I was sprawled on the sofa, dozing off as I read the latest issue of The Truncheon Of Truth, when I was startled by an urgent pounding at the door.

“Come in!” I shouted, for the door was not locked. As I tossed my magazine on to the floor and prepared to rise to greet my visitor, whoever it was, the door crashed open and a man wearing a frock coat and a bippety-boppety hat came striding in. I immediately recognised him as Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur.

“Why, as I live and breathe, it is you, Tarleton!” I yelled. Strictly speaking, none of these words was actually necessary.

“Spare me your unnecessary words,” rapped Tarleton, “Put on your coat and hat and boots and follow me. There is not a moment to lose!”

Thus began one of the more thrilling adventures of my long and, for the most part, undistinguished life. I had no idea, at the time, that I was to play a significant part in what became known as the affair of the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, the missing jewellery box, the dachshund, the drainage ditch, and the freckle-faced lighthouse keeper. On that sopping wet Sunday morning I was preoccupied with the fact that Tarleton had interrupted my reading of an article in The Truncheon Of Truth on the subject of Blunkett.

“I was in the middle of reading a very interesting piece about David Blunkett,” I protested to Tarleton as I hastened after him along the rain-swept streets of my bailiwick.

“Save your breath, man!” rapped Tarleton, “And keep up! There is not a moment to lose!”

We turned down an alleyway next to the ice-cream kiosk, and then down another alleyway, and another, and yet another, until I realised that I was no longer in my familiar surroundings and had no idea where I was. In spite of the fact that each alleyway was narrower and darker and more foetid than the last, Tarleton kept up a cracking pace.

“At the point when you knocked,” I panted, “Blunkett had just entered a field wherein a cow awaited him – a cow that, I think, was about to attack him, on his birthday to boot.”

“You looked as if you were dozing off when I arrived,” said Tarleton, “So you cannot have found the article that interesting. Now hush!” he added, and he made a melodramatic gesture, placing one silk-begloved finger vertically in front of his lips. We stood, soaked, in front of a doorway on which the paint was peeling, the wood was rotting, and the number 49 had been scratched as if by the claws of a maddened bear.

“I was dozing off because the prose was leaden,” I said, “But the content in itself was absolutely fascinating.”

“For God’s sake hush!” hissed Tarleton, and as he did so he pushed the door open gingerly. It creaked on its hinges nevertheless. “Follow me down this secret corridor,” he whispered.

The secret corridor was unlit, and when the door swung shut behind me, I was as blind as Blunkett in the pitch blackness. Recalling the article in The Truncheon Of Truth, I apprehended just how terrifying it would be to be attacked by a cow. I groped forward and clutched at the tail of Tarleton’s frock coat, and we stumbled forward in the Stygian gloom.

“We are not likely to meet with a cow, I take it?” I whispered.

Tarleton hushed me for the third time.

In blackness and silence, like the message of Sylvia Plath’s yew tree, we made our way along the secret corridor for what seemed to me untold hours but was, when I looked later at my wristwatch, only a few minutes. We emerged eventually into the large and imposing pantry of a large and imposing hotel, and now I was Blunkett-blinded not by darkness but by the glare of several Klieg lights. Tarleton, ever prepared, snapped on a pair of sunglasses.

“We are only just in time!” he cried.

There, chained to the pantry wall, gagged and dishevelled, was a Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, and on the floor at his feet a missing jewellery box. With one swift and decisive move, Tarleton smashed the chains with an axe. Then he helped the Crown Prince to his feet, pocketed the jewellery box, dusted down his frock coat, straightened the bippety-boppety hat on his head, and prepared to leave the pantry through a connecting door to a second, equally large and equally imposing pantry, from where we could make our way to the hotel lobby, and then out into daylight and safety and a majestic boulevard. As I made to follow, Tarleton turned, wagged a silk-begloved finger in my face, and said. “Wait here!”

I never saw Tarleton or the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince again. I kept myself occupied in the pantry, rearranging the pots and pans and packet soups on the shelves, and doing a little light dusting, until one day, weakened by hunger, I saw a hallucinatory cow intent on attacking me, and I realised it was time to leave. I made my way back through the secret corridor and out into the alleyway and the other alleyway and the other alleyway and the other alleyway until I got my bearings and made my way home. Several weeks’ copies of The Truncheon Of Truth were piled up on the doormat. I made myself an infusion of boiled lettucewater and sprawled on the sofa to catch up on my reading. There was an article recounting in great detail the affair of the Mitteleuropean Crown Prince, the missing jewellery box, the dachshund, the drainage ditch, and the freckle-faced lighthouse keeper. Tarleton was not mentioned, and nor was I – at least, not in the first few paragraphs. The piece was written in prose so leaden that before I read any further I dozed off.

I was startled by an urgent pounding at the door. But I had taken the precaution of locking it, and I ignored the pounding, and went back to sleep.

Last night I had a dream in which I met a young idiot savant who had committed to memory the entire contents of every single issue of Reader’s Digest magazine.

“Recite the story about the blue caravan that appeared in 1965 or thereabouts,” I said.

Before he was able to do so, the dream veered off in another direction, alas.

NOTA BENE : For the correct placement of the apostrophe in the title of Reader’s Digest magazine, see this potsage [sic].

A couple of years ago I had reason to mention a crevasse wanker. Today, while solving the Guardian crossword, I was reminded of that rather more charming figure of the mountaineering world, Gertrude Chumpot, known as the crevasse poppet (16 down, 3 down). Gertrude earned this soubriquet because she was a sort of one-woman mountain rescue service, adept at saving the lives and limbs of hapless mountaineers who, not looking where they were going, plummeted down crevasses to what would otherwise have been certain death.

One of the great mysteries of the crevasse poppet was the manner in which she effected her rescues. Eschewing the usual kit of ropes and pitons and whatever else is used by standard mountain rescue teams, she employed a form of inexplicable mesmerism. Standing at the edge of a crevasse wherein languished a moaning ninny who had fallen in some minutes earlier, Gertrude would make enigmatic sweeping movements of her arms while babbling gibberish and gazing at the sky. By this means, she somehow levitated the nitwit out of the crevasse. At least, that is what she told the Commission of Inquiry when it was considering whether to prosecute her for witchcraft. She was such a charming poppet that the case was dropped.

The crossword is particularly ingenious because it is littered with references to her story. The chairman of the Commission, for example, was an unromantic taciturn Lett (23 across, 1 down, 24 across), named Arpad Klingklang. Arriving for the first session on his horse (9 across), he gave a press conference where he stated that he was ready to burn Gertrude Chumpot immediately, given that in his view it was a clear case of possession (11 across) by Old Nick (10 across). The crevasse poppet had only been on the witness stand for a few minutes, however, before the Lett was like a moonstruck calf, hopelessly in love. Soon enough, he called proceedings to a halt, put all the paperwork through a shredder (5 down), and was persuaded to take a rest cure (26 across) at a seaside resort (7 down), where he spent his time drinking café noir (8 across), dancing the habanera (20 across) with various ladies (22 across), and poring over erotica (17 across). In an attempt to rid him of his Gertrude-mania, the staff fed him a diet of gruel containing bits of leek (2 down) and locust (22 down).

There are several Alpine folk songs about the crevasse poppet, usually yodelled to the accompaniment of an alpenhorn. If you listen to them you will probably need to take a rest cure yourself.

Madge Strudwick, Madge Strudwick, where goest thou?
I’m going to the barn for to milk me a cow.
Madge Strudwick, Madge Strudwick, what will you do then?
I’ll read the hot entrails of a fresh-slaughtered hen.

After studying this verse for several hours, pupils are required to write a potted biography of Madge Strudwick, of no fewer than twenty thousand words, following her progress from the iron cot in the orphanage to a pauper’s grave, and taking in significant events in her life, including the appearance of milk teeth, theft of her breakfast porridge by bears, pole-vaulting competitions, airship disasters, the darning of a rent in her polka dot dress, ignominy and pelf, later further pelf, deployment of the Snodgrass implement, pantry etiquette, on her first looking into Chapman’s Homer, dreary rainy autumnal afternoons, the thing with the spatchcock, the encounter with a spider while sat on a tuffet eating curds and whey, what she really thought about curds, the pricking of her thumbs, dust in her boudoir, the agony in the garden, gardening tips, her reputation as a chatterbox, clown murder, shortcake recipes, planetary influences, chocolate swiss roll, gladioli, Choctaw lineage, speech impediment, holiday snapshots, filbert hedges, the pounding of those infernal drums, pictures of Jap girls in synthesis, collusion with vampires, baffling reappearance of milk teeth, sun worship, pet budgerigar, possible sighting on the grassy knoll on 22 November 1963, ribbons, melodrama, shoes, bus pass, library ticket, pippy bag, anaconda, hoop, shutters, antimacassar, nunnery, pincers, peg, tap, bedevilment, soot, soap, soup. Extra points will be given for pointy bits.