The compendium Ruined Picnics gives accounts of one thousand ruined picnics between 1959 and 2017. An unsurprising number of ruinations are caused by rainfall and wasps, but there is only one recorded picnic ruined by a panic-stricken goose.

This picnic took place on 14 January 1987, in a field hemmed by larch and sycamore, not far from a farm, or, better, farmstead, yes, a farmstead, where many geese were kept. It was a sort of goose-farmstead, if you can imagine such a thing. The bulk, or majority, of the geese were content and placid, but one of their number was thrown into a state of panic by something strange and grubby and inchoate. At this distance in time, we cannot know for certain what it was, precisely, or even vaguely, this thing. All that can be said for certain is that it induced panic in a single goose, which, maddened, broke out of the farmstead by hurling itself repeatedly against a portion of fencing weakened by rust and metal fatigue, until it had created a gap large enough for it to go goose-stepping away from the farmstead, in a direct line to the field, hemmed by larch and sycamore, where a picnic was, on that afternoon, in January!, taking place.

This was one of the so-called Picnics of Piety, organised by the pious and puritanical Reverend Ringo Starr – not to be confused, though he often was, with the drumming Beatle of the same name, though we would do well to remember that the latter adopted it as a pseudonym or stage-name, whereas for the Reverend it was his real name. At least, he claimed as much, though was curiously reluctant ever to produce his birth certificate when asked, for example by petty bureaucrats working for petty bureaucracies, and similar curses upon humanity.

Picture, them, on a freezing January afternoon, in a field, a Picnic of Piety, with sausage rolls and cream crackers and marmalade and buns and digestive biscuits and reconstituted meat-style gaeitiés, accompanied by flasks of spigot-water. Fast, or fastish, approaching the picnic blanket is the panic-stricken goose. Nobody at the picnic sees it coming, for the Reverend Ringo Starr has commanded the picnickers to shut their eyes and think pious thoughts while chewing their sausage rolls and cream crackers and marmalade and buns and digestive biscuits and reconstituted meat-style gaeitiés and slurping their spigot-water. The scene is set for the ruination of a picnic, by a maddened and panic-stricken goose, and that is precisely what happened. Tupperware was strewn everywhere.

Valuable – some might say invaluable – as the compendium is, we might lament the fact that it neglects to give any details of what occurred in the aftermaths of the one thousand ruined picnics it covers. Thus we are left in the dark about, for example, whether the January 1987 Picnic of Piety was able to resume after its goose-visitation, or whether it was abandoned, or whether the picnickers, with their eyes shut and their minds wholly concentrated on pious thoughts, even noticed that their picnic had been ruined. We might lament these omissions, and we do, by weeping, and singing dirges, or humming them, if we cannot sing in tune.

There is weeping and wailing all over the nation
At untold picnic ruination
Untold until now – now the tally is tolled
And it makes our blood run cold

One of the most valuable lessons life has taught me is to know the difference between salvation and salivation. It is so easy to confuse the two, especially in one’s youth. When I was a young whippersnappernipper, long ago, I would regularly insert an i when one was not needed, or omit an i where the high heavens cried out for one. I know I was not the only pimply young shaver to commit these errors. Over the decades, I have had conversations with, ooh, hundreds if not thousands of people who were – and in some cases still are! – fuddled by the difference. It should go without saying that confusing the two can have serious ramifications.

That is another word, incidentally, with which I had problems. I would commonly omit not just an i but also an a, giving it as ramfictions. This was because I thought it had something to do with stories about sheep. My dear departed Ma would regularly read to me a bedtime story about a sheep named Dolores, whose fleece became snagged on a wire fence at the edge of a field on a farm in a fictional place called Dippydopeyland. As her name indicates, Dolores was a ewe rather than a ram, so even if such a thing as a ramfiction existed, which it did not, except within my little head, her story would not have been one. But that was just something else that confused me as a child.

When I heard the word ewe I thought the speaker was referring to a yew. I suspect this was because, when it was my dear departed Pa’s turn to read me a bedtime story, he invariably chose to recite, in an eerie voice, “The Moon And The Yew Tree” by Sylvia Plath. The result was that I found Ma’s story of Dolores frankly incomprehensible. The Plath poem, on the other hand, with its fumy spiritous mists and sea like a dark crime and bonging bells and bats and owls and the moon bald and wild and the blackness and silence, I found almost unbearably thrilling, so much so that I began to salivate. I would often slobber on to my pillow before Pa got to the end of the poem.

Of course, I confused my salivation with salvation, and imagined Jesus was about to come and pluck me from my bed, and take me to his bosom, and up to heaven, where he wanted me for a sunbeam. Now, as it happened, if Ma and Pa were called away to a night rally, my dear departed Uncle Ned read my bedtime story, which for him was always Chapter V of Part III of Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships. That is why, throughout my childhood, I was convinced I was a cucumber.

Concentrate, look carefully, and you will see an embittered dentist riven by crackers. The crackers are of a circular, unsalted variety, sealed in a cellophane package, itself further packaged inside a cardboard carton. The carton is primarily red, but has upon it a hyperrealist illustration of several circular unsalted crackers executed, for a hefty fee, by the noted hyperrealist Rex Hyper.

The embittered dentist bought the carton of cellophane-wrapped crackers when, one morning, he popped in to his local corner shop. The shop was not actually located upon a corner. Nonetheless, in its ownership, size, opening hours, and range of items stocked, it fell so close to the common understanding of a corner shop that we may as well call it a corner shop, as most of its customers did, including, neatly, our embittered dentist.

Along with the carton of crackers, the embittered dentist made purchase of a (plastic) bottle of milk, a newspaper (The Daily Embitterment), and a keyring to which was affixed a small rubber toad with a jewel embedded in its forehead. It was not a real jewel, but it sparkled brilliantly in the sunlight, or would, when the sun shone. But this was Hooting Yard, forever overcast, with drizzle threatening to become a downpour.

Upon leaving the corner shop, clutching a paper bag in which the shopkeeper had placed with care his crackers and milk and paper and toad, the embittered dentist turned to his left, and pranced for perhaps five or six paces, before wheeling about and prancing in the completely opposite direction, to his right, towards ruins.

These ruins were ancient, the ruins of what once had been a grand palace, much of which had crumbled as centuries passed. At the time it was built, so solid, so new, there were no dentists, as we would understand the term. Nor were there any hyperrealist illustrators, for the techniques of hyperrealist illustration were yet to be devised. It was a very long time ago.

In the lee of a ruined nook, affording some shelter from the drizzle, the embittered dentist sat down upon a fragment of ruined wall. He took from the paper bag the newspaper, The Daily Embitterment, and read that day’s main headline.

EMBITTERED DENTIST RIVEN BY CRACKERS, it said.

Inside the bag, the small rubber toad with a false jewel embedded in its forehead suddenly twitched and squirmed. It had come to life!

NB : This is not part of the planned scheme of interconnected prose pieces to which I referred the other day.

Note : As with the first of our Ten Tarleton Tales, Tarleton plays only a bit part in this final one, yet in many ways his bit is key to the whole damn thing.

Snitby blubbing on the causeway. A death in the family. The priest is on his way, astride his elegant horse, along the clifftop path. Candles lit in the cottage, and blood on the pillow. The dog is being sick in the gutter. Snitby’s dog, with its corkscrew tail like a pig’s. Call My Bluff on the wireless. Nobody wants to turn it off. Robert Robinson says: cagmag. Nobody is listening. Birds are shrieking in the sky, an impossible blue, not a hint of cloud. Snitby’s tears extinguish his gasper. It is too wet to be relit so he tosses it into the sea. A gull swoops to examine it. The sound of hooves, but it is not the priest, not yet. It will not be the priest at all, today, for the telegram was mistranscribed and he has set off in entirely the wrong direction. He will arrive at Taddy at nightfall and have to be put up at an inn. Here comes the crone with the winding sheet. She has a goitre and clogs. The winding sheet is filthy. Snitby stares at the sea. The gull has flown away into the far distance. It is now a speck. In the cottage, Robert Robinson says: pannicles. There is nobody to hear him, for they have all come out to greet the crone, to kick the dog, to rub its snout in its vomit. It whimpers and scampers to the causeway. Snitby pats its head. A tiny white cloud appears in the sky. A police car screeches to a halt outside the cottage. Snitby scarpers.

Snitby listening to Plastic Ono Band on his iPod.

Snitby sobbing on the jetty. Undone by art. A seaside exhibition of oils by Tarleton. Oil paintings of oily subjects, rigs and slicks and sumps. A terrible beauty. His dog tied to a post outside the galeria. Really an underused seaside civic hall. Snitby overcome with emotion. Here in Taddy where the priest is still holed up in the inn, one or more limbs paralysed. He fell from his elegant horse as it cantered to a halt. A hopeful crone came clutching a winding sheet but he let out a groan and she was sent away. Salt stains on the jetty. Salt in Snitby’s tears. He holds his gasper at arm’s length. Sea sloshes against the wooden posts. Onions on Snitby’s breath. Tarleton dead these many years but still remembered and beloved in Taddy. He was a local boy. Blond and breathless. One leg shorter than the other. Collector of cakestands. Auctioned off. Snitby wanted one but had no cash to speak of. In exile here now and for the future, where the police have no remit. Ancient laws, woolly and medieval, like Snitby himself, after a fashion. In his attic room, the priest’s shutters are shut.

Snitby reading Ruskin’s numbered paragraphs on his Kobo.

Snitby bawling on the pier. The handcuffs chafe. The sergeant has a florid face and a massive moustache. His socks are unwashed and give off a whiff. Klaxons blaring. A pier ventriloquist stuffing his gob with steak and kidney pie while his dummy prates. It is reciting a list of over six hundred birds. Snitby’s face in the sawdust. A couple of teeth loose. Police brutality, but then the sergeant does not suffer fools gladly. Kicks Snitby as an afterthought. Fills out a form with the stub of a pencil. Ten miles along the coast from Taddy, twenty from the causeway. Geographical precision. Pins on a map. The priest an invaluable source of intelligence. One arm now working perfectly, or as near as dammit. Grace abounding. Gruel for his breakfast during Lent. Fish abounding in this resort, but he pushes his plate away with his good hand. The diocese is paying his bill at the inn. Totted up in the innkeeper’s head and nowhere else. Snitby turning to prayer. Mouth full of blood and sawdust. O Lord O Lord why hast Thou forsaken me?

Snitby playing Demented Virtual Needlework on his iPad.

Snitby weeping on the quayside. Tears blurring his vision. He cannot make out the horizon, simply a blank grey blue expanse. Fussing with rosary beads in his pocket. Given up the gaspers for now. Cries of gulls and clanks of tugboats. Foghorns on a clear day. A marching Salvation Army band. Catholicism versus muscular Christianity. It’s an endless battle with no winners. Snitby asked for a nun. He was sure this seaside resort had a convent, right on the harbour. He had his resorts all mixed up. Fifty miles from the causeway on the other side from Taddy. At high speed in a Japanese car with blinking lights and a siren. And motorbike outriders. And two helicopters. Promised a nun on arrival. Not in writing. Snitby’s dog still tied to its post in Taddy. Fawned over by passing widow-women. One will untie it and take it home to a cottage in the woods. It will run away and perish on a railway line beneath a thundering locomotive. The nun will hear about the accident on a nun’s grapevine but decide not to tell Snitby, Snitby in extremis.

Snitby scraping his serial number on his iSlate.

Transportation to shores afar
But the gates of heaven are left ajar
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

O’er the sea to a distant shore
To see your homeland nevermore
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

Snitby jumping overboard.

The Paradox of Tarleton’s Pebble is a famous, or infamous, conundrum. It was first posed, not by Tarleton himself, but by his valet, the dwarf Crepusco. Legend has it that Crepusco crept into the room where Tarleton was hosting a swish and sophisticated cocktail party attended by various mountaineers, polar explorers, flappers, Jesuits, toad-headed robbers, Quakers, conjurers, reprobates, gas meter readers, spud-faced nippers, fanatics, greaseproof paper salesmen, composers, dentists, tuppenny-ha’penny tosspots, Grand Guignol performers, Chappaquiddick experts, foopball refs, tugboat captains, hedgers and ditchers, gondoliers, minstrels, troubadours, astronauts, emboldened milquetoasts, rhubarbarians, eel-men, dabblers, plotters, coppers, tanners, coopers, fletchers, tailors, tinkers, Oppidans, floozies, weathermen, mavens, bus conductors, out-of-town Pointy Towners, painters, pimps, and potters. Yes, potters. Several potters, indeed more potters than you could shake a stick at, were you minded so to do. Not for the first time, Tarleton had got the precise balance of his swish sophisticated cocktail party guest-list a little askew.

Things were nevertheless going with a swing, in spite of the potter imbalance, when in crept Crepusco. He silenced the hubbub in his usual manner, by holding aloft the gold-painted head of an antique Italianate monkey doll, through which he ventriloquised. Then, in his horrible voice, raucous as a crow, he posed the conundrum which became known as the Paradox of Tarleton’s Pebble.

The effect was instantaneous. The puzzle dizzied the brains of all those present, including Tarleton himself. It dizzied their brains and it also dizzied their bodies, so that the room became a scene of chaos, the guests reeling about, staggering, flailing, vomiting, and groaning.

Well satisfied, Crepusco crept out and returned to his pantry. He replaced the head of the monkey doll on its shrine, fixed himself a snack, and sat in his rocking chair, rocking, creaking, back and forth, through the long winter evening, on the night before the Munich Air Disaster.

Exciting news! Tarleton is back on his balcony! He is eating a plum! It is a Carlsbad plum! He gazes across the city and the wasteland into the distance, where the pinky-russet peaks of the Pinky-Russet Mountains shimmer in the haze! From one of Tarleton’s ears dangles a piratical earring, but there is no piratical parrot on his shoulder! He has, though, acquired, since last we met him, a wooden leg!

Tarleton’s brief, we might recall, was to gouge and hew. Gouge and hew he did, heroically, losing a leg in the process. But he did not complain. He showed fortitude. I was encamped at Fort Hoity, he said to himself, and then at Fort Toity, so it is only meet that, in forts, I show fortitude. No wonder Tarleton was showered with petunia petals by adoring peasants. There remain a few petals in his hair, for it is a long time since he shampooed it.

It is a long time, too, since last he stood upon this balcony, eating a plum. It is so long ago that he only dimly remembers. More vivid are the memories of Fort Hoity, with its ostriches and bandages and zinc, and Fort Toity, with champions arrayed along the crenellations, and games of spit-in-the-gutter. It was between forts that Tarleton lost his leg to a crocodile.

In the middle ages, returning crusaders brought with them the embalmed bodies of crocodiles, which were wrapped in chains and hung from the ceilings of cathedrals. Tarleton did not think of his gouging and hewing as a crusade, but it was, oh it was.

He spits out the plumstone into the palm of his hand, makes a fist, and, taking careful aim, tosses it over the edge of the balcony down into the shallow pool around the fountain. How many Carlsbad plumstones lie there, barely submerged! He has never once missed a toss. Tarleton turns and withdraws into his chamber. His head is full of squeaking imaginary bats.

Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, had been missing for a fortnight when one evening he came crashing through the door of his consulting rooms, twitching and shattered.

“Good grief, Tarleton!” cried his sidekick, companion, amanuensis and consulting roommate, Not-Tarleton, “Where in blazes have you been?”

“I have been muffled, wallowing in the sink of vice that is a Limehouse opium den, if you must know,” said Tarleton, “I was in pursuit of a man with a twisted lip.”

“I… I… corwumph!” expostulated Not-Tarleton, who resembled, in both manner and appearance, Old Wilkie from Linbury Court, so much so, indeed, that we shall hereinafter refer to him as Old Wilkie in order to avoid confusion with his near-namesake Tarleton.

“Corwumph! away to your heart’s content. You know my methods,” said Tarleton, “The man with the twisted lip was in possession of pelf. I could tell it was pelf because he carried it in a sack slung over his shoulder with the word PELF stencilled upon it in big black block capitals. I pursued him through the streets and mews and boulevards. He was hot under the collar. I dogged his every footstep. The sky was overcast. He entered the stews of Limehouse and still I followed him. He scuttled down an insalubrious alleyway. It was a nest of opium dens. Mayhew surveyed them at one time or another, I am sure.”

“And?” shouted Old Wilkie.

“And I spent a fortnight in an opium-addled daze, from which I have only recently emerged. The man with the twisted lip was nowhere to be seen. But while we were both sprawled upon divans in the Oriental hellhole, I affixed to his ankle, unbeknown to him, a tracking device, which works with light reflecting booster technology developed by L’Oreal. I am going to eat some kippers, and then I shall find out where he is, with his sack o’ pelf. Having located him, I will run him to ground. If he digs himself into a burrow in the ground, like the narrator of Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, I will entrap him, as did Quive-Smith, but I shall ensure I do not meet Quive-Smith’s sticky end.”

“But how, Tarleton? How?” screamed Old Wilkie.

“By wearing this metal head-harness,” said Tarleton, donning a metal head-harness, “If the man with the twisted lip tries to kill me by shooting an arrow between my eyes from an improvised crossbow, it will ping harmlessly against the metal.”

“I… I… corwumph!” screeched Old Wilkie, “Was the head-harness also developed by L’Oreal?”

But answer came there none, for the amateur’s amateur was already gone.

He returned some weeks later, twitching and shattered.

“As soon as I have eaten some kippers, I shall apprise you of my doings,” he announced, and as soon as he had eaten some kippers, he apprised Old Wilkie of his doings. Being, among other things, his amanuensis, Old Wilkie wrote down what he heard, and thus it is that we, too, are apprised of Tarleton’s doings, long after he ate some kippers.

It seems that, shortly before seeing the man with the twisted lip hauling his sack of pelf along the streets and mews and boulevards, Tarleton had been approached by Old Farmer Frack. The mad old farmer was distraught, because his eerie barn had been broken into and all his farm implements and equipment, stored therein, his clodding mell and two Kentish binding rakes and a disc coulter and a subsoil pulveriser plough and a potato grading shovel and five Morris’s turnip fly catchers and two hand-cranked threshers and a seed rusky and an automatic sheaf tying mechanism and a whin bruiser and Keevil’s cheese-making apparatus and a mouldbaert and fan tackle and chogger and a Nellis fork and a plough graip and half a dozen liquid manure pumps and a pair of hedger’s gloves and Gilbert’s improved iron sack holder and four American butter separators and a cauterising iron and a mouth cramp and a charlock slasher and Blurton’s tumbling cheese rack and eight barley hummellers and an adze and a curd agitator and grinding stones and Drummond’s iron harvest sickle and a dairymaid’s yoke and a clod knocker and Biddell’s scarifier and Fowler’s self-adjusting anchor and a bitting iron and fifteen creels and two caschroms and a dung hack and a Crees lactator and five horn trainers and a fagging stick and a pea hook and two Lipmann glass stoppers and a trenching fork and Gilbee’s horse hoe and a drain ladle and hackle prongs and a flax brake and Hall’s smut machine and a heckling board and three flauchter spades and a hay tedder and an Ivel three-wheeled petrol-powered machine and Finlayson’s grubber and a potato riddle and four root pulpers and paring mattocks and Morton’s revolving harrow and Samuelson’s cake-breaking machine and a foot pick and sheep netting and two oilcake crushers and Reade’s patent syringe and various instruments for destroying moles and a barrow turnip slicer and a Paul net and a Sandwich clean-sweep hay-loader and probangs and castrating shears and Hannaford’s wet wheat pickling machine and a scutching board and a swath turner and a plank-drag harrow, had been stolen.

Tarleton put two and two together. It was blindingly obvious that the man with the twisted lip was the thief. He had sold Old Farmer Frack’s barn’s-worth of booty to a fence, and put the pelf in his sack. It was, then, a simple matter of finding the fence and bludgeoning him to death using one of the instruments for destroying moles, and restoring to the mad old farmer his rightful possessions.

“Just one question, Tarleton,” said Old Wilkie, “These various instruments for destroying moles. Were any of them developed by L’Oreal?”

But answer came there none, for the amateur’s amateur, his mouth stuffed with some more kippers, had fled to a Limehouse opium den, to wallow in vice, sprawled on a divan.