In a Bog

In a bog, we find Blodgett. We steal upon him when he does not expect us. He is floundering in the bog, a clumsy giant. One of us says, “Blodgett, you have mud in your beard”. Blodgett fains not to hear. He puffs and grunts. As he splutters, bits of dried mud fall out of his beard. “How long have you been in that bog, Blodgett?” we ask, in unison. Now Blodgett scowls. His spectacles are mysteriously agleam, in spite of the muck in which he wallows. He does not reply. With great groans, he hoists himself almost to his feet, before falling back into the bog with a mighty splash. Now there is some mud on his spectacles too. “Blodgett, Blodgett, there is mud on your spectacles,” we sing, to a little tune we have devised for such an occasion. This causes Blodgett to growl. He sounds like a hog. We toss him one end of a rope. Desmond ties the other end of the rope to the trunk of a nearby sycamore. “Blodgett, pull yourself out of the bog using the rope!” we cry. None of us can remember the rest of our tune. Blodgett's hat has fallen off his head. He tries to wipe the mud off his spectacles with a fat finger, but only makes a smudge. Clouds scud across the sky. They are black and bring rain. Poor Blodgett flops around in the bog. He does not use our rope, for he does not know we are there. No matter how loud we shout his name, he cannot hear us. Even if his spectacles were not smudged, he could not see us. We are always here at the edge of the bog, through days and nights in every season of the year. But we are tiny children, and we are ghosts.

Cattle Struck by Lightning

At a Hop

After clambering out of the bog, Blodgett went to a hop. It was free of ghosts. Blodgett danced a hoocha with a bewitching floozie. She literally bewitched him, using her turquoise earring magnets. For the next three weeks, Blodgett was under her spell. She took him to the harbour and put him on a boat. It was a steam packet. They went on a voyage north, until they encountered pack ice. The bewitching floozie was skilled in the mariner's arts, but even she pooh-poohed pack ice. They turned back and sailed for home and the hop. Blodgett in his entrancement had been commanded to keep the ship's log, and as they came into harbour the floozie snatched it from his hands and with a twist of one turquoise earring magnet she released him from her spell. They walked arm in arm from the harbour to the hop and danced the night away. Blodgett remembered nothing. He was astonished, years later, passing through the town near the bog, to find in a chandlery bargain bin the ship's log, in his distinctive curlicued handwriting. He bought it and took it home and put it on his mantelpiece, where gathering dust was a fading snapshot of the floozie, in her cloche hat and turquoise earrings.

Two Monks

Alfred Wesley Wishart's phrase “two monks took the blood of a duck”, which appears above in today's quotation, was appropriated by the poet Dennis Beerpint as the title of a lengthy, as-yet-unpublished work. It may be that he is still writing it, but our regular Beerpint-watcher, Dan Sprawl, is currently in hospital with a case of jangling cav and pag, so news is limited.

What we do know is that the prose-poem compares the image of monks draining blood from a duck with the concept of being “washed in the blood of the lamb”. Here is an extract:

Then Brother Fabrizius strangled another teal. “Hand me that retort, Brother Arpad, so that I may decant into it this teal's gore.” Brother Arpad reached for the retort and in so doing smashed an alembic. There was a sound of bells. The monks were called to compline. For each canonical hour they allocated a duck to be slaughtered for its blood. At compline, a teal. At matins, a merganser. At prime, a pintail. At tierce, a shoveler. At sext, a wigeon. At nones, a smew. And at vespers, a bufflehead. Out in the fields, sweet little lambs gambolled and frolicked. They would not frolic for long, for soon, in the monastery, it would be bathtime.

Orrery Sleuth

On Monday, in the item entitled Fifty Years Ago, we mentioned Dorothy Sleet's fictional detective Rex Shroud, Orrery Sleuth. Sadly, it has come to our attention that not a single one of these tremendously exciting novels is still in print. This is all the more puzzling when one learns that the Broadway show based on the books is breaking box office records.

The plot of Orrery Sleuth! : The Musical cobbles together incidents from the first three novels with certain episodes from Dorothy Sleet's life. Like Agatha Christie, she once disappeared for a few weeks and was found in a seaside boarding-house. Like Adolf Hitler, she took seven sugars in her tea. Like the Wild Boy of Aveyron, she shrieked when her potatoes were taken away. Like James Joyce, she hid underneath tables during thunderstorms. Like William Ewart Gladstone, she adduced from the works of Homer that all Ancient Greeks were colour blind. Like Pope Pius XII, she gave lectures on gas central heating. Like Hedy Lamarr, she made a decisive scientific contribution that helped to win the Second World War. Like Alfred Hitchcock, she was frightened of eggs.

It is this last point that explains, perhaps, the scene in Act Two of the musical, where Rex Shroud, the Orrery Sleuth, finds himself trapped in a little shed, completely surrounded by hens. The menacing atmosphere is heightened by the music, a slow, brooding theme on woodwinds, accompanied by the chorus delivering a dirge about feathers. Brilliantly, the scene segues into a tap-dancing extravaganza and the show's hit number I Am An Orrery Sleuth Encircled By Hens, which is of course a nod to chapter sixteen of Antarctic Death Paste, the second novel in the series.

Tickets for the show are hard to get, and change hands for ridiculous prices on the OrrerySleuthBay website.

Animal rights activists should note that none of the hens which appear in the musical is a real bird. Some of them are electronic robots, some are made of plasticine, and the ones nearest the front of the stage are constructs of sponge and wire and string.

I Had Too Much to Dream Last Night

I had too much to dream last night, and for once I didn't dream about my weak and not good Bomba. I dreamed about an electric prune, and it looked like this:

It was shouting “The Kol Nidre! The Kol Nidre!”, whatever that might mean, and then it was joined by two more prunes, equally electrified:

I was somehow aware that I was in the middle of a dream, and I was desperate to wake up. I had a feeling of terror that these prunes would begin to celebrate a Mass, not necessarily a Black Mass but perhaps something worse, a Mass in F Minor. I was sure it would be portentous and horrifying, but I was powerless to stop it. I think I may have been chewing my pillow and beating my puny fists on the mattress. Suddenly yet another electric prune came shimmering into view:

There was a heavy, rumbling sound, redolent of überprog. The phrase “release of an oath” hammered through my brain, over and over again. The dream was becoming a nightmare. I yearned for some kind of respite. I sensed that a fifth prune, as electric as the others, would push forward to haunt me. It did, and there they all were, lined up in a row:

Time seemed to go into reverse. That hideous noise became delightful, chirpy, sweetly innocent yet somehow a little bonkers. It was a bit like pop music, but not quite. Now all became clear. Despite my weak and not good Bomba, I was as one with the children of rain, the children of sand. I woke up to a sparkling morning, my soul refreshed, my Bomba in fine fettle.

Fifty Years Ago

Hard to credit, but it was exactly fifty years ago today that Dobson, the out-of-print pamphleteer, made his one and only appearance on the radio. He was booked to appear on the then popular show Bad Gas And Forts, a sort of uncategorisable hour of talk, static and field recordings hosted by an anonymous spook known only as The Gravel-Voiced Ghoul.

Dobson's participation was the result of a long campaign by Marigold Chew, who spent months standing outside the producer's office building, holding a flag and haranguing passers-by to sign a petition. The producer had sworn an oath that Dobson would never appear on the show, apparently because of some otherwise forgotten incident involving a rowing boat and a flock of bitterns. Marigold Chew was eventually able to prove that the oath contravened the ancient law of civil and pursuivant debaling, and it was struck down by magisterium bossa nova in Chancery.

The show was broadcast live, and no recording was made. However, by pasting together the shreds of a hastily-scribbled transcription, it is possible to get some idea of what took place. The Ghoul's first guest was an elderly writer who had defected from the Soviet Union. In the immediate post-revolutionary period, he had written a series of heart-warming tales about a peasant family under the title Little Yürt On The Tundra. With the suppression of the kulaks, and under pressure from the Comintern, he rewrote these works as Little Foundry On The Collective Farm. If the transcript is reliable, the remarks he made were punctuated by loud hammering noises.

After about ten minutes, the Gravel-Voiced Ghoul introduced Dobson. Asked to continue the theme of cloying family-centred story-telling, the pamphleteer embarked on a lengthy anecdote about the books his ma read to him as a child. Here, as far as can be pieced together, is what he said:

“My ma was a huge fan of detective fiction, so my bedtime stories tended to be whatever she was reading at the time. One of her favourites was Dorothy Sleet, who wrote a series of whodunits featuring Rex Shroud, Orrery Sleuth. Shroud was a sleuth all of whose cases involved an orrery at some point in the story. What is that hammering noise? Sleet created one of the classic detectives, I think. He may not be quite on a par with M P Shiel's Prince Zaleski, but she put a lot of thought into giving the Orrery Sleuth all sorts of idiosyncrasies to make him a memorable and fully-rounded character, not just a solver of puzzles. He has a false lung, too many teeth, and is a daily practitioner of Baxterism. His lantern is ruby red. At moments of high desperation, he will invariably fiddle about with a little tin of talcum powder. He keeps blotting paper in his pocket and that hammering is really getting on my nerves. Perhaps the best story Dorothy Sleet ever wrote was The Orrery Sleuth And The Pod People From The Weird Parallel World Out Of Time And Space. You think you're reading science fiction, but that's just narrative pyrotechnics. It is, I think, both valiant and boisterous, as the best prose always tries to be. She was a woman of baleful countenance, Dorothy Sleet, and kept many tortoises in her seaside bungalow. She married four times, and each of her husbands vanished unaccountably. The first three simply vapourised in the kitchen while making omelettes, and the fourth was last seen in Ireland, in the vicinity of the Wobbling Virgin of Ballinspittle.”

At this point the hammering noises drowned out Dobson. By the time they stopped, the show had come to an end, and listeners were treated to a concert by Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra. Dobson never received a fee for his appearance. Some years later, he and the Gravel-Voiced Ghoul passed each other in the street. They did not acknowledge each other.

Tanis Diena

Here is what to do. Get a pig's head and place it on top of a stone. This will protect you from thunder and lightning. When you've done that, go to your nearest pig pen. Leaning on the fence, sing songs in celebration of the fertility of pigs. If you do not know any such songs, make one up. After lunch, bury the rest of the pig whose head is atop the stone, except for its feet. You will probably have eaten the head and the feet for lunch, with or without a garnish. Make sure you refrain from needlework all day, and don't drink when you are at home. Keep an eye on the weather. If it is foggy, start gathering sandbags, for soon there will be floods. At all times bear in mind that you are in Ancient Latvia and that today is Tanis Diena, the sacred pig holiday.

A Note on Bags

Yesterday, in the piece dealing with Dobson's abortive soup encyclopaedia, we mentioned in passing the Old Testament Book of Haggai. This brief text is a favourite of mine. It mentions pottage, of course, which is always a good thing, but also includes the phrase “he that earneth wages earneth wages to put it into a bag with holes”(1:6).

I have always felt a pang of sympathy for that man, whoever he may be. He is the only person in the Bible who carries a bag with holes, a bag so unlike the ones mentioned in Luke 12:33, “bags which wax not old… where no thief approacheth, neither moth corrupteth”. Clearly the Haggai man has allowed moths to corrupt his bag, and that is why it has holes in it.

I can't help wondering if he is a little simple, this man, to be putting his wages into a moth-eaten bag. He is a prototype of the Holy Innocent or the Holy Fool, perhaps, that mythic figure which had such resonance in Tsarist Russia, among other times and places. Rasputin certainly exploited the idea for all it was worth, and although there is no reliable account of him roaming the corridors of the Winter Palace carrying a bag with holes, I like to think he did. At the end, of course, his assassins had such trouble doing him to death that they shot him at least three times, so it is possible that any bag he had with him at the time would have had a hole or holes caused by gunfire, even if it had escaped corruption by moths.

To my knowledge, no one has yet pursued a close study of moth infestations in the Tsarist palaces, but if someone with the requisite scholarly background were to do so, we may learn something of importance. I am not sure whether the moths lying in wait to feed on Rasputin's bag would have been Alder moths, or Antler, Autumnal, Bee, Black Mountain, Black V, Black-veined, Broom, Cabbage, Crimson-speckled, Cynthia, December, Dew, Drinker, Ear, Early, Emperor, Fisher's Estuarine, Fox, Garden Pebble, Ghost, Goat, Great Peacock, Gypsy, Heart, Hornet, Leopard, Lobster, March, Meal, Mouse, Muslin, Netted Mountain, Ni, Northern Winter, November, Orache, Orange, Pale November, Peppered, Puss, Spanish Moon, Swallow-tailed, Sweet Gale, Turnip, Wax, White Satin, or Winter moths, and I would like a top lepidopterist with some knowledge of the fall of the Romanovs to tell me.

Readers should note that “the bag of deceitful weights” is not mentioned in Haggai, but can be found in Micah 6:11. It would not surprise me to learn that Rasputin had such a bag, too, given that he was a deceitful monk as well as the “mad monk” of legend. His bag of deceitful weights and bag with holes may have been one and the same, of course, a possibility which makes the brain reel. This is the kind of historical conundrum that Dobson ought to have written a pamphlet about, but never did. If he had, we might be a little further away from bag quandary, and a little closer to bag truth.

“Bag truth” sounds like a Yoko Ono escapade, so the still, small voice of common sense whispers in my ear, “be silent now, be silent”.

Soup Committee

Dobson rarely sought collaborators in his pamphleteering work, preferring to plough his furrow alone. Occasionally, however, his schemes were so ambitious that it was necessary to call in help. One such plan led to the formation of what became known as the Soup Committee.

Dobson woke up one wintry morning with an idea in his head. This was not uncommon, but usually his ideas could be - and were - dashed off in a brief pamphlet. Not so the gigantic multi-volume work he pictured in his mind, a compendium of every known soup recipe ever conceived, throughout human history, from the dawn of time to today's date, across all cultures and civilisations. Even Dobson realised that he could not accomplish so mighty a project single-handed, so he asked Marigold Chew to draw up a list of likely contributors. The Soup Committee was her idea. Reasoning that if she invited people to take part in a Dobson plan they would probably decline, and thus shatter the pamphleteer's already shattered nerves, she used her usual hardline tactics. The letter she sent out to over eight hundred unsuspecting souls is preserved in the Dobson Archive.

Dear Soup Person, it read, This is to inform you that you have been empanelled on to the Soup Committee. Your empanelment is effective from today's date and remains in force until such time as you die. The full implications of your membership of the Committee will follow by separate post, but you had better start gathering soup recipes right now. Yours decisively, Marigold Chew, pp Dobson.

The pamphleteer himself decided to begin by garnering soup recipes from the Old and New Testaments, and set about rereading his Bible with pencil and notepad in hand. He was distraught, at the end of this exercise, to discover that the word “soup” appears nowhere in the Authorised Version, or King James Bible, which was the edition he swore by. He went back to the beginning and realised that “pottage” was possibly a synonym for “soup”, although it might also mean what we know as “stew”. Undeterred, Dobson was able to fill a couple of pages of his notepad.

In Genesis 25, for example, we have, 29 And Jacob sod pottage: and Esau came from the field, and he was faint, 30 And Esau said to Jacob, Feed me, I pray thee, with that same red pottage; for I am faint: therefore was his name called Edom, and 34 Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentiles; and he did eat and drink, and rose up, and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright. This is elsewhere translated as And Esau sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, of course, a resounding phrase we would all do well to remember.

Moving on to the second book of Kings, chapter four, after having soup for lunch, Dobson read 38 And Elisha came again to Gilgal: and there was a dearth in the land; and the sons of the prophets were sitting before him: and he said unto his servant, Set on the great pot, and seethe pottage for the sons of the prophets, 39 And one went out into the field to gather herbs, and found a wild vine, and gathered thereof wild gourds his lap full, and came and shred them into the pot of pottage: for they knew them not, and finally 40 So they poured out for the men to eat. And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.

Towards the end of the Old Testament, Dobson found one last mention of soup, or stew, in Haggai 2: 12 If one bear holy flesh in the skirt of his garment, and with his skirt do touch bread, or pottage, or wine, or oil, or any meat, shall it be holy? And the priests answered and said, No.

Seven verses, but presumably only three different soups, the most interesting to Dobson being the one in Kings which has “death in the pot”. What was this poisonous potion? We know that Dobson was a vain, even arrogant pamphleteer, but he did have some small shred of humility. He recognised that if his great work on soup was to be definitive, every single recipe would have to be authorised by an expert. Marigold Chew sent a second letter to the members of the Committee.

Dear Empanelled Soup Committee Person, she wrote, As a matter of urgency, further detail is required on the wild gourds which were shredded into the pottage mentioned in 2 Kings 4:39, as well as the ingredients already in the pot, which, as you know, contained death. Send your reply by courier. Yours tenaciously, Marigold Chew, pp Dobson.

Not a single one of the recipients ever replied. Dobson himself soon lost interest in soup recipes, filed his notes away, and embarked that very same winter on a series of pamphlets about sodium, postage stamps, the manufacture of church bells, loosely-fitting cardigans, gutta percha price fluctuations and Plovdiv. One by one, over the years, the Soup Committee members died out. It is thought that only three of them are still alive, one in Bastwick, one in Cleves, and one, now 104 years old, fit as a fiddle, plying a ferry across an inlet at an unidentified seaside resort battered by gales, battered by storms, battered by gales, battered.

Critically Important Information, in Diagrams

Becoming Unbecoming

To become unbecoming, you must learn what is meet - which is moot - and then go against it. Get a book of etiquette. Where it says do, don't, and where it says don't, do. When you can do or don't with practised ease your conduct will be unbecoming. To become becoming again, simply undo the don'ts and do's. By the by, why what is meet is moot is because conventions vary. And remember your catechismus:

Q - What do I not give for convention?

A - A jot

Swammerdam

Today is the 368th birthday of Jan Swammerdam, the Dutch scientist and pioneer of the microscope. His Bible of Nature, published on the centenary of his birth, contains hundreds of his drawings, mostly of insects. For all the painstaking observation, which today we may see as cold and unemotional, Swammerdam had a highly wrought mystical attitude to nature, and in 1875 he abandoned science for a life of religious contemplation. His book on the mayfly is filled with spiritual verses and musings, as well as his magnificent drawings, like this one.

While finding out more about Swammerdam, I chanced upon the marvellous Origins Of Modernity online exhibition, wherein will be found many old book illustrations on topics including alchemy & chemistry, cosmology & astronomy, literature, mathematics, natural history, natural philosophy, philosophy, physiology & medicine, political philosophy, theology & witchcraft, and travel literature.

The picture below is a detail from Thomas Burnet's Telluris theoria sacra. The theory of the earth : Containing an account of the original of the earth, and of all the general changes which it hath already undergone, or is to undergo, till the consummation of all things. The two first books concerning the deluge, and concerning paradise, published in 1684.

Majestic Prose in Dustbin

This item was intended to have a different title. Unfortunately, the only beneficiary of my titanic efforts is the dustbin, or more accurately the wastepaper bin. Now that I have stopped sobbing, allow me to explain.

Many years ago I planned to write a story about a fictional insurance convention. This tedious premise was an excuse to bring together the three most interesting insurance executives of the last century - the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924, Workers' Accident Insurance Institute) , the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954, Ives & Myrick), and the poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955, Hartford Accident & Indemnity). It's conceivable that the three could have met at some godforsaken conference hall, pearls among swine, shortly before the first world war. I never got round to writing the story, in any case, possibly because insurance is so life-sapping a topic, and possibly through sheer idleness.

This morning I recalled the idea when listening to Ives' second string quartet, the one where “four men meet, quarrel, are reconciled, then stride up a mountainside to view the stars twinkling in the boundless firmament”. I thought it might be an idea to ditch insurance, writer, composer and poet, but to retain the idea of a group of characters thrown unexpectedly together. And what characters could be better than Dobson and Blodgett and Mrs Gubbins and Aloysius Nestingbird and Matilda Spamclot and Tiny Enid and Jim Pond and Lars Talc and Ugo and Ugo's ma and Ulf and Lothar Preen and Istvan and Zoltan and Richard Milhous Nixon and Marigold Chew and Dennis Beerpint and Gervase Beerpint and Yoko Ono and the Grunty Man and Chris De Burhg and all the other characters teeming through these pages, all gathered to celebrate the birthday of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger?

So I wrote: It was time to conquer a new, dustier planet but I tore that up and wrote The rainsoaked hens in the rainsoaked farmyard but I scribbled that out and wrote Take three tins of Dr Birdlip's Patent Goo and a sack of potatoes and whatever I wrote petered out, and it was still morning, it was still light, or at least grey and overcast, so I was unable to stride up a mountainside to view the stars twinkling in the boundless firmament, and I sat and drank much tea, much, much tea, and then I wrote this instead.

Political Animals

It is always worth keeping an eye on Hansard, the official record of parliamentary debates. Every so often, among all the blather, there is a spot of illumination. Here, for example, is an exchange from yesterday:

Mr. John Randall (Uxbridge) (Con): The Minister claimed that the Labour Government have been good for birds. What are their plans for cormorants?

Mr. Bradshaw: Cormorants are one of the species that have done extremely well in the past twenty years… even if the maximum number of licences were issued, the cormorant population would still be far higher than it was under the Tories.

The idea that enfranchised cormorants and other birds would be natural Labour voters reminds me of a long-ago comment in the house journal of countryside bloodlust, The Field: “If foxes could hear all sides in the debate on hunting, I think they would vote solidly for its continuance.” A similar sentiment was expressed in a letter to the Sussex Express & County Herald: “I am convinced that if a fox could vote, he would vote Conservative.”

Tiny Enid Extinguishes a Volcano

One windy September morning, Tiny Enid read in her daily newspaper that a big volcano might be about to erupt. Vulcanology was not her strong point, but some of the comments quoted in the story made her sit up with a start. A number of scientists from organisations with befuddling acronyms said things like: “It looks like it will erupt soon,” and “We have recorded volcanic activity”. Tiny Enid scoured the paper to see if there were any other signs or portents, such as unusual locust-swarm formations, but there were none. Yet.

Her mind was made up. She packed a bag with pitons, hammers, extra socks, and a flask of her secret elixir. She left instructions for the milk delivery person and the topiarist, and called a taxi. The taxi took her from her house to the railway station, where she boarded a train to the port, from where a small boat rounded the coastline to that part of the land where there was an airfield. Tiny Enid had allowed her pilot's licence to expire, so she paid a man with a decisive moustache and a flying cap to take the controls of the little two-seater Pangloss diesel plane, and flew into the wild blue yonder with gritted teeth and blazing eyes. Tiny Enid never wore goggles when flying. She thought them a sign of moral dereliction.

Tiny Enid never let a day pass without reading a few pages of The Imitation Of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Indeed, she kept a ragged copy of this devotional classic in her bag at all times. It is true that the Augustinian monk has nothing to say on the subject of flying goggles, given that he was writing in the 1420s, and it is hard for us to comprehend how Tiny Enid arrived at her interpretation. It is hard, and also unwise, for no less than a dozen harmless souls have gone crackers trying to correlate the contents of Tiny Enid's brain. They languish now in places of shuddery languishment, although it is to Tiny Enid's credit that she pays for their keep, including porridge for breakfast and a nurse who mops their brows. Thomas à Kempis suggests (Chapter 50) that “the desolate man should place himself in God's hands”, and Tiny Enid agrees, but she has too a sense of her responsibility. Although these twelve men tried to make sense of her cerebral fumes and vapours uninvited, that does not stop her doing what she can for them.

When the Pangloss landed at the foot of the volcano, Tiny Enid clambered out. She put on her extra socks and ascended the volcano using her pitons and hammers. When she reached the summit, she found a pair of perilous vents in which molten magma was bubbling and boiling, ready to erupt, just like the scientists had said. She also saw a great deal of tephra, in the form of rocks and cinders, ashes and dust, as if there had already been a mini-eruption. Pausing only to scan the sky for birds, Tiny Enid extinguished the volcano using a technique she had read about in the Reader's Digest. Then she started on the long journey home, whistling, and only a little muddy.

Tetrahedron News

So who are they, these people who live on the tetrahedron-earth millions of years hence? (See below, 8th February). I asked Glyn Webster to tell me. He says:

“You don't need me to tell you what sort of people will live on the tetrahedron! First, M C Escher himself made a woodcut of the tetrahedral world of the future, Tetrahedral Planetoid, 1954. According to the Chrysler Museum of Art, ”in this print Escher imagined a small planet in the shape of a tetrahedron, or pyramid. Two of the four surfaces are visible and show houses, gardens, trees, roads, and even people.“ Escher etched in immense detail, so if you were to get close enough to Tetrahedral Planetoid with a magnifying glass you should be able to see just the sort of people who will live on the tetrahedron. There's not enough detail in this reproduction for me to see the people too closely, but it is safe to assume they are able to survive their straitened circumstances by virtue of their very strong Bomba.

“Next, from Carlos A Furuti's excellent Cartographical Map Projections pages I read that the tetrahedral world of the future will be a very relaxed world for cartographers: ”Most cartographic problems would disappear if the Earth were a polyhedron“, says Furuti, and Tetrahedral ”globes“ are very easy to manufacture. Furuti provides simple paper models that can be printed and given to tots to cut out and fold up on rainy days.”

So now we know. Nothing there about rocket booster backpacks, though, which I had hoped would have appeared by about 1999. I'm still waiting.

About Enchatons

In today's lecture we shall attend to both enchatons and enchaton-stubs, in their quiddity and morass. Floripad wrote that “in the collapsing is the appentiture”, and those words, hidden away in a footnote, yet ring down the ages. I gasp, you gasp, he, she or it gasps. Much gasping and not a little panting. We gasp, you plural gasp, they gasp. That is what happens when we try to extricate Floripad from the entangled porcupine of the past, and it is fair to say that it must be so when we take account of the duty imposed upon us by our collegiate panjandrums to sequester what is mad from what is made, that which is made in the brain or with the counted limbs.

Consider for a moment a wild hog. Irksome as it can be to propel one's mind towards the twinkling stars of the incumbency of henmemet beings, it must be done with grace and an attunement to planetary winds. Floripad himself says, in Conditions With Slots, “being as grit, doing as a pearl”, and it is well to remember that in the teeth of reverie.

Let us recollect the technique. The bath of tin and fumigatory salts, the enshadowing of the tapped, and the experimental conquest of untenable tensors, three zinc, three tungsten, five copper, each tensor placed over a retort, and the fires belching grandly. Herein the daring of monsters. Do not forget the bitumen.

As people have made necklaces from bones, teeth, and feathers, so today we must devise new forms in our underground laboratories. Floripad himself speaks of “the mortgage of snow blindness”. Tarleton had booster packs. Science does not rest.

Enchatons of the rubber basin, doused in caustic soda, and then burned. In their burning, unexpected petrochemical advowsons entrained within a cuddy. The helmet and the patent on the prong, made to measure and in the sky. You may recall the shock that greeted proof copies of Temeraire: The Propulsion, that flimsy pamphlet so widely read by movers and shakers. In hock to those who gather cowslips, the resonance of tumbling hobbyhorses, etched on a pane, unjoined dots, fantastic spoor of Mazeppa, De Looth and Bannion, to name but three.

From sand comes not-sand, from the planet-metal affinities the lore of the barb and the barbel. West or east, hands across some mental ocean tied in time and tucked in folds that mimic the integuments of a grosser dispensation. That is what we work for. That is why we work. That is why, one by one, we see each pinprick star brilliant in the ether, our horses unsaddled, our buckles valiant, our dust no longer dust. Goodnight.

Wedd Star

Our quote of the day last Saturday (5th February) was from Cosmic Friends by Jimmy Goddard, a splendid little twelve-page pamphlet I acquired many years ago. The person who gave it to me assured me that it was a work of genius, and I agree. Goddard explains how his teenage interest in communication with extraterrestrial beings was nurtured when he joined the STAR Fellowship, an organisation founded by Tony Wedd of Chiddingstone in Kent. Apparently, Wedd had received a greeting from space people, who “communicated” the words Yava Hoosita! to him. Goddard later deciphered the letters YH, upside down, in the static of a video recording: “I could never with certainty say it was not a coincidental interference pattern, but it did seem like a final seal of approval for my ideas on thought communication”.

Elsewhere in this magnificent pamphlet, Goddard explains his discovery that he is “virtually living on half a brain”, how he suspects that a couple on a package holiday in Holland may have been space people because they spoke in “an accent my parents could not place” and did not carry British passports, and how his wife Doris sees, one night, “two starlike objects wheeling and turning about in a very birdlike motion”. Doris thinks they're birds, but her husband has other ideas about this “sighting”.

These days, Jimmy Goddard has a superb suite (if that's the word) of webpages, which are well worth a visit. The late lamented Tony Wedd has his own nook therein, where you can find out more about the STAR Fellowship. Yava Hoosita!

Pontiff!

Max Décharné writes from Berlin to note that the Daily Mail is reviving the high standard of tabloid newspaper headlines. On Monday I quoted their Gasping Pope Minutes From Death. “I wish I had a framed copy of the front page on my wall,” writes Max, “It reminds me of those early eighties headlines which got used as punk song titles by the likes of The Exploited. City Baby Attacked By Rats is one I remember well.” To which, of course, should be added the immortal Must We Fling This Filth At Our Pop Kids?

Max goes on to remind us of the winning ways of an earlier pontiff, Eugenio Pacelli, alias Pius XII. “I recommend John Cornwell's fascinating Hitler's Pope - The Secret History of Pius XII. Signor Pacelli seems to have been a humble chap. He ordered that anyone in the clergy who was on the other end of the telephone to him should kneel throughout the conversation, and the gardeners in his private garden were instructed to hide in the bushes as he went past, so he wouldn't have to look at them. Having, of course, sworn an oath of poverty, he drove around in a huge limousine with no chairs in the back, just a large throne. He also seems to have regarded himself as an expert on all manner of subjects. Here is Cornwell:

“If he showed signs of grandiosity it was in his tendency to expatiate on an ever expanding range of topics. So numerous and so beyond his competence were these specialised talks, or ‘allocutions’, that the practice seemed symptomatic of ripening delusions of omniscience. He lectured visiting groups on subjects such as dentistry, gymnastics, gynaecology, aeronautics, cinematography, psychology, psychiatry, agriculture, plastic surgery, and the art of newscasting. A visitor to his study once remarked on the piles of fat manuals around his desk; Pacelli responded that he was preparing a talk on gas central heating. When T S Eliot, arguably the leading English-language poet and literary critic of his day, came to the Vatican for a private audience in 1948, Pacelli delivered him a lecture on literature.”

All of which makes me realise that the late Anthony Burgess would have made an absolutely terrific Pope.

That Box

Another letter arrives, this one from Tim Thurn.

“Yesterday you posted a picture of Joanna Southcott's box without accompanying comment. Why?”

My lips, like the box, are sealed.

Total Eclipse

One day, after a huge breakfast, Ignapfando had a total eclipse of the heart, just like that songstress whose name escapes me. He did not look as if it was happening. Indeed to the untrained eye Ignapfando looked as if he was asleep, rather than in the throes of convulsive emotional turmoil accompanied by strident rock music. Adding to the disjuncture was the fact that Ignapfando resembled Clement Attlee, down to the finicky moustache and an inadvisable line in hats. Nevertheless, when he went to his priest for confession the following Sunday, there could be no doubt about the upheavals of his passion.

“Bless me father for I have sinned,” he pleaded as he knelt facing the grille behind which the priest sat clutching his rosary beads and wishing he was Montgomery Clift in I Confess. “I have had a total eclipse of the heart.”

“Let me stop you there, my child,” murmured the priest, “I have heard enough. Say three Our Fathers, four Hail Marys, and one An Evil Cradling by Brian Keenan. Now get you gone.”

Ignapfando left the confessional. Soon afterwards, so did the priest, his own heart not so much in total eclipse as heavy with the weight of the fat black sins he had had to listen to all morning. Terrible, terrible sins, of impiety and vainglory and greed, of abandonment and lust, of twiddly Moog synthesiser solos, rapine, pillage and wrack. He imagined each sin as a lump of lead, and he stuffed them all into a sack. It was a burlap sack, tied up with a knot, and he hoisted it onto his back. His back was broad, and his shoulders were strong, and he carried the sack through all the day long, the sack of sins as black as his heart, and at nightfall he tossed it onto a cart. He reined up his horse in the milky moon's glow, and off he rode with the sack on the cart. Ignapfando tossed and turned in his attic of sin with his total eclipse of the heart.

Dawn came. Ignapfando awoke refreshed, all sin washed away, a man who now was pure. Far, far away on the road to the lime kilns, the priest with his horse and cart and sack full of sin had stopped to drink water from a stream. It was a pretty rill. As if in a dream, the songstress appeared, standing in the long grass, dressed in no longer fashionable glam finery. There was a sudden din. Was it the music of the spheres as conceived in the Mind of Brian May? The priest clapped his hands over his ears, his horse reared up in terror, and the burlap sack exploded, its incandescence vapourising the sun, the blast almost as loud as the songstress and her band, belting out her anthem.

This much have I seen. This much have I heard.

What Sort of People Will Live on the Tetrahedron?

That question is the subtitle of an article in the May 1918 issue of My Magazine. Here are the opening paragraphs:

How would you like to live on a tetrahedron? Men say the earth will one day come to that.

Many strange visions men have had of the world since it began. They used to think it a disc floating in water. There are still stupid people who believe it is flat. Every wise child knows that the truth is that the earth is practically a round ball.

It will not always be like this, however…what the people of the world will live on in millions of years to come will probably be a tetrahedron. It all looks terribly dull, but it is really tremendously interesting… Let us think about it all.

I adore that well-placed “probably”, and it's a bit rich for a tetrahedron-earther to call a flat-earther “stupid”, but look, look!

This is how it will be, and you can read further details here. What you cannot read, maddeningly, is the answer to the question that is posed. I for one want to know what sort of people will live on the tetrahedron. Muggletonians? Quakers? Management consultants? Will they use the Mayan calendar? Will the Pope still wear a little white cap? Will the novels of V S Naipaul be in print? Hooting Yard's indefatigable Antipodean researcher Glyn Webster brought this to my attention. Perhaps he could do the decent thing and answer the question.

Norwegian Wool

Remember MacTavish, the village wrestler whose ugly death was described in the second of those Tales Of The Uncanny? If you don't remember, go down to Friday 4th February and read it. Notice how it begins “They called him MacTavish”. They did indeed call him MacTavish, but MacTavish was not his name. His name was Chris De Burhg (sic) and as well as being the village wrestler he was the village knitsman.

The village had had a knitsman ever since the invention of true knitting, which is to say around 1100 AD, if we accept that the first historical example of knitting as we know it today, as opposed to other kinds of textile work, is a pair of patterned cotton socks found in Egypt. This is not the place to investigate how the craft travelled from the Nile delta, via the English clergyman William Lee's knitting machine of 1589, to the godforsaken rustic silage depot where Chris De Burhg lived all those centuries later.

There was a village knitswoman too, but by a curious tradition it was forbidden for the two ever to meet. Because it was a very small village, extraordinary precautions were taken, involving fences, barricades, false walls, lanes blocked by herds of restless barnyard animals, clocks wound misleadingly, undelivered telegrams, pits dug and camouflaged, and in extremis eldritch tampering with the continuum. By that I mean of course the space-time continuum, but I was trying to save my words as carefully as Chris De Burhg saved his wool.

The village knitsman always used Norwegian wool, although the village was not a Norwegian one. Happy as I would be to report that it was in Finland, near the Karelian holiday resort of Bomba, I have to admit that it was not even in Scandinavia. Be that as it may.

Chris De Burhg was careful with his wool. He was also careful with his food, for poisoning was rife in this village. There had been many problems with ergot before the war, and afterwards, and there were many sociopaths at large. Fortunately, they were easily identified because by decree they were all made to wear chaps, spats, and boxy jackets, and to live in a purple tent near a clump of gasworks. Careful with wool, and careful with food, Chris De Burhg, or MacTavish as they called him, was nevertheless a sitting duck when attacked by a ghoul with a funnel.

Joanna Southcott's Box

New Saints

The ailing Pope has kept very busy in the last few years, beatifying and canonising with gay abandon and creating more new saints than any of his predecessors for hundreds of years. I try to keep abreast of these important matters, but I fear that one of the new saints escaped my attention. This morning, to my shame, I did some shopping in Tesco, that temple of Mammon owned by the wretched “Lady” Shirley Porter, who is long overdue for criminal prosecution. Browsing through the cheeses, I noticed a sign announcing a special offer on “Saint Ague”. (Nearby was a stack of packets of Saint Agur, a delightful creamy blue cheese from the Auvergne.) I have never come across Saint Ague before, so he or she must be one of the new ones. I must check to see if Il Papa has also created Saint Pox, Saint Bubo, Saint Plague and Saint Black Bile, among others.

So You Want to Become a Haruspex?

If you are interested in becoming a haruspex, the first thing to do is choose a sacrificial victim and slaughter it, or, if you are squeamish, have it slaughtered for you. It might be a duck or a hen or a hare, and if you are having delusions of grandeur, you can always use a larger animal like a performing seal or a giraffe. Haruspices tend not to engage in human sacrifice, and it is well not to give the police any pretext to investigate your doings. In current law, there is no plea of haruspexdom to defend you against a murder rap. Remember that, it's important.

Now, once the victim has been slain, it is your job to interpret the entrails. You will be following in a long tradition. Back in Ancient Etruscan times, the earliest haruspices learned their art from Tages, a being who suddenly sprang from the ground near Tarquinii. Tages always claimed to be the grandson of Jupiter, and as no one ever challenged him on this, it must have been so.

I know what you're going to ask. Victim killed, check. Splattered with gore, check. Disposition of entrails visible, check. But how to interpret them? Well, that's where your local library comes in. Early haruspices, sometimes known as extispices, wrote a series of instructional manuals called libri haruspicini, fulgurales, and tonitruales, and copies should be available if you ask the librarian in a very quiet voice, making sure you maintain eye contact. Bear in mind that municipal librarians become rightly suspicious of shifty-eyed borrowers, and if that means fixing them with a stare of unhinged madcappery, so be it. These ancient tomes are not forbidden, as far as I know, and you have every right to borrow them, unless you owe outstanding fines.

I should have told you to get copies of the haruspicina manuals before slaughtering your eel, or bat, or whatever creature you selected. Sorry. Anyway, by consulting the books you will be well placed to interpret from the fresh entrails the will of the gods. And that's all there is to it!

If you are vegetarian or vegan, you can still qualify as a haruspex by eschewing entrails and instead interpreting portenta, that is lightning, earthquakes, and all extraordinary phenomena in nature.

Unlike those snotty-nosed augurs, with their professional association, haruspices tend to be self-employed. You can drum up business by advertising in the Yellow Pages or placing a notice in your newsagent's or post office's window. Good luck!

Rosemary F. of Swanage says : “I followed the So You Want To Become A Haruspex? course and I now employ eight people and take three Etruscan holidays a year!”

Happy Holidays

Today is the final day of the Muggletonian Great Holiday, celebrated on the third, fourth and fifth of February each year. On those three days in 1652, the tailor John Reeve (1608-1658) received his commission from God, and was told that his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton (1609-1698) was to be his “mouth”. Reeve learned that he and Muggleton were the two witnesses referred to in Revelations 11:3, and that God had empowered them to pronounce upon the fate of individuals. As Muggleton wrote in his 1663 tract The Neck of The Quakers Broken, “He hath put the two-edged Sword of His Spirit into my Mouth, that whosoever I pronounce cursed through my Mouth, is cursed to Eternity”.

It was long thought that, of all the sects which sprang up in the English Civil War period, only the Quakers survived into the twentieth century. During the 1970s, however, one Philip Noakes came to light in Kent, a living Muggletonian in possession of a huge archive of material covering the sect's entire history.

The Muggletonians believed that human reason was unclean. This led them to reject physical science. They refused to accept the laws of gravity or the rules of mathematics, and they considered astronomy to be wrong. The stars, they said, were only as big as God made them appear from earth. In later years, Muggletonians banned hot air ballooning, because the balloons would crash into the sky, a solid band around the earth.

And here is a date for your diary. Lodowicke Muggleton was imprisoned for blasphemous writing in January 1677. He was released on 19th July, which was thereafter celebrated every year as the Muggletonian Little Holiday.

(Thanks to Andy Hopton, whose 1988 article in Small Press Gleanings is my source.)

Jarvis and Cubbit

One of yesterday's three Tales Of The Uncanny featured Jarvis and Cubbit, the bird scientist and his assistant. Dobson filled dozens of notebooks with stories about these characters, whom he conceived as an immortal duo as archetypal as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Holmes and Watson, or Laurel and Hardy. Alas, the out-of-print pamphleteer had no talent for fiction, and the surviving manuscripts are fragmentary, littered with vague sketches, false starts, and incomprehensible jottings. Jim Pond, newly-appointed Professor of Dobson Studies at the University of Jim Pond & His Immediate Family, has spent countless hours in the archives to prepare a selection of Jarvis and Cubbit stories, and has kindly offered us permission to publish the following, undated, piece.

The bell tower had bells in it, but that was not what caught the attention of Jarvis, the bird scientist.

“Look, you young tyke, there is a bird on the bell tower,” he said to his pneumonia-racked assistant Cubbit, who was doing something foolish with a pair of bicycle clips.

Jarvis pointed at the bird, expecting Cubbit to look, but the spindly youth was distracted by a passing pantechnicon all a-clatter with pots and pans. It was the neighbourhood Windy Man, on his rounds.

Jarvis hated the Windy Man, for his clattering pots and pans made a din that often frightened birds, so that they flew away into the blue majestic skies just as the ornithologist was creeping close with his tweezers and bird beaker. The Windy Man, on the other hand, was passionately in love with Jarvis, and had been ever since he had seen the bird scientist standing on a dais making a bird-related proclamation, years ago, for all the world like an Apollonian god, or so he seemed to the Windy Man. But the Windy Man was shy, and dared not speak of his love, so he pined and felt pangs and was in torment.

Cubbit knew nothing of what is related in that paragraph.

By chance, a snapshot exists of this precise moment. It was taken by a passing camera buff whose fancy had been taken by a pirouetting mechanical nougat-vending machine, all pink and gleaming. There it is to the left in the black-and-white photograph, in front of the bell tower. To the right, in the foreground, we see the back of Cubbit's head, next to a furious-looking Jarvis. Partially obscured behind them is the Windy Man's pantechnicon, on which some of the clattering pots and pans are visible. Sadly, the Windy Man's face is blurred by a smudge or a cloud of gnats or a freakish effulgence of mist and gas. It could be any of those things. In framing his photo, the enthusiast did not include the upper part of the bell tower, so we do not know what kind of bird Jarvis was pointing at, nor whether it was a bird at all, or just a fluttering black napkin borne aloft on a gentle summer breeze, given avian form through the power of Jarvis' unquenchable imagination.

Ever after, he insisted it was a trumpeter swan.

Strange Goings-on in the Ornithological World

As the title of this item indicates, I have identified some strange goings-on in the world of ornithology. Before apprising you of my findings, let us examine carefully this picture of a pair of decoy ducks:

Note that the picture has nothing to do with the spooky bird-related mystery I am about to report, just that I never pass up the opportunity to take a long hard look at pictures of decoy ducks, and nor should you, for who knows when you will be able to put the insights gained to good use?

On to the matter at hand. Earlier in the week, the Guardian ran a story headed Birds rise in intellectual pecking order. This included some fascinating information, including the ability of pigeons to differentiate between cubist and impressionist paintings, the fact that scrub jays share certain cognitive features with human beings, and, of course, that old favourite, Crows Are Clever.

These facts were gleaned from an article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience about the work of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, an international team of twenty-nine neuroscientists. I have to say I was thrilled to read about an organisation with such a terrific, if highly specialised, name. It occurred to me that this is precisely the kind of august body that Hooting Yard should be affiliated to. Wouldn't it look great at the top of the page? Hooting Yard : An Associate Member Of the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium. (I know that my grasp of neuroscience is less than steady, but I'm sure I could bring a certain élan to the group's proceedings. And I, too, have “new thinking about the brains of ptarmigans and tits, bitterns, budgerigars and buzzards”. )

Before firing off my letter to the Consortium's top bird brain boffin, Erich Jarvis, I went to the Guardian Unlimited website. I wanted to reread the story and follow up any suggested links. Imagine my perplexity when I discovered that, in the web version of the story, Professor Erich's team had become the Avian Nomenclature Consortium. No mention of the Brain at all. I took the newspaper out of the dustbin and double-checked. I was not mistaken. Brain in the paper, no brain on the web. Somehow the brainless version of the Consortium just doesn't have that special something. I tore up my letter of application and squelched off in my boots to take a walk around Nameless Pond, a saddened and shattered man.

Tales of the Uncanny

Here are three brief tales of the uncanny.

One. I was sitting in a bower on a bright summer's day, the air heady with verbena, eating my snack. All of a sudden, gruesome suppurations of foul-smelling extraterrestrial hideousness began oozing from my jam sandwich, and I swooned. When I came to, I had a tiny radio transmitter implanted in my forehead, but I remained unaware of it for the rest of my life.

Two. They called him MacTavish, and he was the village wrestler. He lived in a room above the post office. No other living being ever set foot in the room until the day MacTavish died. They found him lying on his bed, as if he were asleep, but there was no doubt that he was dead, for hovering above his chest was a baleful phantom, emitting gruesome suppurations of foul-smelling extraterrestrial hideousness which it poured into a funnel inserted into MacTavish's right ear. They closed up the room and nailed the door shut and it remained unopened for the next hundred years.

Three. “Hand me that chaffinch, young Cubbit,” said Jarvis to his lantern-jawed assistant. Jarvis was a top bird scientist, and every Tuesday he devoted to the study of chaffinches. They were out wandering the hills, Jarvis and Cubbit, and the boffin had spotted a chaffinch near a babbling brook. As the knock-kneed youth clumsily picked up the chaffinch, he heard a scream behind him. Spinning round, dropping the chaffinch in the process, he saw Jarvis being engulfed by a giant fod. The poor lad scampered back to the lab and told what had happened to Mrs Purgative, the kindly old washerwoman. “Well! I never heard of such a thing!” she exclaimed. And she hoisted her mop on her shoulder, took Cubbit by his withered hand, and led him far, far away, all the way to Gondwanaland.

Source : Six Hundred And Twenty Uncanny Tales, Together With A Pen-Portrait Of Victoria Principal by Dobson (out of print)

More About My Bomba

Readers will recall that last week I had a dream in which it was imputed - by a Peter Lorre lookalike - that I had weak Bomba and that my Bomba was not good (see 27th January). I have been puzzling over what this might mean, and what I might do to attain good strong Bomba. Now Pansy Cradledew has provided a possible solution to the mystery.

Dear Mr Key, she writes, By remarkable coincidence, on the very day that you addressed your weak Bomba, I was doing some internet research on bees, as I often do when I find myself at a loose end. From the excellent pages maintained by Hania and Hans*, I learned that bumblebees are of the genus Bombus! In case you are wondering, bumblebees are big and extremely hairy bees. A few species of bumblebees are being bred nowadays to take care of pollination in greenhouses. They turn out to be very useful in growing tomatoes and cucumbers. One can buy colonies in specialized shops and on the internet. When flying most bumblebees are producing lots of noise, attracting our attention that way. They belong to the most beloved of all insects, for they are the perfect messengers announcing spring is on the way. Bumblebees have typical warning colours: black and yellow or black and red. And it is true: all species are capable of stinging. But they are not very willing to do so. We can even take many species in our hand. As long as we don't squeeze them, they won't sting us at all! Only bumblebees laying on their back should never be touched, for this is their typical defence position, indicating they feel threatened and are ready to sting! The poison they inject is harmless, except for those allergic to wasp poison. ( If you are not sure, arrange to have yourself stung by a wasp while a team of experts in insect toxicity stand at the ready, with bleepers.) Bumblebees are typical insects of moderate climate zones, with a few species even surviving arctic conditions. You won't find them in the tropics though. The hairs on the body ensure they don't cool off too soon. But there is more. Just like mammals bumblebees control their own body temperature. They can detach the muscles used to move their wings. And by moving the detached muscles rapidly they produce their own body heat. This is the reason you can sometimes find a motionless bumblebee on the ground or a flower. It is not dying or sick - it does not, as you would say in your dream, “have weak Bomba” — but is simply heating up its own body. But due to the fact that the wings are detached from their muscles it is not capable of flying at the time. Bumblebees keep a body temperature of 34 to 38 Centigrade. Oh, and just to make sure you know what I'm talking about, this is what they look like:

Anyway, it seems clear to me that your dream about Bomba was a dream about two or more Bombuses. There is something bubbling away in your subconscious that makes you preoccupied with weak and “not good” — ill? evil? - bumblebees. I suggest, Mr Key, that you search your soul with rigour. Did you perhaps once stamp on a little Bombus? Yours astutely, Pansy Cradledew

*NOTE : Hania and Hans are seeking help in identifying unidentified wasps. Can you help? Please do what you can by clicking on the picture of the Bombus.

Claude

Serpentine Claude had been in a gale. I asked him what sort of gale it was. I've got a lot of time for Serpentine Claude. Howling, he said. My my, a howling gale, was the nubbin of my reply. Was there a snap? Claude, who is a plutocrat with a thing about Mary Pickford, said there was a snap, and it was cold. I was beginning to picture Serpentine Claude in a howling gale during a cold snap, but I was hungry for further details. Claude misinterpreted my expression and handed me a pie. He is serpentine but generous, as well as plutocratic. It was a very tasty pie, and I ate it at once. It was a puff pastry pie with a filling of filberts and beeborage. While I chewed, Claude told me that the gale during the snap was accompanied by rain. I did not want to speak with my mouth full of pie, and before I could ask Claude to describe the nature of the rain, he rushed away, along that old canal towpath hectic with foxgloves, to a festival of Mary Pickford films being shown at the ship-shaped cinema in Tantarabim.

I swallowed the last of the pie, hoisted my binoculars, and took careful note of a swallow perched on the bough of a sycamore over to the west. Or it may have been a finch. I am always getting them mixed up, ever since the railway accident. I had a psychic premonition of it, just like the hundreds of people who foresaw in their dreams the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912. There is a good book by George Behe which catalogues them. One day I may find out if anyone else shared my premonition of the railway accident and I, too, might collect them into a book.

Years later I received a letter from Serpentine Claude. This is what he wrote:

Dear Istvan, It has long been on my conscience, through all the years that I ensnared the world in my plutocratic web, that I may have mistaken your look of fixated curiosity about the gale during the snap for one of simple hunger. That is why I gave you the last of my puff pastry filbert and beeborage pies. But I was wrong, wasn't I? I think I knew I was wrong within minutes of stalking off along that foxglove-strewn towpath, but to my shame I did not turn back to rectify my error. I was so hot for Mary Pickford that I gave you nary another thought. Please accept my apologies, and let me at long last tell you what your heart has burned to know through all the succeeding years, through the reigns on earth of a fair few Pontiffs. In the howling gale during the cold snap, the rain was torrential. It fell in torrents. Yours faithfully, Serpentine Claude.