Word reaches me that there may be one or two Hooting Yard readers who may not be attending the Evening of Lugubrious Music and Lopsided Prose at Woolfson & Tay bookshop in precisely two weeks’ time. I find this hard to believe. However, in the unlikely event that there is a grain of truth in it, I suspect these benighted souls will realise the error of their ways when they discover just what they will be missing. Not just Mr Key babbling while dressed in the kind of jacket worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), but the encaped Outa_Spaceman making the world a better place through the medium of song.

And what songs! Here, as a spur to persuade anyone foolish enough not to have yet bought a ticket, is Outa_Spaceman performing his setting of The Pavilion By The Shore. I reproduce the words below, so you can all sing along:

♪ Pavilion By The Shore

There is a pavilion by the shore. I do not go there any more. I used to visit every day on my clomping horse with its rattling dray, and I’d hammer my fists upon the door of the pavilion set beside the shore, but I do not go there any more. I cannot go there any more.

I used to clomp along the lane lined by beech and larch and plane, but something went wrong in my brain and now I languish in the drain.

I languish in a drainage ditch. I’m smeared with grease and tar and pitch. I’ve lost the use of my lower limbs and at the mercy of vermin’s whims.

All sorts of vermin suck my blood as I lie sprawling in the mud, and others gnaw my skin and bones while I groan my dramatic groans.

Above me, a hot air balloon will be arriving very soon. I’ll be winched up by a length of rope, and washed with disinfectant soap.

The balloonist will sing rousing hymns to cure my withered lower limbs, and we’ll hover in the boundless sky eating a snack of lemon meringue pie.

Then I’ll be dumped back on the lane, a few tweaks putting right my brain, and then I shall return once more to the bright pavilion by the shore.

I’m sure there’s something, before I go, that you are very keen to know. The balloonist’s name – don’t be a clot! It was Tiny Enid, the heroic tot!