Set the controls for the heart of the dimness

In desperation while Drayton Parslow is boycotting the modern world, Marjory asked if she could come round and watch the telly with me. No worries, except Drayton turned up as well. It would appear that using electricity is fine, as long as it's on my bill.

We were watching Richard Hammond's Journey to the Centre of the Planet. Quite a fun little science programme, albeit with the totally unnecessary addition of Hammond's name to the front of the title and a certain amount of Top Gear macho-ism by anthropoid geologists scooping lava out of the mouths of volcanoes.

And we were watching the CGI effects of the earth folding as tectonic plates collided, pushing the mountains up. And Drayton watched open-mouthed with awe at this evidence of the wonder of Creation.

"Marvellous," he said. And do you know, I really thought he'd got it. I thought he'd understood something of the way the world was made, over aeons of geological time.

"To think," he said, "that all that happened in just 6 days. It really makes you wonder, doesn't it?"

I rang to have him removed from my presence, of course, but before Ardwulf could get up to my suite Marjory had already chased him out the building. It must be so embarrassing having him around, sometimes.