Sometimes when the jackdaws are absent on more productive errands I am visited by strange characters who I pretend call themselves ‘Durac’ (a made-up name with loosest of allusions to Paul Dirac, who applied relativity theory to quantum mechanics and predicted the existence of antimatter and the positron) and ‘Slynog’ (another made-up name).
They somehow get into stories here. Durac is by himself in Dizain for Durac 7. Slynog is by himself in Politicising the Slynog and in The Slynog’s Cure, a mishmash of poems and snippets from being in France one September, which, if I ever get to writing it as I want it to be, will be a riff on something.
Durac and Slynog appear together in some poems/stories already posted to Facebook and here on Earth Tourist: Non-U Socialising, Mad Helmut’s Tea Party, and Cat and Pig among the Pigeons. And in this one:

Slynog and Durac Study On

‘I am old,’ said the Slynog, ‘and addicted to grief
which I feed on by reading the news.’

The Durac replied with a stitch in its side,
‘Your debilities always amuse

the que vivre in me, though my nebulous glee
gets dispersed by the whiff of compassion

that your sighings evince – they don’t half make me wince –
as they spread in lugubrious fashion

a comradely gloom that fairs poisons the room
and we each go into our brown studies

pretending to be what we aren’t yet, you see,
a twain of twinned old fuddy duddies.’