Of psychiatrists and saucepans

I'm actually glad the image here is a little out of focus as the experience itself was quite surreal. One moment, out for a lovely ride through the autumn countryside, the next, my human of burden claims to be in need of a coffee and just happens to be passing the driveway of some supposed friends. A likely story!

It's hard to describe the indignity to which I was submitted--surely normal share houses don't have a spare saucepan containing a few hibiscus flowers and a Hugo-sized psychiatrist, all partly immersed in a liquid that appeared to be water but tasted quite different.

Was this meant to be some sort of tasteless joke, an inversion of Ophelia's suicide from Shakespeare's Hamlet, on an inside-out stage made from scratched aluminium? Or worse, was this some kind of psychiatric experiment, a sort of Casserole of Dr Caligari? I still don't know. Psychiatrists worry me more than dentists, whom I can at least knock out with my hippo breath. It would have all been ok if someone had given me substances to alter my depth perspective, or possibly composed an edgy jazz score in my honour.

Eccentric I may be, but I prefer my follies to be architectural. Which reminds me of the human of burden's latest mutterings in his sleep: should he shack up with a real damsel in a Gothic pile (he always goes for dark hair for some reason), does he need to be worried about hermits?

That sounds all too much like the third book of Nasier's chronicles, though I never did quite finish it so can't tell you how it ends.