I had never heard of the town of Horwich in Lancashire until it was favoured last week with the arrival of its newest resident, Johnny "Mad Dog" Adair. What did it do to deserve this terrible misfortune?
An outbreak of cannibalism in the 1950s, perhaps, in which the entire population of children were turned into rissoles and fed to the nearby Bolton Wanderers football team at half-time in the FA Cup Final? Or maybe the town had lit signal fires for Luftwaffe bombers attacking Manchester in the Second Great Misunderstanding some years earlier?
Our friend Mad Dog seems to be the most egregiously unpleasant individual. His unlettered, baseball-hat wearing thuggishness, his insensate capacity for violence, his cretinous sub-fascism, make him the most conspicuously monster monster to have emerged from the North in the past decade or so.
But happily, Mr Adair is not alone in Horwich! He is joining his wife Gina, otherwise known as Mad Bitch, and his son Jonathan, who are already there. These might not have the calming influence you might hope for. She was once photographed holding a Kalashnikov rifle. And Mad Pup? Well, that name Jonathan Adair does rather sound as if it belongs to a racing driver or a subaltern in the Brigade of Guards, doesn't it? Actually, he is a crack-cocaine dealer.
Possibly, Mad Dog and Mad Bitch are a breeding pair, even if Mad Pup is old enough to sire whelps himself. Mad Dog and his lady consort Gina are the kind who drop litters from an early age. It would not be all that unusual for the oldest and the youngest in such a whelpery to be 30 years apart, by which time of course the mother usually resembles the Battle for Berlin in 1945.
But assuming that it is possible that the Adairs' union is blessed with further offspring, what will this do for property values in the Greater Manchester area? Of all the ferocious brutes spawned by the Northern Troubles, he is easily the worst-looking. Can you imagine living there and seeing a tribe of wide Adairs waddling towards you on your own street? What do you do? Shin up the nearest lamp-post and pull it up after you? Introduce yourself as a fellow Irishman, and ask him if you can direct him to the nearest Catholic Church? Or do you hurry to the nearest estate agent to put your house on the market, sale price no problem: you'll settle for a cabbage, some second-hand chewing-gum and a shoe. Oh all right, the shoe.
Now to be sure, these days no one else has to emigrate to Lancashire from Ireland any more, though those strange mill towns of Burnley, Preston, Bolton, Bury, Oldham once attracted many thousands of Irish emigrants. Under the influence of Mad Dog, Mad Bitch, Mad Pup, it is just possible that the locals will be returning to their ancestral roots.
I have never been to any of the aforementioned towns, but I do understand that clogs feature prominently in the local culture. No doubt the ferry from Liverpool will soon be unloading hundreds of Lancastrian lads and lassies with their wooden shoes, their chilblains, their rickets, their ferrets and their whippets, all singing Gracie Fields songs.
Naturally, we must all welcome the plans by the fair Mary Hanafin to put Chinese on our educational curriculum, so enabling our students to add it to the many other languages they fail to learn at school. But it looks as though the collision caused by the arrival of the Adair tectonic plate - no, not mixing my metaphors: you have surely heard of Groundhog Day? - is going to propel a very large number of Lancastrian Catholics with Irish names and utterly impenetrable accents to our shores, doing the Accrington Shuffle in their clogs as they come down the gangway in Dublin docks. We will need translators who speak the dialect - known locally as eebahgum - if we are to preserve our social cohesion and absorb this latest wave of incomers.
Is that the biggest problem we face, the possible immigrants driven from England by the evil presence of Mad Dog Adair, an opponent of the peace process? Or is the biggest problem actually from those who "support" the peace process?
In the bottomless moral abyss of the Troubles in the past 30 years, the terrorists who particularly specialised in murdering innocents were loyalists such as Johnny Adair. But if you asked the communities they came from whether these people were criminals or not, the electoral response has been quite clear: yes, absolutely. No party with an unadorned record of unregretted violence would ever be electorally endorsed by the Northern unionist people.
Not so on the other side. In recognition of the moral corruption of the nationalist community, aided and abetted by both governments and a cretinously abject SDLP, the Northern rulebook now insists that the green Adairs of the North must not merely be elected, but that governing institutions may not exist without them. Mitchel McLaughlin - who (God help us) is on the "moderate" wing of the diseased Provisional organism - is not even capable of recognising either the criminality or the immorality of the most spectacularly vile single crime of the Troubles.
The pity of it all is that the pagans of Sinn Féin cannot join Mad Dog in exile - thought not in Lancashire. Poor bloody Lancashire deserves better than that. However, thanks to Leo Enight's much-loved EU rocketry, Titan beckons. By Jove, Leo, so you were right about the usefulness of interplanetary travel all along.