Snow on snow on snow

Edgar has been in touch. Ghastly business about his being fished out of the Thames. All made a lot worse by the snow.

Apparently he had been bingeing on a panoply of substances. But it was the ether that tipped him over the edge, literally (littorally) in this case.

He fetched up in a soup kitchen in Stepney with a bunch of nuns and a shaven-headed loon with no neck who gibbered about the fish in the river, Karl Wilson, Karl Marx, Karl Orf and one of these internet thingies run by a johnny who went by the name of Pipip. I told him he'd been reading Dickens with double vision and he should take some of the emergency supplies of horse tranquilisor that I had long ago advised him to keep on his person at all times in case of just this sort of situation.

The mobile phone Edgar had stolen from a schoolgirl ran out of battery at this point and communication was lost.

The next call I got was from the police who said that there had been a ruckus between two apparent sub-normals in the compacted show somewhere in the East End and both combattants had fallen on the ice and were in A&E at Barts. Contusions, bruises, one split tongue, a slipped disc and a dislocated finger between them.

The one who was well-spoken had been sedated and discharged because he looked too messed up to be put in a ward. The bullet-headed one had been pronounced violently insane, was in a strait-jacket and had been sectioned.

It's quiet in the village tonight. I think the snow muffles the noise.