I feel compelled to tell you how our evening at the Velvet Marmoset ended. This was primarily with me being stretchered out of a singed, smouldering club and being carted off to have some emergency dental work. Naturally, as ever, I blame Nelson. It was naive of me not to expect that an evening with the component parts of the aforementioned miscreant, cocktails and flames would only really end one way, that is, the potential involvement of one (or more) or our most brilliant and underpaid emergency services. 

I left you with the announcement of the return to the stage of Mistress Webb, Spindlehound and the Flaming Hoop of Destiny…how prophetic that announcement turned out to be.

Our spiffy circus performance was naturally quite spectacular, and there were gasps, cheering and the odd uncomfortable silence at the appropriate moments as I leapt elegantly through my devoted Mistresses fiery hoop. There may also have been some interpretative dancing and mystical mime. It was afterwards, whilst the Tiny Terror and I were enjoying a celebratory ‘Ginger Minx’ at the bar, that my still smouldering hoop accidentally ignited Nelsons nether regions. 

His state of intoxication was such that he didn’t realise he had a flaming posterior until it was pointed out by a passing fellow Marmosetter. He peered round to see, and it was then that his keen canine nose detected the smell of burning fur. Well goodness me, he moved with a spritely turn of paw that quite surprised me.

We all looked on in interest as he hurtled around the room like a Wall of Death motorcycle rider. This was a classic school boy error in the face of panic, as I believe the correct procedure for this situation is the ‘drop and roll’. Sister Josephine, never one to miss any excitement, was poised to pounce with the fire blanket, but Nelson would not stay still. 

Straightening myself up and smoothing out my crumpled frock, I felt that immediate action was needed. I scuttled over to the bar area and as Nelson was making his third revolution of the room and I stuck out a spindly leg to trip him up. It did not go exactly according to my plan. His windmilling paws of panic fetched me a biff in the chops and I reeled backwards over the bar, just as Sister J deployed the blanket to smother his back end. It all went terribly quiet for a few moments and then some extraordinarily bad language was muttered from under the blanket. As it was slowly removed, a bedraggled Nelson was revealed, clutching a small blackened creature, himself surprisingly unhurt. He also had a bit of a shifty look about him, more than he usually did. 

Moments passed as I unfurled my limbs and dizzily turned myself back up the right way. It was with some trepidation that I looked to see what poor creature had perished in the inferno. It was very still, flat and done to a crisp. Nelson tried to furtively sweep the beastie under a table, but Sister J skewered it with her stiletto and poked at it with her other toe. It remained unmoving. As my drink addled neuron fired up things began to fall into place. I realised that the ex creature was not a creature at all.

It seems that Nelson had been wearing a buttock toupee. In this case it had served him well and had saved him from a rather nasty undercarriage injury, but it did beg the question, why?  We discovered that the buttock toupee had been the cause of the falling out between him and lady H. Worried that she would find out his secret, that he possessed a balding bottom, he had been refraining from any heavy duty, intimate sniffing action. Lady Hester assumed that he was therefore not entirely committed to her affections, hence the showdown on the fated camping trip. A buttock toupee though? That was a thing? Apparently not, it had been fashioned from a winter hat he found abandoned behind a radiator in a pub. To his credit the colour match was splendid. The flammable substance that ignited was the glue he had used to adhere the thatch of fur to his gentlehound quarters. It was clear that we needed a long chat about this, but I had not fared that well myself that evening.  

As I had been propelled over the bar, I hit out and caught a passing seafood platter with my outstretched paw, and as I fell in a sprawling heap, the dressed lobster bounced off my pointy nose, breaking my tooth, on its journey to the floor.

The good news is that I had a most comfortable and satisfactory visit to the vet, who mended my tooth and gave me a cheeky scale and polish whilst they were rummaging about in there. I was housed in the penthouse suite and I awoke in a drug addled daze, wrapped in pink blanket. As I began to emerge from the fog I turned my attention to my good pal Nelson. Now, what could I do to help him, in both his quest to win back Lady H, and also his own acceptance of his silky smooth botty…