Colour is the keyboard,

the eyes are the hammers,

the soul is the piano with many strings.

As a benevolent employer I feel it is important to keep my staff on their toes. With this in mind, every February I require my colleagues to take part in the annual cross country run between New Corby and Oakham. The run is something of a challenge for the unfit, the design being lifted from Dante’s Inferno, but I reward those who come out of the event alive by allowing them to join in the February shoot of Wild Rut on Corby Moor. How fascinating an experience my colleagues find this depends, of course, almost entirely on whether they remember to be at the right or the wrong end of the gun.

Then it is back to the Toppled Bollard for a cut-price feast of steak pie, ale and Chateaux Pitbul Neauvou, with the evening rounded off by my address to the survivors.

This year I reminisced. “I remember I was writing direct mail sales letters when I was five,” I said. “I don't know what I did before that . . . just mucked around, I suppose. But finally I got my act together enhancing response rates through rigorous experimentation and exciting innovation. Hence our mission: to convince the world of a better way of doing direct mail.”

There were nods of agreement; these people know which side their P45 is buttered. But two events stopped my speech. First there was a noise which I took to be an unexpected collision of two tectonic plates beneath our fair city, but which turned out to be our landlord munching on some celery. Secondly there was a definite “huh!” It was spoken by one of those whom the cross country had not treated kindly.

The speaker looked at me with the sort of look I suspect she would have given an untrained rat she wasn't fond of. “Convince the world?” she announced. “They won’t listen! Every year you tell us to inform everyone how they can double response rates. But in reality we have as much chance of doing that as a one-armed blind man in a dark room trying to shove a pound of melted butter into a wild cat’s left ear with a red hot needle.”

She is no longer with us.

Tony Attwood

ely you can send me a copy of your mailshot if you want me to comment directly, free of charge.