Upon hearing this sort of nonsense, your immediate reaction has to be to ensure that the speaker is completely flambéed: take my advice, douse with a bottle of (cheap cooking) brandy & just toss in a Swan Vesta. However, when one of the guests looks as though that have been to an Afghan dog fight, conversation over coffee can become somewhat stilted… & all because this waif-like figure who up until that point contributed nothing to the conversation all evening since they refused to eat absolutely anything, not even the carrots, because they were dressed with butter that might not have come from free range fair trade milk, suddenly & so disastrously decided to pipe up.

Indeed, assuming that they survived the ensuing conflagration of pudding course, the red mist will descend & the voices in the salt seller urge you to go a get Jose’s machete that you have secreted under the drivers seat of your car, if the conversation continues on that particular course … which inevitably it will. In those last few fleeting moments of rational thought, you can consider that if dolphins are so bl**dy smart, how come they didn’t invent keyhole surgery, satellite telecommunications or more importantly, automatic grenade launchers.

Maybe it is a function of a flawed childhood overdosing on the Cartoon Network & National Geographic channel but some people still insist on imbuing animals with human qualities. So what if dolphins are capable of forming complex social structures … big deal … so do termites; & to date not even Sir David Attenborough has managed to film a member of the Coptotermes genus, building a proper drink. Piling up mounds of earth is one thing, but building a sensibly sized pink gin is quite another.

In fact the next time you should happen to be in the bar at Sea World & the dolphin behind the bar makes a complete fluff of your chosen sharpener, resist the temptation to ask him if he or she did that on ‘porpoise’ (sorry) & instead ask the animal if they are so damn smart, how come they keep getting caught in tuna nets?

However, it is important when posing such conundrums to ensure that you haven’t already partaken in a few crafty early morning come-back bracers & are in fact talking to a Delphinidae & not Le Dauphin. If you have made such an error, the chances are that your question will be greeted with a Gallic shrug of the shoulders & you drinks order will possibly comprise something green as well as being accompanied with a side order of half cooked Blackbirds feet. Confronted with a bolshie member of the former French Royal family the best course of action is to immediately threaten to smother the nearest soufflé with mayonnaise. This I guarantee you will engender a degree Vichy-ite collaboration not seen since Marshall Henri Petain started receiving long distance phone calls from Berlin.

See, all of this unpleasantness could have been avoided if you had just stayed at home with a half decent bottle which is why this evening your humble correspondent will be in … Bristol of all places. I have truly sinned in a previous life to deserve this & I already have a bad feeling about what might occur over pudding.