The diary of Ford Madox Unstrebnodtalb, on this day one hundred years ago:

I gargled. You gargled. He, she, or it gargled. We gargled. You lot gargled. They gargled. That was the gargling done, and it remained only to regargle before getting down to the lesser business of the day, the gargling and regargling being, of course, the main business, on this day as on every day in the current dispensation.

I know for a fact that some queer folk like to gargle with stuff that comes prepared in bottles available from the chemist’s shop, such as Dr Baxter’s “Zippy” Fragrant Spitting Fluid. I abhor those concoctions. I make my own, a mixture of ice cold water scooped from the duckpond, table salt, crushed violets, vinegar, and goaty milk. The precise quantities of each ingredient I measure out in my so-called “gargling jar”, which in truth is just an ordinary jar with horizontal lines scratched on the side with the sharpened ends of a pair of sugar tongs. It has served me well these forty years, and will I hope continue to do so for as many more years as the Lord sees fit in His ineffable wisdom to grant me. Not that I am a religious man. Pious yes, religious no. If there is a Lord, then He is a phantom in my head, lodged somewhere between the brain and the skull, forever eluding the forceps of enquiry.

I must admit that there are days when, having gargled and regargled, I find myself at something of a loose end. On occasion I throw caution to the winds and repair to the bathroom to gargle one more time. Spellbinding as this can be, I know it only staves off the inevitable, which is to buckle down to all those non-gargling activities with which I am afflicted. On any given day these might include: not gargling, taking a constitutional round and round the flowerbeds, scooping water from the duckpond, plucking then crushing violets, milking several goats, resisting the temptation to regargle, firing off a letter to the editor of the Gargling Gazette, shimmying up and down a rope ladder as part of military training for a war I am convinced will never come, dispensing alms to beggars and widows and orphans, communing with my spirit guide, hooplah!, polishing the gargling jar, and writing in a crabbed and barely legible hand in my diary. Today I did some of these things, not others, but with a heavy heart. I felt drawn, irresistibly, to the bathroom sink, to gargle again, though I knew it was madness.

Dr Baxter himself, in spite of his “Zippy” potion, warns against the dangers of overgargling in a pamphlet distributed by an urchin in the village square. I do not think the urchin receives a farthing for his labours. Come rain or shine he stands there, weedy and disease-ridden, handing out pamphlets to passers-by. “Sickness Of The Brain Brought On By More Gargling Than Is Wise And Proper” are the words emblazoned on the cover, below which appears a mezzotint by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint showing a horrifying brainsick mad person in the throes of unreason. Why does Dr Baxter at one and the same time manufacture and sell his spitting fluid while dissuading people from wishing to purchase it? The only reason I can think of is that he is brainsick himself, perhaps from overgargling.

My own head, it must be said, or the brain inside it, has not yet succumbed to lunacy. I feel my phantom Lord, nestled within, would tell me were it so. He said nothing today, which I count as a perk. And so to cot.

Today is the feast day of St Mungo, so let us unearth one of his diary entries, for this day in 573, precisely one thousand five hundred and forty years ago.

Woke up in the Kingdom of Strathclyde. Sausages for breakfast. Thought about building another cathedral but quite honestly did not feel up to it. While I knelt in the muck praying, a messenger person came hurrying along and told me that a mad prophet by the name of Lailoken was rampaging about the place. He is apparently one of those wild men of the woods, the only difference being that he spouts prognostications which have the effect of turning the heads of the peasantry away from the glory of Christ Jesus.

“Can you do something holy to bring an end to his mischief?” said the messenger person.

“I shall see what I can do,” I said, wearily, for forsooth I was weary and footsore and had many another malady as tend to afflict those of us living in such barbaric times.

I struggled up from my knees and tottered off towards that part of the blasted and inhospitable countryside where this mad fellow was reportedly to be found. On my way I saw a bird that never flew and a tree that never grew and a bell that never rang and a fish that never swam. It is not often you see a bird and a tree and a bell and a fish all together in close proximity. A bird and a tree together, yes, and conceivably a bird and a tree and a bell, but the fish as well, that seemed anomalous. I wondered if it might be a miracle sent by the Lord. If so, what did it portend? These are weighty matters of great spiritual significance.

Something that is most definitely not of great spiritual significance is the raving of this wild man Lailoken, who I found cutting capers at the edge of the forest. He was engarbed in animal pelts and exceedingly wild and hairy. I brandished a jewel-encrusted crucifix from the cathedral at him and bid him desist on pain of hellfire. It started to rain and he retreated into the woods. I blessed a few Strathclyde peasants who were loitering thereabouts and was pleased to hear them begin wailing and keening my name over and over again – “Mungo! Mungo! Mungo!”, they wailed and keened. It was music to my ears.

In the evening I had a bath and an eerie premonition of death in a bath at some point early in the next century. Oo-er, missus!

The weedy poet Dennis Beerpint leads a far more exciting life than one would expect of the author of several precious slim volumes of twee verse. If, that is, one is to believe his diaries. Here he is on this day exactly ten years ago.

Woke up and ate a bowl of thin gruel, apt for invalids, for breakfast, but not before I was engaged in a life or death struggle with an enraged and half-starved panther which leapt upon me from somewhere among the pansies and phlox in the garden. Eventually I was able to smother it with a pillow, ruining in the process the pillowcase embroidered by Aunt Dot so many years ago with winsome scenes of Alpine frolic and glee. I wept, for pillowcase not panther.

After breakfast, I went to languish neurasthenically in a nook, there to wring from the depths of my soul a verselet or two of twee beauty before succumbing to the vapours. No sooner had I adopted my posture of languishment, however, and before e’er I had the strength to pick up my quill, than the bright red bakelite emergency hotline metal tapping machine concealed in the shrubbery began to bleep. I had an urgent message from International Woman of Mystery Primrose Dent, warning me of imminent attack by insurrectionary forces. Barely had I digested the news than a trio of helicopters whirred into view overhead, disgorging, on rope ladders, dozens of brutish and pitiless special commandos, who tipped me out of my hammock, crushed my quill underfoot, pulled a grotesque sponge hood over my head and yanked me up into one of the choppers. I was being abducted!

Hooded, manacled, and drugged with a serum, I had to think fast before I lost consciousness. I marshalled the techniques of the mystic oriental art of Goon Fang and freed myself, snatched the vial of serum antidote I spotted in the pocket of the helicopter pilot, and, risking all, leapt out of the chopper. I made a wager that we were flying over the sea, and I won. I plunged into the ocean, and sank many fathoms deep, but just as I was about to relax and come bobbing back to the surface, one of my ankles was grasped in the tentacles of a gigantic undersea Pontoppidan monster, which dragged me further down, down and down, to the sea bed where was its lair.

Luckily, just at the point where I thought my lungs would burst, I found an anomalous air pocket among the rocks. I calculated there was enough air to keep me alive for ten minutes. But the Pontoppidan monster looked hungry, and I reckoned I had half that time at best. Goon Fang would do me not a jot of good in a subaquatic environment, that much I knew. But I had a ray gun, and I used it, zapping the monster between the eyes. I then had to chew myself free from entangling fronds of seaweed before, in the nick of time, I made it back to the surface and swam ashore.

I took a breather on the glittering sands, and ate a seagull which I beat to death with my bare hands. I began to trudge inland, hoping to find a bus stop. Sure enough, I came to one soon enough, and waited no more than an hour for the number 666 which would take me home. Half way there, however, the brakes on the bus failed at the top of a perilously steep slope, and the driver perished from a heart attack. The bus gathered speed as it careened down the slope towards, I now saw, peering through the windscreen, a vast warehouse stacked with drums of highly volatile and flammable chemical compounds, beside which a careless janitor had just dropped a lit match. As I clutched hopelessly at the steering wheel of the bus, it came away in my hands. In a few seconds time, I would be engulfed in the fires of a hell.

It is at times like these I find poetry such a comfort, my own verses in particular. I began to recite the opening lines of my sonnet I languished, neurasthenic, in a gazebo… when all of a sudden an ineptly-piloted hot air balloon came crashing to earth in the path of the bus and acted as a miracle cushion. This gave me an idea for a new poem, and I could hardly wait to get back to my nook to write The Miracle Cushion before it evaporated.

I watched the warehouse explode in a sheet of flame and thanked my lucky stars. I walked home, exhausted but cheerful, whistling. Only as I unlatched the garden gate did I realise I had left my bus pass on the bus. I began to sob, and crumpled to the ground, keening like a widow woman. My shattered nerves could not withstand such a loss. I fell into a swoon where I lay, and that is where I was found, at midnight, by the Ghoul of Gack, which enwrapped me in a grisly shroud and dragged me away to its awful cave. I was in for a rude awakening on the morrow, but the morrow is Saint Mungo’s Day, so I pray for his protection.

The diary of Gösta Ekman Senior, on this day in 1938:

Woke up and snorted cocaine. Plunged my fabulous head, with its boyish good looks, into a pail of ice cold water, then snorted some more cocaine. Sat for a while pondering whether to spend the day as a farmer’s son, an eighteenth century aristocrat, an octogenarian lunatic, or a clown, in all of which roles I am of course equally convincing. Busy schedule of acting, directing, rehearsing, filming, recording, and administration, all fuelled by more and more cocaine. Felt a bit queasy and conked out.

In a staggering breakthrough, tiptop gruntologists at a gruntorium high in the Swiss Alps have discovered what they believe is the diary of the Grunty Man, that terrifying figure from children’s nightmares. As we all know – and shudder as we remember – the Grunty Man dwells in a filthy and horrible and tenebrous cave. Weirdly, some sort of magnetic anomaly in the rock of which the cave is composed has led to the Grunty Man’s bestial grunts being somehow recorded and preserved for posterity. By harnessing state-of-the-art 78 rpm shellac disc engroovement technology, the Swiss gruntologists were able to transfer the awful sounds from the dank interior of the cave on to state-of-the-art 78 rpm shellac discs (with grooves). A collection of said discs has now been made available to the public, so we can all relive the terrors of our totdom.

Here is a transcript of the Grunty Man, musing upon his existence on this day in 1913, and 1813, and 1713, and 1613, and back, back, at intervals of a century, to before the earth was formed, to before the universe existed, to before time and space, back to that unimaginably distant past when the Grunty Man was all there ever was, or ever is, or ever will be:

Grunt grunt grunt.

Woke up in my hovel. Ate a mess of pottage for breakfast. It was a bracing day in Cisalpine Gaul, so I thought I would take a trudge down to the river to wake my weary bones and slop out the pot. It is not the best of rivers for slopping out, for the water is muddy and red, but at least it is shallow, so there is no danger of drowning.

So there I was slopping out my pot in the river when, from behind me, back in Cisalpine Gaul, came the thumping and clomping of a Roman legion. “Legio XIII Gemina” it said on their banners, which I had read in the papyri was under the command of Julius Caesar. And indeed it was he, leading his legion, who now bore down upon me, a frightful look on his face.

“Hail, rude peasant!” he cried, “What river is this?”

I tugged my forelock and sprawled in the muck, and told him it was the Rubicon.

“So over on the other side is Italy?”

“That’s right, O mighty Caesar!” I replied, cowering.

Even though I am a mere peasant I am quite learned. I regularly read the papyri and have a grasp of current affairs and the laws governing the Roman Empire. I thought it best to tell Julius Caesar what I knew, so I pointed out that if he entered Italy at the head of his legion and tried to exercise imperium, the inevitable punishment was death, not only for him but for all the chaps in the legion.

This gave him pause, and for a while he seemed unsure what to do. While he was thus hesitating, the following incident occurred. A person remarkable for his noble mien and graceful aspect, appeared close at hand, sitting and playing upon a pipe. When, not only the shepherds, but a number of soldiers also flocked from their posts to listen to him, and some trumpeters among them, he snatched a trumpet from one of them, ran to the river with it, and sounding the advance with a piercing blast, crossed to the other side. Upon this, Caesar exclaimed, “Let us go whither the omens of the Gods and the iniquity of our enemies call us. The die is now cast.”

I watched as he led his legion across the shallow muddy red Rubicon into Italy, then took my slopped out pot and trudged back to my hovel. Nothing much else happened in Cisalpine Gaul for the rest of the day, though I suppose it is worth noting that I spotted a flock of birds swooping across the sky at dusk. Alas, my knowledge of ornithology is sparse, so I cannot say what kind of birds they were. Linnets? Starlings?

The lumbering walrus-moustached psychopathic serial killer Babinsky was a conscientious diarist. Here is what he had to say for himself on this day in 1966:

Woke up feeling murderous. Preened my moustache and sharpened my axe and cleaver and slicer. Tossed them into a gunny sack, slung it over my shoulder, and went out on a rampage. The sky was blue, birds were singing, and the municipal flowerbeds hereabouts were splurged with glory – plastic glory, in the depths of winter, but glory nonetheless.

I am no Panglossian, far from it, but even I was persuaded that this might indeed be the best of all possible worlds. In fact, I felt so chipper that when a beggar person approached me, his grubby withered paw outstretched for alms, I pressed a penny upon him and wished him all the best. His awful gob broke into a toothless grin that warmed my cockles. Further down the street, several puppies were frolicking. I struck the fear of the dog-God into them and they scampered away.

Above, in the blue sky, a trio of cranes flew by, and I thought of Sibelius. He was a baldy man with a drink problem, but he knew how to write a symphony. I thought about popping into a Finnish church to say a prayer for his immortal soul, and I stopped a passer-by to ask if there were any Finnish churches in this neighbourhood, ones I might have overlooked. I have only been here for a couple of days, after fleeing the coppers following that gore-splattered business over by Pointy Town Town Hall.

The coppers here have not noticed my presence yet, except for one particularly inquisitive and irritating constable who demanded to see my library ticket. I smote him, as if we were living in Old Testament times, and then I smote him again, and again, and when he was thrice smitten I slew him with a flaming sword. Setting fire to a sword is easier said than done, but I recently came across some kind of flammable jelly. Smear that liberally on your sword, and strike a match, and hey presto!

The passer-by was ignorant of any Finnish churches, but he told me where I might find a guidebook to the local amenities. He was so helpful that I spared his life, just having a few little chops at him with my cleaver, nothing that emergency paramedics in a well-equipped air ambulance won’t be able to patch up.

The guidebook I found as promised in the newsagent’s kiosk did not list a single Finnish church. What kind of bailiwick was this? Humming a few snatches from Sibelius’ majestic sixth symphony I smashed the kiosk to firewood with my axe, and then set off in pursuit of the newsagent, who had run off screaming into the hills. I soon caught and slaughtered him, and it was such a lovely spot, up there in the hills, despite the cold, that I snacked on his brains and liver and lights before going back into town for a bit more rampaging.

But in the meantime, the coppers had arrived, headed by that relentless Detective Captain Cargpan, my Nemesis, so I had to go into hiding. I am currently cooped up in a hut at the waterworks. Tomorrow I will have to create a diversion and make my escape. It’s a pity I have run out of flammable jelly.