This is the dawning of the Age of Quasipolynom

TIRED? FED UP? Not getting the respect you deserve? I bet you aren't, and what about that nasty little pain, not the dull ache in the night, the sort of griping grating stabbing one in the morning? Hmm? You know what that is, don't you? It's a rare form of psittacosis, a malign little pathogen carried by birds, and, in particular, by chickens coming home to roost.

And have you looked in your bedroom recently? Behind the bed? Of course you haven't, and, believe me, you do not want to. All I'll say is this: don't tell me it's a coincidence.

Another thing: that Mr What's-his-name. You know exactly who I mean, so take that smirk off your face. Did you know you smirk when you're guilty? Well you do. He's after you, you know. He's got a file on you, you're on his to-do list on his file and he's not going to give up, can't give up, executives on his back, pot-bellied men with moist skin in cheap suits, panicky monotonous nasal voices: one of these days there'll be a knock on the door and your man'll be standing there, large as life. And then what'll you do? Hadn't thought of that, had you? You were going to cross that bridge when you come to it. I know.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? All in all, it's a mess, but trust me. Would I lie? Look into my eyes. Deeper. Would you describe yourself as a rationalist? A rational person au courant with modern thinking on such subjects as the Universe?

That's where you're going wrong, you see, but I can help. Did you notice the pictures of Cherie Blair with her talisman a week or so back? That nasty thing round her neck which contains a special array of mysterious crystals whose precise arrangement was vouchsafed to their creator in a dream? Did you? Did you think: "Bugger me, we are governed by a chap whose wife wears a warding-off juju round her neck, no wonder he has that unholy unwholesome fixed grin"?

Bad attitude. Bad. How can you ever hope that the Asgond of X'um-Faang will visit you, shedding his f'Ti'ii waves in an palleptical mallipsoid, thus warding off the strivels of high-biergy Gumma radiation, if you still cling to outmoded post-so-called-enlightenment models of the Universe just because they happen to be apparently true instead of being stuffed with atrocious bullshit, made-up words and obvious lies? What you must do - what we must all do - is cast aside old habits of mind, and move with ease and smoothness into the Age of Quasi-polynom, the Great Thirteenth Ooph of Ta'an, a manoeuvre (I am glad to say) which can be facilitated by the simple purchase of the Bywater Wodd b'Loqqo for the derisory sum of pounds 220.37.

You will be seeing the Wodd b'Loqqo a lot in months to come. Mr John Prescott is already planning on buying his (I know this because I was visited in the night by the Great Voice of Unravelling, who Told me so), and he will be followed by other leading thinkers and stylish trend-setters such as Jeremy Clarkson, Lord Bragg, Mr Whippy and the literary editor of Exchange & Mart.

The secret of the Wodd b'Loqqo is ravishingly simple. But it is also a secret, so I shall not reveal it here. Suffice to say that the Great Voice of Unravelling communicated the arcane mystery to me by fax while I was spending a week meditating in the Cliff Michelmore Suite at the Hotel Splendide Gran Confort, Tenby, in the company of two neurophysicists and a Lhasa Apso. All I am prepared to say is that the Wodd b'Loqqo, while looking like a simple piece of roughly varnished two-by-four with a clumsily drilled hole slightly off-centre, which you hang round your gizzard on a piece of Cosmonant Superstring (looking, to the mere rationalist eye, like a length of creosoted garden-twine), is in fact a device for focusing and harmonising all the Rays of the Universe into a lovely nice golden-y sort of iridescent glow which will suffuse you in warm radiance which other people cannot see.

And if you believe that, you'll believe anything ... which is exactly what we want you to believe. After all, it's not irrationality that's responsible for the troubles in the world and the mess you've made of your life, is it? It's rational people who cause the trouble. Rational people invented yoghurt, which is gradually destroying the Hengistbury-Von Doenitz Belt in the outer kaleidosphere of our Planet's umbrosial shield. Rational people invented horrid bombs and nastiness and beastly smoke which chokes indigenous peoples who preserve the Wisdom of the Ancients. Rational people say things like: "The Ancients knew bugger-all, which is why they lived like dogs under the yoke of tyranny, sacrificed mice to volcanoes, and tended to croak in their mid-twenties, halt, scrofulous and demented." Rational people believe in so-called "science", but the problem with science (as Bim, my Spirit Guide pointed out the other day) is that it believes in a consistent Universe.

But the Universe isn't consistent. If it were consistent, the Prime Minister's wife would just be another gullible woman in a naff necklace. I think I make my point. As Shakespeare said, "There are more things in heaven and earth than are dream'd of in your philosophy." Shakespeare was no scientist, and a good thing too, because otherwise he wouldn't have been able to say that. It would have been more a case of "Everything's much of a muchness - quarks and such - except for heaven, which is balls." Which it isn't. Which proves my point. And if you needed further proof, Cherie Blair is a Catholic, adhering to a religion which offers an exclusive and exhaustive cosmology, and yet she can still believe in crystals and energy- forces. So there's got to be something in it, wouldn't you say?

No? Well, that's because you are, as yet, unenlightened. Fortunately, I can solve that. Send off your pounds 220.37 and your own personalised Wodd b'Loqqo will wing its way to you by return. Put it round your neck and you will believe anything, even that, by putting a block of wood round your neck, you will believe anything. At the very least, it's got to be better than Freemasonry. !