Even by the wretched standards of tedium to which this column normally aspires, and usually achieves triumphantly, what follows is pure anaesthesia, which may more properly be employed upon patients in the Blackrock Clinic awaiting amputation of their feet at the umbilicus.
For I have a secret vice, which I will now share with the dozen or so readers who have stayed with me thus far
It is this. I adore old aeroplanes. I have been to therapy and counselling about this, have been psychoanalysed till my shoulder-blades are glued to the couch and I know the shrink's ceiling as astronomers know the night-sky, but all to no avail. Some strange chemical within me stirs whenever I hear the sound of an aircraft piston-engine; an almost adolescent ardour fills my soul when I glimpse an airframe of 60 years ago or more. Even the Air Corps Marchetti, which on occasion - and rather obligingly - performs aerobatics in the sky above my house can reduce me to a gibbering heap of ecstasy.
Last weekend I was invited to attend a dinner in Cambridge, where I discovered to my joy that the next day, the nearby Imperial War Museum, Duxford, was hosting an air show to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the end of the last world war. Perhaps some of my readers - all 10 of them - will understand what the prospect of such a show - full of Spitfires and Hurricanes, Flying Fortresses and Lancasters, Mustangs and Catalinas - can do to a human soul. Girls, imagine you've found a brand new Nigella Lawson cookbook; boys, you have found the most corpora cavernosa-engorging erotica ever; well, the prospect of Duxford and its ancient aircraft does the equivalent of all that to my brain.
Nine readers is not bad. Nine, as you know, is divisible only by three, and its threefold multiples remain immune to division by any other number. Nine is faithful. Nine is fine. We'll settle for nine. There's a special Irish reason to visit Duxford, which is that the latest exhibit there is a faithfully restored Air Corps Supermarine Spitfire, complete in proper livery, including the exact shade of a strangely attractive pea-green of Baldonnel 50 years ago or so. Alas, it was not flying last Saturday: if it had been, I fear I would have passed away from sheer happiness. As it was, my contentment was almost terminal.
Ah. Have you to leave so soon? What? You have to see a man about a dog? I see. Very well. Eight readers is more than adequate. And however peculiar the eight of you might consider my appetites for such things, I was like Eamon de Valera himself compared with other people present, for anniversary air show day at Duxford combines Anorak Central with Nerdsville.
Half the males there were apparently on day release from the Home for the Bewildered, where they are being treated for terminal lack of irony. Many of them were strutting around in air force uniforms of various nationalities from the last world war, and not all Allied by any means: the struttingest of all was apparently a Luftwaffe fighter ace, with a Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords. One group of men were dressed as a complete RAF bomber crew, complete with leather helmets and fur-lined boots, though the temperature Celsius was more than four times the numbers of readers I have kept with me so far.
Which is fine. Seven is lucky. Seven is a prime. My Magnificent Seven will understand the echoing surge in my heart as the Lancaster surged into the air, followed by the Flying Fortress. You ask: what kind of Flying Fortress? Well, it was without the chin-turret, which made it a B-17E or F, rather than the B-17G, which of course, as you all know, has the chin-turret.
But though a Lanc and a Flying Fort will be expected to reduce strong men to tears and bring even the most resolutely chaste member of an enclosed order of nuns to an earth-shattering climax, they are as nothing to the effect achieved by a formation of six Spitfires, one for every one of my readers. Have you the least idea how seldom this will ever happen again? Six Spitfires, curving and swooping and diving, their beautiful scimitar-wings scything majestically through the air - can you imagine the unadulterated wonder that that represents? Five North American Mustangs also took to the air: these were perhaps the most important aircraft of the second World War, and just enough to give readers one each.
Then there came the Grumman family of fighters - four of them, the Wildcat, the Hellcat, the Tigercat and the Bearcat, which served in the US navy in the Pacific; and ah, how fortunate, yet again, one per reader.
Alas, as you both know, almost no German aircraft from the second World War have survived, and the picture is barely better for Soviet aircraft. Still, Duxford managed to show a Yak fighter - a composite confection made from several different marks - and a Polikarpov biplane, originally designed to compete in the 1940 Olympics. Yes, in the 1930s the IOC was contemplating making aerobatics an Olympic sport.
Strictly between the two of us, the day was concluded with a fly-past of some 50 second World War aircraft, while down on the ground, I was sounding like Madonna, just back home from a trip to Ann Summers. And you know, I have exactly the same sense of solitude now. Hello? Hell-o-oo? Is there anyone out there?