Every Wednesday morning for years now, Mamgu has been nipping round to Callard and Bowser’s Bathroom showroom in the High Street. Here, when Mr Bowser “nips” into the back room for his regular-as-clockwork tryst with Beryl from the butchers, she avails herself of the many splendored shower cubicles therein.

Anyway, lately we’ve noticed she’s been taking a plank with her.  And when asked she told us it’s because of the fancy new Chinese steam sauna unit they’re selling. Apparently, if she doesn’t tie the plank to her foot and leave it outside she gets dematerialised by the shower only to re-appear somewhere else. Which, apart from the bus fare back again, is a nuisance when you’re ringing wet.

Well, this piqued our boffins’ interest.  So last Wednesday morning, we sent junior Biscuit Procurement Executive, Llyr ap Llwyllion, around to test it out.  Sure enough, when he pressed the vertical steam button he at first turned foggy, swirled around a bit and then got sucked up into the extractor fan and disappeared.  We only located him when we heard on the news of a semi-transparent boy matching his description being found up to his neck on a beach in Co. Donegal.

Presently our experiments are limited to an hour or so each Wednesday morning.  But we figure if we could get Mr Bowser to increase the duration of his love-ins with Beryl, we could get enough research time to fine-tune the thing and perhaps incorporate this device into some ill-thought-through rescue mission of our man stranded on Europa and perhaps even restore the boy Llyr back to solidity from his current state of spectre-esque translucence.