Let us nip back to the seventeenth century, to the village of Britling, and watch Fly Debate Roberts in action. Roberts, you will recall from your assiduous reading of Hooting Yard postages yesterday, was a screamer in a preaching-barrel. At least, that is how he was portrayed in the pamphlet A Word To Fanatics, Puritans and Sectaries; or, New Preachers New (1641).

Though he took naturally to screaming, especially when it was his turn in the barrel, Roberts won his nickname by dint of his great skill in debate, specifically in debate with flies. Every Thursday, he would commandeer a big barn in Britling, and coax and cajole the villagers to gather therein. Given the squalor and misery and sheer drudgery of life in Britling at that time, most people were only too willing to attend. There was certainly no lack of flies to challenge in debate, for what with all the rustic filth and muck and rot Britling was rife with flies. Roberts was particularly given to debating with blow-flies, and, once the villagers had settled and the hubbub had died down, he would select one particular blow-fly among those infesting the barn. The topic of debate was invariably an abstruse point of theology, of which the following is a typical example:

That this barn agrees with the motion that Man is made in the image of God, whereas the blow-fly is an emissary of Beelzebub.

Roberts would then harangue the fly for more than an hour, his voice rising to screaming pitch so that the dimwits and noodleheads in the audience, of whom of course there were many, could be forgiven for thinking they were attending, not a debate, but one of his screamings from the preaching-barrel. Wiser heads noted the absence of the barrel, and the presence of the fly. At the end of his tirade, Roberts invited the fly to respond. Being a fly, of course, and incapable of human speech, it remained silent, save for the irritating buzzing noise it made as it darted hither and thither, haphazardly, within the barn. Roberts claimed this as a victory and proposed that the fly be put to death, as the loser in the debate and as a representative of the Devil. The villagers, provoked into a frenzy by his words, formed a fearsome throng, leaping and cavorting around the barn armed with sticks and pebbles and rolled-up pamphlets, trying to swat and slaughter the fly. Often they were too stupid to recognise the individual fly Roberts had selected for debate, and swiped at the nearest tiny airborne speck.

Seventeenth century flies, including the blow-fly, were almost identical to modern flies, and it would take an extremely learned entomologist to spot the minimal differences between them. I’m not an entomologist myself, so I am unable to pinpoint what tiny evolutionary changes may have occurred in the past four hundred years, if any. But one thing we all know about flies is that they move much, much faster than humans. If we can for a moment imagine ourselves inside a fly’s head, it is easy to picture that a crowd of seventeenth century peasants, bent on our murder, and pursuing us within the confines of a barn, will appear as if in slow motion. We have plenty of time, as we watch a villager lumbering towards us, armed with a small agricultural hand-tool, simply to flit out of the danger zone. Even as the peasant is swinging his arm with deadly intent, we have zoomed over to the other end of the barn and are happily regurgitating viscous goo onto a toothsome rotting morsel. If you have difficulty seeing this in your mind’s eye, I recommend you watch The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) in which Jeff Goldblum illustrates precisely what I am talking about.

Fly Debate Roberts himself, apparently, declined to take part in the attempted fly-slaughter. He was, as a preacher, a man of words, or rather screams, not a man of action. It was enough for him to know that he had provoked the villagers into a murderous, and Godly, frenzy. He slipped out of a side door of the barn and spent the rest of Thursday with his fellow Britlingite screamer, Be Faithful Joiner, probably engaged in a bit of cooperage. Those preaching-barrels were subject to much wear and tear, and needed proper care and maintenance.

At some point it must have struck Roberts that Thursday after Thursday, the number of flies in the barn never seemed to get any smaller. We do not know if he actually bothered to do a count, and he was never on hand to witness the peasants’ killing frenzy, so he had no idea of their success or lack of it. What was plain, however, was that the emissaries of Beelzebub were far from being eradicated. It was then that he devised his fly-tether.

The Roberts Fly-Tether was basically little more than a thin piece of string, looped at both ends. One loop was attached to a nail hammered into an upright post in the barn. Shortly before the start of the Thursday debate, Be Faithful Joiner, who was quick with his hands, would pluck a blow-fly out of the air, and tie the other loop around one of its tiny legs. The fly would then have to squat on the post, unable to go buzzing and darting around the barn. This made the debates far more exciting, as even the densest and most brainless of the villagers could work out exactly which fly Roberts was challenging. They no longer had to cast their eyes around, foolishly, causing giddiness. Use of the fly-tether also changed the manner in which the debates ended. The fly’s silence was no longer met with a scene of violent if pointless havoc. Instead, Fly Debate Roberts himself, having called for the death of the fly, would take a huge iron hammer and crush his opponent beneath it with a single mighty, righteous, Godly blow.

In the next part of this series we shall take a look at More Fruit Fowler of East Hadley. Fowler accumulated more fruit than anyone before or since. But what did he do with it all? That is the question we hope to answer.

A blow-fly, losing a debate with Fly Debate Roberts

[The following piece, one of my own favourites, first appeared in Hooting Yard in September 2005. I find myself somewhat alarmed to think that is almost seven years ago. Where, where does the time go? Seven years is the length of time the Jesuits need to claim a child’s soul for life. It is longer than the Second World War. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!, as Carlyle would say. For this reappearance, I have added some useful notes.]

In certain parts of the world, people still sit around their fires at dusk and tell each other stories. In the wretched village where Marigold Chew grew up, there was one tale in particular that was told over and over again. This was the story of Tadeusz Kapisko and his ears of wheat. It was told so often – sometimes three or four times in a single evening – that it was embedded in Marigold’s brain, and years later, she could recount it word for word, barely pausing for breath. Dobson always knew when she was about to launch into the yarn, because she sucked in her cheeks and puckered her lips in what he thought of as “that Kapisko way”.

Curiously, the tale of Tadeusz Kapisko and his ears of wheat was never written down, but if Marigold Chew’s memory is accurate, there was a record of sorts. She remembered, as an infant, seeing pictorial representations of the main points of the story, richly painted in crimson, cerulean blue and orpiment. Later in life, she tried to describe them.

I recall that the first picture was of Tadeusz Kapisko half hidden behind a cow. It was, decisively, a French cow, une vache. I remember thinking how significant this was, even as a tiny tot. The second picture was the shape of a medallion. The painter overdid the orpiment, but what I loved about this one was that it showed the exact moment of a hen’s cluck. Tadeusz Kapisko is absent. I think we were meant to infer that he had already gone off to war. Certainly that is the import of the third picture, in which the Kapisko parents are shown filling rusty farmyard pails with their tears. I could almost taste the salt of their sobbing, as they waited for the wheat.

Picture four was missing, it had been torn out, you could still see the ghost shade of its adhesive. Some brute or vandal had scribbled over the fifth picture with an indelible black marker pen, and the sixth had been chewed by squirrels. So it was always a joy to look at the seventh, in which we see Tadeusz Kapisko with his ears of wheat at last, returned from the trenches minus one eye, leaning against the shed in which all the rusty farmyard pails full of his parents’ tears are kept. He is smoking a cheroot and looks the spit and image of Josef Starling, though his hair has been painted in cerulean blue with flecks of orpiment which may be accidental.

The eighth picture is like a child’s drawing. It shows the helicopters on the helipad, the burning cities, and the pit of doom, making the next picture all the more alluring, the delightful wash of colours showing meadows dotted with teasel, spurge, gentians, camellias, columbine, bedstraw and edelweiss, honeysuckle, lupins and phlox. And hollyhocks, hollyhocks.

“Oooh, mama! Papa!” I used to pipe, as I turned to picture number ten, “Where are Tadeusz Kapisko’s ears of wheat?” And my parents would always smile conspiratorially and place their fingers over their mouths, and I adored the anticipation of seeing the eleventh and last picture, all crimson and cerulean blue and orpiment, King’s yellow, the frying pan and the hunchback, the countless pigs wallowing in their muck, the detective with his buttons and the unshelled peas still snug in their pods, the glockenspiel and the fire extinguisher, the tiny glittering ships afloat on the soaking wet sea, and there, if you looked ever so closely, on the poop deck of the tiniest ship of all, triumphant in his galoshes, with his ears of wheat, Tadeusz Kapisko, brave and strong!

NOTES

In certain parts of the world, people still sit around their fires at dusk and tell each other stories. One such part of the world, I have learned, is a house on Jethro Tull Gardens, a cul-de-sac in a village in Oxfordshire. There, night after night after night, folk gather around a fire to tell each other stories based on Jethro Tull song lyrics. They transform Mr Anderson’s rhymes into prose, creating afresh tales of minstrels in galleries, heavy horses, Jeffrey going to Leicester Square, and other marvels.

Tadeusz Kapisko. This appears to be a Polish spelling. It has been given elsewhere as Thaddeus Capisco. Without knowing the precise location of the wretched village where Marigold Chew grew up, we cannot plump for one spelling or the other. One thing we can be fairly sure of, however, is that Marigold Chew did not grow up in Jethro Tull Gardens. I think we would know, if she had. Or do I mean if she did? Had? Did? Do? Be? Doobedoobedoo.

a French cow. I have long wondered if this French cow is related to the laughing cow, a red cow usually spotted on the paper element of the packaging of foil-wrapped processed cheese triangles. For certain children, brought up in blasted urban wastelands far from the bosky charms of a rustic idyll, this is the first, and possibly only, cow they have ever seen.

Mention of the cow reminds me to draw your attention to the latest media report of a cow attack, which I am pleased to note refers in passing to David Blunkett. It also includes the immortal line: “It’s hard to comprehend just how big a cow is until you’re underneath one, looking up at it.”

Josef Starling. Paranoid, pock-marked Georgian, dictator of the Soviet Union, died in 1953. Often confused with Clarice Stalin, heroine of The Silence Of The Cows Lambs, a potboiler by Thomas Harris.

the burning cities. Possibly the same burning cities alluded to in Nine Funerals Of A Citizen King by Henry Cow. I have searched in vain on maps for a cul-de-sac called Henry Cow Gardens.

Last night I watched the pilot episode of the flagship new television crime drama Wattle And Daub. Whoever commissioned this has a touch of genius. Set in prehistoric Britain, the series follows Jemima Wattle and Trixie Daub, a pair of female amateur sleuths, as they solve prehistoric British crimes in a gentle amateur sleuthy way. In this opening episode, for example, a body is discovered in a burial mound, a druid is crushed to death by a menhir, a blind pig is found wandering in the woods, and there are spooky goings-on in an important cave. I spotted many actors I am sure I have seen before in Holby City, Heartbeat, and Lork Roise To Candleford, barely recognisable as the costume designers had them dressed in animal pelts and covered in muck. Wattle and Daub themselves, being ladies of a certain age, and impeccably middle class, wear stout walking shoes and sun hats. The sun hats seem rather gratuitous, as the meteorological advisers have done their work and show, correctly in my view, that prehistoric Britain was a land of incessant wind and rain and fog and mist.

This fidelity to weather conditions occasionally made the action hard to follow. A lengthy scene involving Wattle falling into the hands of a band of roaming grunty men and being dragged off into the woods, was marred by taking place in a particularly thick swirling mist. It was not entirely clear to me how her rescue was eventually effected by Daub, armed only with a very modern-looking gardening trowel and a mosquito net.

I am given to understand that Het Internet has been alive this morning with twits and witterers complaining about other perceived anachronisms. The grunting of the grunty men seems unarguably authentic, but several people pointed out that a prehistoric British druid is unlikely to have used such verbal constructions as “thinking outside the box”, “pushing the envelope”, and “oi, leave it out, you numpty!”. I must admit I could never quite work out whether we were in the Stone Age, the Iron Age, or the Bronze Age. I will take a more careful look at that trowel should Trixie Daub be wielding it in a future episode.

This being the BBC, however, you will be pleased to learn that the show is properly inclusive. There are several black and Asian characters, though admittedly it is difficult to tell under the caking of mud, and a sympathetic gay couple. The chief Druid, who looks not unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury, is portrayed as a faintly ridiculous figure, and there is an explicit condemnation of capitalism, even though it did not exist at the time. At one point I think I spotted some of the more likeable grunty men going into a sort of prehistoric British mosque for morning prayers.

But Wattle and Daub are the stars of the show, mildly eccentric, occasionally acid of tongue, both dotty yet as sharp as tacks. Though neither of them has any training in detective work, their insatiable curiosity and ability to stumble upon clues is deeply charming. The scene where they go blackberry picking, only to unearth a body in a burial mound, was brilliantly handled. Similarly, when they decide to pop into the woods to scrape bark off a tree trunk and are confronted by the blind pig, the scene is at once heart-warming, gently comedic, and emotionally wrenching. I did not know whether to chuckle or weep, so I wept through my chuckles. Later, when the blind pig escapes from the pen they have built for it, I sobbed through my guffaws.

Which brings me to yesterday’s other drama premiere, Sob And Guffaw. Geoff Sob and Poppy Guffaw are a mismatched pair of detectives in Gritnorth, a fictional gritty town up north. Sob is an alcoholic widower, estranged from his teenage daughter, a maverick forever at odds with the police hierarchy. Guffaw is an alcoholic widow, estranged from her teenage son, a maverick forever at odds with the police hierarchy. But there the similarities end, for they are completely mismatched, both chafing at being sent on cases together, both sunk in brooding silences punctuated by occasional grunts, not dissimilar to the grunts of the grunty men in Wattle And Daub.

My only cavil with this show is that all the crimes in Gritnorth are committed by villains based in abandoned warehouses in an industrial wasteland. I would think that, if Sob and Guffaw had their detective heads screwed on, they would simply park their car outside the warehouses and wait to nab the malefactors, rather than speeding around the dismal rainswept streets of Gritnorth and leaping out of the car now and then to bustle, shouting, into hair salons or betting shops.

That said, the scene in which they bustle, shouting, into a hair salon and Guffaw realises, too late, that she is brandishing a gardening trowel rather than her gun, was matchless. I think it may well have been the same gardening trowel brandished by Daub in Wattle And Daub, but will have to watch both shows again to be sure.

Also on television last night, though I missed it, was Trowel, a new detective drama about a gritty northern gardener who moonlights as a sleuth. I am also looking forward to Sleuth With Trowel, in which a time-travelling gritty northern sleuth goes back to the Stone Age to solve prehistoric British gardening crimes.

I am often accosted in the streets by wild-eyed maniacs who block my path and jab me on the shoulder with bony fingers, demanding to be told how I arrive, each day, at a topic to write about. As I am reluctant to divulge the true nature of the Hooting Yard creative process, I usually babble sufficient nonsense to satisfy my assailant, who allows me on my way. This morning, however, on my way back from a circuit of Nameless Pond, I felt curiously impelled to tell the truth. Let me reproduce the dialogue verbatim, or as verbatim as I can recall it, to give you a glimpse into the travails of your favourite penniless scribbler.

Me – (sashaying along, humming The Final Countdown (Tempest), by the European band Sweden… sorry, I mean the Swedish band Europe).

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Oi! Mr Key!

Me – Yes, my good fellow, how may I be of assistance on this rain-drenched morn?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – (blocking my path and jabbing me on the shoulder with bony fingers) What are you going to write about today and how did you decide upon the topic? Answer me that!

Me – You mean “answer me those”.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Quit stalling, buster, and spill the beans!

Me – Have you been reading decades-old American pulp fiction, perchance?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Of course not! Like any sensible wild-eyed maniac, I read only the dispatches from Hooting Yard, to the exclusion of all else!

Me – Very astute, if I may say so.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – You may. But now answer my question. I mean, questions.

Me – Although I am usually reluctant to divulge the true nature of the Hooting Yard creative process, for some inexplicable reason I feel impelled to tell you how I arrived at today’s topic. Be warned, however, that my reply is only applicable to this particular day in the middle of June in the year of Our Lord MMXII.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Bob’s your uncle.

Me – In spite of the song I chose to be humming when you accosted me, I am, as you are probably well aware, curiously obsessed with Jethro Tull. God knows why. That being the case, my very first thought, on waking, before I even plunged my head into a pail of icy water, was of the early albums of Jethro Tull, and how perhaps Ian Anderson could be said to have lost his mojo circa 1974. Some would say even earlier, perhaps in 1972. Whichever date one chooses, I suspect there is general agreement that the band’s best work, and the work for which it will be remembered, yea unto every generation, appears on those first few releases. Of those, however, the debut album This Was (1968) is sometimes overlooked, possibly because of the strong blues influence and the presence of Mick Abrahams as a creative rival to Anderson – two things which are of course connected. In that sense, it is atypical of early Tull. Not having listened to it for a long long time, I tried to recall some of the songs, and the one that jumped to the surface of my brain was Beggar’s Farm. It was but a short step from there to making the decision to write about a beggar’s farm today. Not, I hasten to add, to write about the song, but instead to appropriate the title, and write some majestic sweeping paragraphs about a farm populated entirely by beggars.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Gosh!

Me – Before I could concentrate on the ineffable glory of my prose, however, I found myself fretting away about the apostrophe in Beggar’s.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – This is absolutely fascinating, and it reminds me why you are surely the greatest living writer of English prose apart from Jeanette Winterson.

Me – You see, Anderson and Abrahams, as co-writers, seem to have had just one beggar in mind, placing the apostrophe between the R and the S. But my farm, the one gradually taking shape in my head, populated by beggars and indigents and tramps and drunks and wretches, would demand the apostrophe after the S, to reflect the plurality of beggars. Thus I was in a quandary. Should I entitle the essay On Beggar’s Farm, to reflect its fons et origo, or On Beggars’ Farm, to more accurately signal to the panting and overexcited reader what to expect?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – How on earth did you know that we Hooting Yard readers pant with overexcitement as our Windows Vista computer screens are lit up each day by your latest scribblings?

Me – I have my spies. But tell me, what would you advise regarding the placement of that pesky apostrophe?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – It’s a tricksy one, make no mistake.

Me – I think it is important that I give due credit to the monopod flautist and the founder of Blodwyn Pig. The idea of the beggar’s farm is theirs, and theirs alone, and I am merely plodding in their footsteps – or, in Anderson’s case, footstep. I have always assumed he got from place to place by hopping, at least while playing the flute.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – I have heard that is indeed the case.

Me – At the same time, I do not wish my title to be grammatically incorrect, nor to lead the panting and overexcited readers into thinking they will be reading about a farm with only a single beggar in situ. I envisage dozens, if not hundreds, of beggars, sprawled or lolloping about the farm, surrounded by rusty abandoned farm implements and machinery, growing nothing on fields reduced to scrub and gorse and bracken, rattling their tin cups at passers-by, moaning and keening and displaying a variety of unsightly sores and scars and stumps resulting from the amputation of one or more limbs. If the setting is shortly after a war, several of the beggars may have been gassed in the trenches.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – I can’t wait to read it!

Me – But wait you shall, until I am able to work out where to put the damned apostrophe.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – (his attention suddenly diverted, pointing at the sky) Oh look, a flock of swooping feathered beings with wings!

Me – They are called birds.

And so we went our separate ways, I returning to my escritoire to struggle with an apostrophe placement crisis.

Let Huz bless with the Polypus – lively subtlety is acceptable to the Lord.

Let Buz bless with the Jackall – but the Lord is the Lion’s provider.

– Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment A.

I wondered what ever became of Huz and Buz, the stout companions of my childhood. On the long summer afternoons we three played together in the shadow of the old viaduct out by Pang Hill. We played foopball and hockey and we polevaulted over ditches and we set fire to buttercups and we pretended to be Prussians or Russians or monsters from the far Carpathians. And always Huz had his polypus puppet of wool and wire, and Buz his cardboard jackal. And in the gloaming at the end of those endless days, Huz and Buz would trot back to Pang Hill Orphanage and sneak in through the hidden wicket, and I would trudge home, along the canal towpath rife with phlox and lupins, to the enormous mansion where Ma and Pa lay on separate ottomans in separate chambers in separate wings, both of them neurasthenic and medicated and moaning. I ate my dinner with Crouch, the impossibly tall and gangling servant, in the baronial hall, tenebrous and chill, where bats swooped in the rafters, and the rafters rotted, and sometimes shards of rafter dropped into my soup. And I thought of Huz and Buz, shivering in their attic room in the orphanage, going hungry to their iron cots.

Sometimes, in the night, I would slip out of bed and pad along the corridor to Ma’s wireless room to transmit coded messages, buzzes and clicks and bleeps, to my pals. Either Huz, or Buz, I forget which, had smuggled a portable metal tapping machine into the orphanage and kept it hidden under the sandbag that served as his pillow. It was a hazardous business, for there was always the risk he might be caught by the beadle. If that happened, Huz or Buz would be made to put a saucepan on his head and spend a week on the orphanage roof, among the crows and ravens, without shelter, slaking his thirst with rainwater from the gutters. It was hazardous for me too. The wireless room was thick with dust and cobwebs, spiders and beetles and gnats. Ma had abandoned it long ago, before I was born. Once it had been her sanctum, when she was young and lively and the recipient of mountaineering trophies. Crouch still polished the trophies, devotedly, day after day, with his special rags.

The messages we exchanged in the night were couched in a private language Huz and Buz and I had devised. I still have some of the transcripts, musty and dog-eared, the ink fading, in a filing cabinet in what was once Pa’s smoking room. I do not know why I keep them, for I long ago forgot the language, and can wring no sense from them. Perhaps it is that they are the sole remaining tangible reminders of my childhood friends. The orphanage, at the railings of which I often stood and wept, burned down last year. The beadle’s grandson was arrested, but I do not know the outcome of the case. The local police officers do not speak to me any more.

As a child, I was barely aware that the police existed. Certainly, on those long afternoons by the old viaduct, Huz and Buz and I never once saw a police officer. The only person we ever saw in uniform was the tally man with his dog, on his patrols, and we would always hide from him. We used to make up stories in which he and his dog were involved in alarming hazchem episodes. Once I think Huz or Buz devised a plan to kidnap the dog and take it back to Pang Hill Orphanage to attack the beadle, until I pointed out that it was old and lame and almost blind, and could not attack one of the gnats in the wireless room. Then one day we saw the tally man alone and dogless, and we assumed the dog had died. We decided to make an excursion to the pet cemetery, to leave a bunch of lupins on its grave. The pet cemetery was out beyond the orchard and the railway tracks and the decoy airfield, but none of us was clear precisely where it was, and we got lost. The sun was sinking in the west when we came to an army camp. I was worried about Crouch, who would be cooking our soup and herrings and would be wondering where I had got to. Huz and Buz were fearful of the beadle, who would no doubt be pulling a couple of saucepans from their hooks and clearing the staircase up to the roof. Though it was summer, there was a chill in the air at dusk, and we shivered as we sank exhausted to the ground at the perimeter fence. We were far from home, far from the mansion and the orphanage, and we had no idea what to do.

When the sky grew darker, searchlights flashed on, and we were caught in the bright beam of one. A sentry spotted us, and took us into the camp. He put us in a tent and told us to wait. We were, I think, so awestruck by his uniform, so much more resplendent than that of the tally man, that we could hardly think. We made no attempt to escape. About half an hour passed before a captain entered. His uniform was even more impressive, all crimson and gold, with epaulettes and medals, and he carried a sword. He rapped a few questions at us, which we answered truthfully, in shaky little squeaks, for we were tired and hungry and terrified. Then he left. Huz and Buz and I rummaged in our pockets for playthings, and improvised a game with a button, a rubber band, and a boiled sweet wrapper.

It kept us occupied until we heard the spluttering of an engine, followed by the parp of a hooter. It was Crouch! He had been summoned to collect us. At least, that is what we thought. When he came into the tent, accompanied by the captain, we burst into tears of relief. For Huz and Buz, alas, the relief was short-lived. The captain announced that Crouch had come to take me home.

“As for you orphans,” he said, “War was declared earlier today, and we need every recruit we can lay our hands on. You will be shipped overseas at the break of dawn, to fight the good fight.”

I clutched Crouch’s hand and he led me away towards his jalopy. As we went out through the tent flap, I looked back at Huz and Buz, my childhood friends. I never saw them again.

Facecloth, which some people continue to insist on calling Facebook in spite of my cajoling, grows ever more ubiquitous. At times it really does seem to have taken over the world. Efforts by others to supplant it – Google+ for example – have only limited success, and I think this may be because the alternatives so far are too similar to Facecloth. There is also the fact that Zuckerberg and his minions adapt their monolith to ape the best features of their competitors. What this suggests to me is that if there is to be a social networking site that can consign Facecloth to the dustbin of history, it will have to be so far in advance of the original that little Mark will take one look at it, burst into tears, dismantle his entire operation, and retire from the fray. I think I have now come up with the goods, daddy-o.

My insight was granted by going back to basics, and considering the original name, Facecloth. Sorry, Facebook. As far as I am aware, this refers to the practice of American higher education colleges of issuing yearbooks containing snapshots and potted biographies of their students. Little Mark took that very simple format as the building block for world domination. But therein – I realised – lie the seeds of his destruction. Break the word in two. Face. Book. It is all so damned two-dimensional. Photographs of faces, gathered in a book of flat pages with printed words. It is just not good enough, even when modified and complicated and transformed into a global phenomenon on Het Internet. It seems clear to me that the whole thing needs to be shifted up into three dimensions. And that is the beauty of Headbag!

Just think. Why be satisfied with the face when you could have the whole head? And what kind of nincompoop would be happy with a book of flat paper pages when they could have a bag packed with solid objects? It is so blindingly obvious I am surprised nobody has thought of it before.

But perhaps they have, and have raised objections. After all, if you are going to stuff a bag full of heads, where are you going to get the heads from? We do not want to encourage those Islamist nutcases whose greatest joy in life, when not persecuting women, is to chop off the heads of infidels. But, using the kind of lateral thinking espoused by geniuses like Edward “Six Hats” De Bono, we need not cram our bag with human heads. Instead, we can use cabbages as a substitute. Carefully picked, cabbage heads are about the weight, size, and shape of human heads, and if you are pernickety you can always draw facial features on the cabbage with a magic marker, and apply a variety of superb and exciting hairstyles with cotton wool and glue. It is then a simple case of shoving, say, half a dozen or even a baker’s dozen of cabbages into a burlap sack of the appropriate size, and voila!, you have signed up to Headbag. You will receive a confirmatory metal tapping machine message, to which you should respond using a special code to demonstrate that you are a real person, toting a real bag, filled with real cabbages. Once that is received and processed and filed away in a filing cabinet drawer at Headbag HQ, you are off and away!

What we found, in our preliminary research, was that the best way to network with other Headbag users was to find a suitable three-dimensional real-world location and to gather there, each of you with your burlap sack of cabbages. Caves, particularly caves by the seaside, proved to be the best spots of all. A particular advantage is that they tend not to be haunted by anybody else. Vagrants, drunks, and riff-raff are all more likely to be found slumped in municipal parks and on the outskirts of leisure and retail facilities, whereas the caves we reconnoitred were empty. Occasionally there might be a small creeping creature of dubious provenance scuttling about, but they can always be stamped on or, if of a somewhat larger bulk, sprayed with a canister of some death-delivering chemical compound. When the cave is properly vacant, it makes for a splendid meeting-place for Headbag users. You might want to take along a torch or a Tilly lamp, and a packed lunch.

There are all sorts of rewarding ways that a group of persons each with a bag full of cabbages can interact. You probably don’t need me to tell you what they are. In fact, doing so would fatally undermine the sheer beauty of the Headbag experience, which is posited on giving users full control. There is none of that sneaky shenanigans going on in the background that you get with Facecloth. None of your details will be passed to sinister multinational corporations. You will not find a data trail linking you to unseemly or criminal activities. No, with Headbag, you can be sure your privacy is safe. You sit in a cave, by the sea, with other users, clutching your sack of cabbages, and do whatever you want to do, without Headbag HQ interfering in any way. All we ask is that you be very careful to scarper before the tide comes in, flooding the cave, as tides tend to do.

One question that often crops up at our marketing seminars is how we will make sufficient money from Headbag to reduce little Mark Zuckerberg to comparative penury and have him come grovelling to our door with a begging bowl. In the interests of robust transparency, I should point out that your burlap sack will carry advertising, stencilled on using luminous ink or paint which will be visible in the dank darkness of your cave. That is our only concession to the commercial realm. Please do not believe any stories you read in the press that we have plans to force users to rent their cabbages from us. You are free to buy them from your local greengrocer’s or hypermarket, or even to grow them yourself on your allotment, out beyond the viaduct by the railway tracks. That is the Headbag way, like it or lump it.

Onward to world domination!

Let us imagine you are sitting at home, in an armchair, with your feet up, listening to Scriabin on the radio perhaps, or reading Martin Amis’s very sensible new novel Lionel Asbo : State Of England, or simply gazing vacantly into space, like a dimwit or a simpleton, though you need not actually be a dimwit or a simpleton, merely dozing, half-asleep, at the border of the Land of Nod. Then imagine that your poppet rushes into the room, from the front garden, crying “Dennis! Dennis! Come and see!”

Whatever you have been doing, or not doing, you sit bolt upright and ask “What is it?”

“Come and see the shoveller!” cries your poppet.

It is important to note, and indeed it is the very crux of my argument, that, while still sat in your armchair, before following your poppet out to the front garden, you do not know what she is talking about. Note, too, that I did not write, you have no idea what she is talking about. There is a difference, and a critical one. It is not the case that, at this stage, you have no idea. On the contrary, you have a very good idea. You know that, once you are in the front garden, in response to your poppet’s urgent beckoning, you will see one of two things. But because you do not know which, it is fair to say that you do not know what she is talking about. Thus may we calibrate the efficacy of human communication through words.

Let us leave you in your armchair for a moment, and examine what you know. You know that, from the vantage point of your front garden, a shoveller can be seen. But what kind of shoveller? There are, as I have indicated, two types. The shoveller may be a person with a shovel, or it may be a duck. Before hoisting yourself out of the armchair and making your slow, creaking, exhausted way into the front garden, you might want to ascertain the type of shoveller your poppet is eager for you to see. You can ask, “Is it a person with a shovel or a duck?” But it may be that your poppet has already rushed back out, and is out of earshot, in which case you might make an educated guess.

For example, which type of shoveller is likely to spark your poppet’s excitement, and spark it sufficiently that she wishes to share it with you? If you, or she, or both, are fanatical ornithologists, it is a near certainty that she is talking about a duck. But what if ornithology plays no important part in either of your lives? Astonishingly, such people do exist! In that case, guesswork will avail you little. Conversely, your home might be slap bang next to important roadworks on the Blister Lane Bypass, the racket of which has been causing you grief while listening to Scriabin or reading Martin Amis or dropping off to sleep. In that case, in all likelihood your poppet has seen a person with a shovel. But why would that spark her excitement, so much so that she rushes in, to tell you about it, and rushes out again, to see? Even if we grant the possibility that you, or she, or both, are fanatical civil engineers, there will be shovellers – that is, persons with shovels – aplenty to be seen for the duration of the roadworks which, being important, will be a period of weeks or even months. On balance, and irrespective of your fanaticism or lack of it in the field of civil engineering, you might decide that the duck is the more probable shoveller, based on the information thus far available. Even if neither you nor your poppet are fanatical ornithologists, she may have been struck by a sense of wonder, out of the blue, as sometimes people are, at sight of a bird. There is literature on such epiphanies.

With you still in your armchair, we have been able to weigh the likelihood of the type of shoveller your poppet wants you to see. We cannot say for certain it is a duck, but the chances are that it is. Narrowing it further, to a Red shoveller, Cape shoveller, Australasian shoveller, or Northern shoveller, will have to wait until you make it to the front garden and see for yourself, unless, impatient, your poppet rushes back in to implore you to hurry, in which case you can ask: “Of the four types of dabbling ducks with long broad spatula-shaped beaks known as shovellers, which is it?” Beware, however, that you will only get a sensible answer to this question if (a) your poppet is a fanatical ornithologist, and (b) if the shoveller she has seen is indeed a duck, and not a person with a shovel.

For let us not forget that the type of shoveller is not yet settled beyond all doubt. By deciding, on the balance of probabilities, that your poppet is talking about a duck does not mean we can airily dismiss the possibility – and it is no more than that – that she is talking about a person with a shovel. We can briefly examine the circumstances which make that actually more likely than the duck.

What if?, we ask, and it is often the prefix to a question which can yield significant if unexpected results, what if the shoveller your poppet spotted was a person with a shovel who was not engaged in important roadworks on the Blister Lane Bypass, but was a gravedigger? The sight of a person with a shovel digging a grave just outwith your front garden would be cause for surprise, and alarm, would it not? It could be considered a portent, even a supernatural vision. Key to deciding if this could be the cause of your poppet’s excited rushing in would be her tone of voice and her countenance. Innocent excitement, as occasioned by a bird epiphany, can easily be confused with fright, or terror. It may be that your poppet is on the verge of hysteria and nervous collapse, having seen a sinister figure digging a grave just outside your front garden, a grave thus intended, as in a vision, for you, or your poppet, or both. We might argue that she would have said “gravedigger”, not “shoveller”, but it is worth remembering that when on the verge of hysteria or nervous collapse language can become skewed or fractured or otherwise dislodged from the norm.

To know, beyond all doubt, what your poppet is talking about, language itself is not enough. You are going to have to hoist yourself out of your armchair and see for yourself. That is the basis of all science.

Shoveller

Shoveller

Once upon a time there was a knock-knee’d ingrate. He was slumped outwith the palace gates, clutching a begging bowl. No matter how many times he was chased away by the princeling’s henchmen, he returned to his patch and whimpered at passers by, hoping they would fill his bowl with slops.

Before we go any further, it would be helpful to consider the different characters, both individual and collective, we have encountered thus far. We have met two individuals, the INGRATE and the PRINCELING. We have also been introduced to two collectives, or groupuscules, in the persons of the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY. We might like to draw a diagram to get these all clear in our heads, using say, a triangle for the PRINCELING, a square for the INGRATE, and a couple of amorphous blobs for the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY, one blob filled in in black ink and the other blob left blank, that is, white, assuming our diagram is drawn on white paper. Next, we may wish, with pinking shears, to cut out each of our four shapes, the triangle and the square and the black blob and the white blob, separating them, so we have four bits of paper, which we can thus manoeuvre on a green baize tabletop as we follow the action. Doing so will be an enormous help in visualising the drama about to unfold.

Let us assume it is Thursday afternoon. The sun is shining, or it might be raining, or perhaps it is merely overcast and threatening imminent rain from louring clouds. Or, if it is the depths of winter, perhaps the palace and its environs are carpeted in snow. There is a howling wind, or a balmy breeze, or it is one of those hot unbearable humid days when the air is thick and still and suffocating. We might posit all sorts of weather for this Thursday afternoon, but we need not try to cut shapes out of a second sheet of paper in order to add a suggestion of weather to our diagram. We could, but we do not need to. While I am on the subject of the diagram again, briefly, I should point out that the green baize of the tabletop on which we have posed our representations of the INGRATE and the PRINCELING and the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY ought not be taken as an indication of verdant lawns or greensward. Christ almighty!, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing whatsoever grows in the vicinity of the palace, for miles around, not grass nor bracken nor vetch nor brambles nor weeds nor nettles. It is a blasted landscape, as if visited by hellfire. Why this is so need not concern us.

On this Thursday afternoon, the knock-knee’d ingrate has returned to his patch outwith the palace gates following his most recent chasing away by the henchmen. His begging bowl is empty. It is that time of afternoon when passers by are few and far between, what with early closing and curfews and roving banditti and, possibly, inclement weather, but see above. The princeling, in his chamber, pokes his head out of the window and sees the knock-knee’d ingrate and flies into a temper. He summons his henchmen, those that are on duty. Other henchmen are taking naps in their little hench-cubbies. We do not need a separate blob for them, for our diagram. They are, as it were, breathtakingly irrelevant. I mention them merely because, having referred to the henchmen who are on duty, you might start wondering about the henchmen who are off duty, and become distracted from the main business, fretting about where the off duty henchmen might be, and what antics they might be up to. Well, now you know.

Turn for a moment to the green baize tabletop and align your cut-outs accordingly, the PRINCELING triangle and the black HENCHMEN blob right next to one another, the INGRATE square at some distance away, and the white PASSERS BY blob tucked away in your pocket, out of sight.

We ought to have a spot of dialogue here, with the princeling shouting his head off at the henchmen demanding that they chase the knock-knee’d ingrate away from the palace gates, and the henchmen protesting that they have already done so, several times today alone, and every time we chase him away he comes lurching back, sire, no matter how fiercely we screech, how violently we poke at him with pointy implements, how fast we chase! To which the princeling responds by shouting even louder, even more fiercely, and telling the henchmen he will have their guts for garters if they do not rid him of this infernal knock-knee’d ingrate!

The having of guts for garters is a common exclamation of princelings, though how often or regularly the threat was carried out, by this princeling or others, is by no means clear. Let us assume that these henchmen are sufficiently alarmed at the prospect that, clattering away along the corridor after their interview with the princeling, they mutter among themselves, trying to come up with a plan that will prevent the knock-knee’d ingrate ever returning to his patch.

Move the black HENCHMEN blob a little further away from the PRINCELING triangle, to reflect this latest development.

There are so many corridors in the palace, and so many staircases, and so many lobbies, that the henchmen have plenty of time, on their way from the princeling’s chamber to the palace gates, to devise a stupendous number of plans. Much as I would like to tell you about each and every one, I am not going to. Instead, I will reveal, as a magician does at the climax of a conjuring trick, the plan that won favour with the henchmen, as being the most effective. They decided to kill the knock-knee’d ingrate and bury him, with his begging bowl, in an unmarked grave.

Now place the black HENCHMEN blob slap bang next to the INGRATE square. And, unexpectedly, take the white PASSERS BY blob out of your pocket and place it on the green baize tabletop slap bang next to the other blob and the square!

For cor blimey!, it is rush hour, and all of a sudden there are dozens if not hundreds of passers by passing by the palace gates. Several of them stop to pour slops into the knock-knee’d ingrate’s begging bowl. Being an ingrate, he does not say thank you, nor even acknowledge the receipt of charitable slops with a nod, as he might do were he not an ingrate. One would think, with such ill manners, he deserves to be killed. But the henchmen are very wary of carrying out a killing in front of witnesses. It is not their way. So instead they stand around puffing on cigarettes and pretending to be interested in flocks of birds in the sky.

What this means is that at the end, we still have all four cut-out paper shapes, and have not scrunched up the INGRATE square and chucked it in the bin, which is what we would do had he been killed and buried, with his begging bowl, by the henchmen. Tomorrow, we will play the game again, but next time we will swap the INGRATE square and the PRINCELING triangle. We will turn the world topsy-turvy, by installing the ingrate in the chamber and having the princeling begging outside his own palace gates. That should prove quite a lark.

From within his concrete pillbox, he spotted a stonechat. Never having seen a stonechat before, he did not recognise it for what it was. His mind reeled, as minds will reel when faced with the unknown. He flapped his arms, and then he calmed himself and consulted his field guide. It was dark in the pillbox, so he took from his satchel his torch and depressed the knob to switch its light on, but the torch was dead. No light shone.

Are those not terrible words? Consider them for a moment. Chew them, as it were, within your mind. No light shone. That is what the world must have been like before the formation of the sun. But the sun did form, and light did shine, but the roof and walls of the concrete pillbox blocked it out and there was only a thin slit through which he was able to spot the thing he knew not, which was a stonechat. The stonechat was outside the pillbox, on the heath, and they were lit up by the sun, heath and stonechat, both of them, but not him, not the interior of the pillbox with its small cement bench and shelf. There was nothing on the shelf.

He rummaged in his satchel, by touch, sure he had some spare batteries for the torch. He did not know that they had fallen out, upon the heath, a mile back, though a rent in the lining at the base of the satchel, a rent he had not noticed, for when he set out it was barely noticeable, but when heading for the heath he passed through a patch of thorn bushes, and the satchel was snagged on a mighty thorn, and the rent was rent further, enlarged, and shortly thereafter the batteries fell to the ground upon the heath, but he did not register the tiny diminution in the weight of his satchel occasioned by the loss of these important objects. He had other claims on his attention at the time, his plodding, for one, the avoidance of puddles in his plodding, for it had rained relentlessly for hour upon hour before he set out for the heath through the thorn bushes.

It was when the rain ceased that he set out. He hoisted his satchel over his shoulder, the satchel with the fateful rent already present in embryonic form. He set great store by a well-packed satchel. “I set great store by a well-packed satchel” was something he had said more than once, much more than once, to members of his family and to friends and even to himself, aloud, as was his habit. On this day he had packed, during the last of the rainfall, a pair of binoculars and a propelling pencil and a notepad and a torch and spare batteries and a field guide and sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a flask of hot cocoa. Due to the disposition of the contents within the well-packed satchel only the spare batteries fell through the thorn-enlarged rent, on to the heath, a mile before he reached the concrete pillbox, the interior of which was dark, for the sun could not penetrate its roof and walls. Light cannot penetrate concrete. That is a lesson humankind has learned.

Because the spare batteries lay, ruined, in a puddle on the heath, his rummaging by touch in the dark proved fruitless. We knew it would be so, for we have been told about the rent. We are better informed than him. It is even possible that we would recognise a stonechat when we saw one, were we sat in a concrete pillbox on the heath after the rain, peering out, peering out into the light, through binoculars. That is a moot point, and can remain so without consequences of any kind. It hardly matters, in the run of things. But it does matter to him, because had he recognised the stonechat for what it was, a stonechat, he would not have sought recourse to his field guide, he would not have tried in vain to switch on his torch, he would not have rummaged in the satchel for the spare batteries, and he would not have discovered the rent in the lining. At least, not then. He would have discovered it sooner or later, but in different circumstances, back at home, for example, where he would have needle and thread and thus the means to mend the rent. “Damn damn damn” he said to himself, aloud, and the words were followed by the silent thought that he ought to have packed needle and thread in his satchel, followed by a further silent thought that, depending on whereabouts within the satchel he had packed the needle and thread they too might have fallen out upon the heath, into a puddle. There were all sorts of possibilities, the more he thought about them, and he did, for a while, think of them, in a rush, as sometimes thoughts will come in a rush, tumbling one after another through our heads, unstoppable, often irrational, especially in the dark, where there is little or no light to distract us, by making visible things to turn our attention from the innards of our own brains.

But he was mindful of the dangers of the darkness, if “dangers” is not too strong a word, and so he hefted his satchel and emerged from the concrete pillbox into the light, on to the heath. His sudden bustling alarmed the stonechat, and it flew away. He watched it, silhouetted against the sky, growing tinier as it grew more distant, until it was a mere speck, until it vanished completely. And it occurred to him to sketch it, the memory of the sight of it, while it was fresh in his mind. He placed the satchel on the heath and took from it his propelling pencil and notepad and he shut his eyes to see the stonechat in his mind, as he had seen it minutes before through the slit in the wall of the pillbox, and he drew what he remembered, as best he could. But he was at best a cackhanded sketcher.

Home again, he showed his sketch to his dearest, who knew all there is to know about all the birds of the air.

“What was it I saw?” he said,

His dearest had no clue, for his sketch did not resemble a stonechat in the slightest. We might ask, then, what, if anything, he had achieved, on that day, after the rain, striding out through gorse and thorn bushes to the heath, and the concrete pillbox? There are several answers, and we shall leave them hanging in the air. To ask them is enough.

I am of low birth. If you go back a few generations, my forebears on both my mother’s and father’s sides were peasants, struggling to eke pitiful subsistence crops from the muck of Flanders and Ireland. Though my parents themselves had risen a little higher in the world, they had not risen by much. I grew up on a council estate, and though I too, rose a little, debauch put paid to whatever material gains I made, and now I am mired in poverty. Granted, in comparison with the poverty of my peasant forebears it is the veriest luxury, yet by modern Western standards I teeter on the edge of destitution. In my mind, however, I am a king, or, if not a king, at least a baron or a magnifico.

I am not labouring under the delusion that I am some kind of changeling, a prince switched, at birth, with a pauper. I have not spent my life in fruitless quest of some illusory document that will, if ever found, prove my claim to title, riches, lands and chattels. What I mean, rather, is that my material circumstances are of no account in comparison to what might be called my attitude – and my attitude is that of Scriabin’s nobler being who would emerge after the performance of his, alas unfinished, unperformed, Mysterium.

It has amused me, in recent years, to watch our leaders – worthless gits all of them – attempting to deny or disguise their own elevated backgrounds and to pretend to a woeful fantasy of “ordinariness”. Of course these ploys are based on ruthless political ambition, yet it is laughable to witness Blair’s estuarine glottal stops, Brown’s purported delight in the Arctic Monkeys (does anybody remember them?) and Cameron’s kitchen sink video clips. I take a completely opposite approach to the common people. Our leaders are desperate to be at one with them, whereas I rise above them, and look upon them with contempt. It is not, perhaps, an attractive quality, but it keeps me getting up in the mornings and ploughing my furrow.

Having said that material circumstance is trumped by attitude does not mean that I am averse to the trappings of nobility, or of royalty, if they can be obtained. Such trappings, after all, are merely what I deserve, and would be gifted in a more sensible universe. Thus it is that recently I considered installing my own household cavalry. The monarch has a household cavalry, and I shall have one too! That was the thought sparkling in my brain as I leaped out of bed. My penury being what it is, I live in a flat rather than a house, but I take the word “household” in its broader definition, as used in the census and elsewhere, to mean a separate living unit.

So much for the household element. Next I will require horses. Though I have never been the keenest aficionado of westerns, I have watched enough cowboy films to know that the standard method of obtaining several horses is to rustle them. Generally speaking, I abhor theft as a mortal sin, one to which the lower classes are habitually prone, as indeed are those higher in the social strata, if they think they can get away with it, as, regrettably often, they can. I will therefore have to engage in some fairly tortuous moral justification if I am to rustle horses, but that is not beyond my wit. Weak though the argument is, I can claim that my peasant forebears probably rustled a few horses in their time, and thus I am merely obeying the dictates of my cultural inheritance. It is not an excuse I would entertain for a moment were I a magistrate sitting in judgement over an oiky indigent, but let that pass. I shall have to locate a paddock and set out at dead of night for a spot of rustling.

I have considered the matter of the minimum number of horses required for a cavalry, deciding I need four. They will be somewhat cramped in the flat, which cannot be helped, but I shall keep the windows open. My downstairs neighbours may be disturbed by the clattering of their great iron horseshoes, what Father Hopkins described as the drayhorse’s “bright and battering sandal” because it rhymed with Felix Randal, the eponymous, if dead, hero of his poem. Perhaps when the neighbours hammer upon my door to complain I shall simply fling it open and recite Hopkins at them to befuddle their tiny, barely flickering brains. George Melly, I recall, used the same tactic when set upon by grunting ruffians one dark night outside a pub where he had been singing. As a thug smashed a bottle preparatory to enacting savagery upon the chubby jazzman, Melly took from his pocket the book he was carrying – a volume of Kurt Schwitters – and began to recite a Dadaist sound-poem. The ruffians reeled in cognitive confusion and fell away. (The anecdote is given in Melly’s memoir Owning Up (1965).)

For the feeding of my four horses I shall require an enormous supply of hay. Quite where I might obtain it is something I have yet to settle. Obviously, were I a dweller in some squalid rustic backwater I would have hay coming out of my ears. Instead, I shall have to identify and locate urban hay. I am creating a rod for my own back, but that, perhaps, is one cost I must pay for having rustled the horses in the first place.

A second, more onerous cost, is that I shall require riders for my horses. And not just any riders, but riders dressed from head to toe in livery, livery so gorgeous and ornate and Ruritanian that spectators will be almost blinded by it. The livery is not the problem. But where on earth am I going to keep the riders? I cannot have them cluttering up my flat, gabbling their horsey gabble and quarrelling about their epaulettes and generally being loud and boisterous and hearty, as I suspect members of a household cavalry are when they are off duty. I suppose I could have them break in to the downstairs flat and terrorise the neighbours into fleeing, and then set up home there, but in that case it would be unclear exactly whose household cavalry they were – mine or the downstairs flat’s? Once installed downstairs, they would want the horses with them, so I would be back to square one, the only difference in my circumstances being a daily delivery of huge bales of urban hay.

Thinking it through, it may be an idea to modify my plans. Rather than having my own household cavalry, I could send my four rustled horses sweeping out across the globe, the riders mounted upon them Conquest and War and Famine and Death. That will be tickety-boo!

Here at Hooting Yard we will be providing complete coverage of the Euro 2012 foopball tournament. What this consists of, for the uninitiated, is a few weeks during which men in shorts run around grassy fields, huffing and puffing and occasionally falling over. The focus of their attention is a ball – the foopball – which is about the size of a pig’s head. There are various arcane rules governing their chasing around of the ball, but you do not really need to know them to enjoy the spectacle.

The grassy field is known as a pitch. It has several lines drawn on it with whitewash. These are applied by a chap known as the groundsman, but he is nowhere to be seen while the men are running around. At least, he is not readily identifiable. He may well be among the teeming thousands of spectators, but then again he is just as likely to be sat in his potting shed puffing on a rollup and smearing grease on to his whitewash-applicator, readying it for the next application of whitewash to the grass. He is, in a sense, the unsung hero of the tournament, for without his whitewash application skills, without the markings on the grass, the men running around in pursuit of the foopball would run around in a completely haphazard fashion. Some of them are already haphazard enough, but at least with the whitewashed lines they are given some idea of where they are.

In the potting shed, while smoking a gasper and greasing his whitewashing contraption, the groundsman will probably be listening to a transistor radio. He will have it tuned in to a station broadcasting what is called a “commentary” on the foopball match. This is where a man among the teeming thousands of spectators, in a special box, and armed with a microphone, babbles his observations of what is happening on the pitch. He will say things like: “Here we are in the field of dreams, surrounded by fields of cows” and “For a moment there, he looked like a baby gazelle who’d just plopped out of the womb”. Such aperçus can actually be more entertaining than the foopball game itself, long stretches of which are often pointless and enervating.

If you find your mind wandering and do not have a transistor radio, you can pass the time by counting the persons on the pitch. Generally speaking, there ought to be twenty-one people running around, two standing at either end looking a bit disconsolate, and a further two running up and down the whitewashed lines on either side. Those latter two have whistles and flags. One of the men on the pitch also has a whistle, but no flag. Instead, he carries a couple of cards in his breast pocket. Every now and again he will take one of the cards and brandish it in the air, as if it were some kind of talisman of great import. He will always blow his whistle shortly beforehand. In addition to these… er, let me add the numbers quickly… these twenty-five persons, there is a twenty-sixth, a shadowy figure rarely if ever seen, known as “the fourth official”. You don’t need to worry your little pointy head about him.

Another thing you can do to pass the time is to keep a beady eye on the men in shorts who are nowhere near the foopball. They will occupy themselves in various ways, chief among them being standing with their hands on their hips, kneeling to retie their bootlaces, spitting, and darting about in brief little runs in every direction to no apparent purpose. Sometimes they might punch each other.

If, like Charles Babbage, you are neurasthenically sensitive to noise, you should be warned that the “soundtrack” to a foopball match, apart from dirge-like singing from the teeming thousands of spectators, is the blaring of hooters and klaxons. This blaring appears to be entirely gratuitous, a din for din’s sake. In olden times, before the hooter, spectators liked to hold aloft wooden rattles. They made less of a din, and were only ever seen or heard at foopball matches, unlike the hooter and klaxon which can be deployed in various other contexts. Nobody is quite sure what became of the common wooden rattle, not even the groundsman, who in his time probably collected a fair number of discarded ones from the grounds. One assumes they must have been discarded, otherwise they would still be being rattled, by spectators, in place of the hooting of hooters and the blaring of klaxons.

Certain more unruly spectators like to set off burning flares, as if they were lost at sea. You cannot play foopball in the sea. The nearest thing to it is water polo, and even this is more likely to be played in indoor pools rather than in the vast and pitiless ocean. But whitewash cannot be applied, in straight lines, to water, whether fresh or salt, pool or sea, so there is no role for the groundsman. That is why you will not find him listening, in his potting shed, on his transistor radio, to the commentaries babbled by spectators in special boxes with microphones at water polo matches. He has no personal investment in water polo, whereas with foopball he knows that in every moment of the game his whitewashed lines have significance. His work has heft.

Throughout the Euro 2012 tournament you would be advised to keep a tally of the results. I realise I have not explained the scoring system, but that is something else you need not fret about, as there are big scoreboards next to the pitches which display numbers on them. At the end of each match you can copy the numbers into your Hooting Yard Euro 2012 Foopball Tournament Tally Ledger, With Stickers. Details of how to obtain this treasured souvenir will be revealed in the coming days.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Millennium Feast of Saints Blot & Cugat. It was a very special day, so I wore the least tatty of my vestments. The chasuble is only slightly frayed, the stains on the cincture have faded, the alb, granted, is little better than a rag. I cannot get the grease out of the amice, and the stole is in tatters. The less said about the maniple the better. But by adjusting the lighting so it played through the cobwebs I think only the sharpest-eyed of congregants will have noticed. I did my best to disguise the stink by spraying the chapel with an aerosol can of Essence of Blood of the Lamb. It was decocted, of course, not from the real blood of a real lamb, but from chemical compounds manufactured in the lab by boffins. I have seen pictures of so-called “real” lambs in a codex. They look like tinier versions of sheep, if, that is, they were drawn to scale. Who knows?

It being such a special day, the service went on for much longer than usual. A couple of the faffers keeled over through exhaustion. Why they volunteer for faffing duty when they are clearly not up to it is a mystery. But it is not an ineffable mystery, not like the mystery we were celebrating. Yes, believe it or not it is precisely one thousand years since Saint Blot and Saint Cugat wrought the destruction of the old world and brought into being the Eternal Kingdom of the Hideous Bat-God Fatso. In another codex, I read that neither saint actually realised that that is what they were doing. It’s a moot point. I like to think that one or both of them at least had an inkling. I have seen pictures of so-called “real” inklings on my Windows Vista screen. They look quite shimmery, sort of half way between the stains on the cincture and the light playing through the cobwebs in the bat-chapel.

After the service I gave the crew special permission to play ping pong in the narthex.

I revived the fainted faffers using the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot and got them to mop up the spillages from the service. It is, again, a mystery, though not an ineffable one, why the prescribed form of worship of the Hideous Bat-God Fatso has to be so terribly, terribly messy. But both the codices and the Windows Vista screens are in agreement on this point. Fortunately we have plenty of mops aboard the starship, enough at least until our next scheduled landing, on the planet Willself. Rumours persist that intelligent life is to be found there, but I am not convinced.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Feast of Saint Von Straubenzee. Change of plan. We are now heading for Venus. I received emergency orders on my metal tapping machine to go and investigate the Vinegar Valves. Fatso has spoken.

I looked up the Vinegar Valves of Venus in a codex. Apparently, there are teeming thousands of them, lined up neatly in rows across some kind of Venusian plains or pampas. It will be a risky adventure. In fact I have already donned my helmet, and taken some protein pills. We have to check all the valves to ensure there is no leakage of Venusian vinegar. It is one of several types of Venusian gar, but I cannot find any reliable information about the others. At times like this, I ask myself “What would Cugat do?” Saint Cugat, the one-time Bosun Cugat, was of course a vampire, though the codices and Windows Vista screens give varying accounts of exactly what kind of vampire he was. He gurgled, we know that much. So, in preparation for the landing, I gurgled too, but admittedly without conviction. I am afraid to say I have the collywobbles. What terrors await us on Venus? What fierce fanged spittle-flecked life-forms will bar our way to the Vinegar Valves?

Monsignor’s Log, same stardate, quick update. We have landed on Venus and made our way across an inhospitable wasteland, a wasteland unimagined by T S Eliot. It might possibly have been imagined by Ezra Pound, but I will have to check that when back aboard the starship. As we approached the plains or pampas whereon the teeming thousands of Vinegar Valves of Venus are lined up in serried rows, we discovered our way was barred. As I feared, fierce fanged spittle-flecked life-forms protect the Valves from interplanetary interlopers. Peering at them, from a safe distance, through my space-lorgnette, I had the distinct impression that they were akin to the lambs I had seen pictures of in the codex. White, woolly, four legs, stupid facial expressions – and yet befanged, and fierce, and spittle-flecked. I took a few snapshots and have transmitted them to the boffins in the lab. Now we must wait, pending their report. I set up an altar and we celebrated Mass to pass the time. An indigent faffer keeled over again, but this time it might have something to do with the Venusian atmosphere. There is an overpowering stink of vinegar in the air. I think the Valves are leaking.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Feast of Saint Poxhaven. Gosh, what a calamity! Whatever those life-forms were, Venusian versions of the baa-lambs that once bestrode the old Earth or not, they were savage! Perhaps it was an error of judgement on my part to attempt to convert them to Hideous Bat-God Fatsoism. As soon as they saw me mincing towards them armed with the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot, they let out an awful collective keening. I have never heard anything like it, save for one of the more alarming passages in Saint Blot’s Threnody for Piccolo, Cowbell, and Celery Sticks. I dropped the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot on to the Venusian dust and slammed my hands over my ears, and ran screaming back to the landing module. The pilot-faffer had keeled over, so I had to take the controls myself. Not having much experience in flying the module, or indeed any experience whatsoever, I completely missed the starship. We are now zooming at warp factor unstoppable into the empty vastness of space. It is empty, and vast. And all I can do is gurgle.

Captain’s Log, stardate the Ides of March, Year Dot plus [redacted]. I am sick of this damned log. Literally sick. Whenever I open it to scribble another entry I am overcome by a wave of nausea. I am convinced I have a palsy and an ague, even though I would be hard pressed to define exactly what a palsy is or an ague is. Were there a medical dictionary aboard the starship I would look them up. But if ever there was a medical dictionary it disappeared along with the doctor, Von Straubenzee, a year ago today. A year or a space-year, I cannot be certain. The Captain and Second Officer Wilmot and that rascal Mister Poxhaven vanished too, leaving me to take command, and to scribble in the Captain’s Log. I was going to cross out the word Captain’s, with a big thick bold indelible black black black black black marker pen, and insert instead Purser’s, me being Purser Blot. I don’t know what gave me pause, unless it was the terrible shaking of my hand occasioned by the palsy. But I could barely lift the pen, so it remains the Captain’s Log rather than the Palsied Purser’s Log. I am using a special lightweight space-biro to do my scribbling. It puts no strain on my quivering white tiny frozen hand.

My hands are as tiny as those of the composer Scriabin. I wanted to compose music, delirious and ecstatic music, but instead I was sent to starship pursers’ training academy. There was no music there, only bleeping and whooshing and buzzing noises. At least it prepared me for the starship itself, where there is a constant din of bleeping and whooshing and buzzing, punctuated only by the strange gurgling sounds made by the ship’s vampire, Bosun Cugat. He claims they are involuntary, his gurglings, and apologises, a little too fulsomely for my liking. I would have him confined to the brig were it not that he would simply melt the metal bars with his basilisk glare and escape. I am not clear precisely what kind of vampire he is, just as I am unclear about palsy and ague. Ach Gott!, I was not cut out for this life. I ought to be sprawled on a divan in a dacha, composing ecstatic music.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus one. At the time of his death in stardate 1915, Scriabin was working on his Mysterium, of which he wrote: “There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.” He intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by “nobler beings”.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus two. Bosun Cugat confronted me at suppertime yesterday and revealed that he had snuck a peek at this Log. He said I ought to be using it to note pertinent details of the starship and its space-voyage, rather than wittering on about Scriabin. He has whiffy oxters. I threw an aerosol can of space-deodorant at him and told him to use it. I am a nobler being than Bosun Cugat. I would like to compose my own Mysterium, but there is far too much faffing about to do on this damned starship. I think we have entered the Belt of Jiffy. I looked out of the starboard window and saw a gas giant.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus three. Whether or not we were in the Belt of Jiffy yesterday, we are nowhere near it now. Bosun Cugat has seized control of the starship and we are hurtling towards Saturn at warp factor God knows what. He has locked me in the space-janitor’s cupboard, with my biro and the captain’s log and a flask of dandelion and burdock and a few sticks of celery. Every now and then he comes hammering on the door and shouting questions at me, but refuses to let me out. His questions are technical ones, to which I do not always have ready answers. He wants to know if we should pass through the rings of Saturn or try to avoid them. Apparently he is going to land on the planet’s surface and go in search of the Suet Siphons of Saturn. Being a vampire, he will not require a spacesuit. What in heaven’s name he wants with suet I have no idea.

Rummaging around in the cupboard I found a piccolo and a cowbell. I am passing the time composing a piece of delirious and ecstatic music for piccolo, cowbell and celery sticks. Scriabin would be proud of me, at least I like to think so. Hail to thee, blessed Alexander Nikolayevich!

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus four. A couple of hours after we landed on Saturn, I heard Bosun Cugat’s dainty footsteps padding along the corridor. He stopped outside the space-janitor’s cupboard and the door whooshed open and he moaned and fell, crumpled, into my arms. For hours I cradled him, mussing his filthy hair and making cooing noises into his pointy ear. I know my duty. Eventually he gathered himself, and explained that he had located the suet siphons, teeming thousands of them, all lined up in neat rows on some kind of Saturnine plain or pampas. And every single one was exhausted. Not a spit of suet could be eked from a single siphon.

“Do you not understand what this means?” he shrieked, “Others have been here before us!”

I had to admit that this put something of a damper on our five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

“Should we go in search of the suet?” I asked.

But before Bosun Cugat could reply, he was engulfed in mists and lights which modified his corporeal contours. In front of my eyes, he was transmogrified into a nobler being. I looked out of the starboard window and saw that the universe had vanished. Scriabin’s Mysterium had come to pass. It was the end of the world. I picked up the piccolo and cowbell and celery sticks and played a threnody.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin

Captain’s Log, stardate the Ides of March, Year Dot plus [redacted]. Symmes was right after all! John Cleves Symmes, Jr. (1779-1829), who posited that there were holes at the poles through which one could gain access to the hollow earth! He was absolutely correct in every particular except one. He had the wrong planet! It is not our gorgeous Earth that is hollow, but Neptune! Less gorgeous, certainly, and much, much colder even than our Arctic and Antarctic regions, and lacking penguins, in fact generally unearthly as planets go. But it has holes at its poles, as we have seen during our sweeping orbit of the planet as part of our latest five-year mission. Tomorrow we shall make an emergency landing close to one of the holes at one of the poles and send a team down on rope ladders.

Captain’s Log, next day. A stupid and maddening argument erupted regarding which of the holes at which of Neptune’s poles the landing party should descend on rope ladders. Mister Poxhaven is terrified of penguins, and argued for the Neptunian North Pole. We simply could not drum into his pointy head that there are no penguins on Neptune, in either the south or north polar regions. He stuffed his ears with space-putty so he could not hear us beseeching him. Second Officer Wilmot made equally vociferous claims for making a descent at the Neptunian South Pole. He is fond of penguins, and thinks there may be a colony living just below the surface, in one of the interior spheres of the Hollow Neptune. I lost my temper with both of them and had them slammed in the brig. I decided to postpone the landing until tomorrow, and sought to keep the rest of the crew occupied with games of ping pong and communal reading of interesting articles from back numbers of the Reader’s Digest.

Captain’s Log, the following day. Fool that I am, I entrusted the key to the brig to Purser Blot, who has mislaid it. Regulations forbid carrying a jemmy aboard the starship, so we cannot force the door. Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot are growing increasingly fractious. They rub each other up the wrong way in the best of circumstances, and these are by no means the best of circumstances. We continue to orbit Neptune. Bosun Cugat, the ship’s vampire, has reported some intriguing meteorological and magnetic phenomena. Peas for supper,

Captain’s Log, Ides of March plus three. Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot escaped from the brig by means of top secret technology the details of which are redacted. With inhuman patience I repeated, until I was blue in the face, that there is no such creature as a Neptunian penguin. We drew straws to decide whether to descend the hole at the North or the South Pole. I used the last of our drinking straws. As soon as we leave Neptune’s orbit we shall have to locate and dock at a supply planetoid to replenish the drinking straws and several grocery items. I should not have to fret about such matters when there is a hole at a pole to descend on rope ladders.

Captain’s Log, Ides of March again. Mister Poxhaven, Second Officer Wilmot, Doctor Von Straubenzee, and I are on a platform within the interior of the Hollow Neptune. Our first discovery, after we descended on rope ladders, is that there is no such concept as time down here. According to the bizarre scratchings on the wall, it is, always has been, and always will be the Ides of March. There is no sign of any penguins – Mister Poxhaven is relieved, Second Officer Wilmot tearful. Our breathing apparatus is holding up as well as can be expected. Less so our coathangers, which prove wholly useless in the Neptunian interior. I have asked Doctor Von Straubenzee to analyse the problem using his powerful artificial brain.

Captain’s Log, still the Ides of March. We have moved from the platform into a subterranean arena which appears to be some kind of Neptunian warehouse. The scratchings on the wall here are if anything even more bizarre. Second Officer Wilmot claims to have seen several leafcutter ants, more or less the size of earthly leafcutter ants, but none of them were carrying leaves. Or so he says. We suspect he is hallucinating. I have taken the precaution of placing the [redacted] contraption on his head, just to be on the safe side.

Captain’s Log, the Ides of March. Yesterday, whatever that means down here in the Neptunian interior, Mister Poxhaven discovered the nozzles, thousands upon thousands of them. Every so often they spurt forth some kind of nougat with the consistency of jelly. It is pink and white, ish, thus not unlike earthly nougat. Doctor Von Straubenzee volunteered to ingest some. Before any of us could stop him, he punctured his breathing apparatus with the points of a pair of pinking shears and sucked up nougat straight from a nozzle. When he did not immediately keel over and lie splayed on the floor twitching with convulsive fits, Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot followed suit. On my next voyage I must recruit less impetuous crew members. Shortly thereafter the three of them keeled over and lay splayed on the floor twitching with convulsive fits. I put two and two together in my pulsating captainy brain and blamed the nougat from the nozzles.

Captain’s Log, the Ides of March. There is no let up in the twitching and convulsive fits. While I wait for my men either to recover or die, I try to concentrate on straightening out at least one of the coathangers, at least for five minutes. Communications with the ship have deteriorated to meaningless static. Out of the corner of my eye, a little while ago, in the shadows, I think I saw a penguin, or a leafcutter ant. How I wish I had thought to bring a back number of the Reader’s Digest with me. For God’s sake look after our people.

Symmes’ tombstone. All rights reserved by rcoss 2001

If ever you find yourself in Bohemia, there is every likelihood that you will be enmired in a scandal or swept away by a rhapsody. It is even possible that both may occur. Fortunately, there are historical precedents to guide your conduct. For a rhapsodic episode, one can study the case of Farrokh Bulsara and his chums, one of whom, I think not incidentally, was later to become an accredited expert on the starry cosmos, and a friend to badgers. Should, on the other hands, scandal erupt, there is an account of how to deal with it by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no friend of badgers then or later, but a man who did much research into what we might call the psychic and supernatural cosmos.

It is well worth your time to study the relevant texts, by Bulsara and Conan Doyle, before you set out on your journey to Bohemia. By the time you arrive at the border, and present your credentials to the border guard in his Bohemian border hut, you should be ready for absolutely anything the Bohemians can throw at you, be it a rhapsody or a scandal, or – which I have not yet mentioned but is equally likely – a doomed love affair with a consumptive seamstress.

You will be asked to state the purpose of your visit, and to empty out your suitcase upon a rickety wooden table inside the hut. On no account should you take the Bohemian border guard’s grim demeanour as a personal affront. He will have been trained in physiognomic grimness from his very first day at the Bohemian Border Guards’ Academy, an institution which has known its own share of rhapsodies and scandals, both possibly involving consumptive seamstresses. You should remain polite and compliant, and pay no attention to the rifles, revolvers, submachine guns, truncheons, and lead-weighted saps much in evidence inside the hut. Bear in mind that Bohemian border guards have an almost pathological mania for tidiness, so when you empty out your suitcase you should align the contents very very neatly upon the rickety table. Alignment in alphabetical order is recommended, if you can manage it. Do not even think about offering a bribe. Bohemian border guards are absolutely incorruptible, and have been to known to take umbrage at backhanders, umbrage they give vent to by thwacking their potential corrupter on the back of the neck with a sap.

Once you have emptied your suitcase you may be taken into a small connecting room within the border hut. This is where you will be questioned about the purpose of your visit. At this stage, of course, before actually making the physical crossing into Bohemia, you will not have been swept away by a rhapsody, nor enmired in a scandal, and you can therefore deflect any pertinent rhapsody/scandal questions by adopting a gormless facial expression. Most Bohemian border guards consider foreigners stupid, so you will only be reinforcing their existing prejudices. This will put them at their ease. The wilier border guards might slip in a trick question about, say, Irene Adler or Scaramouche, or even frozen tiny hands. Do not take the bait. Have recourse to a tactic such as biting your tongue so forcefully you draw blood, or carrying in your pocket a small device which can deliver an electric shock when squeezed in the palm of your hand. Such distraction should rescue you from the risk of blurting out more than it is advisable for the border guards to know.

At the end of the interrogation, if all has gone well, your papers will be stamped and you will be led back into the main room of the hut. You will find that your suitcase has been repacked with all your belongings, and much more neatly than when you originally packed it earlier that morning at the hotel on Lüneberg Heath. Perhaps if you remain in Bohemia long enough, and can avoid becoming embroiled in rhapsodies and scandals and doomed love affairs with consumptive seamstresses, you will learn to pack your suitcase with fanatical tidiness. This is the kind of thing that can keep you occupied once you have shaken hands with the border guard and trudged across the border proper into Bohemia and found a cheap hotel at which to rest your weary head.

At the hotel, the first thing you should do is to unpack your suitcase and rummage in the lining for the listening device planted therein by the border guard. It is best disabled by being submerged in water. You might want to hurl it into the Vlatava, or another major river or watercourse. Be careful not to do this in the evening, however, for standing on a bridge over a Bohemian river in the twinkling lights of evening has been to known to provoke rhapsodic feelings. It is also a time when scandal might be brewing. After chucking the listening device into water, go straight back to your hotel to do some practice suitcase packing and unpacking, and resist the temptation to visit any garrets where consumptive seamstresses may be languishing. Between the hotel lobby and the safety of your room you might of course scent a whiff of scandal among the potted plants and in the corridors. Wrap your scarf tighter about your neck and pull the brim of your Homburg down to shade your eyes.

As an extra precaution, find, in an insalubrious Bohemian alleyway, a rascal skilled in counterfeiting. Pay this person to provide you with forged papers purporting to show that you are a trusted and long-serving employee of an important asbestos works. Armed with this documentation, you can then guard against any eruption of rhapsody or scandal or doomed love by taking out a policy with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Make an appointment with Herr Kafka. Be sure to catch him in the office at a time when he is not out on the river indulging his love of rowing boats. There is a chance he might scoop up, with one of his oars, the listening device you chucked into the river earlier, and you will not want him asking you any hard questions about it. He can be tenacious. And whatever you do, do not accept an invitation to lunch with him. He is a Fletcherist, who chews each mouthful of food one hundred times per minute, and his table manners are disgusting.

Otherwise, enjoy your stay in Bohemia.