'Twas a fairly prosaic Tuesday morning for me: after leafing through a few bits of snail mail (among which I found nothing more interesting than a cheque from Snossinger's for eighty-two thousand pounds and an invitation to the Duchess of Grand Fenwyck's slumber party), I took a bite or two of the scrumptious kickshaw Jeeves had whipped up, read a passage from my prized 1486 incunabulum The Shockingly Lurid Tale of th' Queen of East Pond, and then blazed up a pipeful of Old Toby and leaned back in my favorite chair to contemplate the various zeitgebers of my life: you know, the everyday environmental cues that help me to regulate my biological clock, such as the mating habits of the Gunderian Dappled Yak, or the rhythmic patterns tapped out Morse Code-like on Surmberry leaves by the hook-clawed feet of the Seven-Footed Septocanth, which makes its home among the snow-lashed fjords of Jarl--and to whose care (or so it is whispered, by the farsighted monks of the Zokov Islands) the custodianship of the world shall one day be delivered, when errant humankind, fatally obsessed with cheeseburgers and high fructose corn syrup, has at last failed in its charge.

The old man began to smile as he strolled along the Potomac; the cherry trees in bloom were his zeitgeber for the onset of spring, which meant it was finally time for him to post the incunabulum he had retrieved from a box of kickshaws he came across at the flea market, and even if snail mail parcel post took a while, it was nothing compared to the wait of several centuries which had been endured by its recipient while trying to recover the long-lost volume.

Having stayed up for nearly twenty hours straight, James helped himself to réchauffé bisque and some oysters with other weird ten-dollar-name kickshaws to make up for having to ignore such subtle zeitgebers of sleeptime as the pitch-black sky or spine-jolting blaring of neighbours' kids Rammstein - all for the sake of some blasted '1495 Dante incunabulum', since our precious Janet hated scans and faxes and would rather cope with snail mail ('why would I want something I can't even touch, Jammy?');  but of course, she had had no time to wait for it herself ('Jam, and who will tell Amanda what to wear to Roche's party? Last time I left her to her own devices, you wouldn't believe the hairdo she got.....) while she certainly had had some for Chardonnay and flirting with pampered, sleek, rich boys, who drove Continental GTs and spoke French with you even if you couldn't tell d'or from d'ores.

 'Twas  said, in the incunabulum of 1460: Life Cycles of Ye Flora and Fauna, that: "Ye zietgeiber of ye mollusc known as "ye snail" is  verily ye onset of Yuletide, when ye mollusc in question is overcome by an urge to travel far and wide, delivering mailbags containing kickshaws of sweetmeats or jewellery to all ye dwellings in ye land"; thus giving rise to the term "snail mail", for  which we all   patiently wait each day.

The snail mail I receive from my mother, written on her yellowed parchment so it may as well be an incunabulum, always serves as a zeitgeber for the seasonal, and subsequently my dietary, shift as it arrives every three months and contains recipes exhibiting the current produce: kickshaws with curry, savory soups with cinnamon, appetizers with apples.