Hoping to find him in a sympathetic rather than critical mood, today I offer the gentle reader an English version of what is arguably the most important poem written in Russia in the last century.

Instinctive qualms aside, I should like to say a few words about the role of pornography in modern life.  Not from the ethical point of view, as this, on the face of it, is straightforward and makes no distinction between private and public, between a bedroom in Manhattan and a film studio in San Fernando Valley. The moral case is that unless activity of the kind pornography parodies has conception as its specific aim, it is beyond the pale. Once that activity is generalized and the aim obscured, it is no different from theft or fraud.

Yet another good reason to live in poverty, I reckon, is that paying a cool quarter of a million to get squashed inside a tin can at the bottom of the ocean should be well out of one’s reach.  I have always regarded the appetite for adventure as at least as attendant on wealth as on feeblemindedness, and  I must admit that the much-reviled comment by a leftist politician in England – to the effect that if millionaires can blow their fortunes on subaqueous deathtraps, it means they are not taxed enough – chimes in with my own macabre postmortem.