Planet Zog,

The Third Age, year 36 (roughly equivalent to the Earth year 2058)

Meanwhile, faraway, in a world not wholly unlike Earth in certain ways (but drastically different in certain, very important ways), a young furry creature began to gain the power of insight.

It wasn’t so much of a ‘now I know how protons and neutrons converge to form atoms’ sort of insight, but more of a ‘I feel rather like I could quaff down a large amount of cheese and crispbread, and I wonder if there’s anything good on the telly’ type of thing. Which was quite unnerving for this tiny, miniature, decidedly un-statuesque, and all-over hirsute alien creature, for no other reason than the concepts of cheese, crispbread and telly (and whether there was anything on one) were entirely foreign to it. As well as that, for that matter, was the ability to form thoughts in sentences in an entirely stuffy, foreign language – and even the concept of language altogether, since before now, this really quite miniscule animal had previously only communicated through telepathy in a sort of husky binary code.

Nevertheless, this teeny fuzzball with legs brushed off these strange thoughts, and went about his day, which involved hunting for even tinier creatures in the underbrush, right at the bottom floor of a heaving forest canopy, located in a tropical rainforest on a completely foreign and undiscovered planet somewhere about umpteen light years left of the Sagittarius Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy. But try as it might, it couldn’t seem to shake a strange craving for a nice big helping of strawberry sponge cake, and a fast game of french cricket in a Salisbury backyard.

As it happens, in fact, this wasn’t a particularly isolated event. All over this small, lusciously green planet, other creatures of great and small statures (and several species of semi-conscious moss, too) began thinking in a way that could only be described as, well, English.

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Tall flamingo-esque-looking animals with boggly eyes, and wings made of a sort of skin meshed like crepe-paper, began arguing about the average goal scores of South London football players. They also suddenly had the ineffable urge to buy a pair of sturdy wellingtons, ‘because it’s a bit wet out.’

Indeed – the weather was a bit ‘wet out,’ and had been for millennia – particularly since these lanky beaked beanpoles were wetland creatures, who had been born in, and lived their entire lives, loping around in a knee-deep fluorescent bog. ‘Wet out’ was a feature - not a bug.

Bugs – or what can be passed off as bugs on this strange planet – also formed a large part of their diet. Though they couldn’t help but wonder whether the whole thing was a bit unrefined, and whether they could be better enjoyed crushed into a pate and spread onto crackers.

A colossal mammoth-like creature (though in this instance, with tusks where their eyes should be, and eyes where their nostrils ought to be located), in much the same way, felt inclined to read up on the latest misgivings and pratfalls of something inexplicably named the royal family, in the equally as inexplicable tabloid press, as well as the private lives of certain reality TV show contestants (all concepts that appeared with no logical context for which they could base their understanding on). Which was particularly inconvenient for the mammoth-like creature, since at that very moment, it was being coaxed onto a cliff-edge by a tribe of bipedal simians with spears, presumably so that they could use the height of the cliff to dispatch the poor creature and eat it.

But the mammoth shouldn’t have worried, because this cosmic explosion of Englishness hadn’t missed his tool-using upright-walking pursuers. Suddenly, and without warning, they were all struck with embarrassment at the skimpy loincloths they had previously worn without issue. They started anxiously asking each other where the nearest H&M was; so that they could rush there immediately and buy a smart pair of jeans, a T-Shirt with a logo on it and some crisp white sneakers. When a senior member of the hunting party realised that she didn’t have a watch on, she freaked out completely. This was apparently because she didn’t know whether or not she’d missed the latest episode of 8 out of 10 Cats Does Countdown (which she had apparently been really looking forward to watching, particularly the Joe Wilkinson bit), and that she also now knew what 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown presumably was.