It has been said that the sky above Duntblau is rife with fulmars, but I have never seen one. And I have gazed up at that sky for hours, more hours than I can count, lying on my back on a lawn outside a hotel, searching for fulmars. It’s what I do. Nobody pays me.

Now, about this hotel It is you know what?, quite honestly, what do you expect me to say about a hotel in Duntblau? It’s not as if I’ve ever stayed in it. I doubt they would let me in, in my foetid rags, without a hat to my name, and the whiff of soup-gone-bad on my breath.

I read somewhere a recipe for fulmar soup. As I recall, you first had to obtain a brace of fulmars, which is easier said than done, particularly if there is not a single one to be seen in the sky above the hotel you are lying on the lawn outside of. I think my grammar is impeccable there, though I wouldn’t swear to it, not that anybody is likely to make me.

The recipe was in a book called 26 Bird-Based Soups. I seem to recall it was an A to Z of birds, but I don’t remember what the other twenty-five were, whether A was for auk or albatross, B for budgerigar or bananaquit, you can fill in the rest, with the aid of a dictionary of ornithology, if you have one, or from whole cloth, if you haven’t.

I don’t have a dictionary of ornithology, but I am working on a dictionary of hotel lawns. Not all hotels have lawns attached, did you know that?, but the one in Duntblau does. I often lie on it looking up at the sky, hoping to spot a fulmar. That is the hotel lawn I have started to write the entry for in my dictionary. Others will follow. I hope to interest a publisher.

Publishers are a funny lot. They used to be men wearing tweed and smoking pipes. Now they all seem to be twelve-year-old girls. Do they even know what a fulmar is?

I can’t remember how old I was when first I learned about fulmars. Possibly eight. We had a teacher at my primary school who was simply mad about birds. He was mad about a few other things too, like kings and queens and cornflakes. He was meant to be teaching us forensic criminology, but he was always getting carried away with his pet subjects. I think he was drafted to Vietnam, and killed at Khe Sanh.

Birds have often played an important part in wars, particularly pigeons. What valiant birds! They risk their little lives for us, with no hope of reward save the occasional handful of millet.

It is a curious fact that, lying on the lawn outside the hotel in Duntblau, gazing at the sky, not only have I never seen a fulmar, but nor have I ever spotted a pigeon, and at least I am one hundred percent sure what they look like, which I have to admit is not quite true of fulmars, the precise lineaments of which I have never been certain, not even when I was eight, and Mr Uganugu raved about them during several forensic criminology lessons in a row, Thursday afternoons at 2.15.

Oh, life held such promise then! I was an eager pupil, and the world lay before me, rich and ripe with possibilities. I had yet to discover gin and floozies and high debauch.