Gadfly's New Job

While the soothsayers continue to weave their fantasy fiction tales about the Cyrenian Civil War and the Mystery Of The Missing Despot Murmur O'Daffy, reports of the valiant struggle between the clueless but victorious goat-herders and the loyal Praetorian Guard die-hards continue to circulate ad nauseam.

Since my recent encounter with the foreign stranger called Marmer of Gadfly, I've been quite puzzled. His reluctance to talk about the events in Cyrene aroused some of my feline inquisitiveness. So I thought I'd try to find him and continue our conversation, in the hope of gaining some fresh perspective about these momentous events. It's always interesting to speak to exotic members of the human race; apart from their weird clothes, dietary habits and strange accents, they have a refreshingly different outlook from the rather mundane and frankly, pedestrian Northumbrian world view.

I eventually tracked him down in the market. He told me that he was looking for a supplier of camel meat - which was something of a bizarre delicacy to these cold shores and leaden skies. He hadn't had any joy in his quest, but he was at least grateful to have found some dried figs and a flagon of olive oil. I asked him if he came from a desert place, since those regions seem to be the favourite habitat of camels (or so Caedmon tells me), and he admitted that this was indeed the case. He went on to comment that Murmur O'Daffy had done a great deal of good for the Cyrenian people, and that his ousting from power by his own people was an act of enormous ingratitude and treachery. His eyes narrowed strangely when he said these things and he started to spit rather vehemently (definitely not a Northumbrian custom); I'd evidently touched on a raw nerve.

So, to make polite conversation and in a bid to defuse the mounting tension I detected in my finely-tuned whiskers, I asked him what occupation had brought him to these green and pleasant shores. He told me that he had recently been appointed as an honorary advisor to Edweird the Milliner and the Redistributionist Faction. He also was hoping for a professorial appointment at the Yorvik School Of Esoterics.

Now that I have more of an idea of who he is, where he comes from and what he's doing, I feel less intrigued. Nevertheless, I still think he knows more about the deposed despot Murmur O'Daffy than he lets on..