Yesterday I remarked that you’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are a weed and a milksop. But clearly, you need not do any such thing. It is simply an example of the worst kind of aspirational pap peddled by pop singers and television programmes and so-called “lifestyle” magazines which besmirch the cultural landscape like so many contaminated puddles in which mutant aquatic beings slither and squirm and squirt toxic gack.

You might argue that I am over-egging my metaphor, but to do so would suggest that there is such a concept as “too many eggs” which, unless you are Alfred Hitchcock, is absolute nonsense. How in the name of heaven could one ever have too many eggs? Surplus ones can be placed in storage and used as and when they are required, whether you are whipping up a tasty egg-based recipe or deploying a metaphor when wishing to execrate the twaddle that threatens to engulf us all. Or one can distribute one’s spare eggs to paupers. A pauper with an egg is no less a pauper, of course, but better an egg in his hand than a bowl for begging.

If you are really becoming overwhelmed with eggs, and your chosen pauper looks halfway capable of poultry husbandry, you could even give one of your hens to him. At a stroke, you will have reduced the pauper population by one, for a hen-owning person cannot properly be considered a pauper as such. He has risen to the status of a property owner. Though his property may be only a single scraggy hen, it is still property. Some are dismayed at the idea of treating even the least of God’s creatures as objects of ownership, but that is the kind of sentimental drivel expounded by scruffy wastrels who would have us living in the dark ages, without antibiotics, or indeed industry, surviving on berries and nuts and rainwater.

Such a prescription can appear attractive when under the onslaught of contemporary pap. It is easy to imagine that one might live a more fulfilling life huddled in a cave snacking on almonds instead of being bombarded by visions of cavorting popstrels demanding that we search for the hero inside ourselves, or insisting that our hearts will go on. But remember, we can tread a more lustrous path, one with the benefits of poultry ownership and antibiotics, and much, much else besides, and as we make our way along that path, a basket of surplus eggs in one hand and a hen in the other, we should keep our eyes peeled for paupers crumpled in ditches along the way, paupers we shall raise out of pauperdom with gifts of eggs and a hen, and also of any berries and nuts and bottles of saved rainwater we may be carrying in our capacious pockets.