My Uncle Bertrand, after a brief period of relaxation at the pleasure of Her Majesty (during which time he had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of a certain Mr Bridger, a long-term guest at the establishment in which my uncle resided, with whom my uncle spent many pleasant evenings enjoying chifir (made by Mr Bridger's simian butler Boris, who picked the tea leaves himself), playing patience for matchsticks, or organising daring criminal escapades in busy European cities, much to the annoyance of the local criminal fraternities), soon found himself employed by the laird of a remote Scottish island to address a catering problem, the solution to which had evaded him for years.

Every year, on May Day, the inhabitants of this laird's island enjoyed dressing up, playing games and organising a barbecue, to which a special guest was always invited to attend: Sometimes an animal, sometimes a child, and sometimes 'the right kind of adult', although my uncle never quite understood what the laird meant by the last comment.

These barbecues were very popular, with roast goat, sheep and pig bringing the epicurean pleasures of the mainland to the isolated inhabitants of this far-flung corner of the British Isles, and the local ladies took great delight in competing to provide the finest potato salads, salsas and dips to accompany the meat, the beer and the orgiastic ceremonies.

The problems began, however, with the introduction of the turkey fowl from the mainland, some time in the early seventies. Until that time, the meat had been shared out fairly, and it was rare for the hideous heathens of the isle to squabble over bits of eye, brain or buttock, since, in their eyes, meat was meat, and that was that.

And then the turkey arrived - and with it, strife! Now, each member of the family wanted a leg, the binary nature of such appendages notwithstanding, resulting in shouting, quarrelling, pushing, shoving, punching, kicking, gouging, diving, ducking, bombing, heavy petting, and all manner of inappropriate and hitherto unknown behaviour. The laird decided that Something Had To Be Done and, having heard of my Uncle Bertrand's experience in the experimental laboratories of a large biochemical company whose name shall remain unmentioned for fear of losing access to their Friends and Family Massage and Aromatherapy services, he called upon my uncle to bring peace, understanding and harmony to the island, just as he had done in Greece, Israel and Biafra back in '67.

Such difficulties were far from new to my Uncle Bertrand, who had spent many years researching ways to address the rapidly expanding population of the world (for which he himself may be considered responsible to a not entirely insignificant degree), resulting in brilliant and original solutions involving antimatter, nuclear fall-out and anthrax, resulting in his losing a number of friends within the scientific community, but also resulting in his gaining a number of friends within various defence ministries and intelligence agencies across the globe.

On this occasion, however, my uncle realised that a more humane solution might be advisable, partly due to the sensitivity of the islanders to outsiders bringing their white powders and dead sheep over, like they'd done back in the forties, and partly due to my uncle's unwillingness to participate in the annual May Day barbecue to the same extent as he suspected his cousin Howie may have done during his visit to the same island just a few months before (he'd never returned, but his uniform was later spotted on a ventriloquist's dummy in the Theatre Royal in Glasgow, during a performance by the Summerisle Mummers, an amusing folklorique troop who augmented their performances with masks, hobby horses and tinned beans, which they cast amongst the audience with the somewhat surreal cry of: "Some things in their natural state have the most vivid colours!". Modern theatre never was my uncle's thing. One can understand why, really.)

So it was, therefore, that my Uncle Bertrand set to work to create a new creature: One that had never walked the earth before!

He would take a spider, a camel spider, the biggest spider that he could think of (though, to be honest, he didn't spend an awful lot of time thinking about it, having been distracted by the daughter of the landlord of the pub in which he was staying, who had a tendency to knock on his wall at the most inconvenient times of the day and night, such as when he was already busy with the village schoolmistress), and cross it with a turkey, thus ensuring that, at the next May Day barbecue, even a family of eight would each enjoy a leg. The solution to the problem was, as usual, sheer bloody genius (in my uncle's opinion), and he set to work without delay (or at least, with only a short delay, of a night or so).

After many weeks of toiling by starlight, shorting the powerstation over in Dounreay, upsetting the local sheep population with his hideous aborted experiments, which he let free to make their own way in the world (one of which now resides in Downing Street), and abusing his hunchbacked assistant, Igor McTavish (seconded to him by his good Argentine friend Donald in return for a favour involving a box of dynamite, the madame of the most expensive bordello in Comodoro Rivadavia, and a llama, the detals of which really do not bear telling), my Uncle Bertrand was ready to reveal to the world his awful creation: The Gobblelob!

It was May Day Eve when my uncle chose to present the Gobblelob to the laird of the island, a night when the locals were busy indulging in nocturnal naughties of a nature nauseating even to my slightly-too-broad-minded Uncle Bertand. A night when nobody would be home, but the laird and his mistress. A night when the fields, the glens and the heather-strewn slopes would be covered in rutting romantics, lascivious lovers and canoodling copulators: Easy meat for any diabolical creature which might choose to escape from the Tesco's carrier bag in which it was confined, to scuttle horribly away to feast on an eat-one-get-one-free orgy of bloodsucking, bonechewing and eyeballdraining unprecedented on the island, and never to be seen again until the nineteen-eighties (though that bloodsucking creature looked very different, and spoke somewhat posher).

When, finally, the Gobblelob was caught, more than half the population of the island had been savagely sucked to death, and most of the other half had endured a little nibble. My uncle was banished, never to return; the laird was invited to be the special guest at the following day's barbecue; and, shortly afterwards, the Ministry of Defence bought the island and invited the entire population to take part in a study on anthrax.

The Gobblelob was never heard of again, though it is rumoured that he was bought by some fellow in East Anglia and kept for breeding purposes.

Although this rumour has never been confirmed, I note that my Uncle Bertrand never eats Turkey Twizzlers when offered them at the 'Fifteen' restaurant at which he occasionally dines in Hoxton.

It could, of course, just be the jus du coqnieguizer that puts him off, though.