One of the incidental pleasures of reading the long-forgotten memoirs of obscure figures from our island history is to stumble upon fleeting mentions of that gruesome ogre of children’s nightmares, the Grunty Man. All of us, I think, can recall the shiver that ran down our spine when we sat at mama’s knee and she read to us tales of the fearsome Grunty Man, lurking in his cave and occasionally emerging into the light to grunt and grunt and lay waste the earth and grunt some more. Now we are grown we can look back with fondness on this loathsome fantastical creature, safe in the knowledge that he never really existed … or did he?

The other day, I was reading the long-forgotten memoirs of an obscure figure in our island history, the expatriate Hollander Joost Van Dongelbraacke. It is an unfathomably dull book, or I should say books, for Van Dongelbraacke managed to eke seven fat closely-printed volumes from what was, by any measure, a fairly uneventful life. I love this stuff and could read it until the cows come home. I was about half-way through volume three when, to my delight and consternation, I came upon this passage:

At luncheon that day I ate a goodly amount of My Lady Kent’s Pudding, but it had not been sufficiently boiled, or perhaps it had been boiled for too long, for shortly after digesting my third bowl-ful I suffered the most terrible mortification of the bowels and had to be carried from my place by the servants and deposited on an an ottoman in the smoking room where I moaned weakly and cursed heaven. Thereafter, to make recompense, when I was able to move I repaired to my private chapel and offered orisons to the Almighty that he might spare me from the horrors inflicted by skittish cooks.

I then determined to berate said cook, and had her summoned from the pantry, only to be told she was not to be found there. I strongly suspected her of being involved in unseemly canoodling with Mr Snippage, the gardener, and so I pulled on my out of doors boots and went striding through the grounds, past the filbert hedges and towards the ha-ha, where Snippage had his hut. While I was walking thus, waving my stick, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Grunty Man, darting between the elms.

When I reached the hut I banged my fist on the door, hoping to disturb the gardener and the cook. But there was no response, and when I opened the door to peer inside, I found the hut was empty. My mood was now tempestuous, so on my way back to the house I berated one of the estate peasants who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead toads from one pond to another. Shouting my head off did me the world of good.

Back in the house, I settled in the library and spent a profitable hour reading a collection of sermons by Parson Freakpit. Outside the sky was louring and there were hints of English drizzle. I closed the book and thought longingly of the canals of my homeland. These thoughts were interrupted by a servant who came to inform me that the cook and Mr Snippage had been seen boarding the mail coach heading for the coast. I cursed heaven once again, kicked the servant all the way along the corridor, and, feeling a renewed mortification of the bowels, shut myself in the Thunder Box until it was time for supper.

For supper that day I ate a goodly amount of My Lady Kent’s Pudding.

Binder’s first piano concerto had no piano part and was not a concerto. There was a piano in the second piano concerto but it was out of tune. The third piano concerto was deafening. The fourth gave Binder the heebie jeebies. Binder’s fifth, or the sixth as it is usually called, was performed in a submarine. Let us draw a veil over the sixth, by which I mean the sixth proper, rather than the fifth, with which it is often confused, performed as it is in a submarine. The seventh is that rare thing, a godawful din. Binder’s eighth, ninth, and tenth piano concertos are audible only to dogs. The eleventh features an electronically modified cat. No animals were harmed in the composition of the twelfth, but the score for the thirteenth piano concerto calls for the ritual slaughter of several otters. The fourteenth is pithy. The fifteenth is punchy. The sixteenth was dedicated to Stalin. The seventeenth is a carbon copy of the ninth. Piano Concerto No. 18 is so vivid it makes grown men weep and grown women have an attack of the vapours. The nineteenth has the charm of a sausage. The twentieth, the brilliant twentieth, is rudderless. Rudders, snapped off boats, are repeatedly and relentlessly bashed on the keyboard during the twenty-first. The twenty-second is popular in prisons. The twenty-third is full of grace. The twenty-fourth was used in a toothpaste advert. The twenty-fifth was written atop an important, stationary mountain. The twenty-sixth is fishy. Binder’s twenty-seventh is his longest piano concerto, a full performance lasting several years. The twenty-eighth consists of a single note, of the performer’s choosing, plinked twice and plonked once. The twenty-ninth is lost. The thirtieth is hidden. The thirty-first tugs at the heart-strings. The manuscript of the thirty-second is rolled up and stuffed into a jam jar, and there is still jam in the jar. The thirty-third is all that the thirty-second is not. The thirty-fourth gallops along like a horse. The thirty-fifth slithers like a worm. Binder said of the thirty-sixth piano concerto “de gustibus non est disputandum”. Raindrops kept falling on Binder’s head while he was writing the thirty-seventh. The thirty-eighth is a biography of Christopher Plummer imagined as a piano concerto. The thirty-ninth steers its way through choppy waters towards an island where brutes disport themselves in wild abandon before sinking into the sea.

Once upon a time there was a little Italian boy made out of wood. He wore a pointy hat, also wooden. In this age of grand illusion, he walked into my life out of my dreams, and forced his way into my scheme of things. This was somewhat unnerving, for it is not an everyday occurrence to find oneself in thrall to a wooden boy. But enthralled I was, to the point where the tables were turned and I tried to fit in with his scheme of things.

In order to do so, I felt I needed to gain a better understanding of what it was like to be made of wood. So I drove to the forest in a Japanese car. I parked at the edge, by a pond, and then I walked deep into the forest and stood there, pretending to be a tree, a pine or an elm. At first I was fidgety, but as the hours passed I found it easier to stand perfectly still, as if I were wooden. I swayed slightly in the breeze.

The little Italian boy made of wood had not followed me to the forest, for he could not drive. I wondered what he was up to, back in my chalet, perched on the edge of a glacier. It was a wooden chalet, so it suited him well, better, in fact, than it suited me. I felt so at home in the forest. Oh I so wanted to sprout leaves and buds!

Several months passed before I was forced to admit that I could not fit in to his scheme of things and that I was not, nor ever would be. made out of wood. I trudged back through the forest towards the pond where I had parked the Japanese car. It had been stolen. I sat on a tuffet next to the pond and I pondered. Pondering by a pond, not made of wood. The sky was immense and immensely blue.

It was a small mercy that I did not know the little wooden Italian boy was a delinquent rascal, and had burned down my chalet the instant I screeched away in my Japanese car. And yet the world keeps turning. That, after all, is in the scheme of things, whether one is wooden or – let us be plain – not wooden, not wooden at all, neither pine nor elm nor any of the other types of wood. They all burn.

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 to do so. 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.

Soup-in-the-beard was a condition which affected many Victorian gentlemen possessed of disgusting table manners. It commonly took the form of patches of beard hair becoming soaked in spilled soup, which then dried out, causing the hairs to become matted and malodorous. The spillage would usually occur at the point where the Victorian gentleman, wielding a spoonful of soup and aiming to transfer the full amount into his mouth, would fall at the last hurdle, and send some or all of the spoonful dribbling down his beard. If the bowl of soup was a generous one, as it often was at Victorian banquets, repetitions of this manoeuvre could result in the beard being absolutely drenched, with droplets of the spilled soup dripping on to the elegantly embroidered tablecloth.

Although we do not have precise figures, it is believed that a significant proportion of cases of soup-in-the-beard were caused by uncontrollable tremors of the hand, symptoms of withdrawal from the gargantuan doses of opium favoured by almost all Victorian gentlemen. This does not, of course, excuse their disgusting table manners, which were disgusting, almost as disgusting as – at another time, in another place – those of Franz Kafka.

Contemporary written accounts of soup-in-the-beard are surprisingly few, possibly because it was so prevalent, so much a commonplace, that chroniclers of the time did not consider it worthy of remark. A vivid exception is contained in a letter written by the Dowager Duchess Dipsy of Poxhaven, dated 14 January 1868:

Last night I attended a dinner to raise funds for the Society for the Promotion of Sending Working Class Orphans Down Mineshafts, held at Soot-Blackened House. I was seated next to Walter Mad, whose beard is prodigious. The poor man’s hands were shaking badly, and he confessed to me that he had not had a dose of opium for a full half hour. During the soup course – mulligatawny, to my horror – Walter Mad had a great deal of difficulty transferring the soup from bowl to mouth by means of a spoon, and after a minute or two his beard was sopping wet, almost more soup than hair. I was amused to note that he summoned his valet, who proceeded to wring out the beard, much like a janitor with a mop. Cleverly, Walter Mad commanded him to do this directly over the bowl, so that the soup in the beard replenished the soup in the bowl. By this means, and by several further wringings-out, Walter Mad was still busy with his soup while the rest of us had moved on to the jugged hare and the strangled weasel. His table manners are disgusting, but he gave ten shillings to send urchins from the lower orders down the mines, so his cold black heart is in the right place.

Next week : Egg-On-The-Waistcoat.

Plan B for 2016 is to post a potsage [sic] here every day, except on those days when Mr Key is beset by uurrgghh. So far the plan is succeeding beyond all expectations.

Meanwhile, when not whimpering softly, I have tried to cheer myself up by watching Die Hard : The Director’s Cat, two hours of footage of John McTiernan’s pet moggy, Tiddles, graceful yet unfathomably stupid, prowling around the upper floors of the Nakatomi Building, lapping milk from a saucer, fixing its gaze on things invisible to the human eye, and taking long naps. Yippee-ky-oh, motherfucker!

The plan for 2016 was to post a potsage [sic] here every day. In January, I succeeded, but come the first day of the second month and the plan was as dust and ashes in my mouth. Yesterday I felt decidedly uurrgghh and lay abed, with occasional visits to the Thunder Box, over which we shall draw a heavy black veil. Today I feel almost equally uurrgghh. However, quite fortuitously, I posted two potsages on Sunday. I think what we shall do is to pretend that the RIP for Jacques Rivette actually appeared yesterday, and prance on regardless. I hope to feel less uurrgghh tomorrow, Now, back to bed.

In Forbrydelsen, the 2007 Danish TV crime thriller known here as The Killing, there was a minor character, appearing in just three of the twenty episodes, named Knud Padde. I confess that I have forgotten pretty much everything about the character but for his name – but what a name! Knud Padde ought, surely, to have his own spin-off series.

I can imagine him, dapper in his Danish duds, as one of the Four Norsemen of the Apocalypse, alongside Lars and Bengt and Erik, a quartet of impossibly sophisticated Scandinavians, noble of brow and fond of herring. I am assuming, of course, that “Norsemen” can refer to any old Scandinavian, not exclusively those from Norway, though if we had to export Knud Padde and his fellows to Norway then so be it.

We could, after all, put them on the banks of a fjord. What would the Apocalypse look like, viewed from a fjord? I asked fjord- and Apocalypse-expert Tarleton Buchbinder for his thoughts. He never called me back. I think he was taking a very long bath, in his tub, listening to a cassette tape of inspirational speeches by Patricia Fripp, sister of the guitarist Robert, husband of popstrel Toyah Wilcox.

Toyah’s big hit was “It’th A Mythtery”, and I think the Knud Padde TV series ought to have a mystery element. The mystery could be some unspoken horror in Knud Padde’s past, or in Lars’s past, or Bengt’s past, or Erik’s past, or perhaps in the pasts of all four of them, the unspoken horror that brought the four of them together in the first place, on the banks of a fjord, in a high and icy wind, noble of brow and fond of herring.

This needs work.