Archive for the 'Essays' Category

Tarleton was visited in his consulting rooms one April evening by a padding fellow clutching a buff envelope.

Glossary :
Tarleton, “the amateur’s amateur”.
Consulting rooms, address unknown but probably in an ill-lit alleyway off the main thoroughfare in Pointy Town.
April, fourth month of the year. Abolished during the French Revolution and replaced by Germinal (to 19 April) and Floréal (from 20 April). Tarleton’s internal “clock” was regulated accordingly, though not for ideological reasons.
Evening, latter part of the day, descending into dusk and twilight and, eventually, nightfall, wherein terrors are unloosed (see Thomas Nashe, Terrors Of The Night, 1594).
Padding, moving like a cat.
Buff envelope, an item of stationery, not to be confused with the Buff Orpington, a type of duck.

“Why are you padding into my consulting rooms clutching a duck?” asked Tarleton. Then, putting on his spectacles, he added, “I beg your pardon, I ought to say clutching an envelope.”

“Within this buff envelope,” said the visitor, “Are papers which, if revealed to the press, could bring about the collapse of several crowned heads, and seething unrest throughout the continent!”

Glossary:
Then, here indicating the next action or event in a sequence. Can also refer to the past, as in the model sentence “I was happy then, in my childhood, before the revolution, before the shambles wrought by our new masters”.
Spectacles, eyeglasses, two monocles stuck together with connecting wire. Often rose-tinted, though not in Tarleton’s case.
Papers, top secret quasi-official documents of world-shuddering significance.
The press, generic term for newspapers, both tabloid and broadsheet, even, great heavens to Betsy, Berliner format!, not to be confused with Papers (see above).
Collapse, can happen to puddings and soufflés if cooking times go awry.
Crowned heads, done away with, violently, during revolutionary upheavals.
Unrest, second album by Henry Cow, released in 1974. Sock on cover.
Continent, seven known to exist, in alphabetical order Africa, Antarctica, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America, South America. There may be others, hidden or occult. Continental location of Tarleton’s consulting rooms not yet identified beyond every shadow of a doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943).

“Good grief!” spluttered Tarleton’s sidekick Not-Tarleton, sprawled on a beanbag by the fireplace, “If what you say is true we must act immediately to stop the collapse and unrest in their tracks!”

An enigmatic smile played over Tarleton’s lips.

“May I have the buff envelope?” he asked the visitor.

Glossary:
Grief, Hardship, suffering; a kind, or cause, of hardship or suffering. Hurt, harm, mischief or injury done or caused by another; damaged inflicted or suffered; molestation, trouble, offence. A wrong or injury which is the subject of formal complaint or demand for redress. Gravity, grievousness (of an offence). Feeling of offence; displeasure, anger. A bodily injury or ailment; a morbid affection of any part of the body; a sore, wound; a blemish of the skin; a disease, sickness. The seat of disease; the diseased part; the sore place. Physical pain or discomfort. Mental pain, distress, or sorrow. Deep or violent sorrow, caused by loss or trouble; a keen or bitter feeling of regret for something lost, remorse for something done, or sorrow for mishap to oneself or others. Accidents in steeplechasing or in the hunting-field. Also in Golf. (OED). Not-Tarleton’s usage encompasses all these meanings, and more, oh! so many more, for he is that kind of chap, sprawled on his beanbag, spluttering.
Sidekick, a companion, colleague, junior partner, straight man.
Not-Tarleton, specifically in this case, Tarleton’s sidekick. More generally, can be applied to any organism, animate or inanimate, other than Tarleton himself. Thus, everything in the universe. Space precludes a complete list.
Beanbag, a large sealed bag containing synthetic beans, upon which to sprawl. Similar to the “Protean armchair” in The Confidence-Man : His Masquerade by Herman Melville (1857).
Fireplace, as the name suggests, a place of fire, of licking flames, of heat and blaze. Often located within an inglenook. Beanbags (see above) ought only be placed near to inglenooks if they are fire-resistant, otherwise a single spark from a hissing spitting coal upon the fire and, pfft!, up they go in flames. For fictional treatments of the catastrophic effects of fire upon persons, see Dickens, in particular Miss Havisham and Krook.
Tracks, “So take a good look at my face / You’ll see my smile looks out of place / If you look closer, it’s easy to trace / The tracks of my tears” (The Tracks Of My Tears, Smokey Robinson And The Miracles, 1965). In The Song Of Investment Capital Overseas (1981), the Art Bears hint at tracks without quite mentioning them : “The roads and rails run like cracks / And carry me upon their backs”.
Enigmatic smile, cliché used to impart spurious depth to a fictional character.
Lips, important parts of the mouth.
Buff envelope, remember not to confuse it with a Buff Orpington duck.

Hesitantly, the visitor handed the buff envelope to Tarleton. Without opening it, he in turn passed it to Not-Tarleton, still sprawled on a beanbag by the fireplace.

“Toss it on to the fire!” he commanded.

Not-Tarleton did as he was bid, and within seconds the buff envelope, and its mysterious world-shuddering contents, were consumed by the awful flames.

“I think we can say that the world is a safer place,” said Tarleton, smugly. “Now, shall we toast some crumpets?”

Glossary:
It would be a shame to add a further gloss on terms at this point. We would distract from the thrilling climax of the tale, and in any case few new words have been introduced. Hesitantly, toss, bid, awful, toast and crumpets can be looked up in any decent dictionary, and sometimes it is beneficial for readers to take the initiative, rather than having everything handed to them on a plate.

Glossary:
Plate, or platter, an item of crockery on which toasted crumpets are served in the consulting room of Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, at the conclusion of the famous story Tarleton And The Mysterious Affair Of The Buff Orpington Envelope.

The best laid plans, blah blah blah. Yesterday’s idea that I might take as my daily topic the subject of the Wikipedia’s random featured article has hit the buffers even before it has begun. Quite frankly, I cannot be expected to spin out a thousand words on Ahalya, the wife of the sage Gautama Maharishi in Hindu mythology. I’m afraid I have always found Hindu mythology, and Eastern religions in general, unbearably tedious. I suspect I would have had a hard time of it in the hippie sixties. George Harrison and I would have had little to talk about.

Instead, let us turn our attention to Mayerling.

Mayerling is a tiny village in Lower Austria on the Schwechat River in the Wienerwald. It was in the hunting lodge at Mayerling, on the evening of 29 January 1889, that Crown Prince Rudolf, heir to the throne of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, and his lover Baroness Mary Vetsera, met their deaths. He was thirty, she just seventeen. He shot her, and then, some hours later, shot himself. Or he poisoned her and then shot himself. Or she poisoned herself and then he shot himself. Or she died accidentally in the course of a botched abortion, and he then shot himself. Or they were both killed by three intruders, muffled up to the eyes in greatcoats. One bashed the Crown Prince on the head with a full champagne bottle, crushing his skull, another shot the Baroness. Among the three may have been the brother of the Baroness, though it is unclear whether he wielded the bottle or brandished the gun, or did neither, the murders being committed by his companions.

Indeed, the entire episode is unclear, as is apparent from the various possible scenarios outlined, all of which have at one time or another been claimed as the truth. All we know for certain is that on the following morning the bodies of both Rudolf and Mary were discovered by Loschek and Hoyos, valet and hunting companion respectively, who smashed the locked door of the lodge with an axe to gain entrance after knocking and knocking and knocking to no avail. We know, too, the seething passions bubbling beneath the rigid, stultifying protocol of the imperial court. Sex and death.

Oh, and we know something else. Always, in tales of imperial courts and aristocrats and the ruling classes, there lurk in the background the valets and factotums and servants. We have met Loschek. But a Crown Prince and a Baroness, in that world, would not have swanned off to a hunting lodge with a single valet. There would have been a retinue, an entourage. This is where the memoirs of Graves come in. Though Graves sounds like the name of a valet or butler, in this case we are dealing with a German spy who claimed to report directly to the Kaiser. Writing in 1916, Dr Armgaard Karl Graves introduces the brothers Max and Otto, trusted attendants of the Crown Prince. Probably a step up from valet status, but not by much. It is Max who opens the door to the three intruders, while Otto is down in the cellar fetching the champagne. In all the subsequent kerfuffle, not only do Rudolf and Mary lie dead, but Max, too, shot with the popular Alpine firearm the Stutzer, already used on the Baroness. Otto, meanwhile, gets knifed between the shoulders with a Hirsch-fanger. He survives, however, and when the intruders have fled into the freezing Austrian night, he scribbles an account of the events with pencil and paper and pins it to his brother’s corpse. Then he too flees – though Graves does not explain why – and, nearly thirty years later, “old, gray and bent.. is living the quiet life of a hermit and exile not five hundred miles from New York City”.

Well, maybe. Graves sounds like a nutter peddling a conspiracy theory, a Mayerling “truther”. I like that detail – or lack of detail – in “not five hundred miles from New York City”. There must have been untold Austrians, many of them old and gray and bent, living within such a radius in 1916. “Money would never make Otto talk,” adds Graves portentously, “but some day the upheaval in Europe may provide an occasion when this old retainer of the House of Habsburg may unseal his lips; and then woe to the guilty”. Guilty woe was something Graves already knew about by the time his memoir came out. In 1912, as the so-called “Glasgow Spy”, he was convicted under the Official Secrets Act in Scotland, having been caught in possession of telegraphic codes relating to the British navy. At his trial, he claimed to be a medical doctor who had practised in Australia (not Austria). He was sentenced to eighteen months. He later turned up in Washington DC (charged with blackmail, 1916) and Los Angeles (grand theft, 1929). Who knows, maybe he was Otto? That might be a theory worth pursuing.

Another, more gruesome, Mayerling obsessive was a busy bee in the 1990s, a century after the murder-suicide or suicide-suicide or double murder or triple murder. This was Helmut Flatzelsteiner, a furniture dealer from Linz. At dead of night – wolves may have been howling – he broke into the graveyard at Heiligenkreuz Abbey and exhumed from their tomb the bones of the Baroness. Two years later – and one shudders to think what he was doing with them in the interval – Flatzelsteiner paid for a forensic examination, claiming the bones belonged to a long dead relative. He later attempted to sell both the forensic report and the skeleton. The remains of Mary Vetsera were reinterred, and the Linz furniture dealer was made to pay damages to the Abbey.

The Mayerling Grave Robber Of Linz has not, so far as I know, been made into a film, but it ought to be. It might work well as a comedy. Mayerling itself – the hamlet, the hunting lodge, the Mitteleuropean murder suicide sex and death drama – now belongs, in perpetuity, to the film director Terence Young, whose 1968 costume drama starring Omar Sharif and Catherine Deneuve as the doomed lovers was for some reason billed on its original release as Terence Young’s Mayerling. On that basis, perhaps I should lay claim right now to Frank Key’s The Mayerling Grave Robber Of Linz, and set to work on the screenplay. I think I’d like it to be narrated by the ghost of Otto. Or by the shade of Dr Graves.

It must be forty years, I think, since last I saw a duck. It is not that I have consciously avoided them, though I am willing to admit that I may have done so subconsciously. But nothing is more dull than the subconscious, particularly one’s own, don’t you find? Thus I shall pass on the notion that there may have been an element of subconscious duck avoidance. The only thing worth saying in this connection is that Vladimir Nabokov liked to call Sigmund Freud a “Viennese quack”, and “quack”, of course, is the usual way we represent the characteristic sound made by ducks, in this language at least.

Whether I have avoided them, or they me, the blunt truth is that I have not seen a duck since the last years of the war in Vietnam. I did not fight in Vietnam myself – I was too young – nor was that ill-remembered duck I did see, circa 1972, a Vietnamese duck, so far as I know. I mention that war merely to give some idea of how much time has passed. I could equally say “since the middle years of the Heath government” or “since the year Ezra Pound died”. Did Ezra Pound ever write a poem about ducks? I do not know his work well enough to be able to say. Certainly it will not be anything said, or unsaid, by Pound that propelled me into the duckless years.

At the time, of course, when I saw that teal plashing in a pond in a park, I could not have foreseen that so many years would pass without my seeing another duck. Had I known, I might have remarked it better. I would probably have made a note in my log book, perhaps essayed a little sketch with my propelling pencil. That said, it is better that I did not, as I am a hamfisted sketcher at the best of times. My attempt might have looked like something other than a teal. There are innumerable sketches in my log books, both child and adult, where the subject would be wholly unidentifiable had I not added a written caption. I know this because in a surprising number of cases I saw no need, at the time, to add a caption, and now, whenever I pore over the log books in a fit of nostalgia, I have no idea what in the names of all the saints in heaven I am looking at. The sole certainly I can cling to, like a drownee to a raft, is that I was not sketching a teal, nor any kind of duck, at any time since 1972. That narrows down the possible subject matter, but only slightly.

If my sketching is so barbarous and cackhanded, one may wonder why I have continued to practise it, in my log books, through all these years. I could say that it is simply that I am waiting for the lead in my propelling pencil to be exhausted. It shows no sign of ever reaching its end. Either it is a magic lead that somehow replenishes itself, or goblins replace it while I am asleep. There can be no rational explanation.

Is there, though, a rational explanation for my never seeing a duck for forty long years? As I said, I have not consciously avoided them, nor their habitats. In a municipal park I often prance through, at least once a week, there is even a duckpond. I grant that, for at least the past several years it has been drained, and filled with filth and litter, it being that kind of park, but one might have expected perhaps to find a stray duck investigating the area on the off-chance that volunteers of a conservationist bent could have restored it to watery duckponddom. There is always the possibility that there is something about me terrifying to ducks, and if indeed a stray merganser or pochard were to come waddling into the park in hope of finding the duckpond restored to its former glory, they might scarper behind a shrub at the first hint of my approach. But why would I terrify a duck?

It is true that I do not know enough about the inner workings of a duck’s brain, its psychology, if a duck could be said to have one, to give a coherent answer to that question. All I will say is that it seems unlikely that I have certain attributes which would cause mental turmoil to ducks. I have never seen a duck flee from my presence, nor indeed any other aquatic creature, nor non-aquatic creature come to that, except for such beasts as always flee from humans, the nervous ones, such as squirrels and some cats. And there are some beasts which, on the contrary, seem to be inexplicably attracted to me. I was once pursued, on a country lane, for at least a hundred yards, by a gaggle of honking geese. That was in the year of the fall of Saigon, the year Dmitri Shostakovich died. Did Shostakovich ever write a divertimento about ducks? I do not know his work well enough to be able to say. I wish I did.

Yes, I wish I knew more of Shostakovich, but would it be equally true to say that I wish I had seen more – seen any – ducks, in the past four decades? Do I feel a gaping absence in my life because of a lack of ducks? That is a hard question to answer. But if I give it due thought, I suppose the answer has to be No. After all, if my heart was really set on seeing some ducks there is nothing to stop me going out in search of them. There must be, somewhere in prancing distance, a park with a duckpond still extant, one not drained and rife with filth and litter, a duckpond in which ducks happily plash. I should put on my hat and coat and walking boots right this minute, and crash out the door, and prance the highways and byways until I light upon such a park, with such a duckpond, with such ducks. And taking from my pocket my current log book, I should make sketches of them, and append captions, so that, forty years hence, when poring over them in a fit of nostalgia, I will be able to identify them as the ducks I saw in 2012, after a gap of forty duckless years.

That is what I should do. But instead, I am tempted to make a cup of tea, and listen to Shostakovich, and read Ezra Pound, and imagine myself in hand to hand combat with the Vietcong. The ducks can wait.

Look at this parade of off-duty bellringers limping into the seaside cafeteria. Or don’t look. It might be better to avert your eyes. Look instead at the charabanc from which they have been debouched. The charabanc driver is leaning against his charabanc puffing on a cigarette. He wears a peaked cap which sits uneasily on his big blockish head. There is an emblem, an embroidered badge, stitched to the front of the cap, consisting of a generic bird silhouette and a Latin tag. Neither you nor the charabanc driver know enough Latin to be able to translate it. I do. It says “Forward To The Seaside!” There is no exclamation mark in the Latin original, but I have added one to indicate the imperative. The command or aspiration implicit in the slogan has been met. We are indeed at the seaside. If there was any doubt, gulls are screeching and briny water is sloshing against the posts that support the pier.

The cafeteria is alongside, but not on, the pier. There is, between them, an amusement arcade. This is a place of sin, so we shall shun it. For a moment, when I saw the parade of limping bellringers heading in its direction, I feared they would be tempted to enter, placing their immortal souls in peril. With what relief, then, to watch them continue past it, and go into the cafeteria, every man jack of them, though there are women as well as men, among the bellringing party.

Why do they limp, the bellringers?

The charabanc driver is no limper, but he has other problems, not unrelated. He has not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six, yes six!, phantom limbs. In addition to the two legs God has given him, in his mind he has a further six legs, upon which he scuttles. His brain is that of a spider. It is, thankfully for the rest of us, a very rare mental delusion. To the innocent spectator, his gait is unremarkable. Certainly, at this seaside scene, the eye is drawn to the limping of the bellringers, not to the pacing across the carpark of the charabanc driver, as he stubs his cigarette out under his boot and walks off along the promenade. Only within his fantastical spidery brain is he scuttling. Only within his fantastical spidery brain is he spinning a silken web as he walks. And only within his fantastical spidery brain will he entrap in his web a fly, and gobble it up, still living, still breathing. It is a wonder such a man can be entrusted to drive a charabanc.

In the cafeteria the bellringers have come limping to a table and sat around it. They order tea and sausages and eggs and ice cream. When the factotum disappears behind a door behind the counter to pass their order to the cook, the bellringers each take, from the roomy pockets of their blazers, a handbell. Then it is clang clang clang for thirty seconds, until the factotum rushes out and demands to know what all the racket is in aid of. The oldest and most wizened of the bellringers, the one with the most pronounced limp when in motion, explains that they are providing seaside cafeteria bellringing entertainment. The factotum waves her arms wide, and looks from right to left and from left to right, as if to say, but there are no other cafeteria patrons, it is off season, it is pouring with rain, who are you entertaining?, for it is surely not me, I am as deaf as a post, as is the cook in the kitchen behind the door behind the counter, look at the sign in the window.

There is a sign in the window of the cafeteria, unnoticed by the bellringers, which announces that it is a seaside cafeteria for the hard of hearing and the stone deaf, though patrons with good ears are also welcome, if they are sympathetic. The limping bellringers are not sympathetic. They are sour and indignant. With exaggerated scraping of their chairs upon the linoleum and much huffery, they get up from the table and limp their way out of the cafeteria, slamming the door behind them. The deaf cook in the kitchen has already begun to prepare their sausages and eggs, which will end up in a bin for pigs.

Several hundred yards along the promenade, leaning against the railings in the rain, the charabanc driver has stopped to smoke another cigarette. He is staring at the sea. He sees the sea as a spider might see it, as a vast illimitable drowning pool. If the tide were out, he would like to scuttle across the wet sands, spinning his fantastical imagined web, trapping tiny seashore creatures for his lunch, but the tide is in, the sea is sloshing against the great stone wall atop which are placed the railings. The steps down to the sands are submerged and slimy. He chucks his cigarette end into the sea. A gull swoops to investigate the fallen floating bobbet, then soars away, dissatisfied.

Now the limping bellringers approach the charabanc driver. They are wearing rainhats. Unlike the driver’s cap, their hats do not sport an emblem of a generic bird silhouette and a Latin tag. They are plain and beige and shapeless. Their spokesman, the ancient one, demands they be taken back aboard the charabanc and driven to the next resort along the coast. Having nothing better to do, the driver agrees. But might I ask, he adds, what has caused you all to be afflicted with a limp? No you may not, comes the reply.

I watch from my seat in the bus shelter across the road. I, too, would like to know why they limp. I would like, too, to know more about the charabanc driver and his spidery delusions. There is much I would like to know, while I wait for the 49. It is a pity, a very great pity, that a vandal in the night time smashed the glass on the bus company display board at the bus stop and tore down and tore up and scattered to the four winds the notice announcing that the 49 would no longer stop here. Later, much later, when the rain has ceased, I will give up the ghost and walk to the cafeteria and, unsour, unindignant, order tea and sausages and eggs and ice cream. I will clang no handbell. By that time, the limping bellringers will be far away, further even than the next resort along the coast, caught in the charabanc driver’s spidery web, damned to perdition.

ONE LOT : A SINGLE TUSK
ONE LOT : TWO TUSKS
ONE LOT : THREE TUSKS
ONE LOT : FOUR TUSKS
ONE LOT : TWO TUSKS

To the Director

Dear Sir
I have come to enquire if I have anything left on account with you. I wish to change today my booking on this ship whose name I don’t even know, but anyway it must be the ship from Aphinar. There are shipping lines going all over the place, but helpless and unhappy as I am, I can’t find a single one – the first dog you meet in the street will tell you this. Send me the prices of the ship from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralysed, so I wish to embark in good time. Please let me know when I should be carried aboard…

Thus Arthur Rimbaud’s last recorded words, dictated in a delirium to his sister Isabelle from his Marseille hospital bed on the eve of his death on 10 November 1891. As Charles Nicholl notes in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 188-1891 (1997),

Where or what Aphinar is no one is sure. The phrase he uses is le service d’Aphinar, which seems to mean ‘the ship from Aphinar’ but could equally mean ‘the Aphinar shipping line’, so one cannot be quite sure if Aphinar is a place or a company, or even a particular captain. One cannot even be sure that ‘Aphinar’ is what Rimbaud said: it is only Isabelle’s transcription. Was it rather Al Finar, the Arab word for ‘lighthouse’, and was this phantom ship which he wished to board ‘in good time’ the one that would carry him away from the light and into darkness?

But we must begin somewhere, so, in the teeth of uncertainty, we dismiss the shipping line, the captain, the lighthouse, and we say Aphinar is a place, a city, a distant city across the sea, and we set out to find it. We pack twelve tusks, divided into five lots, into a pippy bag and we sling it over our shoulder. Mindful that Rimbaud had lost his right leg to the surgeon’s saw on 27 May, we hobble our own right leg by less drastic means – twine and cord, perhaps, or a tight burlap sack. And so on crutches we make our way to the docks. It may be that we are setting out on a journey from which there will be no return, a hopeless and pointless journey, like the one undertaken by the Japanese student who left her homeland in search of the fictional loot hidden under snow by the criminal robber and kidnapper Carl Showalter in Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996). The poor girl perished on her quest, and we too may face death before we reach Aphinar.

At the docks, we lean upon our crutches and we cast an eye over the ships. We did not get a chance, on the way here, to ask questions about shipping of a dog in the street. The street was empty of dogs, as if Rimbaud had been here ahead of us and poisoned all the dogs, just as he poisoned thousands of dogs in Harar, after a cur pissed on his animal hides hung out to dry in the hot dusty Ethiopian air. The air here is neither hot nor dusty. It is bitter cold, even icy, and a glance at the sky reveals the near certainty of snow. And so we gaze from ship to ship. Look, there is the Herzogin Cecilie, magically restored from its wrecking off the Devonshire coast! It gleams and glistens, even shimmers. We haul ourselves on to the gangplank, and it seems scarcely solid beneath our foot. A phantom ship, perhaps, for a phantom voyage, to the distant city of Aphinar.

Aboard, the captain greets us. What have you in that pippy bag?, he asks. We have twelve tusks in five lots, we reply. For like Rimbaud, we are honest, capable, and courageous. I have cargo of grain and nitrate in the hold, says the captain, Your tusks may be stored there for the duration of the voyage. We thank the captain and are glad to relinquish the pippy bag of tusks to a sailor, who carries it below. We do not know if ever we will see the bag, the tusks, again, but something tells us we will need the tusks to parlay our way through the massive wrought iron gates of the city of Aphinar, where the sentries must be bribed.

Shown, by another sailor, to our cabin, we collapse upon our berth. We wait, with the impatience of Rimbaud, for the ship to sail. At rest, flat out on the hard bunk, we are soon asleep, and dreaming. And such dreams! Of Appenzeller and Ilg and Zimmermann. Of two thousand poisoned dogs. Of a season in hell. Of our right leg, amputated and dumped in a Marseille incinerator.

We awake and are relieved to see our right leg present and correct, though numbed. Would it destroy the purpose of our journey to free it from twine and cord, from the tight burlap sack, to shake the life back into it, and go walking on the deck of the Herzogin Cecilie, unencrutched? Rimbaud had not that option, at the end. But nor, so far as we know, did he ever reach Aphinar. It will surely do us no harm to walk on two legs, as Rimbaud did, for untold miles, in Europe and Africa, until his final monopod months.

And so we free the numbed leg and leap from the bunk and cut two or three brisk capers around the room, like Boswell in the morning. But it is not morning. When we leave our cabin, and go out on deck, we see it is night, vast, illimitable, and starless. There is no sign of the captain nor his crew. There is no sign of a living soul. Yet the ship, the ship! It is riding the waves, fast and steady and straight, sails billowing. Nothing can stop us. We are on our way to Aphinar!

His frostbitten limbs. Sappho in the doldrums. Bad gas and forts. If these phrases do not stir you, you are clearly not a devotee of Urbane Geistige Geist, who was born one hundred years ago today. If, on the other hand, your brain lit up like a beacon on reading those words, you will be one of that little band who rightly acknowledge Geist as a key figure in twentieth century popular music.

‘Popular’ is perhaps not the most appropriate word. Although he worked within such fields as jazz, folk, rock, hootcha, pop, and swing, Geist’s music never won mass acceptance. He was only ever a cult figure, but it is to be hoped that, with the celebration of his centenary, the ears of the world can be opened to his extraordinary accomplishment. Who would have thought that an obscure cadet in the Bolivian army would become – in the words of one perceptive commentator – a cross between Yoko Ono, Xavier Cugat, and Mark E Smith?

We need not dwell here on Geist’s military career, except to note that he learned to play his first instrument – the glockenspiel – when he came under the wing of the legendary Bolivian army glockenspiel instructor, Captain Enrique Finisterre Belbacqau, a man of whom it has been said that if he did not exist, the staff of the Bolivian Army Glockenspiel Training School would have had to invent him. (One body of opinion attests that that is precisely what they did, creating a fictional character not unlike the supposed agent George Kaplan in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, for whom the Cary Grant character Roger Thornhill is mistaken. This theory has never satisfactorily answered the obvious question: if Belbacqua did not exist, who exactly did teach Geist his formidable glockenspiel technique?)

After being thrown out of the Bolivian army because of his flawed cadetship and shape-shifting, Geist hitch-hiked to Paraguay, where he soon fell in with a criminal gang who, when they weren’t cutting throats and pushing widows into the paths of oncoming trains, toted their piccolos and banjos around the market squares of provincial towns, playing an infectious combination of bluegrass and light opera. This raggle-taggle peasant band became, improbably enough, the first incarnation of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity.

There has been much speculation regarding Geist’s lifelong insistence that the groups he led, no matter how often he changed personnel, must always go by the same appellation, sometimes as just The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, and sometimes as Bolivian Army Cadet Urbane Geistige Geist And The Crooked Timber Of Humanity. He took the name from Immanuel Kant’s observation that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”, and it is tempting to see this as a less than subtle comment on that very first line-up of evil-hearted robbers and violent thugs. (Incidentally, Dobson wrote an out of print pamphlet entitled Nomenclature of Paraguayan Bandit Musicians & Soviet Collective Farm Administrators Compared, in which he proposed that Geist arrived at the name during a tarot reading. This is piffle.)

Sadly, no recording exists of that very first group. By the time the LP Pelf And Cant was released, with its magnificent trumpet-driven melodies, all but one of the original band were either dead, imprisoned, or hiding in the hills. Geist was supremely unconcerned at the almost total loss of his group, demonstrating for the first time the ruthlessness which was to make him so feared. As Dave Pod puts it in his Oral History Of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, “You could always tell when someone had done their time with Geist’s band. Their hair was prematurely white, most of their teeth had fallen out, and they walked, if they were able to walk at all, on spavined legs. They trembled uncontrollably, burst into tears every five minutes, and were unable to achieve closure on their issues despite extensive, and expensive, therapy”. Pod’s own band became a sort of rest home for ejected Crooked Timber, though artistically he is not fit to lick Geist’s boots. Nonetheless, one should not overlook the fact that by throwing in their lot with Pod, the wrecked survivors of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity were given a chance to play at the Eurovision Song Contest, something that was unlikely to happen under Geist’s iron rule. (He did, notoriously, attempt to enter the competition when he kidnapped Kathy Kirby, but an international police operation foiled his reprehensible, if entertaining, scheme. Many of us would have given our eye teeth to witness that superb twenty-six strong line-up of the band, all accordions, trombones and pounding drums, backing the British songstress in the specially-written song Black Rubber Beelzebub.)

His Frostbitten Limbs. Sappho In The Doldrums. Bad Gas And Forts. This was the trio of LPs that, for many of us, cemented Geist’s reputation. Released within the space of a single month, containing between them no fewer than one hundred songs, shanties and pop-madrigals, they still stand as one of the commanding achievements of twentieth century music in any genre, vibrant, vivacious, vivid and even, at times, deceptively cloth-eared. The story of those fractious recording sessions has been told many times, notably in the memoir by lutenist Julian Beam, one of the few band members who managed to remain in favour with Geist and appear on all three LPs, although his contribution to Bad Gas And Forts consists of a single string-pluck in the middle eight of The Gregory Peck Protein Imbalance Song. By the time The Crooked Timber Of Humanity appeared on the television show Pop Fabulousness! to promote its release as a single, Beam had been “consigned to the outer darkness” as Geist always put it, and was hawking his lute-playing skills at a variety of seaside resorts in exchange for the price of a cake or bun for his dinner. By the time he came to write his book, his arm was withered, his prematurely white hair was infested with beetles, and he had all the telltale signs of an ex-Geistist.

When we recorded the songs on side one of His Frostbitten Limbs, wrote Beam, Geist had devised some new ideas. He made us sleep in tents on the sloping roof of the studio, wear bells on lanyards around our necks, and force fed us a grey, tasteless paste of his own recipe. Every member of the band ballooned in weight and the constant clanging of those bells sorely tried the engineer, who had to erase their clamour from the tapes. The tents could not be properly secured to the concrete roof, and there were violent gales throughout the month, so we got little sleep. Only the hammer and tongs players, all six of them, were exempt from this regime. They were put up in a luxury hotel and taken to exciting sporting events during breaks. Geist himself spent most of the sessions smoking his pipe and making lascivious phone calls to a floozie.

Elsewhere, Beam declared that no recording session had given him such great joy, and he continued to idolise Geist for the remainder of his life, until the day his pitiful wasted body collapsed in a heap in a post office near the Blister Lane Bypass, and he was pronounced dead. Reportedly, his dying words were “Urbane Geistige Geist is a profound and matchless genius and everyone should devote their lives to his work, as I have been honoured to do, despite the feeble and broken carcass you see expiring before your eyes on this post office floor near the Blister Lane Bypa…..”

Geist himself was to die within a week. He had recorded over one hundred and twenty LPs, played concerts in almost every country on earth, won the esteem of a dedicated troop of followers, and been appointed as a Chevalier De Leo Sayer In Perpetuity. Countless times it had been foretold that he would meet his end at the hands of a vengeful, dismissed member of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity. Fingers were pointed, even while the bandleader was still alive, at bassoonist Ned Nightshade, the man who had played such a wonderful solo on a reworking of The Snapping Turtles Of Old Cadiz, yet whose heart had shrivelled and rotted when Geist sent him packing. Suspicions were raised, too, about Hetty and Ingmar, the Norwegian teenagers who sang on over a dozen LPs but were sacked from the band when Geist got himself into a flap about something or other.

In the event, the maestro was not murdered. One damp Sunday he was wheeling a barrow of nettles over bracken, whistling the showstopper from his stage musical version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, when a bee landed on his hat. Geist had always worn bee-proof hats until this fateful day, when a mix-up at the dry-cleaners’ found him for once in his life unprotected from bees. In a panic, he stopped whistling and flew into convulsions. His head flushed purple, he gasped for breath, and his tongue became puffy. He did not remove his hat, the fool. He became snagged in the bracken, miles from civilisation, and by the time the bee flew back to its hive, Geist had become hopelessly entangled. Unable to free himself, he lay on his back, staring at the sky, and sang Roll Along Covered Wagon, over and over again, until his last breath.

Roll along covered wagon, roll along, to the turn of your wheels I sing a song, city ladies may be fine, but give me that girl of mine, roll along covered wagon, roll along. Going home covered wagon going home, for this cowboy was never born to roam, ‘long the road that doesn’t change, to that old bar twenty range, roll along covered wagon, roll along. Yipee-teeyi, old timers, heading for your ranch house door, yipee-teeyi, old timers, corral me so I’ll never stray no more. Roll along covered wagon, roll along. Come along old pal, let’s get going. Roll along.

[This piece first appeared on 21 March 2006.]

One day long long ago, in the bloom of youth, I was at the seaside, tarrying on a pier, fresh from a game of crazy golf and sucking an ice lolly. The sky was overcast and seabirds were screeching. I had decided, when once I was done with my lolly, to return to the dilapidated boarding house where I was staying with my parents and siblings, to fetch my swimming trunks and a towel, and then to go a-splashing in the sea. But as I leaned against the railings on the pier, sucking away, I was accosted by an elderly gent. He gave off a stink of kippers and brine and his huge hairy beard was riddled with fishbones. He leaned against the railings next to me, and pointed out to sea.

“Look, sonny,” he said, “What do you see?”

I looked in the direction of his pointing finger and could just make out, in the sea-mist, the shape of a ship, half way to the horizon.

“I see a ship,” I said.

“Aye, ’tis a ship indeed,” said the old sea dog, “And can you tell me the basic constituent parts of, say, a wooden ship?”

“I’ll try my best,” I said, for I was biddable and eager to please, “Sternpost, keel, false keel or shoe, fore foot or gripe, stem, headpiece, garboard strake, bottom planking, side planking, wale, sheer strake, covering board, bulwark, rough-tree rail, topgallant bulwark, rudder, counter, stern, chain plates, cathead, figurehead, mizzenmast, mainmast, foremast, and… oh… there’s one part on the tip of my tongue.”

The old tar stuffed a gobbet of salt taffy into his mouth and chewed on it, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.

“Bowsprit!”, I cried, triumphantly.

“Good lad,” he said, “But what if I asked you to name three different types of parrel and their constituent parts?”

“Golly!”, I said, and after a moment’s thought, babbling, I listed what I could recall. “Well, first, a parrel with cleats on a wooden yard, you’d have topmast, yard, wooden cleats, a half-iron hoop served with leather, pins forming hinges to open the parrel, an iron band to take the tie, and iron straps and bolts securing the parrel to the yard. But if you had a tub parrel for an iron yard, then there would be topmast, yard, tub divided in halves, iron binding for same, gooseneck bolt, iron bands to take parrel and tie, yoke for the parrel, yoke for the tie, and eye bolt for the quarterblock. Thereagain, with a parrel sliding on a T-bar in a big ship, I would say topmast, topsail yard, T-bar, slide, two-way coupling, tie, connecting chain keeping slide in place, and last but by no means least, eye bolts for quarterblocks, captain. Should I call you captain?”

“It is many a long year since I served as a captain, my boy,” he said, “But tell me, if you cobbled together a topsail yard, parrel, rolling spar, iron drum end of the rolling spar, yardarm hoop, arm carrying the reefing halliard block, cheek block for topgallant sheet, parrel crutch with lignum vitae rollers, lignum vitae rollers, topsail, lead block for reefing halliards, and topsail yardarm, what would you have?”

I rubbed my chin to demonstrate that I was thinking carefully, as Darbyshire does, in imitation of Mr Carter, in the books by Anthony Buckeridge.

“I think,” I said, “No, I know… you’d have Colling’s and Pinkney’s patent self-reefing topsail, would you not?”

“You would indeed,” said the ancient mariner, and he spat his salt taffy into the sea.

I waited for his next question.

“I wonder if you can tell me,” he said, “About a four-masted barque.”

“Easy peasy,” I said, but too quickly, because with a glint of impatience, he snapped:

“Not just any four-masted barque, lad, but a particular one! Tell me everything you know about the Herzogin Cecilie!”

I gulped, and took a last suck on what was left of my ice lolly.

“Well,” I began, haltingly, “The Herzogin Cecilie, the Herzogin Cecilie… Ah, I think that was a four-masted barque built in 1902 by Rickmers shipyard at Bremerhaven for the Norddeutscher Lloyd at Bremen. It was a big sailing vessel of three thousand, two hundred and forty-two gross tons or four thousand, three hundred and fifty dw. She was a good sailer and made many excellent voyages. During World War One she was interned at Coquimbo in Chile. After the war, she brought a cargo of bauxite to Ostend, and… no, not bauxite, it was a cargo of nitrate. At Ostend she was allocated to the French government. In November 1921 she was purchased by Gustaf Erikson, Mariehamn, Finland, and under his flag was employed chiefly in the Australian grain trade. She foundered on 25 April 1936 off Salcombe in Devonshire, after running aground in heavy fog.”

“Tiptop Herzogin Cecilie information,” said the sea dog, beaming at me, “Now, just one more question. How many jibs did she have?”

“I would say three,” I replied, “An inner jib, an outer jib, and a flying jib.”

“And you would be right to say so,” he said, “But now our conversation is at an end.”

“Oh,” I said, a little downcast, “I think that must be the first time I have had a ship-related conversation with no mention at all of poop or orlop decks.”

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “You will be having plenty more ship-related conversations in the decades to come, for you have passed my rigorous tests and I am going to press-gang you into the service of the king’s navy.”

And so saying, he suddenly gave me a great shove and pushed me over the railings and I splashed into the sea. I was picked up by a rowing boat sent from the wooden ship he had pointed out to me, in the distance, now wholly enshrouded in sea-mist. And into that mist I was rowed, by a crew of hefty silent rowers, until the ship loomed huge ahead, and looking back I could no longer see any trace of the the pier, and the shore, and the dilapidated boarding house where my parents and siblings waited for me.