Dear Hooting Yard, writes “A Traveller”, We understand that your admirable website likes to feature readers’ holiday snaps, and have pleasure in attaching this specimen for your editorial team’s consideration.

Oh, such an evocative snap! It took me back, back to this, which originally appeared nine long years ago, in 2008 …

I went from Wivenhoe to Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. For the journey, I wore upon my head a hat woven from the hair of gorgeous hairy beasts, and a pair of goggles. Otherwise, I was dressed in the sort of suit you might see Edward G Robinson wearing in a film noir, with accompanying spats. It was suggested to me that I might take in Nunhead and Snodland along the way, but I had no time, I had no time.

Other than the sea crossing, for which I commandeered a skiff and its skiffer, I walked the entire route. Whenever I became exhausted, I slept upon the ground, under the bowl of night. I would like to say that I grew familiar with the stars, but I did not. Unless it was cloudy, as it often was, I could see countless stars twinkling above me, but they appeared randomly scattered, and I was never able to discern any patterns. I always woke up with strands of hay in my hair, wherever I had slept. I used my gorgeous woven hat of hair as a pillow.

Though I was walking, rather than cycling, I carried with me a bicycle pump. Often I pumped it, pointing it ahead of me, as an exercise drill, and also as a means of dispersing gangs of gnats or midges hovering in the air. Sometimes I fancied I could hear their faint insect shrieks as they were whooshed out of my path. I refreshed myself with water from duckponds.

I tried to keep a steady pace. There were times when I felt the bile rising in my throat. Whenever this happened, I stopped walking, sat on the ground, took my journal from the pocket of my film noir suit, and wrote a memorandum. Here is an example,

I am no longer in Wivenhoe. Ten minutes ago, walking along a bosky lane lined by what I think are plane trees, I pumped the pump at a cloud of midges, scattering them. Shortly afterwards, I felt the bile rising in my throat. Above me the sky is wonderfully blue and dotted with linnets, swooping. Tonight it will be dotted with stars. The stars do not swoop, they stay where they are, far away in the cold universe, so far away that the linnets can never reach them, and nor can I. But I can reach Cuxhaven, by way of Ponders End, and must do so quickly, while there is still time.

The act of writing in my journal always made the bile subside, and I was able to press on. When it was humid, my goggles steamed up. I carried on walking, as if in a mist. When I came to a stream or a rill I would take off the goggles and dip them briefly in the water, and wipe them dry on one of my film noir sleeves. Sometimes a true, engulfing mist would descend. Then I would get down on my knees, even if where I was was muddy, and take from my pocket my little wooden god, and prop it against a stone, and beseech it. Here is an example of such beseeching:

O little wooden god propped up against a stone, I beseech you to sweep away this engulfing mist and to make visible my path, so that I may walk on fearlessly towards Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. Ooba gooba himmelfarb farbagooba!

The last four word were my incantation, designed to assuage my little wooden god and have it do my bidding. My bidding was always done, for the air would clear, sooner or later, and if the land was flat I could see for miles. One day I was able to see Ponders End far in the distance, and on another day I saw the sea, and once I was on the sea, being skiffed across it by an energetic skiffer in his skiff, I saw Cuxhaven, just in time.

I paid the skiffer to skiff me across the sea. He refused to skiff me otherwise. I had no cash, no chequebook, no debit nor credit card, not even shells or beads or trinkets, but I had honey. Along my journey from Wivenhoe to the coast by way of Ponders End, I had paused whenever I passed an apiary and snaffled honey from beehives. I collected it in pouches strung around my waist attached to a cord, hidden under my film noir suit. Some of the honey I ate to keep myself from fainting, but I was careful to keep some aside, for I did not expect to be skiffed across the sea for nothing. My offer to pay the skiffer in honey was met with great civility, even glee.

I knew that, if ever I made the return journey from Cuxhaven to Wivenhoe by way of Ponders End, perhaps able to take in Nunhead and Snodland given that I would no longer be pressed for time, I would be accosted by several irate beekeepers demanding recompense for their stolen honey. I had time enough, in Cuxhaven, to work out a way to repay them. If time passed and my head remained empty of ideas, I could prop my little wooden god against a Cuxhaven stone and beseech it for a brainwave. If all else failed, I could stay in Cuxhaven, and never go back to Wivenhoe through all the days of my life.

Yet conscience told me this was wrong. It was one thing to be holed up in Cuxhaven, quite another to be holed up in Cuxhaven tormented by guilt that good honest beekeepers had been robbed by my own honey-snaffling hands. Yes, it was true that I bore the bee-stings, but I had sucked the venom and spat it out and rubbed my hands with dock leaves. I still had dock in my pocket, should the bees of Cuxhaven have at me with their stings. I hoped they would not, for I resolved not to take their honey. In Cuxhaven, I had sausages.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. You are wearing a pair of round gold-rimmed “granny” glasses. Beside you in the boat is your wife, an avant-garde artist from faraway Japan. You turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. Then you turn your mind back on, just a tad, just enough to imagine no possessions. You wonder if now would be an opportune moment to raise with your wife that malarkey about her acquiring a second apartment solely for the storage of her collection of fur coats. You open your mouth to speak, but what comes out is gibberish. “Goo-goo-g’joob”, you blurt. Your wife looks at you as if you have taken leave of your senses, which, to be frank, you probably have. Perhaps Bernard Levin was right when he wrote that there was nothing wrong with you that could not be cured by standing you upside down and shaking you gently until whatever is inside your head falls out.

It strikes you that such a manoeuvre would be perilous if performed in a boat on a river. Your wife, who would have to turn you upside down, is diminutive, and it is likely that if she made the attempt both of you would topple over, capsizing the boat, and forcing you to swim to the riverbank.

There are, apparently, tales of the riverbank, but you did not write them. Nor did you write tales of topographic oceans. But you did write about that famed ocean-going sailor Sir Walter Raleigh, who you described as a stupid git. You pronounced Raleigh as Rally. Nowadays, people usually pronounce it as Rahley. But in his own time his name was universally pronounced Rawley.

The pronunciation of surnames is important. I have heard tell that an alarming number of young persons confuse you with the Bolshevik psychopath Lenin. These are presumably the same young persons who confuse Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in The Silence Of The Lambs, with your successor Stalin.

Oops! I meant Lenin’s successor, not yours. Now I’m getting things all mixed up in my head. Just like you. Well, you wrote a lot of nonsense too.

Oh cloak of night! Enshroud my hob
On which I boil, in a pan,
A gruel thin, to feed my flock
When morning breaks, and they line up,
Each with his coupon, snipped or torn
From Christ In Extremis! magazine
Bought from the kiosk by the pond
Past the crumbling viaduct
Beyond the hen coops and the sump
Over the hills and far away.

One morning recently, I walked out of my house and along the path to my front gate, and there, standing on the other side of it, was a barbarian. Sensing that he was about to smash my gate down with mighty blows from the heavy wooden club he was brandishing, I moved to distract his attention by pointing up at the sky and saying “Oh look! A peewit!”

According to Pepinstow’s Bumper Book of Barbarians, barbarians are particularly partial to peewits, and will usually become much less barbaric in their presence. But of course, I had invented the peewit, I had pointed at nothing. I was merely playing for time. Soon enough, the barbarian at my gate would realise there was not a nearby peewit, and he would set about smashing down my gate and laying waste to anything and everything in his path, including me.

As he turned his head to look up, therefore, I dug into my pocket for a glob of plasticine, and swiftly fashioned it into a toy or model peewit. It was a pretty cack-handed effort, resembling a punch-drunk starling, or even Stalin, rather than a peewit. I hoped nevertheless it would serve to fool the barbarian and placate him for a minute or two.

This would give me time to make a call to the Defence of Civilisation Foot Patrol, who would come screeching up in their squad cars and Taser the barbarian. You might wonder why a Foot Patrol goes about in cars, but these are strange times, strange times indeed.

Before I had time to call them, however, the barbarian at my gate had ascertained that the sky was empty of peewits, turned his head back to glare at me, spotted the plasticine sort-of-peewit in my outstretched hand, made a series of mawkish icky cooing noises, grabbed the peewit in his huge hairy paw, and begun dribbling. Not for the first time, I gave thanks to Pepinstow.

But in the Bumper Book, Pepinstow advises strongly against the Tasering of placated barbarians. Apparently, this only redoubles their barbarity when the effects of the Taser wear off. Thus I was in something of a quandary. The barbarian, too stupid to realise that the plasticine peewit was not a real peewit, remained as if transfixed at my gate, thus blocking my exit. And I had an urgent appointment at the Village Wrestling Ring!

Also, it occurred to me that the manner in which the barbarian was mauling the peewit, in the mistaken belief that he was coddling it, meant that it would soon lose its peewity shape, and be once again a plasticine glob. As soon as the barbarian noticed this, he would cease the cooing and the dribbling and be once again barbaric. What was it Pepinstow had written? To the barbarian, mauling is coddling, or words to that effect.

I realised I needed a real peewit, one that could fly, and thus coax the barbarian to follow it, away from my gate. But where could I obtain a peewit at short notice? I rushed back indoors and logged in to the ePeewit website on my computer. I noted that there were a couple of fairly local peewit vendors, one of whom offered express delivery by drone. I tried to place an order, but as usual the ePeewit site was agonisingly slow and repeatedly asked me for my password and the name of my childhood pet puppy. I could not remember my password and I never had a puppy.

In desperation, I wondered if I could make my own flying peewit, out of plasticine, by attaching to it a propellor. I had a stash of plasticine, but where could I obtain a propellor? Could I make one using a couple of drinking straws? Damn Pepinstow for not addressing this eventuality!

Then I heard the first crunch! of my gate being smashed by the barbarian’s club. Clearly the plasticine peewit had lost its shape and he was no longer placated. I cowered in a corner, listening to the awful sounds of the barbarian destroying my gate, and my garden path, and my front door, and anything else in his way as he came lumbering, barbarically, into the room. I was about to cry out for mercy, using the wording recommended by Pepinstow, when the barbarian laid down his club, mopped his brow with a filthy rag, and said:

“Good morning to you, sir. I am Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb. I come from a far country, and my brain is hot.”

NOTA BENE : Readers who have immersed themselves in Mr Key’s witterings since the last century may recognise this as an hommage to The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet (1990).

Jasper The Baffled Eel is a brand new children’s book about an eel named Jasper who is baffled. What baffles him? Oh, just about everything that happens in his life as an eel. I don’t need to go into the details, as I am sure you can imagine yourself as an eel and tally up in your head all the things that would baffle you.

I say it is a children’s book, and that is indeed how it has been marketed by the soulless twerps in the marketing department of the publishing house. But I suspect the book may appeal more to older readers, very old readers, those in or approaching their dotage. It may even prove popular among those who have passed beyond dotage into death. At rest and encoffined, what better token of life to take with them, clutched in their cold stiff hands, than this baffling eely book?

There are no illustrations. Most of the words are simple ones, of one or two syllables, with only a few instances of longer or less common words, among which I noted flapdoodle, japonaiserie, and haemoglobin. Jasper the eel is baffled by these words, but you will not be, not even if you are dead, because nothing baffles the dead.

They say walls have ears, but birds and eels do not. They also say that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but try telling that to an eel. You will only baffle the eel, as Jasper is baffled, in a bravura display of realism. It may even be hyperrealism. There were certainly points in the book where I felt, vividly, that I had been plunged into the wide Sargasso sea. I was sopping wet and festooned with seaweed. Though it is fair to say that I am usually sopping and festooned, when reading books. It is, and always has been, my way.

Oh, Jasper! Jasper! Poor baffled eel. No longer a glass eel or an elver, with its life stretching before it, full of promise, but a full-grown adult eel, lost in the immensity of the world’s oceans and seas and rivers and lakes and other watery parts, watery parts that cover seven-tenths of this globe, with its magnetic bits and its vegetation and its eels. For Jasper is not alone.

But he is alone, in this book. Population of eels in its pages – one. One eel, but oh! how he fills those pages, turning up once, twice, even three times before it is time for you to turn the leaf. And that is not surprising, because this is his story. No other eel gets a look in, and nor does any other living creature, other than occasional mentions of a rabbit and a plover and a brass-necked goose. But these are incidental beings. They will, one day, have their own books, in which Jasper the eel may make a fleeting appearance.

I would have been interested to learn more, in this book, about eels and japonaiserie. But then, most people who know me well will attest that I constantly carp on about eels and japonaiserie, to the exclusion of other, perhaps more pressing, matters. I make no apology. Though I may never be transfigured into a sunbeam for Jesus, I have buttered my parsnips, and I will take them with me to the grave, instead of my copy of Jasper The Baffled Eel, which I will donate to an orphanage library, for the future edification of generation after generation of orphaned tinies, as baffled as Jasper by the complexities of this complex and baffling universe.

Now let us all sing Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind?