text: Marlon Brando sat at the head of a grand old dinner table, twenty-eight feet long, resplendent with varnished oak wood, engravings and regal table top embellishments; candles, fine silver cutlery, gold-tinted napkins, frilly old table cloths like the kind your gran put out for Sunday dinner, only nicer. The table was located in the grand old hall of a grand old mansion that at one point belonged to a grand old Lord or Baron or Marquis or some other archaic personage. Now it belonged to Brando; to Hollywood. The transformation complete. The Visigoths at the gates of Rome no longer, they plunder now its splendid pantry and gorge themselves on the fruits of a thousand conquests of a thousand centuries. Bloated Brando at the head of the table, fireplace raging behind him and casting his engorged shadow across the ancient fireplace stones, chicken thigh in one hand, a wing in the other, lips stained with mashed potato, laughed a hearty laugh. The corpse of Francis Ford Coppolla sat slumped in the chair to Brando’s right. Al Pacino, not quite dead, stood serf-like at Brando’s side, wearing a torn tuxedo stained with a thousand condiments, waiter’s tablecloth in hand: the perfect supplicant, the faithful hound, ready at the sound of his master’s voice to rush to the kitchen where Diane Keaton waited to prepare for her beloved (Brando, not Pacino) any dish his cholesterol weakened heart desired. A ragged dockworker; union man, collar blue like the blueberry pie Brando was feasting upon at the moment of his entry, cries hysterically: “They are here my Don! Your people have come once more, to gaze upon your emboldened visage!” Brando sets aside his gallon tub of ice cream and allows an open-mouthed grin to grow across his huge face, rolls of cheek and neck fat piling one atop the other like some hideous optical illusion, thin strands of fried chicken skin dangling between incisor and canine, “Bid them enter!” he commands. At this the floodgates open and a wild throng of Hawaiian shirt clad, camera clutching tourists, the flash from their smartphones exploding on the visors of their Ray-Bans', enter the grand hall and surround poor portly Brando. He tries to hide behind a freshly cooked turkey just laid on the table by Diane Keaton, who now lies deceased, perished beneath the footsteps of a hundred eager vultures. But it is not Brando’s banquet they have come to devour, but Brando himself. “Mr. Brando!” squawks one of the vultures, “Show us the way! Lead us from temptation!” Brando smiles, red wine flows from his facial orifices, spilling onto the toes of a nearby sycophant, who eagerly bends down to lick the wine of Brando from his sandal shoe and from between his toes. He does not answer. Another croaks “My Lord! We have been told there’s something wrong; the politicians, the journalists, the new inhabitants of the Big Brother house, they all speak of impending doom, cliff edges and the like! What are we to do?” “It’s okaaaaay Babaaaaay” he bellows in response, with tears bubbling in the cauldron of his eyes. As the throng presses ever closer, Brando begins to suffocate, his eyes literally popping from his skull as thick gravy seeps from his tear ducts and clumps of miscellaneous meat regurgitate from his swollen mouth. The sound of iPhone camera clicks becomes deafening, and Brando collapses into a bowl of sticky toffee pudding, his final feast complete. A maggot crawls out of the hollow cavern that was once the eye of Francis Ford Coppolla, like a solitary teardrop, and high above this sordid scene, where once there was mounted the head of a boar or lion, the perfectly preserved head of Jacob-Rees Mogg watches all below, the scheming glint still alive in his eyes.