Alas, on this very important post I have left behind my battered old dictionary. I must make do with an online definition which is bang up to date: or track back to latin roots for a bit of fustian ageing.

The Romans had a word integritas, which meant wholeness. We’ve adopted it, and its great-grandaughter of a word in our language is prim and proper. Integrity, as defined by Chambers, refers to sticking to one’s moral code, being an upright sort.

I wonder why the very thought of that kind of integrity strikes icy dread into my heart?

It is one of my greatest vices, that I know large tracts of Monty Python scripts by rote.

It comes of playing their work, over and over again ad infinitum, like a Victorian child who has been presented with a particularly delightful clockwork musical toy, and cannot leave it idle.

I know all the Ministry’s silly walks and can do many of them. I know the difference between lion tamers and accountants; and I know how to avoid being seen. I have even mastered the skill of apprehending someone who is coming at you armed with a  banana.

My favourite Python characters, though, have to be the Pepperpots. This was the group’s affectionate name for their old women, always played in drag by Terry Jones and crew.

Their Women’s Institute battles, a parody of battle re-enactment, were peerless: after a solemn interview with a journalist explaining the background of the battle they were about to perform, they made a charge worthy of Mods and Rockers, and beat each other senseless with large handbags.

The quote which has been voicing itself in the back of my mind comes I think from Terry Jones, and I couldn’t tell you which sketch. But dressed in his pepperpot garb, he turns to one of the other Python team members and declares: “Well, Michael, I’m a Staunch.”

A Staunch is a perfect parody of integrity as it has come to be known. He or she sticks to their moral code, and is generally an upright sort.  A Staunch feels strongly about whatever it is he or she feels strongly about. With passion.

On our sceptered isle, Staunches complain at changes in the plot of the Archers and slow-clap Prime Ministers. Life wouldn’t be the same without them.

One of the most fearsome and fabulous examples of this animal in literature is the aunt of a young gentleman with a rather good valet.

Aunt Agatha is the relative of the hapless Bertie Wooster, and she knows her mind better than most.

She feels she has a divine right to interfere in the relationships of others, and simply barges through life doing just that.

Poor Bertie. His accomplished valet, Jeeves, is his only line of defence against such an extreme Staunch. He remarks forlornly: “When Aunt Agatha wants you to do a thing you do it, or else you find yourself wondering why those fellows in the olden days made such a fuss when they had trouble with the Spanish Inquisition.”

Perhaps humour is the best way to manage a Staunch. Not to their face, obviously, that would be suicidal.

But PG Wodehouse simply laughs wickedly at such interfering upstanding behaviour. He has Bertie describe Aunt Agatha in the most refreshing ways: “Aunt Agatha, who eats broken bottles and wears barbed wire next to the skin,” and , “My Aunt Agatha, who is strongly suspected of turning into a werewolf at the time of the full moon.”

If you can’t please them, lampoon them. It’s a sixth-form attitude, infantile, really. But adopting the cheeky child’s pose is like heading for a bolthole when strong opinion raises its predatory head.

No, I don’t think that is integrity at all.

But nor is taking a stand without any moral values or principles. George Bernard Shaw followed this to its natural conclusion in Androcles and The Lion. He wrote of Spintho, a hard-drinking weak roustabout in Roman times, who has become a Christian.

Spintho, along with a whole various gaggle of characters, is rounded up for his faith, and brought to the amphitheatre to be fed to the lions.

The play is a wonderful study of the different motivations humans have: those who have integrity, like the Roman Captain and the beautiful noblewoman Lavinia; those who do not, like Spintho; and those puzzling characters who seem simple, but divinely blessed.

This last is Androcles, someone of such divine simplicity that his very honour and integrity brings good around him.

Spintho spends his time boasting to anyone who will listen that he has repented and so will see heaven and eternal glory.

Martyrdom will help him side-step the vile life he has led, never ultimately accepting responsibility for the mayhem he has caused. It is a way out.

But he loses his nerve; he charges off to find the altar to a Roman god, so that he may sacrifice and recant and live to debauch another day.

Ironically for him, he runs straight into the path of a hungry lion, and is eaten anyway.

I won’t spoil the end, just in case anyone has not read or seen Shaw’s beautiful little play; but honour and integrity, sheer goodness, win the day.

Androcles has been taxing me somewhat, lately. And his honourable and dishonourable friends. Because I have both the ability to write with, and without integrity.

I work to the journalist’s ethic: 1000 words a day, every day. Soulless, really, but it’s the way I’ve been trained, and it generally works.

There are days when it is almost as if something else is hammering those keys. Sometimes it’s a funny story which must be told: sometimes it’s a theme which has been thundering around in my head waiting for resolution.

On these days, I am as simple and altruistic as Androcles.

There are other days when the words will not flow, and I have constantly to guard against writing just for needy little me. Simple as that.

There is more of Spintho in me than I would care to admit on days like that.

So: I put it to you that integrity is not a fixed commodity. That depending on the day, and the situation, and whether or not one is about to be sacrificed to the lions, one has an integritometer  in there indicating a reading for the day.

It’s as well to celebrate the wonderful days: and be on guard for the others.