He understands that his boredom is a dangerous weakness against which he must perpetually be on his guard.
Now that Douglas Carswell is Nigel's bitch, he will perpetually be picking up the political equivalent of prison soap.
The more potent duel is the one Cera always loses: the comedy duel in which he will perpetually be upstaged by the evil competitor.
So he is perpetually being asked - how do we lift the collective fatwa on our transport systems, our nightclubs, our cities?
There he is, like he's always been, perpetually on the brink of breakdown, hands grasping for nothing in particular, eyes twitching, voice abruptly fluctuating in and out of that cartoon squeal of his.
He was sent to Eton, where he was perpetually bullied.
Unlike Mortdecai, he was perpetually broke — he seems to have spent his entire adult life in debt — and struggled to support a large family, eventually abandoning both struggle and family.
He was perpetually asking himself whether he had achieved the technical goals set by his teacher Frank Bridge, with whom he had started studying at the age of 14.
Always garbed in a Hawaiian shirt, he was perpetually bewildered at events around him, ready to believe or follow anyone who pretended to know the Truth.
He was perpetually imploring Lincoln for new weapons, and, in the words of one observer, "he felt he never had enough troops, well enough trained or equipped".
He was perpetually disappointed by the British attitude to Europe, and especially impatient with Labour, but he put his case with courtesy and humour in a masterly speech in excellent English to the Labour Party conference in 1974.
