Copyright: Paul Kidby

Wizards, thieves and suspicious buggers with big coats on across Discworld are no further forward in the search for the coronavirus cure created by raving genius Leonard of Quirm.

The missing polymath is known to have written it in the corner of a painting of all the colours in a blackbird’s wing whose fragile beauty and ineffable truth is only slightly undermined by designs of a device capable of destroying mountains and melting armies absentmindedly sketched in the margins.

“I find myself lacking both painting and patience,” said Havelock Vetinari, Patrician of Ankk-Morpork. “The painting will be brought to me and anyone who is thinking of finding it and then deciding to play Mister Clever instead of immediately handing it over is invited to remember where all the mime artists have gone.”

“The city and the Disc will survive this virus,” he said. “I am aware that there is an old witch in Lancre who has allegedly had some success treating it using a tincture of ‘sukrose and akwa’ combined with a hard stare but this is the Century of the Anchovy and science and rationality will prevail. I am equally aware that there is a second witch in Lancre advising people to simply stay indoors and have a big glass of something they like on the grounds that if you’re going to be ill you might as well enjoy yourself but the less said about her and that song about the hedgehog she claims is ‘music therapy’ the better.”

Sir Terry Pratchett remains, sadly, unavailable for comment.



