The most talented man in Britain is called ... well, he wouldn’t want his real name to be revealed, so let’s call him Eric (which, let’s face it, doesn’t sound like a real name).

Eric is an excellent painter in oils and watercolours - landscapes and portraits mainly - and he is superb at writing rich and dense, humorous prose, but his chief talent is for music.

Eric’s ability to pick up any instrument for the first time, hear a tune for the first time and within minutes play that tune on that instrument, with improvements, surpasses the ability of anyone else since Mozart, so people have said. His compositions are likewise said to be of the very highest quality.

But, unfortunately, Eric does not want anyone to hear them, and he does not want to play any instrument in public at all. As well as being the most talented man in Britain, Eric is also among the shyest. He likes drinking beer and sometimes, when he has had a few pints of beer, he can be persuaded to pick at a guitar, strum a mandolin or tinkle the ironies of a piano. But even then he is reluctant.

His talent stands alone. It needs other, lesser, talents to surround it and coax it into the world. Talents like ambition, like the desire to perform in public, like the yearning for love. Is that a talent? Maybe not, but if he had it, Eric might be out there, communing.

As it is, he plays, alone, all day sometimes, he does what he can to keep on receiving benefits from the government, and he likes to ride the buses around the country regions of this still-green land, humming complex melodies where no one can hear them. He lives in a remote cottage in the hills somewhere. No one disturbs him there. He is a very nice chap, by the way, very nice and more talented, at music, than anyone else in the country. What’s one to make of Eric, then?