The Great Leader's Last Report

It's hard to describe such a work. But since I am the Great Leader, suffice it to say that it is a great book. For instance: This will almost certainly be the Great Leader’s last report. And I have changed the type AGAIN, so now even MORE fixing up the format. Not that you’ll notice …. The ‘Great Leader’? We all, each one of us, have a world inside our head that nobody else gets to see. It’s what makes us US, I think; what makes each one of us unique, one-of-a-kind, oh but that’s what unique means, so already I’m repeating myself; something I do a lot, although you won’t know that unless you’ve read all the OTHER reports from that same Great Leader: me. What I lead is an Expedition; of sundry odd characters, bits and pieces of myself dressed up in all kinds of exotic costumes: a rather surly Chinese gentleman, Gung Ho; a cat called, perhaps not very originally, Princess, since all cats are princesses, even the males, although there is also Royal Cat, who is probably the same one … you never know with cats; a sparrow, Wise-Eye, wise in the ways of the Toronto streets and the workings of logical process, always ready to offer an encouraging BLINK!, and pick up whatever crumbs result; a Little Yellow Truck, who likes nothing better than a trip to the dump, ostensibly to dispose of the rubbish but really to see what others have discarded that you know MIGHT just come in handy some day; a pretty lady of questionable character, in that she is holding a lighted cigarette in a VERY long holder, although whether she is actually SMOKING it, history does not relate; a Dog With A Name (his name is … aw, shucks, you GUESSED it … ), who does not often answer to that or anything else, being too absorbed in the chasing of rabbits and the sniffing of fewmets; and me. All, I suppose, figments of my imagination, myself included. It’s an interesting world, to be sure, and I have had countless hours of fun listening to what it has to say, and transcribing a lot of it into the pages of the Weedy Mead Chronicles, formerly the Swine Hill Papers, and there are reasons for that, as there are reasons for everything. But reasons are not often interesting, and so there will be very little in this about THOSE kinds of things (or as Christopher Robin likes to put it, Those Kinds Of Things), but a lot about what the Expedition has turned up in its meanderings over the past forty years or so; which, I suppose, in turn had its origins, THEIR origins?, over the course of the odd thirty-seve