Home hunting for a property with ‘many special features’ in an area full of character and local colour?

Try Ankh-Morpork.

But be careful to bring a sense of irony. Discworld is not a safe place without it. Much of Terry Pratchett’s humour derives from metaphor made solid and subversive parallels with the human condition. This creates a relatively uncontentious platform from which to snipe.

A politician making such observations about the voting masses usually willing to tolerate any amount of criticism, as long as it is not directed at them, would destroy their career. Most of us are druids at heart, with immolation of people with a different opinion being a useful way of settling an argument.

Terry Pratchett is the only author, totally free of gravitas or apology, to take a stab at a convincing (pseudo) scientific explanation for magic. If black holes do exist, a tachyon might not be so preposterous after all. Discworld works on the Tinkerbell premise: belief can bring into being an entity while denial of something real, ie Gaspode, Foul Ole Ron’s talking dog, goes unnoticed because it is generally known that dogs are unable to talk.

They’re all here. From DEATH to the Electric Drill Chuck Key Fairy.

Lines not to be missed: On food; ‘Ephebians make wine out of anything they can put in a bucket and eat anything that can’t climb out of one.’ Febrius on physics; ‘He proved that light travels at about the same speed as sound, in his famous "Give us a shout when you see it, OK?"’ Nanny Ogg’s Carrot and Oyster Pie; ‘Carrots so you can see in the dark, oysters so you’ve got something to look at.’ Also find out about the perils of drinking Klatchian coffee or the Puzuma, fastest (and flattest) animal on the Disc.

Rationality does not enter here to spoil the view. The wit of this dimension is condensed into the literary equivalent of Dr. Dinwiddie’s frog pills which stop him losing his sanity by making him hallucinate he is sane. ‘The New Discworld Companion’ has an unerring logic to its absurdities that persuades you that this prolific author really does have a return ticket to an orbit about the Great A’Tuin. Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs account for all with impeccable and sideways cod science.

They are a two-man conspiracy to commit to posterity the pomposity deflating humour of a place that at least deserves a postcode.

If by some fluke the Discworld books become unavailable, their essence will live on in the bones of this volume of concentrated humour of fantasy’s best known planet. (Though I am somewhat relieved that Terry Pratchett’s career as an apologist for the nuclear industry never branched out into research.)

If you are unable to keep up with the Discworld torrent, this is a brilliant way of finding clues to what you’ve missed.

Jane Palmer