For many years the scientific and educational community has wondered and worried about the possibility that semi-sane scholar-pretenders would find the means to put out a series of reference books aimed at children but filled with ludicrous misinformation. These books would be distributed through respectable channels and would inevitably find their way into the hands and households of well-meaning families, who would go to them for facts but instead find bizarre untruths. The books would look normal enough, but would read as if written by people who have eaten too many lead-based paint chips.

Well, sadly, that day is upon us. We offer to you the first in a proposed series of 377 reference books, all written by a couple, Dr and Mr Doris Haggis-on-Whey, married fifty years and now getting their chance to twist and tickle the brains of the impressionable.

Giraffes? Giraffes! is the first in the series, and puts forth the following novel theories: that giraffes were not part of any evolutionary chain, but came here from Neptune, by way of very long (but convenient and fast) escalators; that giraffes are expert dancers, but they become angry if you ask them about their dancing; that giraffes control over 90 per cent of what we see in mirrors; that the Giraffe navy is as strong as ever, contrary to recent claims in the popular press.