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Just one of the many things discovered by Hercule Leitmotif, croquet champion and companion of Corsican explorer Tesco Van Morrison on his search for the lost vineyards of Iceland.

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Quote: Erskin Quint

Just one of the many things discovered by Hercule Leitmotif, croquet champion and companion of Corsican explorer Tesco Van Morrison on his search for the lost vineyards of Iceland.

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I believe the bottle-nosed wombat is distantly related to the glass-faced Scottish warbler - so named because its loud, late evening mating calls have led to it being "The Most Glassed Bird Ever" according to the Guinness Book of Records. Indeed it is the only bird named after a violent act with a drinking vessel, unless of course you count the now-extinct goblet-arsed windy tit, which I don't.

Then again, I may be wrong.

Strongly suspecting that the Bottle-nosed Wombat was something conjured from the imagination of Mr Quint, I decided to investigate. A good thing that I did, for there is absolutely no trace of the aforementioned strain on Google, the leading authority on wombats.

There is, however, rather a lot of interesting information on something known as the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat. I thought, to give Mr Quint the benefit of the doubt, that we might assume that he had become confused with the different wombat models, but I do not, now, think this is a very good idea either.

You see, the Northern Hairy-nosed Wombat is a resident of the Epping Forest National Park in Queensland, which happens to be nowhere near Iceland, where Mr Quint informs us the venerable Mr Leitmotif invented the Bottle-noses. Nor has there ever been any record of Bottle-nosed Wombat habitation in Iceland.

I smell a leg-pulling, and refuse to be drawn into the prank.

Dear Mr Monkey,

this is not the first time that my veracity has been impugned. Indeed, the querulous voices of the hoi polloi are to me what the horripilating shrieks of the pygmy buffalo-mouse must be to the aboriginal, when, his belly replete with rancid kangaroo meat, he settles himself to sleep in the terrible red evenings of the Queensland bush.

A more careful reader of my previous epistle would have discerned that at no point does it claim that the Bottle-Nosed Wombat is a denizen of Iceland, nor that Hercule Leitmotif would stoop so far as to invent a species of marsupial.

Msr Leitmotif is a man who has been known to play many parts, but inventor of spurious wombat strains is not one of them.

He discovered the Bottle-Nosed Wombat amid the groves of eucalypt on an expedition to Tasmania and Queensland, where he had travelled, in the guise of daffodil connoisseur Archduke Ninian Kwaak de Groote, as companion to the Prussian kangaroo-hunter Baron Adelbert Stoppleganger III, the Hereditary Draffen Meningenhesse of Pluffen.

Google is hardly an authority, if one wishes to transcend the idiot masses. My bible in these matters is no less an oracle than Lord Manticore's Marsupial Miscellany. There the discerning reader can learn of such wonders as the Satchelled Toad, Biddlecombe's Sighing Wallaby, and the Dancing Mice of Warra Warra.

Yours sincerely

E Quint

Well that's fine, then.


Why didn't you say so in the first place?

It was a satire on didactic rhetoric.