One man who knew a thing or two about boiling My Lady Kent’s pudding, apart from Sylvester Patridge, was Blodgett. Blodgett first came upon the recipe when he was under the culinary tutelage of the so-called Culinary King of Cuxhaven, Binsey Poplars. Poplars himself unearthed the pudding details during his researches in an archive of pudding recipes at the Texas Recipe Book Depository in Dallas, bang next door to the more famous – or infamous – Texas Schoolbook Depository, from a sixth floor window of which, on a November day in 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald shot President John Fitzgerald Kennedy with a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. Some would add “allegedly” after that statement, but not me. I have read my Posner.

Nobody, so far as we know, ever shot anyone from a window of the Recipe Book Depository, not even Binsey Poplars, who, when he was not rummaging through old recipe books, could himself be impelled to acts of senseless violence. He once broke Blodgett’s legs, for example, quite deliberately, with blows from a tent peg mallet. Poplars called this mallet his Hammer of Pedagogy, which was something of a misnomer, as he also used it to crack eggs, to bash out dents in his pans, and to hammer tent pegs into campsite mud. He was fond of taking his students on camping trips to the outskirts of Cuxhaven, and having them forage or starve.

It was on one such escapade, when Blodgett was still on crutches, that teacher and student fell into a lengthy conversation about puddings. The Culinary King had only recently returned from his Texas trip, and his head was full of the recipes he had discovered in the pudding archive. The countryside around Cuxhaven was at the mercy of roaring winds that weekend, and Poplars and his students were huddled in their tents. It was not foraging weather. The pedagogue made a point of sharing his tent with any student whose bones he had broken in a fit of temper, and so it was Blodgett on this occasion who sprawled at his master’s feet. As far as puddings went, Blodgett knew almost as much as Binsey Poplars. He had immersed himself in the world of puddings since infancy, and it was this enthusiasm that had led him to sign up to the Culinary King’s Crash Course in the first place. For though Blodgett could tell you about thousands of different puddings, he had no idea how to make a single one of them.

In the tent, as gales howled and canvas flapped, Poplars and Blodgett talked about puddings for hours.

“Of course,” said Binsey Poplars pompously, “Sylvester Patridge claimed to know the correct boiling time for My Lady Kent’s pudding, but the man was a charlatan and a fool, and if you boiled it for the time he recommended you would end up with a pretty sorry excuse for a pudding”.

“Tell me more,” said Blodgett, all ears, because here was a pudding that, remarkably, he had never heard of. And as his tutor prattled on, Blodgett scraped shorthand notes on to one of his crutches with a sharpened twig.

Years later, far from Cuxhaven, restored in limb, and now a dab hand at cooking the puddings he had once merely salivated over, Blodgett stumbled upon his old crutch and deciphered the scrapings he had made upon it. He transcribed them into a notebook, embellished them, and published them as part of Blodgett’s Book Of Many Puddings, a copy of which, fittingly, was acquired by the trustees of the pudding archive at the Texas Recipe Book Depository on Elm Street in Dallas, just along from the overpass on the Stemmons Freeway.

A fantastic challenge for any maker of boiled puddings, he wrote, is the pudding named after My Lady Kent. Should it be steamed before boiling, or afterwards? Should it indeed be steamed at all, or should one just get on and boil it? What is the best type of pan in which to chuck the pudding ingredients prior to boiling? Does the pan matter? If the pan is dented, should one bash out the dents with the Hammer of Pedagogy beforehand? If one neglects to do so, will any indentations in the finished pudding caused by the dents add to its savour, or will they detract from it? Is there a place, in the contemporary world, for dented puddings, or should we be aiming for clean lines and smooth edges? Can a modern version of My Lady Kent’s pudding compete with the original? Should we allow indentations irrespective of their effect simply because, in all likelihood, given the rough and tumble of the times, My Lady Kent’s own pans would have been outrageously dented? Rare was the pan in those days that did not get bashed about and suffer because of that bashing. That may be one reason for the popularity of puddings, for there are cogent arguments claiming that the final shape of a pudding, particularly a boiled pudding, matters not a jot to the eater of the pudding. Are there any cases we can advert to where a pudding has been sent back from table with the complaint “I cannot eat this pudding. It is dented.”? Such reservations are likely with other things one might eat. A duck of the wrong shape, likewise a pig’s head or a pie full of misshapen blackbirds, will cause revulsion, for the eater may think, rightly, that they are being fobbed off with abominations of nature. But there is no such thing as the correct shape of a pudding, not even of My Lady Kent’s pudding. And yet to make one that is succulent and lip-smacking remains a challenge, and takes years of study, sometimes in a tent, on the outskirts of Cuxhaven, while canvas is buffeted and fierce winds blow.

It does not escape the reader’s notice that Blodgett fails to answer many of the questions he – or Binsey Poplars before him – raises, and nor does he provide a workable recipe for the pudding he so enthuses about. That is Blodgett all over, of course, infuriating and exasperating yet strangely adorable for all that.

Incidentally, it is said that the dressmaker Abraham Zapruder, who filmed the famous footage of the Kennedy assassination on his top-of-the-range Model 414 PD 8 mm Bell & Howell Zoomatic Director Series movie camera, was planning to spend the afternoon, following the passing of the presidential motorcade, in the Texas Recipe Book Depository, specifically to consult Blodgett’s book. Whether he was intending to boil My Lady Kent’s pudding, and was looking for helpful hints, we do not know, and now we never will, for history took a fateful turn on that sunny day in Dallas, and the dressmaker’s boiled pudding thoughts were wiped clean from his brain. But not from yours, or mine.

In his later years, Blodgett amassed a collection of inky puck stampings, kept in an album bound in the starch-stiffened fleece of a lamb. The fleece was spotted with unexplained bloodstains which Blodgett made no attempt to remove. He could have used a patent bloodstain eradication spray goo as manufactured by Don Federico’s Royal And Ancient Portugese Spray And Paste Company, but he chose not to. Boffins in a lab were recently given the opportunity to scrape minuscule quantities of the blood off the binding. When they subjected it to tests, they were able positively to identify it as the blood of a fruitbat. Curious indeed, but no more curious than much else about Blodgett’s later years.

In his new television series The Pitiful Whimpering Of A Soul In Torment, celebrity historian Simon Sebag Stimmungbag examines in detail the final decade of Blodgett’s life, and unearths some starling facts. I’m sorry, that should read startling facts, although among them are a number of Blodgett-starling collisions. If it seems unlikely that a man could collide with a starling on repeated occasions, as per being struck by lightning, Stimmungbag has at his fingertips a mass of convincing evidence, including ornithological records, accident reports, and ticket stubs from showbiz bird displays.

He also gives us a remarkable account of the time Blodgett decamped to a loggia, neglected to keep a log of his stay there, and upon returning home spent some six weeks dementedly chopping logs with a very sharp axe, despite being over eighty years old. He then carted the entire supply of chopped-up logs back to the loggia, dumped them outside the door, and kept a log in his journal of their gradual depradation through theft and rot.

There are other distinctively Blodgettesque glimpses: hen harrying, bricks on the brain, tormented scribblings on parchment regarding soup, starling collisions, misted glass obscuring a decisively important bus timetable, things chewed and spat out, intimations of mortality, imitations of Christ, intimacy with a mute milkmaid, delusional vampires, card games, ditch digging, reading aloud A Fiery Flying Roll by Abiezer Coppe to an audience of stunned potters, other potters encountered in hospital corridors, smashed-up lobster pots, a zest for crumpled things… the historian takes us through it all, at a pace sometimes gentle and at other times hectic, and occasionally incomprehensible unless one is already familiar with the material. That is Stimmungbag’s way, as viewers have come to expect from his previous documentaries on topics such as collisions in the sky and on starlings.

For most of us, though, whether or not we are students of Blodgett, it is the attention paid to the collection of inky puck stampings that is truly revelatory. Indeed, I had no idea that Blodgett maintained such a collection, nor that he kept it with such uncharacteristic care in a starch-stiffened lamb’s-fleece-bound album stained with the blood of a fruitbat. Again, one has to admire the way Stimmungbag marshals the evidence, a particularly difficult task when one considers how many similar collections were destroyed after the coup which brought the new regime into power. There will be younger viewers who have never known about inky puck stampings, let alone that people used to collect them. Of course, few were kept in albums as magnificent as Blodgett’s, it being far more common in those days to shove them haphazardly into cardboard pouches or discarded agricultural sacks. What shines most brightly in this excellent television series is the almost inhuman concentration with which Blodgett attended to his collection, peering at the stampings for at least three hours every day no matter what else was going on in his life or in the world at large. It is remarkable that on the day “Lovin’ You” by Minnie Riperton hit number two in the British singles chart, Blodgett spent at least nine hours not only peering at his inky puck stampings but rearranging them within his album, getting through an entire packet of stampings hinges, each one torn in half as was his usual habit. I think it says something about the man that he did not even collide with a starling that day. And it says something about Simon Sebag Stimmungbag that he has crafted such a long, blurry, black-and-white television documentary series with a deafeningly loud yet simultaneously muffled soundtrack to which one must listen with one’s ears pricked up and one’s mouth hanging open, drooling into a pewter pot held by one’s unpaid companion on the balcony of a sanatorium upon which the snow falls, and does not melt.

A couple of days ago, we looked at angles of hats, and today we turn our attention to angels of huts. One of the least rewarding periods of Blodgett’s life was when he had a job managing a collection of huts, each of which had its resident angel. These were battered and dilapidated rustic huts, rather than more well-appointed beach huts, or chalets, the type of hut Blodgett understood them to be when he accepted the post. Imagine his distress when the train taking him to his new office delivered him not to a sandy stretch of coastline but to a filthy countryside backwater ankle-deep in muck.  This was particularly galling because at the time he was being followed about by a film crew working on a documentary called Blodgett On The Beach. The film had been commissioned by an ambitious but airheaded young git from Channel Bilge, and once it became clear that Blodgett was not going anywhere near the seaside, the airhead cancelled the project and sent his crew to cover a dramatic reconstruction of the credit crunch instead.

So it was a solitary Blodgett who was deposited from the train at a deserted railway station in the middle of nowhere. He fumbled in his pocket for the hand-scrawled map his masters had given him and set off on his squelchy way to a distant barn, in a corner of which a desk with an anglepoise lamp and a pencil sharpener and a vase of spurge had been provided as his operational base. Just as the United Nations has its special rapporteurs, and Olympic teams have their chefs de mission, Blodgett’s job title was French and sounded important, and he was, at least at this point in his life, naȉve enough to swell with pride as, approaching the barn, he paused to pin his badge on his lapel. To their credit, his employers had no truck with such execrations as the contemporary laminated name-badge, and Blodgett’s badge was brass and heraldic and lively with beaked and taloned and winged beasts of myth and with Latin inscriptions. Blodgett had neither French nor Latin, so he had no idea of the meaning of either his job title or of the motto upon his badge. What he did have were unparalleled map-reading skills, and he was soon installed at his desk in the corner of the barn, having improvised a crate as a chair, and plugged the anglepoise lamp into a generator.

The many huts for which Blodgett had responsibility were scattered all over the place, in no discernible pattern. This rapidly became apparent to him when he stuck pins into a map tacked up on the barn wall, each pin representing one of the huts. Blodgett did this, with much enthusiasm, as preparation for what he foresaw as regular rounds of visits to his huts and to their resident angels. So great was the distance he would have to travel that he wondered if he could afford to rent a horse or a jalopy. He was counting out his coinage on the desk, just hours after his arrival, when he was interrupted by a visitor, who brought news that blasted Blodgett’s plans and left him sobbing.

“How now?” shouted the newcomer as he burst into the barn, “You must be Blodgett! I am Simon Sebag Costanza and this is my theme tune!” He pulled a portable parpophone from his pocket, depressed a knob, and a short burst of Hindemith’s Concert Music For String And Brass Instruments, Op. 50 (1930) roared at deafening volume and made the barn shake. It also made Blodgett shake, so much so that he lost his footing and toppled to the floor, where he remained hidden from his visitor’s view as Costanza continued, having redepressed the knob and popped the parpophone back into his pocket. “There is much you will need to know as the new manager of the many scattered huts with their resident angels, and I am here to tell you what’s what, even though you are crumpled on the floor behind your desk. It is all the same to me if you stay there throughout your tenure, so long as you keep up with your paperwork. I will be out and about on my visits to the huts, for I am the Milk Man. No, no, not the sort of milkman you may think, pootling around the lanes in an electric float delivering bottles of milk, as happened in days of yore. A pox on such ninnies! No, I am the Milk Man who calls upon the angels of the huts and monitors their intake of angel milk! There are recording angels and fumigating angels, there are angels of mercy, moon angels and archangels, but what all angels have in common is that they are reliant upon angel milk for their sprightliness and spark. Thus it falls to me to keep a proper check on the angels of our huts, lest they fall prey to ennui and Weltschmerz through neglecting their milk diet. Your job, meanwhile, is to sit at your desk, or crumpled on the floor behind it, and, by the light of the anglepoise lamp, to enter my daily dictated reports into a ledger. We measure milk by the pint here, Blodgett, so you will need no knowledge of fractions. But you must tally up the daily pintage and do much other tiresome and exhausting drudgery, and never once set foot outside the barn, not even to contemplate the cows in the fields or to chuck breadcrumbs on to the duckpond, for at any time of day or night I, the Milk Man, may come a-calling with my reports, and you must be at your post, diligent and miserable, for such is the way we do things in these parts and if ever you forget that you will be at the mercy of the cacodaemons, Blodgett, the cacodaemons with their curdled milk and their unspeakable yoghurts.”

With a second blast of his theme tune from the parpophone, Simon Sebag Costanza, the Milk Man, swept out of the barn. From behind the desk came the sound of sobbing, as Blodgett realised the full horror of his situation. He was stuck there for years, for years and years, at a desk in the corner of the barn, in the middle of nowhere, when all he had ever wanted was to stride purposefully from hut to hut, huts he was in charge of, preferably at the seaside.

Blodgett decided he wanted to live in a Schloss, so he did the sensible thing and went to an estate agent who specialised in Schlosses, or Schlossen.

“What I’m looking for,” he demanded in his demanding way, “Is somewhere bleak and forbidding and inaccessible except by a vertiginous and unreliable funitel or gondola lift. If you have seen the film Where Eagles Dare, directed by Brian G Hutton and released in 1968, you will have a good idea of what I am talking about, O estate agent.”

“That is not a film I have seen,” replied the estate agent, an impossibly youthful and pimply person who was terrified of Blodgett for reasons he was as yet only dimly aware of. “I am not much of a cinemagoer at all,” he continued, “For I prefer to spend my leisure hours at the circus.”

Blodgett had strong views on circuses, but so intent was he on viewing at least a couple of Schlossen with a view to purchasing one of them that he decided not to berate the estate agent just yet.

“A pox upon circuses!” was all he said, and then asked the pimply person if there were any suitable Schlossen on his books, at which point he was handed a big fat leather-bound Schlossen brochure and invited to thumb through it, which he did, for about fifteen minutes, occasionally making strange explosive noises and thumping his fist on the estate agent’s desk.

Outside, birds landed on the branch of a tree and began to squawk and sing.

The pimpled youth was growing increasingly nervous of Blodgett, so he reached into his drawer for a can of pepper-spray. He had only used it once, to disable a ruffian bent on criminality, on a Wednesday morning. Now it was Wednesday morning again and he was faced with this bad-tempered giant of a man in a Homburg hat and unseasonal galoshes who was perhaps using Schloss-purchase as a blind for some evil deed, though what that deed might be the estate agent did not yet know.

In truth, Blodgett was perfectly serious in his intention to buy a Schloss, although he had not worked out how in the name of heaven he was going to pay for it. That was why he wanted it to be bleak and forbidding and inaccessible except by a vertiginous and unreliable funitel or gondola lift, for then, once inside, for a viewing, he would simply stay put and pull up his ramparts, and defend himself against any bailiffs or law officers by pelting them with burning rags. It was not that he did not intend to pay the full Schloss-purchase price eventually, for at heart he was an honest man, but he wanted to be in his Schloss while devising a money-making scheme which would allow him to pay for it. Meanwhile, as he gazed at the pages of the Schloss-brochure with greedy eyes, he continued to thump his fist on the desk, because that is the sort of man he was.

Outside, the tree on the branches of which little birds squawked and sang was being chopped down by an inept municipal tree-chopping man. Not only was he chopping down the wrong tree, but the direction of his chopping meant that when it fell it fell slap bang into the Schloss-specialist estate agency. And it fell, smashing the glass frontage, at precisely the moment that the pimply youth, unnerved by yet another thump of Blodgett’s fist upon his desk, pointed the pepper-spray at Blodgett’s face and sprayed him. At which point, also, one of the thicker branches of the tree, falling, landed with a mighty bash upon the youth’s head, braining him into a daze.

The birds had flown away to the branches of another tree, and were squawking and singing still.

Thus it was that Blodgett ended up at a clinic to have the pepper-spray rinsed out of his eyes, while the estate agent lay in a bed elsewhere in the same clinic having his brain examined. It is hardly surprising, then, that Blodgett failed to buy a bleak and forbidding Schloss, one inaccessible except by a vertiginous and unreliable funitel or gondola lift, on that Wednesday morning loud with birdsong and squawk.

If you were fortunate enough to be hanging around with Blodgett on a Thursday morning in the middling years of the last century, you would as likely as not have been witness to a display of rare skill. For it was Blodgett’s endearing habit in those days, on Thursday mornings, to bash out various national anthems, using his fists, and sometimes sticks, on the base of an upturned biscuit tin. He would have eaten all the biscuits for his breakfast, of course. Blodgett had learned by heart the national anthem of almost every state and statelet on the planet, reduced each one to its rhythmic core, and bashed them out on biscuit tins. He would do this at home, or by the edge of a pond, or halfway up a hillside. In truth, it mattered not where he was, for he had fallen into a routine. Thursday meant biscuits for breakfast, then bashing out anthems. So energetically did he thump and bash that by the end of his recital the biscuit tin would be a dented and effectively destroyed thing. Apparently he passed the ruined tins on to Jasper Poxhaven, the sinister scrap metal dealer whose yard was a few doors away from Blodgett’s chalet.

Blodgett was not fussy about his biscuits, and would gobble down whatever the tin contained. The biscuit shop was conveniently located between his chalet and Poxhaven’s yard, so you can see that fortune favoured the accomplishment of his designs. He might take his tin to the pond, or to the hillside, if the weather was balmy, but if it rained, or there were tempests and cataclysms, he would hurry back indoors. I am not sure if he kept a dog at this time, but if he did it was probably the deaf dog of which we know he became fond, its lack of hearing rendering it oblivious to the frantic bashing of the biscuit tins. It would be useful to gain some clarity about this, because it raises the possibility that Blodgett may have bought a tin of dog biscuits from time to time, and given them to the dog rather than bolting them down himself, which would have been a boon at such times as he suffered from stomach cramps. Certainly there is evidence that the biscuit shop sold dog biscuits as well as biscuits for human beings. It also sold hard tack biscuits for the many jolly jack tars and matelots who congregated at the quayside, babbling incoherent maritime gibberish while gutting fish in a desultory fashion.

I have said that sometimes Blodgett bashed his biscuit tins with his fists and that sometimes he deployed a pair of sticks. Had you asked him about this, he would have explained that the different timbres of fists and sticks were each appropriate for certain national anthems. Indeed, one of his little mottos at the time was “European fists, South American sticks!”, which he always shouted with great enthusiasm. That leaves unclear the preferred thumping implement for the anthems of other continents, but Blodgett was the first to admit that he was not yet fully au fait with all the anthems in the world, just most of them. This may have been a specious claim, but who in that wretched seaport knew enough to challenge him? Certainly not Poxhaven, whose knowledge of music was confined to his eerie renditions of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie The Moocher”, drunkenly wailed under the moonlight as he staggered out of The Cow & Pins.

It was only on Thursdays that Blodgett ate biscuits for breakfast. The rest of the week he strained to suck a glutinous purple goo through a straw. He had been assured by a quack that it was a miracle goo, a panacea for all known ailments, corporeal and cerebral, that by ingesting it he would in all likelihood cheat Death itself. To be sure, the quack himself looked to be at least two hundred years old and still went tobogganing every winter. That is what he told Blodgett, in any case. It is a pity that we do not know the recipe for the goo, for we could mix up a supply and subject it to lab tests, with our wiser heads. All we know with any certainty is that Blodgett once described the taste of the goo as approximating to that of the straw through which he sucked it. In the years of which I write, such a straw would most likely have been made from cardboard.

Of course, neither Blodgett nor anyone else became immortal by sucking goo through a straw, but long before his death he had abandoned his Thursday morning biscuit tin bashing. Why? It would be an exaggeration to say, as Ford Madox Ford does at the beginning of The Good Soldier, “This is the saddest story I have ever heard”, but I’ll admit that when I heard all about it I sniffled into the napkin I happened to be holding. Jasper Poxhaven had, it turned out, been hoarding all those battered and dented biscuit tins rather than flattening them his big pulverising machine and selling the tin to a tin buyer, as one might have expected him to do. But I told you he was sinister. Now he built the huge collection of biscuit tins into a tower, out at the front of his yard, for no other reason than a deluded sense of self-importance. He hoisted a flag, embroidered with his likeness, atop the tin tower, and took to perching up there, in all weathers, like some ascetic of the ancient world, except that rather than contemplating the ineffable he hurled imprecations and spittle upon the citizenry below. He was bonkers as well as sinister. But the biscuit tins, remember, were bent and battered, and the tower was unsafe. And one day a gale swept in from the west, and the tower toppled, and it toppled at the precise moment that Mrs Purgative, the proprietress of the biscuit shop, was pulling up her shutters, and she was buried under the biscuit tins and the flagpole and the flag and Poxhaven himself, who somehow survived. Mrs Purgative did not, and soon her shop was taken over by a potato magnate, and no more biscuits were sold in the town from that day to this.

As Blodgett was to reflect, when writing his memoirs many years later, potatoes come in sacks rather than in tins, and you cannot bash out the national anthems of the world on burlap, with fists or sticks or anything else. And so he ceased his Thursday morning biscuit-scoffing, and his rhythmic thumping of biscuit tins, and on those days too he sucked glutinous purple goo through a straw for breakfast, but it did not save him.

A generation ago, the aeroplane pilot and sage Numan asked “Are friends electric?” It was pertinent then, and is perhaps more so now. Over the years, many thinkers have grappled with Numan’s question, but it is fair to say that none has been able to give a satisfactory answer. Much publicity was generated when Pilbrow published his big fat Symposium on the problem. The garlanded laureate of pseudo-sci fi hermeneutic psychobabble persuaded over a hundred movers, shakers, and hysterics to respond to the poser put by Numan, and then toured the radio and television studios giving inaccurate summaries of their replies. Few who saw it will forget the Newsnight appearance when Pilbrow’s pretensions were comprehensively demolished by weatherman Daniel Corbett, who strode across the set from his meteorological map and literally tore a copy of the Symposium to shreds before Pilbrow’s – and Jeremy Paxman’s – eyes. It was a cheaply-produced paperback edition of the book, with weakly-glued binding, but Corbett’s feat was no less impressive for that.

Since that watershed, there have been other, muted responses to Numan, appearing for the most part tucked away in little-read specialist journals or inserted at the tail-end of lectures delivered in draughty, half-empty civic halls in the depths of winter. The question remains cogent. The responses have, almost invariably, shirked its implicit challenge.

Until now. For last week, Blodgett commandeered space in all the major newspapers to announce his answer. “Are friends electric? No!” it read, in big bold letters, and then, in smaller type, continued “Not my friends, at any rate. My friends are made of gas.”

Blodgett went on to describe the small band of his pals who appear to him in the form of clouds of luminous, and sometimes volatile, gas. Anticipating the charge that he is subject to hallucinations, he refutes it with aplomb. Blodgett’s gas friends shimmer around him, he says, ethereal, mercurial, and insubstantial, but boon companions still. He gives the example of his friend Abu Qatooba, a friend composed of particularly volatile gas, an Islamic fundamentalist gas-form forever railing against the iniquities of pretty much everything he disagrees with and threatening to behead sinners and apostates and infidels. Blodgett is himself an infidel, of course, and this has led some critics to claim that he is making up all this stuff about a gang of friends made out of gas who hover around him. He is keen to dispel the impression that his chums are ghosts or wraiths. “They are as real as you or I,” he writes, “Completely human, with human virtues and vices. But they are formed of gas clouds. Abu Qatooba and I disagree on many points, but I count him as my friend because I admire his striking beard, also of course made out of gas, and his amusing tendency to fly off the handle at tiny provocations.”

Blodgett gives fewer details of his other gas-pals, although he finds room to mention Daisy Blunkett, a blind widow-woman with a gas guide dog, and Anhopetep, an ancient Egyptian gas pharaoh. He explains that when they are not by his side, his friends flit from place to place, sometimes together in a gang and sometimes apart, and try to strike up friendships with others. They have met with little success in doing so, and Blodgett puts the blame firmly at Numan’s door.

“Intentionally or not, Numan planted the idea in people’s heads that in future their friends would be electric,” he writes, “Thus today’s citizens are less open to the idea that they may have friends made out of gas. This is a great pity. I have found companionship and joy with my little band of gas pals. They have much to offer in the hurly burly of contemporary life, and I urge each and every one of you to put out the hand of friendship to members of the gas community. Next time you are waiting at the bus stop and notice a cloud of luminous gas approaching you, take that bold step. Shed your Numanoid prejudices and greet that gas-cloud as a compadre. You can make a difference.”

Blodgett has been hoping to appear on Newsnight to further his cause, but the producers are somewhat wary after the Pilbrow incident, and have no plans to invite him on to the programme.

A week or two after the inaugural parade for the Hooting Yard website, as long ago as December 2003, I received a plea in the post from a concerned reader. Dear Frank, my anonymous correspondent wrote, I have heard it said that Blodgett always maintained an alphabetical contents in his duffel bag. Is this true, and if so, can you give an example, drawn from a typical Blodgett day?

I have not ignored this question, but coming up with an answer has taken a lot of research, sometimes perilous. If you have undertaken perilous research, on any topic, you will know how it can make you a bit wobbly on your pins. Anyway, I did finally manage to find out what Blodgett kept in his rucksack on a typical day, and now that I am less wobbly on my pins, I can at last respond to that long-ago question.

Yes, Blodgett did always maintain an alphabetical contents in his duffel bag. The twenty-sixth of March 1965 was, for Blodgett, a pretty unremarkable day – neither muckling nor mickling, as Fisher would say. Here is a comprehensive list of the contents of his duffel bag on that day:

Aniseed. Blötzmann diagrams. Cake. Dust. Ectoplasm. Flippers. Grease. Hinges. Incunabula. Jam doughnuts. Kaolin. Linctus. Marmalade. Nothingness. Orpiment. Prunes. Queen Esmerelda’s Toilet Water. Ransom money. Sandpaper. Turps. Ullage. Vinegar. Wax. X-Ray Spectacles. Yeast. Zinc blobs.

Old Russia had only one tsar at a time, but now of course we have many of them, each with their own speciality, like patron saints. Traffic tsars, drugs tsars, respect tsars… every week some bug-eyed government wonk creates yet another tsardom. Such power!

Apparently, Blodgett used to be a tsar, for a few weeks. It was a gorgeous summer afternoon, and he was putting the finishing touches to his sleek gas-powered überpod when one of those bug-eyed government wonks came prancing up the path, out of nowhere. Blodgett put down his rag on a pile of other rags, dipped his hairy hands into a tub of swarfega, and wiped them on one of the other rags from the pile, or perhaps on the one he had just dropped. He adjusted his lorgnette with exquisite daintiness and looked the wonk over, as if he were examining a beetle. Blodgett had history with wonks, as they say, and he was prepared for anything.

“You are Blodgett?” asked the wonk, in a wonky monotone.

Blodgett was tempted to curl his lip, but he was still wearing a protective cotton dimity thing over his nose and mouth, so instead he nodded his assent.

“We need to appoint a cow byre tsar,” announced the wonk, without preamble, “And your name has been put forward. There is a modest stipend and an armband. Congratulations.”

If the wonk said anything else, his words were wasted, for he was drowned out by the sudden appearance of swooping corncrakes. Blodgett ushered him into his hut and put the kettle on.

“What does the job involve?” he asked, his booming voice only slightly muffled by the dimity thing.

“Oh, you know, just go and hang around cow byres being sort of tsary,” replied the wonk.

What Blodgett was not told was that he was expected to send in daily reports, including the Latin names of the cows in each byre he fell upon, looming in his fierce Blodgettian way in the shadows. An added difficulty was that all the cows he visited seemed to twinkle, like stars in the heavens. His first report was sent back to him, his lovely handwriting virtually obliterated by comments and corrections scribbled with an impossibly thick black magic marker pen. Blodgett wept that night, huge convulsive sobs wracking his frame as he crouched next to the überpod. His second and third reports fared no better, so he stopped sending them. And nothing happened. Each morning, as dawn broke, he would don his cow byre tsar armband and stride out towards yet another cow byre of twinkling cows, and loom, tsarily, for hours upon end, before returning home to his soup and his fireside. No word came from the wonk, for the wonk wed his sweetheart and fled to a city of curious puddles and gigantic towers of granite, and he never again thought much about cows, twinkling or otherwise. And after a few weeks, nor did Blodgett. He put his cow byre tsar armband on his pile of rags, and soon it was smeared with swarfega, just another Blodgett rag.

Postscript. Six months later, Blodgett’s hut was crushed by a stampede of twinkling cows. He was out at the time.