On the road with a long-distance morris dancer

‘I’m morris dancing to Norwich and I need someone to captain my road-crew. You’re the only man for the job. Yours, Tim.’ Tim FitzHigham, Bt. BA Hons. Dunelm. FRGS (all Ret.) is a man so wildly different even Ranulph Fiennes thinks he’s a little crazy. And Sir Ranulph is by no means alone. When Tim rowed the Channel in an original Thos. Crapper bath (one example among many), Marcus Brigstocke felt duty-bound to ask him if he was aware that ‘most of us just stay at home and write our jokes from there’.

Naturally, I took the job (who the hell else was going to?) and thus found myself playing Jeeves to Tim FitzHigham’s Wooster as he attempted his latest mad challenge: a re-enactment of William Kemp’s stunt of 1600, in which, after falling out with Shakespeare over the dramatic value of a ‘humorous’ dog-on-wheels (in Hamlet, of course), Kemp amply demonstrated who was the sharper wit by morris dancing home to Norfolk.