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I received an invitation to attend a swish sophisticated cocktail party, and decided to wear for the occasion my second-best bib and tucker.

On the evening itself, with the party in full swing, I was leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece when I was approached by a fellow guest.

“You are a grown man,” she said, “Why are you wearing a bib?”

I embarked upon a lengthy explanation of the phenomenon known as involuntary slobbering, citing certain vivid examples both from my own experience and from the historical records. I prattled for quite some time, holding my interlocutor spellbound, until one of my exemplary slobbering vignettes caused her to interrupt me.

“Spiro Agnew?” she cried, so loudly that she caught the attention of guests on the far side of the room.

“Indeed so,” I said, “And I will not qualify my assertion with that weasel-word allegedly.”

At this, she executed a startled little jump, and confessed to a terrible fear of weasels. I told her they only alarmed me when they went pop! up and down the City Road. More than once, I added, such weasel-popping had caused me to slobber involuntarily. I was pleased, momentarily, to have brought the conversation back to my chosen topic, but my new companion was now fixated upon weasels, and insisted I join her in a search-and-destroy mission in case any weasels had infiltrated the cocktail party.

“With what,” I asked, “Shall we destroy any weasels we might hunt down?”

“Well,” she said, “What is that?” and she pointed to my tucker.

“That is my second-best tucker,” I said, “It goes with the bib.”

“We can use it to smother any weasels we find!” she cried, and she took me by the hand, and led me away from the drawing room towards another part of the house where, she hinted, there might be weasels.

I never did get the chance to finish my exemplary slobbering vignette featuring the thirty-ninth vice president of the United States of America. But the weasel-frightened lady gave me her telephone number, so one evening soon I will call her, and tell her the rest of that tale, and several others, until the cows come home.

A letter plops onto the mat from Tord Grip. I wondered if this was the same Tord Grip who is something of a luminary in the world of foopball coaching, but apparently it is a different Tord Grip altogether. Anyway, here is what he has to say for himself:

Dear Mr Key, I have been a devoted reader of yours for many years. Something that has particularly struck me is your fondness for the motif of a character “at a swish sophisticated cocktail party, leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece”. You return to this again and again. Sometimes the person so leaning is a fictional character and sometimes, in first person narratives, it is you. I am not so naïve as to think that the “I” figure in such tales is actually you, and that the pieces are wholly autobiographical. I realise that the first person narrator may be a fictional or semi-fictional version of yourself. This interpretation is not simply common sense, but is borne out by Roland Clare in his introduction to the anthology By Aerostat To Hooting Yard, where he makes the point that “When Key … conducts occasional epistolary dialogues with correspondents … – almost certainly not real people – his engagement with them shades his own status with a fictional quality. His uncertain standing is compounded by the … pieces written in the first person”, and he posits a distinction between “Frank Key, author of the blog vs Mr Key, the quasi-fictional entity”. So, when you report that you were “at a swish sophisticated cocktail party, leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece”, are we to infer that this statement is factual or fictional? Or are we deliberately left on shaky ground, uncertain, bewitched, bothered, and bewildered?

Incidentally, the quotation above from Mr Clare also calls into question my own existence, as one of your correspondents. While I know in the very core of my being that I am a real person of flesh and blood – I need only bash my head against my writing-desk to confirm as much – ouch! – your readers may, like Mr Clare, think I am “almost certainly not real”. Whether or not their suspicions will be heightened or dampened by the coincidence that I share my name with one of the tiptop figures in the world of foopball coaching, I cannot say. In my part of the world, Tord Grip is not so outlandish a name that one can jump to any conclusion in the matter. I think it best to pass over my further ruminations on the question of reality, otherwise we would be here all day and in all likelihood end up with what my clinician has dubbed “crumbling of the brainpans”.

Instead, I should like to turn to the reason I am writing to you in the first place. It so happens that one of my hobbies – alongside knitting, sandpapering rough surfaces, and bird observation – is enacting short extracts from my favourite writers. To this end I have, in recent weeks, gone about wearing a little Ether Hood (Emily Dickinson), taken pictures of Jap girls in synthesis (David Bowie), sucked innumerable pebbles (Samuel Beckett), and run screaming from a Paris hotel room after casting a spell to summon the great god Pan (Aleister Crowley). Having ticked these off in my ledger, next on my list was to go to a swish sophisticated cocktail party and lean insouciantly against a mantelpiece (Frank Key).

First of all, of course, I had to obtain an invitation to such a soirée. The difficulty with this was that, like you, I have been described as a Diogenesian recluse, and I don’t get out much – oh, wait a minute. That reminds me. If you are as reclusive as Mr Cutler asserts, how is it that you are forever attending swish sophisticated cocktail parties? I have spent an inordinate amount of time pondering this conundrum. Even if we take into account that many of the insouciant leaners are explicitly fictional characters, and concede that, pace Roland Clare, you yourself are quasi-fictional, there remains the fact that there is something compelling in these scenes that convinces the reader they must, at the very least, be the result of particularly acute authorial observation. Consider the swish and sophisticated nature of the cocktail parties, the insouciance of the person leaning, the brute solidity of the mantelpiece itself. It seems unlikely that such details could be fomented entirely within your head, absent of direct and emotionally shattering experience.

I am pleased to say that the result of my agonised mulling over the matter was ultimately beneficial. If Mr Key, as a recluse, can yet summon the nerve to accept invitations to swish sophisticated cocktail parties, I said to myself, then I too can screw my courage to the sticking place and do likewise. I said this to myself repeatedly, gazing into a mirror at my strange unnatural beauty. Eventually I was ready. But still I had not received any invitations.

I dabbled with the idea of skipping to the next item on my list, to ring upon the rein of a wimpling wing in my ecstasy (Gerard Manley Hopkins), but I am a methodical sort of person and I knew I would lie awake at night remonstrating with myself until I had completed the Frank Key element of my project. I had been very careful, when drawing up my roster, to place my proposed enactments in a very specific order, based upon the Blötzmann system (Yellow Notebook, Fifth Series). Though I was keenly aware of the possibility that Blötzmann, and his system, and his notebooks, in their series, were all fictional, having been made up by you, Mr Key, I have found his guidance invaluable in several different areas of my life, not least the careful compiling of lists in very specific orders.

I thus found myself at an impasse. I could not move on until I had leaned insouciantly against a mantelpiece at a swish sophisticated cocktail party, and I could not attend a swish sophisticated cocktail party without an invitation. Or could I? Was it not possible for me simply to gatecrash such a do? Hell, yes!, as Ed Miliband would say. But first I had to find a party to gatecrash.

Much as it went against my reclusive nature, I took to stalking the streets of an evening, stopping when I came upon a building with a window alive with lights, and peering in to see if a swish sophisticated cocktail party was in progress. I had already planned how I would gain entry. Knocking at the door, I would pretend to be an emergency postman with an urgent delivery for – at which point I would counterfeit a violent coughing fit and bite on a capsule of blood tucked in my cheek. Spraying what was in reality a small amount of duck’s blood all over the hallway carpet, I would stagger into the house and collapse. While the host ran for help, I would stand up, dab at my mouth with a napkin to erase any traces of gore, comb my hair, take off my emergency postman’s jacket and stuff it behind the umbrella stand, then sashay into the main room where the party was in full swing, grab a cocktail from a tray, and make for the mantelpiece, against which I would lean insouciantly. Job done.

I don’t know if you have ever stalked the evening streets in search of a swish sophisticated cocktail party to inveigle your way into by dint of a foolproof scheme, but believe you me it is not as easy as it sounds. Perhaps I was stalking through the wrong part of town, down by the docks where the sailors all meet, eating fish heads and tails, splitting the night with the roar of their jokes, laughing and lusting till the rancid sound of the accordion bursts. The lit windows I peered into framed scenes of unimaginable depravity and debauch. Nor did I spot a mantelpiece clean enough to lean upon in my specially-hired Ferdinando Boffo dinner-suit, worn beneath the emergency postman’s jacket.

I turned down an alley towards what I hoped would be a more salubrious part of town when I became aware of footsteps following me. There was something inexplicably menacing about them (M. R. James, Sheridan Le Fanu, E. F. Benson – names absent, alas, from my list). I quickened my pace, and so did the footsteps. Determined to confront whoever – whatever – was following me, I turned around. To my horror I saw, silhouetted against the sickly moon, the lumbering walrus-moustached psychopathic serial killer Babinsky! My mind was a chaos. I had always believed him to be a purely fictional maniac dreamed up by you, Mr Key, to trouble my dreams. Yet here he was, all too real, lumbering relentlessly towards me. As he raised his blood-drenched axe above his head, preparing to strike, intermingled with my terror I felt a small measure of solace that, though it was not the enactment of a Hooting Yard scene I had planned, when I drew my last breath having been felled by Babinsky, I would, inadvertently, be recreating a common motif from the works of Mr Key. There can be no more piquant farewell to this life, be it a real life or, perhaps, perhaps, an entirely fictional one.

The other day I met a man who claimed he could eat his own head. I considered this preposterous, and said so. We were at a sophisticated cocktail party and he was leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece.

“I can prove it to you,” he said, “As a demonstration, I will eat your head, and that will show that I could eat my own.”

I thought about this for perhaps three seconds before responding.

“Your so-called proof has several distinct flaws,” I said, “First, that if you eat my head, I will be in no position to form a judgement on the success or otherwise of your antics, as I presume I will lose consciousness and die as you gnaw through my neck, thus severing those all-important nerves and arteries and whatnot that enable my brain to function. Second, your ability to eat my head has no bearing whatsoever on your claim to be able to eat your own head. It is an entirely different head.”

He took a sip of his cocktail before conceding.

“Those are both valid points. But there were but two, and you said you had several.”

“Let those two suffice for the time being,” I said.

“Very well,” he replied, “I can see that I am up against a sceptic of formidable mental acuity. You are not by any chance a Jesuit, are you?”

I assured him I was not, despite it having been a childhood ambition to be ordained into the order.

“I, too, once dreamed of becoming a Jesuit,” he said, “But alas, I lost my faith. Still, that was a long time ago, since when I suppose I learned to replace it with the more fervent belief that I can eat my own head. You will not be satisfied until you actually witness me in the act of doing so, will you?”

I nodded my agreement. He looked at me in silence, and after a pause, said “There”.

“There what?” I asked.

“I just ate my own head and regurgitated it, as a bird does with food for its young.” he said, “You must excuse my manners, for I am a terribly fast eater and tend to gobble my food. I can be quite a cause of social discomfiture in the better restaurants.”

“I witnessed neither eating nor regurgitation,” I said, “You just stood there looking at me.”

He sighed with a measure of impatience.

“I have just explained to you that I eat with regrettable speed,” he said, “And this habit has a deleterious effect on my digestive system, one consequence of which is that I cannot tolerate certain foodstuffs, including human flesh and bone and brain matter, etcetera, so I spew them up immediately.”

“You are a very foolish man. Good evening to you, sir,” I said, and I turned on my heel and wandered off across the room, away from the mantelpiece, in search of somebody else to talk to.

Later that evening, passing near the mantelpiece again, I saw the man biting the head off another party guest, a person who, I reasoned, had not had the benefits of a Jesuitical education, and thus could not counter the arguments of this foolish but persuasive fellow. There was blood on the carpet, as there so often is, even at the most sophisticated cocktail parties.

The willow warbler is a type of bird which warbles in willows. I am not a bird – obviously! – but I, too, have warbled in willows. It is a simple enough matter. What you do is locate a clump of willows, then wander into the midst of them, and start warbling. You can then describe yourself as a willow warbler, perhaps when, at a sophisticated cocktail party, leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece, you are approached by a fellow guest who asks you what you do. “I am a willow warbler”, you can say, truthfully.

Among the various definitions given for warble in the OED, the one I find particularly helpful is “To twitter, as a young bird; to make uncertain attempts at singing”. This is my kind of warbling, because, frankly, I cannot sing for toffee. But there is nothing to stop me making “uncertain attempts” at singing, in the midst of a clump of willows, whenever the mood takes me. And take me it often does!, to the point of mania.

I have a varied repertoire of songs which I warble – or sing uncertainly – on my willowy jaunts. Land Of Ladies by the Brothers Johnson, Vienna by Ultravox, Boom Bang-A-Bang by Lulu, and Nunc dimittis servum tuum by The Toofles are among my favourites. I struggle with the words – and tunes – of all of them, but that is par for the course with warbling. Occasionally I am shot at by farmers.

“You must be that fire-priestess everyone is talking about.”

This is a line from Game Of Thrones that I have been hoping to use in everyday conversation. I could, of course, just say it next time I find myself leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece at a swish cocktail party, to any woman within earshot, but even I realise how foolish that would be. No, what I need to do is to find the right milieu, one where not only can I fall naturally into conversation with a fire-priestess, but one where she is a common subject of discussion among the bien pensants. That is very unlikely to happen in my bailiwick, where I do not think I have ever met a fire-priestess. Nor have I heard anybody talking about one, though to be fair most of the people who live around here speak in barbaric incoherent grunts, if they speak at all.

Shortly after writing the above paragraph, I decided to immerse myself in some serious fire-priestess research. I took the phone off the hook, drew down the blinds, barricaded the door, and crouched in the middle of the living room in the stance Blötzmann calls “the alert chaffinch” (see the Third Notebook, Lilac Series). Concentrating hard for twenty seconds as recommended, I was then able to proceed. I put on my shoes and Tyrolean sports casual jacket, unbarricaded the door, and pranced off to the railway station, where I bought a ticket to Shoeburyness.

Using the Blötzmann method, I had ascertained that the Essex coastal town was a likely milieu to find everyone babbling about a fire-priestess and, indeed, a fire-priestess herself. I would then be able to meet with her and deploy the line from Game Of Thrones. To do so had become my dearest wish, to the point, I suppose, of mania.

Shoeburyness is notable for its proximity to the large Ministry of Defence facility at Pig’s Bay and also for its bottomless viper pit, of which I have written previously. As I disembarked from my train, I was confident that my Blötzmann-inspired hunch was correct, and I immediately pranced into the railway station canteen to commune with Shoeburynessites who, I felt sure, would have no other topic on their lips than the presence in the town of a fire-priestess. I bought a cup of tea, a sausage snack, and a slice of fruitcake, and sat down at one of the tables, cocking my ears.

To my bitter disappointment, in the time it took me to munch my sausage and fruitcake and to drain my teacup, I heard not a single mention of a fire-priestess. Ukip, badgers, foopball, Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, the weather – these seemed to be the hot topics in Shoeburyness that day. I crashed out of the door and went prancing through the streets, down to the beach. Nobody I passed had a word to say about a fire-priestess.

I wondered if perhaps I might draw her to me by setting fire to a waste bin. I found one, overflowing with paper and cardboard and seaside detritus, and ignited it with my lighter. As I hoped, a woman came rushing towards me. She was dressed in the uniform of a Shoeburyness Seaside Community Support Patrol Officer, but I knew, deep down in my gut, that it was merely a disguise. I opened my mouth, about to speak the magical words, but before I could do so she unleashed a Tazer and zapped me, deep down in my gut.

As I lay writhing on the ground, panting and frazzled, she doused the flames in the waste bin. But here is the curious thing. She did so by making the tiniest gesture, a significant sweeping movement of her hand through the air, so quick it was virtually imperceptible. Only a fire-priestess could do that!, I thought, before losing consciousness.

When I came to, I discovered I had been bundled into the freight van of a train, and it was just pulling out of Shoeburyness station. Pinned to my Tyrolean sports casual jacket was a civic proclamation banning me from ever setting foot in the town again. I staggered to my feet, and peered out of the train window, and there on the platform I saw, waving at me, her flaming red Pre-Raphaelite tresses blowing in the breeze, her eyes pools of fathomless inky-black witchery, the Shoeburyness Seaside Community Support Patrol Officer. Only I knew her for what she truly was. But as I gazed, the train gathered speed, and soon she was but a speck in the distance, and then she was gone.