"Well," said Maude, taking a sip of her vodka, "some of you may have heard this before, while some of you won't, but it concerns Mr Stalin, who was possessed of a considerable duende and whose real name, of course, was Djugushvilli, on account of his being from Tbilisi in Georgia, and it happened at Red Square in Moscow, on the occasion of the May Day Celebrations in 1930 something – can you remember, Sam?" she asked Smiles, who said: "it was 1933 when Sir Palimpsest MacFarlane was briefly the British Ambassador in Moscow," and Daphne nodded, "that's right, between the withdrawal of Sir Esmond Ovey and the appointment of the Viscount Chilston, when things were a bit iffy over the arrest of some engineers of Metropolitan-Vickers who were accused of espionage and wrecking – wasn't one of them a Desmond Doubleday?" and Sam concurred: "yes, he was said by the Russians to be the ringleader, but he was released after two months," and Maude continued: "well MacFarlane was on the podium, along with other diplomats from the few countries who had full relations with Russia at the time, and he overheard the whole thing and wrote it out verbatim from memory," and Daphne interjected: "he had a wonderful memory, despite his debauchery, if I remember correctly," and Maude patted her hand, "you do, dear heart, you always remember the family birthdays and there are so many of them," Daphne smiled, then added, "I also recollect that that particular MacFarlane lost his head in the Land of the Midnight Sun when the father of a young girl from a nomadic tribe of Reindeer herders came upon him repaying the hospitality they had shown him by having his wicked way with the girl, who must only have been about 8 or ten years of age – the father, a sinewy nomad named Gluskrhind Haarfeece, slew him with a single sweep of his sabre, then hung the ex-Ambassador's head to the bridle of his lead Reindeer and took it at the end of their estival grazing on the Arctic pastures, together with the frozen body which had been dragged on a litter, to the authorities in Tomsk," and Maude finished that tale with: "and his head, reunited with his body, was sent West on the Trans-Siberian Railway but unfortunately by the time it reached his estate in Perthshire it was so decomposed and stinking that no-one came to the funeral and it was left to that same Desmond Doubleday who had collected it at the local station on Rannoch Moor, carried it in a dog-cart to the house and buried it in the little graveyard at the back of the property, where it still lies, below a statue of a man with his head tucked underneath his arm which is reportedly how it lies in the coffin, now, where was I?" and Sam reminded her, "the story about Stalin and the little Jewish Tailor!"