Some years ago, Outa_Spaceman described Hooting Yard thus: “a world of heroic infants rubbing shoulders with tugboat captains, extravagantly bouffanted composers drinking and fighting in seedy dockside taverns, Jesuit priests lurking in kiosks on abandoned seaside piers, bat gods haunting abandoned potato research stations, huge grunting ogres drinking from cisterns in horrible caves, and where diktats are being issued to Community Learning Hubs by suburban shamans”. Rereading this, recently, I thought to myself, “How right he is!”. But then I thought, “Hmm. We have not seen many tugboat captains hereabouts of late!”. My thoughts are not always followed by exclamation marks, but those two were.

Casting around in my mind for a tugboat captain I could tell you about, I recalled the skipper of the tugboat Blavatsky. This fellow was neurasthenic and highly-strung, character traits which are quite undesirable in a tugboat captain, and led to several unfortunate episodes. Big majestic ships being tugged by the Blavatsky suffered a series of minor and major calamities, from dents below the plimsoll line to scuppering upon sandbanks to attacks by enormous flocks of deranged guillemots. These incidents were not always the result of the tugboat skipper’s mental weakness, but whether he was responsible or no, when the big ships’ captains gathered in conclave they laid the blame firmly at his door.

“He is neurasthenic and highly-strung,” they said, “He cannot be allowed to tug our ships.”

With no big majestic ships to tug, the Blavatsky lost its purpose, and so too did its skipper. He took to traipsing the deck of the tugboat wailing and keening, driving the rest of the crew crackers. Eventually his second-in-command, the science officer, took him aside, bundled him into a cabin, and gave him a talking-to. Like several seconds-in-command, he was half-Vulcan, with pointy ears, and he spoke with compelling logic.

“The Blavatsky is a tugboat, Captain,” he said, “And therefore it must tug something. If we cannot tug big majestic ships we will have to find something else to tug.”

“But what?, dammit, what?” yelled the skipper, who was clearly close to the end of his already frayed tether.

“Well, Captain,” replied his pointy-eared science officer, “It so happens I have been reading some back numbers of the Daily Pony Predations Digest. It seems there is, loose in the land, but happily close to the coast, an enormous squid named Neville Mossop. It is already responsible for slobberingly devouring one twee little pony, and logically one must assume it will go on to consume others in its awful hideous Lovecraftian manner. We can stop it, Captain. I suggest we send a landing party, capture the squid, drag it to shore, then attach it to our tugboat with chains, and tug it far out to sea so it can no longer prey upon ponies.”

“That’s a fantastic idea!” cried the skipper, and at once his mood lifted and he ceased keening.

Without further ado, he sent a landing party which captured the squid, dragged it to shore, attached it to the tugboat with chains, and tugged it far out to sea.

“This is terrific!” said the skipper, “We are tugging something, just as a tugboat must, if it is fit to be called a tugboat!”

But his joy was short-lived. For unbeknown to the skipper, far out at sea the enormous squid’s distressed mother was searching for her son. Mrs Chlorine Winslow Mossop was so gigantic a giant squid that she made Neville look like a mere minnow. And when she found him, she reared up from beneath the waves, towering over the tugboat, her tentacles thrashing violently, and from suckers on those tentacles she emitted an eldritch viscous goo that burned through the iron chains tugging her son as if they were wisps of straw, and she freed him. And then, with a horrible gurgling noise so loud it made the sun shake in the heavens, she slobberingly devoured the tugboat Blavatsky and its crew, in a single awful gulp.

It happened that at the very last second, just as he was about to be swallowed up, the skipper managed somehow to kick himself clear. He swam away, as the gigantic squid and her almost as gigantic son disappeared into the chthonic depths of the broiling sea. He swam and swam, until he reached a remote atoll. Exhausted, he clung to the rock and slowly, agonisingly, pulled himself up out of the sloshing sea. He was marooned, but no longer imperilled.

In spite of his highly-strung neurasthenia, the skipper was a resourceful fellow, and he kept himself alive by drinking rainwater and eating barnacles and the occasional guillemot which plummeted unaccountably from the sky. And he kept his mind busy by studying, from memory, Catholic theology, to the point where one day, several years after his maroonment, he felt able to ordain himself as a Jesuit priest.

And that, children, is the story of how the legendary Atoll Jesuit came to hold sway over a remote stretch of the vast and merciless sea. Amen.

A letter plops on to the mat:

Dear Mr Key, My name is Neville Mossop. The latest outpouring on your foolish website was brought to my attention by my dentist. I have to say that I do not take kindly to having my name bandied about by the likes of you, purely for the purpose of amusing your readers (if there are any, apart from my dentist). You did not even bother to seek my permission. If you knew anything about me, I doubt you would be so cavalier. I have had a very difficult life. As a child I was teased incessantly by my playmates on account of my inability to punctuate sentences after my opening sallies they treated me cruelly oh so cruelly in fact one day when I went to have a go on the swings a boy whose name coincidentally was also Neville Mossop took a bowl of milk slops and upended it over my head then poked at me with a twig while reciting in a singsong voice some ditty he had learned from a book of insulting ditties I cannot recall the exact words but they pierced me like spikes and I began to blub like a ninny which only made things worse particularly when I arrived home and saw that my ma was cooking swordfish for supper again even though she knew quite well that swordfish played havoc with my innards I will spare you the details because they are too monstrous to repeat suffice to say I had to be carted off to a clinic and missed a whole term of school I think the one where they taught punctuation of sentences after the first few so you can appreciate that I have had a terrible time and have become a self-pitying whiner rather than the international man of mystery with a Peter Wyngarde style moustache I always yearned to be and still do but I fear it is too late as I am now ninety two years of age and very few if any agencies employ international men of mystery of such advanced years and I would say I live in hope but I do not I am thoroughly pessimistic to the point where I wake up every morning groaning and cursing the memory of Neville Mossop my childhood acquaintance who caused me such grief and now I have to put up with you causing me grief too as well as my dentist who told me not to waste his time making an appointment to see him when I have not got any teeth left in my gob being so old and withered unlike the young scamp with the same name as me who chases swans in parks I never chased a swan but you should know that the only reason I left the clinic after that bout of swordfish poisoning was because I was chased out of it by swans a whole gaggle of them honking horribly they chased me out of my bed and out of the ward and along the corridor and down the stairs and out of the door and into the grounds and out of the gate and I was still in my hospital gown and still the swans came after me savage and relentless and then I developed a massive nosebleed which was the last thing I needed well I suppose not the last thing because the last thing would be death and it is rare to die from a nosebleed but I expect you would die from one if the flow was not staunched I staunched mine that day with some rags I found in a bin you can find all sorts of things in bins if you rummage for example just the other day I found some pages torn out of a book by Dennis Beerpint that someone had obviously found so stupid that they ripped them out and threw them away well I kept them and took them home and read them very carefully again and again over the next few days until I realised they were utter twaddle at which point I crumpled them up and took them back to the same bin to throw them away like the other person had done but the bin was gone it had been removed by municipal bin removers one of whom I later learned was also called Neville Mossop as were two of his colleagues which is quite a series of coincidences or maybe not perhaps it was a deliberate recruitment policy pursued by a madcap town hall bureaucrat whose name might also have been Neville Mossop for all I know and I suppose I could find out by going to the town hall and banging my fist on the reception desk until someone gave me a list of all the bureaucrats in the town hall but when you get to the age of ninety two the prospect of making the bus journey to the town hall is a bit too much to cope with and it seems far more enticing to stay sprawled in your bed cursing the young scamp Neville Mossop and swans and swordfish and people like you Mr Key who think it is amusing to write poppycock about someone you have never met and who might take umbrage at having his name besmirched. Yours sincerely, Neville Mossop.

In her comment on yesterday’s Tale of Popsy the Pony, Pansy Cradledew berates me for failing to give the name of the squid. I accept that this was an unforgivable omission and fatally undermines what might otherwise have been a classic text destined to be read and reread and rereread throughout the ages. Thus I am more than happy to inform Ms Cradledew, and other readers – if there are any – that the slobbering squid is named Neville Mossop. Neville is quite a common name in the squid population, Mossop less so.

Neville Mossop also happens to be the name of the young scamp seen chasing a swan on a new piece of signage in St James’s Park. He was chosen from a pool of over a thousand applicants to appear on the sign. There is some evidence that the pool was the very same pool into which Neville Mossop (the squid) slithered, after devouring Popsy the Pony, but this has yet to be confirmed.

Incidentally, Neville Mossop also turns up in a new collection by twee poet Dennis Beerpint:

There was a young fellow from Glossop
Whose name was Neville Mossop
He frightened swans

This is one of the so-called “truncated limericks” in the Beerpint book, entitled Truncated Limericks By Dennis Beerpint, Daddy-o! Towards the end of the book, there are a number of what the winsome versifier calls “severely truncated limericks”, such as:

There

In a review of this slim volume, critic Stockard Owlhead writes: “Dennis Beerpint is an utter nitwit”.

Do you have any exciting Neville Mossop information? Do not on any account share it. Just keep it to yourself, you pimpled popinjay!

Before reading, see here and here.

Hullo tinies! Are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

Once upon a time there was a lovely little pony named Popsy. Popsy the Pony lived in a meadow splattered with buttercups. It was a lovely meadow. The sun was always shining, the weather was always balmy, and the other animals in the meadow – birds and insects and burrowing moles – were happy and contented. Of course it was a completely artificial and unnatural meadow, quite unlike real nature, which is bloody and gruesome and utterly horrifying, full of violence and pain and death. Just ask a sheep. Sheep know. That is why they barely get a wink of sleep, they are so frightened and fretful.

Anyway, tinies, one day Popsy the Pony was having a lovely time in the lovely meadow when, all of a sudden, this pastoral idyll was shattered by the intrusion of reality … no, let me rephrase that … this pastoral idyll was shattered by the intrusion of the hidden, Lovecraftian, true reality beyond our puny human comprehension, and Popsy the Pony was slobberingly devoured by an enormous squid from the Black Pit of Hellish Nothingness. Slobber slobber slobber! Eek eek eek!

The end. Now, tinies, you may run away screaming and blubbing like fotherington-tomas.

The third and final part of an old, old story.

III. October 1928

We docked at 0800 hours. Bingle, Carg, Linnet, Frack and Pinmouth were detailed to search the northern half of the island, while Bewg, Shimm, Jabber, Thurp and myself took the south. I left Wicket and Birdhole aboard the ship, with strict instructions. I cannot remember what the instructions were, but they were strict, make no mistake about that.

The five of us who comprised the southern party set out. It rapidly became apparent that the boulders and rocks on the island were giving off violent magnetic discharges. The tension was oppressive. We saw what looked like ball lightning far in the distance. I instructed Bewg to make sketches in his little pad, but he complained that his pencil was blunt. Between us we could not muster a pencil sharpener. I was loth to have Bewg return to the ship alone to fetch the required implement, so I instructed Jabber to accompany him. I pressed on with Shimm and Thurp, the latter carefully scraping rock and mud samples into our canister. The path ahead was burned and scorched – by what agency was not clear to us.

At 0950 hours Birdhole joined our party. She brought with her the ship’s pencil sharpener. Apparently Bewg had suffered an attack of the seeds, and was having a lie down in his cabin. I made a mental note to tick him off later. I remember that clearly, because at the very moment I thought it a mighty crevasse opened in the ground directly in front of us. Thurp was swallowed up, as the earth cracked apart. The rest of us staggered backwards. I am glad that I had the presence of mind to tell Birdhole to execute a quick sketch in Bewg’s pad. She complained that she had not yet had a chance to sharpen the pencil, but I cut her short with a screech of blood-curdling ferocity. One is taught to do that sort of thing at officer school.

Shimm put down her accordion and made an impromptu bridge across the crevasse using all our footwear tied together. We clambered across, and pressed on, although not before Birdhole had insisted upon holding a commemorative service for the sadly departed Thurp. Why I allowed it I do not know. I can be a sentimental old buzzard. While Birdhole was ululating, we were joined by the northern party, who had completed their investigations. Other than some extremely fascinating magnetic readings, ornithological discoveries, amateur geological observations, a net full of moths and a worm count, they had nothing to report. I commanded Frack or Pinmouth – I never could tell them apart – to return to the ship, but I cannot remember why. Whichever one it was sent Jabber back to us. I had suspected her of idling around like Bewg, but she made haste to tell me that she had cast a Mackenzie Beam from the ship. I patted her on the head, not without some misgivings, as I do not think she had ever washed her hair. At last Birdhole stopped howling, and we pressed on. We passed an enormous heap of skeletons – bat and human, according to Bingle’s eagle-eyed diagnosis – and various other manifestations of what Lamouche calls la flaque de la mort. I have Jabber to thank for that quotation. Birdhole wanted to delay further to give the two human skeletons a decent Christian burial, but I cuffed her on the temples and snarled at her.

The ground over which we passed became rough and spiky, and we had to tread carefully in our socks. We would retrieve our tough adventurer’s boots on our return trip, when we would be able to dismantle Shimm’s bridge. Frack or Pinmouth handed around some custard-balls for sustenance. Then, as we hacked our way through some overhanging foliage, we suddenly came face to face with the building. It was smaller than we expected, like a scale model of a typical nineteenth century Bolivian civic hall, and it had all the hallmarks of having been constructed out of bat droppings. I removed my hat in awe. The others did likewise, except for Shimm, who was not wearing a hat, Linnet, whose hat had snagged on the branch of a dunstable tree a few hundred yards back, and Birdhole, whose hat had been glued to her head for the duration of the expedition for some obscure religious purpose. I had interrogated her on this point back at Tantarabim, and will publish the documents separately.

Of course, we could not stand around like a bunch of clots all day. I jammed my hat back on my head and commanded my team to get to work. I was heartened to see that they set to it with such gusto. Within minutes, the instruments had been unpacked, the music stands set up, sheet music distributed, and everyone was at their post ready to tune up. The band was as follows: Bingle on bugle, Carg on bassoon, Shimm on accordion, Jabber on sackbut, Linnet on harmonium, Frack or Pinmouth on castanets, and Birdhole on handbells. I myself conducted and played the cornet. We ran through a few bars of Bring Me Your Winding-Sheet, Oh Mother Of Mine before settling down to the concert proper. Macaws shrieked but we drowned them out. We played my arrangements of Die sieben letzten Worte des Erlösers am Kreuze (Haydn), Sonatine Bureaucratique (Satie) and The Anti-Abolitionist Riots (Ives). For an encore, we performed a rousing version of The Consumptive’s Vest (Jabber, arr. Birdhole). Then we packed up. I ordered Birdhole to make some detailed sketches of the building in Bewg’s little pad, and we also took measurements and poked about the place a bit. But night would soon be falling, and there was no let up in the magnetic activity of this accursed island. The sooner we returned to the ship the better. The journey back passed without incident. We collected our boots after re-crossing Shimm’s bridge over the chasm. Thurp’s body had fallen so far it was not visible. We did not tarry. Wicket and Pinmouth or Frack were on duty on the bridge. They had received warnings of volcanic activity over the radio. Before we set sail, I went into Bewg’s cabin and told him I would brook no further nonsense from him. I presented him with a rag and told him to go and polish everything on the ship. Back on deck, I found Linnet mucking about with the Mackenzie Beam. I let it pass; I was a tired woman. We weighed anchor, and headed home at last. Only later did I discover I had left my cornet on the island. I cannot bear to go back there to retrieve it.

Continuing an ancient yarn from the last century. Part One is here.

II. January 1911

I had been marooned on the island for just two days when I discovered the gigantic Bolivian architectural diagrams. They were spattered with blood, rolled up and jammed into a rotting wooden casket. I carried them back to my hut to examine them. There were about a dozen large sheets, rather frayed around the edges but perfectly legible. The top left corner of each sheet had been stamped with an official device of the Bolivian administration, showing an escutcheon, a ziggurat, the helmet of a conquistador, the hand of God and abbreviations in neat italic lettering. The signature of what I supposed to be a petty official had been scratched across each of the stamps in mauve ink. I could not understand why they were in such good condition. I tacked them up on the walls of my hut, where they rapidly grew so familiar that I no longer noticed them. I am no architect, and I had more urgent matters to attend to.

I have never forgiven myself for my stupidity. I had been warned not to row my skiff into uncharted waters near the Antarctic Circle. Oh, but did I listen as Captain Peabody harangued me? “You d—-‘d fool!” he shouted, his frosty whiskers twitching in the cold morning light. I turned for one last look at the ship as I guided my skiff into oblivion. I have not seen a human face since that day. Within minutes I was overwhelmed by chilling, poisonous mists. The hideous stench of crocuses made me sick to my stomach. I let fall the oars. The tholes, tampered with by my enemies, Glubb and Mufton, fell to pieces, and the oars floated away, out of reach. I drifted for hours. My anorak, with its hood of reindeer hide, froze solid, encasing me so that I was unable to move an inch. An auk, or some such feathery ingrate, shat on me repeatedly, hovering above my head like a malign shade. I could not move to shoo it away. Eventually – mercifully – I passed out.

When I came to I was surrounded by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. One of them, with icicles forming on the brim of his hat, was solicitously offering me a tin mug of brandy. I took a grateful swig, then noticed that his colleagues did not seem so friendly. They were glaring at me menacingly. One brandished a rather archaic halberd in the air and shouted horrifying words. All of a sudden I became aware that I was aboard a huge, shiny boat, its sails billowing, its decks scrubbed clean. I turned to look again at the Mountie with the tin mug. For the first time I took in his features. It was Mufton! My deadly enemy….

There were other hallucinations, other dreams. I shall not repeat them here. Hours, days, perhaps weeks after I had set out in my skiff, I came at last to dry land again when I woke to find myself sprawled on the beach of this island. Was it yet another phantasm? There were a number of ways to find out. I tried three of them. First, I beat my head upon some boulders. This caused what seemed like real pain. Then I shovelled handfuls of coarse sand into my mouth and attempted to swallow. This caused me to retch uncontrollably for some minutes. Almost satisfied, I conducted a third test. Taking from the breast pocket of my anorak a small phial, I poured a minuscule quantity of a decoction of sandalwood, cresol, gutta percha and pitch into the palm of my hand, held it aloft in the salty air, and mumbled incantations and gibberish. Sparks crackled in my hair, shot up into the sky, and brought tiny jewels of hail pinging down around me. Within seconds they evaporated, and were gone. But now I knew for certain that I was wide awake, no longer prey to visions and vapours. Being a resourceful sort, I managed to provide myself with adequate food, drink, warmth and shelter within a few hours. I began to search my temporary home, and found the gigantic Bolivian architectural diagrams. That was over a month ago. I found the remains of my skiff, crushed and broken, swept up on some rocks on the northern coast, which seems to be the wildest. I have been working hard at my almanack, and at keeping my beacons lit.

Last night, as I hurled dried and matted vegetation upon my northern beacon, I was attacked by a swarm of bats. They swooped at me one after another, squealing horribly, pecking at my flesh. I fought them off with a burning stick, but I was shaken. I ran back to my hut, and blocked up the doorway and some of the holes in the walls with mulberry paste. Tonight the bats are back, chewing their way frenziedly through the walls. I have on my rickety home-made desk a small bag of sulphur bombs with which I hope to fight them off. But timing will be crucial. I do not intend to perish.

I am minded to post an old, old story from the last century. Gigantic Bolivian Architectural Diagrams is divided into three parts. The first part follows. Parts two and three will appear over the coming weekend.

I. September 1894

I had been marooned on the island for eleven weeks when I discovered the gigantic Bolivian architectural diagrams, rolled into a metal canister and wedged in a narrow crevice between two rocks. Taking a swig from my bag of turtle’s blood, I squatted on the ground and removed the diagrams from the canister. There were about a dozen large sheets, rather frayed around the edges but perfectly legible. The top left corner of each sheet had been stamped with an official device of the Bolivian administration, showing an escutcheon, a ziggurat, the helmet of a conquistador, the hand of God, and abbreviations in neat italic lettering. The signature of what I supposed to be a petty official had been scratched across each of the stamps in mauve ink.

Munching a whelk, I turned my attentions to the diagrams themselves. They were fearfully complicated. I am no architect, and at first all I could make out were miriad lines meeting at angles and criss-crossing each other seemingly at random. Most of the diagrams had been subjected to revision, and there was much evidence of erasure, overprinting and churlish emendation. My studies were interrupted by a sudden and ferocious thunderstorm. Shoving the diagrams hastily back into the canister, unfortunately tearing one of them, I hobbled back to my shelter, where my viper was busy biting the head off an unidentified rodent. Tossing my crutches into the corner, I lay back on my pallet and spent a profitable hour mucking about with bits of wire and driftwood to make a trap for bats.

The life of a maroon, on an island such as this, is not unpleasing. Food is plentiful and easily gathered, or slaughtered. The vegetation is lush and the animals are slow-witted and trusting. On my very first day I was able to bash out the brains of a badger which trundled innocently towards me as I sat on the beach idling with my club. Quite what a badger was doing on the island is beyond me. I have not come across any others. But I am ever vigilant. I will not risk boring you by listing the stupendous array of equipment I managed to salvage from the wreck of the HMS Tot of Magnesium. Suffice to say the club was not my only weapon; nor am I at a loss for a change of trousers.

I have told you that I am not an architect. The truth is, I cannot remember what I am, what trade or business I followed on dry land. Perhaps I was a jolly jack tar; but I think it unlikely. I like to think that I was aboard the Tot of Magnesium as a supernumerary passenger, a merchant of sorts, my cabin crammed with samples of tea, or silk, or mustard. In the final desperate moments, as the ship pitched and rolled and smashed against gleaming rocks, I received a blow to the head which has impaired my memory. It was not the only injury I received. My right leg is only just recovering. I was thankful that among the first items from the ship washed up on the beach was a wooden box of sinapisms from the surgeon’s casket. In the first days of my marooning, the lifeless bodies of my shipmates were washed up on shore, white, puffed, gruesome. I ticked off the dead in an impromptu ledger, which I have since mislaid. The bodies did not lie there long. Enormous birds swooped out of the sky, hooked the dead in their vicious beaks, and bore them off. Their nests are not on this island; I have searched every inch of it. The gigantic Bolivian architectural diagrams came to light on one of my earliest searches. For the first few weeks I was so sure of being rescued by a passing smack or schooner that I could barely bring myself to move. I sprawled on the beach, knocking out the brains of a variety of curious animals, applying sinapisms to my wounds and gashes, and covering myself with an old bit of sailcloth at night, or during rainfall. At last a ship hove into view. I hopped about like a mad thing, shouting and raving in Latin, following the advice of my Jesuit mentors. Eventually I realised that the craft I was hailing was none other than what was left of the Tot of Magnesium, seen from an advantageous angle. If, dear reader, you were expert in tides and currents, in the pleasingly complex science of the movement of seas, I would ask you how it was that this broken wreck of a ship sailed about for nine or ten weeks without sinking, only to return to the spot where razor-sharp rocks hidden beneath the waves had pierced its fabric and brought about its doom. But I suspect you are not.

It was at this stage that I conquered my indolence and set to work. In forty-eight hours, I salvaged everything I could carry from the ship, constructed a raft, knocked up a shelter from planks and sail-cloth, knocked up another shelter when the first one collapsed on top of me, this time shoring up the sides with some sort of metal, killed eight turtles, made a store for buckets, dug some holes, lost my death-ledger, ate a pickled wren I found in the surgeon’s casket, and hardly paused for sleep. The next day I began my search of the island. I found a mulberry bush and some gemstones. On the second day I found bauxite deposits, a waterfall, big grains of sand and what looked like the bones of a horse. On the third day I found the gigantic Bolivian architectural diagrams. On the fourth day I found a crushed encampment of beetles, and a cave full of the most loathsome bats I had ever seen. So it went on, day after day. In two weeks I had covered the island. All the while I had been making careful notes, and now I rested and spent my days drawing an exquisitely detailed map. I tacked this up above my pallet. As night fell, and my blubber candles spluttered, I lay back and considered my island home. With nary a smack or schooner in sight, I could remain marooned for years on end. My shelter may not last, buffeted as it was by howling winds and freezing rain. I decided that the best place for me to live would be the cave. I declared war on the bats.

As a child, I was warned never to sprinkle too many hundreds-and-thousands upon a fairy cake. Doing so, I was told, risked suffocating the fairies who, invisibly, skated upon the icing atop the cake. For this reason, my infant nightmares were filled with desperate gasping fairies gagging on tiny slivers of coloured sugar before collapsing in the stillness of death. It seemed obvious to me that the Big Fairy would seek to avenge this slaughter of the innocents.

Because I was forever helping out in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to the fairy cakes baked by my Ma, I was thus in constant fear of the Big Fairy. My terror was increased by my presumption that, like its young, the Big Fairy was invisible. How was I to know if it was lurking by the larder door, armed with a fairy axe, about to strike?

Ma could not stop making fairy cakes. She had a sort of mania. It was encouraged by my Pa, who had an insatiable appetite, ravenously gobbling down the fairy cakes straight from the baking tray, often before they had cooled. As his teeth rotted and he grew ever fatter, I could not help thinking about all those dead fairies he was ingesting. He was a walking fairy graveyard.

This thought at least helped me to deal with the threat of the Big Fairy. I assumed it would stay close to Pa, mourning its progeny, perhaps too emotionally distressed to summon the strength to wield its fairy axe. I might remain safe from the Big Fairy if I kept well away from Pa. This was easier said than done, as we lived, during my early childhood, in a cramped hovel.

Then, one day, in a shaft of unaccountably bright sunlight gleaming through the one hovel window, I caught a glimpse of the Big Fairy. It was much bigger, and more goaty, than I had suspected, and it was looming over Pa, a look of ravaged grief on its goaty countenance. There was no sign of the fairy axe. Passing clouds obliterated the sunbeam, and the Big Fairy was once again invisible. But from that day, I felt pity for it, not fear.

Ma continued to bake fairy cakes, and Pa continued to scoff them, until the inevitable happened. Pa succumbed to a surfeit. It was a dismal Thursday when, by now toothless and impossibly fat, he keeled over and lay prostrate on the kitchen floor. I knelt down next to him and took his hand. He opened his mouth, trying to utter his last words. But no sound came. Instead, fluttering out of his mouth and crowding the air, poured a throng of ghost fairies, visible at last. My heart sang.

Then Ma went to work with a fly-swatter.

The legend of the smothered chicken of Greaselbow has been told and retold for over a thousand years. The core details seldom vary. In the rustic backwater of Greaselbow, a child, usually but not always an orphan, is settling in to its cot one wild and windy night when it senses an unusual lump under its pillow. Lifting the pillow, the child finds a chicken, often but not always a Vanburgh chicken, which has expired due to smothering. The child picks up the chicken by one of its feet, and chucks it out of the bedroom window. The instant it is let go, the chicken springs to life, utters a shrill squawk, and hurtles heavenward. When the child returns to bed, it finds the pillow vanished, replaced by a large egg. The child climbs into the egg – somehow – and the shell then closes around it.

Interpretations of the legend by folklorists have tended to concentrate on the egg and the child, but of more interest is the smothered chicken. That is particularly the case if one has a penchant for poultry. And which of us does not? Well, you might counter, there are plenty of people who don’t give a fig about poultry. Even keen egg-eaters, who rarely let a breakfast go by without scoffing an egg or two, might be utterly uninterested in the provenance of their eggs, id est poultry of one kind or another.

This is a lamentable state of affairs, and is the reason I carry a pillow with me whenever I am in the vicinity of someone eating eggs.

“Oi!”, I shout, “Where did those eggs come from?”

Unless I receive a full and frank reply, acknowledging the eggs’ origins, I bundle the egg-eater to the ground and smother them with the pillow. Oh Lord, save us and protect us, for we know not what we do.

That was a Thought For The Day by the Reverend Joost Van Dongelbraacke, vicar prebendary of St Bibblybibdib’s.