When Hailey visits her sick Aunt Blodwyn in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, she learns the truth of the hoary saw 'a week becomes a season in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag', for, though she had planned to stay only a few days in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, Pontyllanffarsyngiognag is her home for the whole summer. What is it that keeps her in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag? What is so special, so unique about Pontyllanffarsyngiognag? We meet the amazing local characters of Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, such as Myfanwy Evans-Jones, who makes black shawls for the Eisteddfod of Pontyllanffarsyngiognag and lives in an original 'brwm cryffgol' on the slopes of Blynt Crandylfa, near Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, Hywel Gromer, 'the lodestone of Pontyllanffarsyngiognag', to whom all repair for repairs to the soul as well as their shoe and wellington soles, which he repairs, being the sole soul and shoe and wellington sole repairer in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, and, last but far from least, 'old mother Rhiamon', the withered crone with a 'daffodil heart' who dwells by Llyn Pwhalgar in a converted freshwater coracle where she keeps a snail farm, a Rhenish sheepdog named Erskine, fashions jerkins from hareskins, and will tell the fortune of those who approach widdershins from the direction of Pontyllanffarsyngiognag. In the end, it is not so much a question of 'why does Hailey stay in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag for a whole summer?' It is more a matter of 'why doesn't she stay in Pontyllanffarsyngiognag for ever?' Hailey takes a black shawl, a pair of freshly repaired wellingtons, a jar of potted snail, a charcoal etching of Erskine and a hareskin jerkin back home with her to Chorlton-cum-Hardy, but it's not these treasures so much as the essence of Pontyllanffarsyngiognag within her that haunts her, and will haunt the reader as it haunts her, be the reader he or her. 'If Pontyllanffarsyngiognag did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent Pontyllanffarsyngiognag, so let us rejoice that, thanks to Ms Tully, Pontyllanffarsyngiognag does exist' bellows the Pontyllanffarsyngiognag Clarion & Argus.

'Madam, please lie on the ceiling, for your ears add up to 34, and the iron mice have set sail for Thursday again.'

'My chaise-longue bristles with catfish: let us exchange coal-scuttles by moonlight so that the green postman can boil his trombone in parrots' blood while uprooted badger-tongues lick the backs of your naked knees.'

'Is that your own yellow dung, or has yon humpbacked chimpanzee rubbed his or her excrement into your hair? Oh let me bring you a boiling cormorant from my Uncle's pyjama-case! These umbrellas remind me of the forest of blue minarets in Uzzijar: I shall not forget the muezzin's isinglass forehead or smoked-glass hooves: let me ride your capybara bareback in the autumn gloaming, for we shall have high tea beneath the Sargasso Sea.'

This is a book that speaks for itself. Will anyone be listening?

Jake Lamprey sailed the world as bosun on the 'SS Dromedary'. His cargos were betel nuts and sorghum molasses. In the 'long languid latitudes' Jake passed the time by putting ships into bottles. Now retired and dwelling at Hassocks, in Sussex, our indefatigable old salt faces 'an odyssey on the ocean of old age', and has risen to the challenge of filling his days by 'transcending the traditional tar's timewaster' (Jake loves all forms of annoying alliteration). Jake's home - a knocked-through amalgam of two adjacent goose-kennels on a defunct 'fowling farm' - is the perfect gallery for his bizarre creations, from the Carrollian, zen-like, 'Goose in a Teapot', to the sinister, slender 'Anaconda in a Yard of Ale'. Here we see 'Lichfield Cathedral in a Sunfish Pelt', over there we delight in 'Harrods Floor-Walker in a Superstore Meat-Counter Glass' (the capture of the famous 'floor-walker's lunge' is only one of the fascinating features of this work). The spectral 'Bishop of Southwell in an Egyptology Display Case' is something of a show-stopper, though of course the real 'piece de resistance' is 'Solicitors in a Perspex Lens Maze', wherein an entire firm of miniature solicitors (Westinghaus, Gupster & Bringo of Hurstpierpoint? - Jake's blistered lips are sealed, alas, the resemblance to a young, unbearded, Hereward Bringo notwithstanding), wherein an entire firm of miniature solicitors, I say, are encased in rippled perspex folded into a maze, the magnifying effect of the perspex rendering the figures lifesized, though the maze remains in miniature and the solicitors always out of reach. Jake Lamprey eschews artistic debate, and claims to be 'all a-baffled and ta'en aback' by such things. Is Jake Lamprey another Alfred Wallis? Is Jake Lamprey, his life and work, the whole compost heap, a fabrication, a work of art that comments upon art itself? 'I laid this book down with a heavy heart, none the wiser, and 2 weeks older', was the plaint of the Guttergormpton Messenger.

'I always spend Autumn in my mock castle in Ruritania; my man, Lars, kills me a wild boar and my albino lover, Andre, comes over from Switzerland with his Siberian tiger; and those autumn hues, and the pretty costumes of the local peasantry - all those leather trousers!' Thus gushes Hans Lindeln Bruger, the transexual Bavarian Fire-Eater (and fantasist, if this book is anything to go by) in Miss Brittle's year-long (and it feels every inch a year, it really does) journey around the world and around the seasons with as bloated a collection of 'celebrities' as has ever been rounded up on a preposterous pretext. Miles Hundraker III, 'the Nevada Cocktail Stick Millionaire', loves to spend Christmas at his Minnesota prairie ranch, 'where I can sip bourbon and look out on the empty spaces and be thankful that this land was swept clean of the Redskin menace generations ago'. Hundraker III boasts the largest private hot-tub complex in the world at his ranch, which was built upon the site of the Mahibwe Massacre of 1873 where the remaining tribes of the Hopquahunte were put to the sword. 'We just love to sit in our hot tubs while the snow falls, and raise a glass to the brave boys who made it possible for civilised folks to enjoy the fruits of their labours without getting an arrow in their guts' enthuses our hero. Back in dear old Blighty, Breakfast TV weathergirl Baz Riquelme-Smythe shakes her blonde tresses, whinnying that 'a gang of us shoot down to Lingley Bay on the Sussex coast whenever we can in the Summer. There's rooftop shindigs at my seafront apartment, windsurfing, jellyfish-hunting, the guys always go tombstoning off Carber Cliffs and the Clopestone Pier, you can do offroading at White Cross Estates. Oh and the nightlife, you know, it's a wicked scene right now, people come in from all over the South East. With a bevy of great little places serving mezzes and tapas and fresh-caught crab, you could be anywhere in the Med. Then there's the all-new fab club scene down there - I think Mark666 is my current hot fave - and what better after a long night than to chill the next day on the nudist beach at Crapcombe. Yeah, it's a sad name, but a fabulous shingle beach. We're trying to get it renamed. In the town, there's still the old 'Lobster Pot Inn' and 'Ray Clutterford's Fish & Chip Shop', but, thanks to our petition, they'll have closed by this time next year. If you make the effort, you can have a great time in this country. You don't have to go abroad.' But soft, gentle reader, be of good courage, for here is ex-middleweight boxer and former star of 'It's a Knockout' Brian O'Bunnion, on his Easter trips to Ballygob in his younger days: 'I always go in my car, I do, for they won't let me drive on the buses, there's always a man sitting there, and he won't shift, and they always want money off-of yers, and them trains, well, how they steer them I'm jiggered if I can tell yers. So I goes in my own car. I set off on the Wednesday, to allow plenty of time, and I usually aim to get lost by the time I get into Thursday morning, whether it's dark or not quite dark yet. I mean to be lost by the daylight, which is what I mean. What I mean is, I mean to be lost by then, that's what I mean, that's what I mean about what I mean to do in the ways of getting lost. When I can see the signposts, and I have no idea where the divell them places are, then I know I've arrived nowhere, if you see what I'm a-driving at, or driving away from, if ye like. And I've never failed yet. I can never remember where I was, the one year or another, I mean, if I did, I wouldn't have been lost now, would I? Well, I'm all along these country roads, a-looking for the sea - for Ballygob's right by the seaside, it is - and I sees the sea plenty of times, but it isn't the right sea, not the right shape, the shore doesn't bend the way it does at Ballygob, and there's no church with a crooked spire - not that there's a crooked spire at Ballygob either, but that's by the by, as me old grandmother used to say when she sent me out to Mullion's Pub with a half-crown for a bottle of Blaskett's Cream Stout, an' there's me sayin' as how the Priest - Father Malty, with the one leg longer than the other (or was it the one leg that was shorter than the other, or the other leg that was the short one?) - told me never to have anything to do with the fallin' down waters. But there, ye see, I've lost me way again, I've even got lost just a-tellin' yers about how I used to get lost a-heading fer Ballygob, all o' these years ago. World champion o' gettin' lost, me old Mam used to say, when I telt her I was aiming to be World Middleweight Champ. But anyway, that's water under the Killfiddle Bridge, as me old Uncle Seamus used to say when we asked him to tell us about his days in the Ballyrattle Fusiliers...' I was going to quote from the review of this book by the East Lancashire Puppet-Master's Gazette, but I weary of this charade. Why did I leave the Convent? Will they have me back? Alas! I renounced my vows, and wrote a satirical letter to the Mother Superior, so all is lost. I am imprisoned for eternity in this netherworld of ludicrous books. And how will I ever meet a man in here? Ah me!