifeless body of Captain Ahab from his harpoon-scarred flippers and, if necessary, I can put him back there too.

Laura (Stuck-up Orca Whale)

They say that elephants never forget, and what are whales if not the elephants of the sea. I wonder whether Laura remembers that weekend when I was supposed to be travelling to wine country with my wife, but was instead brow-beaten into driving my flatbed trailer to Kentucky, so that her highness could be moved from her 'lagoon' at Neptune Brothers Magic Ocean Adventure Kingdom, to the North Atlantic Ocean.

It seems that your keepers were so busy training you to jump through a large hoop, that they neglected to teach you any manners.

Herod XVI Jr. (Sperm Whale with a Walter Mitty complex)

Claims to be a descendent of the allegorical biblical whale who swallowed Jonah, right up until the moment when you ask him to help move your life-size cardboard standees of characters from Star Wars and The Simpsons, then suddenly swallowing anything man-size is a huge deal.

Kevin (North Atlantic Right Whale and heartbreaker)

After I removed the tracking device that had been attached to Kevin by my arch rivals, Durrant Whale-Location Solutions (DWLS), it seemed like we were set to be soul-mates for life. As a prank, we fastened the old tag to the tour jet of the British heavy metal band, Iron Maiden (see Durrant's peer-reviewed article that breathlessly describes the annual migration of North Atlantic right whales to various large arena venues in mainland Brazil, and then weep for the current state of science).

Together, we picked out one of those heart-shaped satellite tracking tags that split in two, so we would always be connected. I wore my half on a cord around my neck. Kevin wore his half as a fin piercing. Incidently, Kevin, that's how I know that you aren't anyway near the old Sherrington offices, helping me move this enormous pile of cardboard boxes.

Barry (Blue Whale, asshole)

As an adult blue whale, Barry has the stomach capacity to accommodate the contents of my study. It seems that, on his list of priorities, attending to his harem in the South Pacific comes before providing me with temporary office space.

Andre (Fin Whale, 'The Pigeon Hill Bay Butcher')

Okay, so maybe this notorious whale serial killer, who is currently serving twenty-six consecutive life sentences at Maine State Prison, can't actually help us move, but he could at least have the decency to tell me where he buried my wife's body.

Daniel Craig (Humpback Whale, has blocked me on Twitter)

Would Daniel Craig's humpback whale namesake have won the coveted Nobel Prize for Best Tagged Whale without the help of the Sherrington Ocean-Adjacent Research Laboratory and Late- Night Detective Agency (the latter ran for two seasons between 1995-1997). It seems doubtful. Who would have provided the exonerating evidence after he was framed for murder by corrupt cops?

Now a four-times Grammy winner, Daniel Craig currently duets in hologram-form with Celine Dion at her Las Vegas residency, but he doesn't work on Wednesdays. Surely he can manage a dash along the east coast with a pair of filing cabinets on his back, for old time's sake.

Lionel (Spider crab, modern-day saint)

I would like to end this list of selfish whales on an upbeat note, with a tale of true altruism: Enter Lionel, a 15-year-old spider crab with arthritis, who is gamely dragging the safe, containing the annual SOARL payroll, across the sea bed towards Boston. Some of my staff have expressed concerns about Lionel's recent change in direction, out into deep water, beyond the range of our tags. I have reassured them that he is probably just avoiding a rough area of the ocean floor, so that he doesn't get robbed.

On the basis of Lionel's generous assistance, I am seriously considering ending our whale-tagging program and diverting the funds into spider crab research.