“If only this world had shown me a little more mercy,” muttered Reginald P. Snivelsworth, as he crouched behind a toppled fruit and veg cart, hat smouldering gently, watching the angry mob approach with a selection of improvised murder weapons, some random farm tools and at least one accordion.

It had not, by any standard, been his best afternoon.

The plan, Reginald’s plan, had been simple, elegant, and, as it sadly turned out, doomed from the beginning: impersonate the Royal Astrologer, predict the King’s lucky colour (turquoise, always a crowd-pleaser), and quietly abscond with the temple donation box while the crowd was distracted by celestial flapdoodle. Nothing, Reginald reasoned, could be simpler. Unfortunately, the actual Royal Astrologer had turned up halfway through Reginald’s dramatic demonstration of the Fifth Moon’s wobble utilising a turnip as the moon, a sugar beet as the Earth and a piece of green string, and insisted, rather unkindly, in Reginald’s opinion, that astrology was a “subtle and precise art, not a hobby for lunatics wielding allotments of root vegetables.” It was, at precisely this moment that Reginald realised, with sickening clarity, that, in fact, almost everything, apart from this current doomed extravaganza, could be simpler.

Hence the mob. Mob’s, as a general rule, are not a good thing.

Reginald had made a career out of smartly and nimbly running away from things, including responsibility, creditors, numerous and various fiancées of varying ferocity quotients, and once a surprisingly nimble goat. On this occasion as he was just about to make his escape down a narrow alley, the accordion, hurled by a particularly large member of the assembled mob, struck him squarely, and with some considerable force, between the shoulder blades.

He hit the cobbles with a surprised “oof,” and, rolling over, stared up at the grey sky, the first raindrops beginning to fall, as if the weather, with some pernicious, foul intent, had been waiting for just such a moment as this.

“This,” he sighed, “is exactly the sort of comic timing I could do without.”

And somewhere, far off in the murky machinery of the cosmos, the gods made a note to double-check the settings on the Intergalactic, Pan-Systemic Irony Blasters.