I am weary, writing down all this ; so little has my lost one to do with it, which alone could be its interest for me ! I believe I should stop short. The London years are not definite, or fertile in disengaged remembrances, like the Scotch ones : dusty dim, unbeautiful they still seem to me in comparison ; and my poor Jeannie’s ‘problem’… is so mixed with confusing intricacies to me that I cannot sort it out into clear articulation at all, or give the features of it, as before. The general type of it is shiningly clear to me. A noble fight at my side ; a valiant strangling of serpents day after day done gaily by her (for most part), as I had to do it angrily and gloomily ; thus we went on together. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!

Thomas Carlyle, recalling his wife Jane Welsh in Reminiscences (1881)

It was a rainswept gloomy afternoon in Chelsea when the doorbell clanged at the house on Cheyne Walk. Sparky chatterbox and letter-writer Jane Welsh went to answer it herself, for she had given all the servants a day off to enjoy the rain and gloom. She opened the door to reveal, standing on the step, a tall angular dusty creaking tatty bristly fellow, whose eyes were like fathomless whirlpools. He might have been a chimney sweep, had he been dustier and the dust blacker. As it was, she recognised him immediately, not surprisingly, as he called at the house at about this time every single day.

“Old Snakey!” she cried, “You are a tad early.”

“Yes, Mrs Carlyle, so I am, I hope not inconveniently so. I’m afraid my appointment book is absolutely chocker at the moment so I have had to squeeze you in today as best I can.”

“Well I am indebted to you for fitting us in. You know your way to the parlour. Go thither while I fetch Mr Carlyle.”

And while Old Snakey made his way to the parlour, Jane Welsh Carlyle climbed half-way up the stairs towards the attic where her husband sat scribbling away at his interminable biography of Frederick the Great.

“Oh Thomas! Thomas!”, she cried, but it was no use. The attic was soundproofed to blot out the sound of the next door neighbour’s rackety hens, and of train whistles, both of which drove the Scottish sage crackers. Jane climbed further up the stairs until she was at the door of the attic, flung it open, and announced in a bright and cheerful voice,

“Thomas, you must come down at once! I am so happy! The snake charmer is here!”

“Isn’t he a tad early?” growled the irascible polymath.

“Oh don’t get all grumpy, Thomas” pleaded Jane. She was in high spirits, ever since the arrival of Old Snakey.

The pair of them made their way down to the parlour, Jane skipping with glee, Thomas glowering with anger.

“What with all this carry on I am never going to finish my life of Frederick the Great,” he moaned.

“I am sure you will, Thomas, even if it takes you thirteen years of ultimately worthless toil,” said Jane, while humming a happy ditty.

In the parlour, Old Snakey was sitting in an armchair, getting himself into what generations yet to come would call “the zone”.

“You two can make idle chitchat while I fetch the tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets from the cellar,” said Jane, in high frolic.

But the snake charmer and the proto-Fascist sat in silence until Jane returned, lugging the two tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets she had fetched from the cellar.

“Do you have any preferences today?” asked Old Snakey.

“I’d like a boa constrictor, please!” shouted Jane with unrestrained glee, “And what about you, Thomas? A python? A viper? A burrowing asp?”

But Thomas merely grunted.

“Oh, you’re such an old miseryguts!” said giggly Jane, “Give him a surprise then, Old Snakey!” she added.

At which the snake charmer took from his pocket a flute or pipe of mysterious Oriental origin and proceeded to play upon it a mesmerising melody of mysterious Oriental origin. And as he played, so the lids of the tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets were dislodged, from within, and out of each came crawling a serpent, a boa constrictor and a diamondback rattlesnake.

“Ooh, how unbearably thrilling,” cried Jane, “We haven’t had a diamondback rattlesnake before! Isn’t that exciting, Thomas?”

But Thomas Carlyle, his head still stuffed with what he called Prussian blockheadism, was hardly listening.

“Well,” said Old Snakey, replacing his mysterious Oriental flute or pipe in his pocket, “I have much to do, so I shall take your leave. I’ll let myself out. See you tomorrow!”

And he left the room, leaving the Carlyles and the serpents alone together. No sooner had he gone than Jane sprang upon the boa constrictor, laughing her head off, and strangled it with her bare hands.

“Your turn, Thomas. Come on, cheer up!”

But as he loomed above the diamondback rattlesnake with murder in his eyes, there was no lightning of the Craigenputtock savant’s mood. He was angry. He was as gloomy as the Chelsea weather. He fell upon the serpent with all his bottled-up ferocity and gripped its throat in his big hairy fists and squeezed and squeezed until the serpent sank limp and dead upon the carpet.

Beside him, Jane Carlyle clapped her hands like an overexcited child.

“Tip top serpent strangling, Thomas!” she yelled, “Well, that’s that done for another day. You can go back to your attic and write more guff about Frederick the Great. I will throw the corpses of the serpents over the fence into next door’s garden.”

“I expect that is why his damned hens make so much damned noise!” shouted Thomas Carlyle, and he puttered up the stairs.

Outside, it was still rainswept and gloomy. It was another nineteenth-century afternoon in Cheyne Walk. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!

The scene is the deck of a warship. The crew, doughty sailors all, are on battle stations. Klaxons are blaring and bells are clanging. Above, in a clear blue sky, a fleet of enemy dive-bombers comes sweeping into view. The ship is under attack from the air! There is shouting and panic and uproar. In the midst of it all, the captain on the bridge is laughing his head off, telling jokes, being generally puckish and amusing and, perhaps, suggesting they set up the ping pong table for a quick game of whiff whaff.

This, I surmise, is broadly speaking what prompted Captain Hugh Corbett, DSC, DSO, to be mentioned in dispatches for his “conspicuous cheerfulness under air attack”. Not bravery, nor presence of mind, nor true grit, but cheerfulness. There is somehow a hint that, when not under attack, he was a bit mopey and miserable. Then the enemy planes come roaring and swooping and he brightens up.

Captain Corbett has died at the age of 95, and his obituary appeared in the Grauniad in the Other Lives section where readers commemorate the otherwise unknown, uncelebrated and unsung who have passed away. Though the good captain may still be with us, in some ethereal realm, for after his retirement from the Royal Navy, we are told, he became the vice-chairman of the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. He might use any psychic powers gained in the post to send eerie messages from beyond the grave. Given his warship experience, however, it is possible that any such messages might be rather disturbing.

“Feeling a bit down in the dumps being dead,” his psychic essence might communicate, “Could do with cheering up. Please arrange to have my grave subjected to aerial bombardment.”

I think it worth noting that Captain Corbett was cited not just for being cheerful but for being conspicuously cheerful. I wonder quite what this means. Perhaps it was simply that he laughed loudly and went around slapping other crew members on the back. Or maybe he dressed up as a clown, in the fashion of Bluebottle (see below). If his ethereal shade is reading this, should there be access to Het Internet in the Elysian Fields, it would be nice if he could psychically communicate with me to give me a bit more detail.

I can imagine that conspicuous cheerfulness could be somewhat irritating, particularly when one is being strafed by a Stuka. A fit of the giggles could also be construed as the verge of hysteria. It would be interesting to learn if any wartime ship’s captains were ever mentioned in dispatches for “conspicuous hysteria under air attack”. Or, indeed, a gamut of other emotions and reactions. Conspicuous grumpiness. Conspicuous irksomeness. Conspicuous desire to listen to Frippertronics. Conspicuous inconspicuousness.

That last would be a difficult one to pull off, but not, I would think, if one displayed psychic powers like Captain Corbett. Using eldritch manipulations of the space time continuum, it would surely be possible to be very much there, on the spot, conspicuous, and yet not there at all, hidden, occult, inconspicuous. In the midst of battle, while being attacked by machine-gun-rattling Stukas and dive-bombers, this could be a highly-prized quality. It would surely confuse the enemy, though of course it might equally confuse one’s own crew. And if one’s own crew became confused, skittering about the decks in haphazard fashion, not knowing their keels from their false keels, their gripes from their strakes, their garboard from their larboard, their bulwark from their cathead, or their orlop from their poop, then soon enough one is going to find oneself the captain of a ship of fools.

At which point I should confess that it has long been my desire to sail aboard a ship of fools. There are plenty of fools on land, of course, but the prospect of being aboard a ship on which every single person is an irredeemable fool has a peculiar attraction. Would my presence on such a ship make a fool of me, too? Well it might, but it is a risk I am willing to take, should any fool-ship see fit to invite me on board and give me a berth in a cabin of fools. Think of the jollity, the hysteria, and indeed the conspicuous cheerfulness to be found on a fool-ship! It would be a Dionysian bacchanal, afloat on the ocean wave.

The only drawback I can think of is that, as we well know, because we have had it drummed into us, worse things happen at sea. But they would only be mildly worse if we remained determinedly and conspicuously cheerful. To that end, it would be a good idea, to have among our complement of fools, a clown or two. Whatever else you might say about clowns, you could never accuse them of being inconspicuous. Take, for example, Bluebottle The Clown, pictured here at a gathering to commemorate Joseph Grimaldi on the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. (And my thanks to Spitalfields Life for the snap.) Bluebottle is both cheerful and conspicuous. But unlike Captain Corbett, I do not think he would have been best pleased had the grave of the legendary clown come under aerial attack. I think we can assume from his cheerful grin that bombardment of the grave did not occur.

Yesterday’s edition of Hooting Yard On The Air on Resonance104.4FM, broadcast, as ever, live, had to be abandoned after ten minutes. I am sorry to say I felt queasy and dizzy and faint, and was unable to continue babbling into a microphone. I think I explained the situation before my dulcet tones were replaced by Erik Satie, but as the one piece I did manage to recite was On A Plague Of Boils it occurred to me that some listeners may have been given to understand that I had to truncate the show because I had broken out in a plague of suppurating boils. I am happy to reassure you that this is not the case. As it was, though I did not faint, I felt very close to doing so, and still today do not feel tiptop. I am bolting clementines as an aid to recovery. Meanwhile, rather than writing about Fainting Mr Key, here is a 2008 piece about a fainting goat.

You would do well to remember, if ever you are out walking in the vicinity of the farmyard at Scroonhoonpooge, that you may come face to face with the fainting goat. If you encounter it on the lane leading out of the farmyard towards the orchard, and as soon as it sees you it topples over in a swoon, you must not be alarmed. You must certainly not think that the goat has fainted because you have caused it fright, by dint of something alarming in your appearance. Even if there is something terrifying about you, such as a twisted-up face or a too-brightly coloured clinker jacket or your being armed with a mail order Mannlicher-Carcano sniper’s rifle, none of these things will be what causes the goat to faint. The goat will faint for the reason it is known as the fainting goat, which is that it is constantly fainting, dozens of times a day, even dozens of times an hour.

This constant swooning is a mystery as far as the local vets are concerned. There are several vets with practices in walking or short bus journey distance of Scroonhoonpooge farmyard, and all of them at one time or another have been called to tend to the fainting goat. They have tried all sorts of treatments, from goat-friendly smelling salts to the deployment of Peruvian whistling vessels to simply shouting very loudly into the goat’s ear, and though such techniques may revive the goat from its faint, none have served to stop it clattering over in a dead swoon again and again as the long countryside day draws on towards dusk and rainfall. When it is conscious, the goat seems hale and hearty, even frisky, and engages in all the normal activities one might expect of a farmyard goat. I would list these activities but I am sure you are thoroughly up to speed with the doings of goats, given the demographic of the Hooting Yard readership.

There has been a certain amount of bickering among the local vets, as each of them grows frustrated at their inability to stop the continual fainting of the fainting goat. When they passed out of their veterinary colleges, they were all brimming with confidence, armed, as they thought, with the knowledge and expertise to handle all sorts of bestial maladies, from the workaday to the exotic. Whether it be a cow with a pox or an ostrich beset by Von Straubenzee’s Gruesomeness, these vets believed they could march into a farmyard or menagerie and win the undying gratitude of farmers and menagerists by weaving their vetty spells. An injection here, a siphoning off of fluid there, and to the gasps of their keepers the cow or ostrich or whatever beast it may be would leap up, restored to vigour, and there would be a round of applause and the discreet passing of banknotes into the pocket of the smug vet.

But the fainting goat goes on fainting, day in day out, and not one of the vets has a clue what to do about it. When they gather of an evening on the balcony of the Café Simon Schama, at first they boast of their breakthroughs, the splint affixed to the leg of the sparrow, the gunk drained from the badger’s boils, the palsied pig unpalsied. But as they sip their fermented slops, tempers fray, and the talk soon turns to the fainting goat, that damned intractable fainting goat, and harsh words are said and there is spitting and chucking and fisticuffs, black eyes and bruises and the odd dagger slash. And so it goes on, night after night.

Now curiously enough, during the night the fainting goat never faints. It remains wide awake all night every night, either in its comfy pen or out in some field, doing goaty things, things other goats do in daylight. Apprised of this singular information, some have posited that the goat’s swoons are not swoons so much as its repeatedly falling asleep from exhaustion. It is indeed a cogent case, but it is nevertheless mistaken, for reasons crystal clear to those, such as some among the vets, who have made studies of the goat’s neurological peculiarities. It sleeps not, yet it faints. The one is understood, and explicable, the other not. There are more curious cases among the goat population, as among other farmyard beasts, but not many, sure enough. That is why the vets fret so.

But you will not fret, will you, as you wander past Scroonhoonpooge farmyard, on your way to the orchard, to pluck persimmons from the trees, illegally, and you come upon the fainting goat upon the path and it faints at your feet? You will pat its little horns and lift it to its feet, and send it tottering off along the lane to its next collapse, for you are wiser than the vets, you are wiser than the farmer. The only thing wiser than you is the fainting goat itself. No goat was ever wiser, nor had so explosive a brain.

When one is covered from head to toe in suppurating boils, one finds that invitations to sophisticated cocktail parties, unlike the boils, dry up. I discovered this through personal experience. There was a time when, like Job, I was tested by the Lord. One such test the Lord devised was to strike me with a plague of boils. It could not have come at a worse time, hot on the heels of a plague of locusts, an infestation of mice, and a bloody ridiculous gas bill. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s not as if I actually get to see any of the gas unless it is already up in flames, burning away. But try telling that to the automaton on the other end of the so-called gas helpline. All you get is a flea in your ear. Speaking of which, I forgot to mention the plague of fleas. That was another test from the Lord, between the locusts and the mice. So I was not best pleased to find myself one day completely covered in suppurating boils, particularly when I was due to attend a sophisticated cocktail party that very evening.

“O Lord,” I implored, on my knees, “I understand why thee tormentest me so, for I am but a snivelling wretch unworthy to crawl upon my belly like a worm or other creeping thing. Having said that, could thee perhaps show mercy and remove from my hideous flesh this plague of suppurating boils, given that I have received an invitation to attend a sophisticated cocktail party this evening and in my present state am barely able to present myself in civilised human company?”

To which I am afraid the Lord replied in a booming authoritarian roar which made the walls tremble. I cannot recall His precise words, but the tone was not reassuring. I got the distinct impression that He expected me to suffer the boils in silence, with hopeless resignation to his Lordly whims, and not to bother Him with pathetic self-pitying supplications. So after a while I got to my feet and went out to the chemist’s.

Luckily there were not many people about at this early hour. Those few that did see me looked on me with horror, or turned their backs, or shielded their eyes. One or two vomited. I cannot say I blamed them, as before leaving the house I had checked my appearance in the hallway mirror. I was not a pretty sight. I dressed as best as I could, in the few pitiful mice-nibbled rags the Lord had seen fit to leave me with, and I wafted a sprig of hyacinths in front of me as I walked, to mask as far as possible the stink of the suppurations, which was considerable.

The chemist and I went back a long way, having been childhood tobogganing pals. Indeed, we had even tobogganed as adults, when conditions were right on the slopes, and he was able to drag himself away from his dispensary. I knew that he, too, had been driven crackers by his gas bills. So I expected a degree of sympathy as I pushed open the door and the little bell clanged and he hove into view behind his counter.

“By Saint Spivack and all the holy martyrs of mediaeval Ravenna!” he cried, “You’re a sight for sore eyes!”

I nodded in agreement, which was unwise, as a glob of pus was shaken free from one of my boils and landed on the clean scrubbed linoleum of the chemist’s shop floor.

“The least you can do is mop that up,” he said, handing me a mop.

I did so, while my pal rummaged among his pills and potions for a suitable unguent.

“I can’t promise this will eradicate your suppurating boils,” he said, handing me a tube of Dr Baxter’s Patent Palliative Cream For Suppurating Boils, Sores, And Buboes, “But it is a cream, and it is a palliative, so in tandem with your sprig of hyacinths it might make you a slightly less noisome and offensive creature.”

I thanked him and paid him and edged carefully out of the door, hoping not to leave any further deposits of pus on the linoleum.

“Are you up for some tobogganing come Sunday?” he called after me, which was thoughtful of him, but we both knew I could hardly enjoy swooping down a snowy slope aboard a toboggan while plagued by suppurating boils.

“That is in the hands of the Lord,” I replied, and hurried off along the lane towards the canal. I would find a shrubbery-sheltered bench somewhere on the towpath and smear my boils with unguent. That, at least, was the plan. I was not to know, nor had my pal the chemist seen fit to warn me, that Dr Baxter, when concocting his Patent Palliative Cream For Suppurating Boils, Sores, And Buboes, had used several ingredients which, in combination, proved absolutely irresistible to swans. Thus it was that, as I hunkered in the shelter of shrubbery, on a bench, smearing my boils, a baker’s dozen of swans came padding out of the canal and surrounded me. It is one of my iron rules never to antagonise a swan, so I tiptoed away as quietly as I could, with only a few of my boils smeared. But the swans, driven to delirium by the whiff of Dr Baxter’s recipe, pursued me. I made it home, and they simply waited outside, occasionally thumping their beaks against the front door.

When evening came, and it was time for me to leave for the sophisticated cocktail party, the swans were still there. I had no choice but to let them follow me, along the lane and past the allotments and through the tunnel under the bypass and past the industrial estate and the science park and the oil refinery and the other allotments, until I reached the gated community wherein the sophisticated cocktail party was taking place. I flashed my permit at the security guard in the booth, who depressed the knob which opened the gate. I hoped he would shut it again quickly, to keep the swans out, but he seemed to think they were my pets, so closely did they tail me. Thus it was that I arrived at the sophisticated cocktail party wafting my sprig of hyacinths, covered from head to toe in suppurating boils made only slightly less noisome and offensive by Dr Baxter’s Patent Palliative Cream, and accompanied by a gaggle of delirious swans.

I plucked a drink from a tray and leaned as insouciantly as I could against a mantelpiece. I was not a social success. In fact, throughout the evening, the only person who came within ten feet of me was a blind flapper with a streaming cold which had robbed her of her sense of smell. We were getting on like a house on fire until she confessed that she was allergic to swans. I did the gentlemanly thing and revealed that there were thirteen swans in close proximity.

“Ah,” she said, “That explains why I have developed a splitting headache, have a ringing in my ears, and pins and needles in my extremities. I had better go out on to the balcony, away from your pet swans, or I am liable to break out in suppurating boils all over my body. Toodle-pip!”

“Wait!”, I cried, “The swans are not my pets and I have a half-full tube of Dr Baxter’s Patent Palliative Cream For Suppurating Boils, Sores, And Buboes!”

But she was already gone.

A social pariah, I at last realised I had outstayed my welcome, and I made my way home, swans in tow. The Lord alone knew when next I would be invited to a sophisticated cocktail party, so I got down on my knees and asked Him. Back came that booming authoritarian roar. Again, I could not make out the individual words, but the tone was if anything even less reassuring than it had been in the morning. I headed for bed convinced that those swans were going to be following me for the rest of my life. When I opened the bedroom door, there they were. They had somehow managed to get into the house, and now they were lined up, all thirteen of them, at the foot of the bed, their black eyes gazing at me, pitiless, savage, and mad.

As a child, I gained my first understanding of the grand sweep of our national story from a book entitled British History In Strip Pictures, undated, but published by Odhams Press at some point in the 1950s. I used to pore over this book for hours, and was going to pore over it again, preparatory to writing today’s essay. Alack and alas!, I am mortified that I cannot find it on the tottering teeming Hooting Yard bookshelves. Now I am not exactly the most organised of persons, but I can usually lay hands on a book I am looking for. The current whereabouts of British History In Strip Pictures must, for the time being, remain a mystery. I know I have it somewhere.

Not being able to find it, I was going to postpone this essay for another day. But then I determined to soldier on, as my subject would have soldiered on, determinedly, and regardless of handicap. My handicap is merely that I cannot find the book I was looking for. His handicap was that he was blind. For I speak of that titanic figure Blind Jack of Knaresborough.

In British History In Strip Pictures, Blind Jack was granted a whole page, the same amount of space given to, for example, the Magna Carta, Shakespeare, and the Civil War, and twice that given to Gladstone and Disraeli, who had to share a page, as I recall. I thus grew up with the idea that Blind Jack of Knaresborough was a pivotal figure in British history. I fully expected, when I went to school and studied these matters in greater depth, that Blind Jack would probably have a few lessons devoted solely to his doings, if not an entire term’s worth. As it turned out, in thirteen years at school, from age five to eighteen, I do not think I ever heard his name mentioned.

At some point the sheer wrongness of this must have occurred to me, along with the thought that perhaps the editors at Odhams Press had made him up for a lark. “Tee hee! Let’s insert a page about a wholly convincing yet completely fictional character to play a trick on the tinies!”, I imagined a couple of them, resembling Gabbitas and Thring from the Molesworth books, chuckling to each other over their printers’ proofs. Such scampishness could be the only explanation for my history teachers’ neglect of the man I believed had single-handedly brought about the Industrial Revolution. I had been led to believe that, were it not for Blind Jack of Knaresborough, we might still be living in rustic squalor, a nation of peasants consigned forever to remain in Lork Roise because we would never have been able to travel to Candleford.

Blind Jack, you see, was a road builder. And the way he built roads, British History In Strip Pictures told me, was that he walked along tapping his stick in front of him to gauge the smoothness and straightness of the road he had just built… er… something along those lines, they had but six pictures and captions to tell the story, so obviously some of the finer detail was left out. I recall being haunted by the picture of Blind Jack out on the road, dressed just like the man on the Quaker Oats carton, gazing at nothing. I am sure there were times when I dreamed of him, relentlessly approaching me, the tap of his stick, the eerie sightlessness of his eyes… I think for a time I even managed to get him mixed up, in my fevered mind, with the much more malign figure of Robert Mitchum’s preacher man in The Night Of The Hunter (Charles Laughton, 1955), which I saw when very young and impressionable.

Without having the book to hand, I am unable to confirm whether it mentioned other titans of the Industrial Revolution such as Thomas Telford and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. I am fairly sure that neither of them had a whole page to himself. Blind Jack did, and that was good enough for me to credit him with creating a world that lifted me out of peasantry. And to my relief, I have since learned that he was not an invention of a couple of scallywags at Odhams Press, that he really did exist.

His name was John Metcalf, born 1717 and died in 1810, blind from the age of six.. One of the intriguing things about him was that part of his success in building roads was a matchless ability to make accurate estimations of costs and materials, using a system of his own devising which he was unable (or unwilling?) ever to explain to others. He also worked out a method of constructing  roads over bogs, using matted rafts of marsh grass and furze. No wonder he is my hero, when we consider that that previous sentence alone contains at least three words essential to the Hooting Yard lexicon.

His gravestone, in the Yorkshire village of Spofforth, bears this epitaph:

Here lies John Metcalf, one whose infant sight
Felt the dark pressure of an endless night;
Yet such the fervour of his dauntless mind,
His limbs full strung, his spirits unconfined,
That, long ere yet life’s bolder years began,
The sightless efforts mark’d th’ aspiring man;
Nor mark’d in vain—high deeds his manhood dared,
And commerce, travel, both his ardour shared.
’Twas his a guide’s unerring aid to lend—
O’er trackless wastes to bid new roads extend;
And, when rebellion reared her giant size,
’Twas his to burn with patriot enterprise;
For parting wife and babes, a pang to feel,
Then welcome danger for his country’s weal.
Reader, like him, exert thy utmost talent given!
Reader, like him, adore the bounteous hand of Heaven

ADDENDUM : I wonder if Anna Pavlova named her swan after Blind Jack of Knaresborough? Perhaps a balletomane reader might know, and could enlighten me.

I was casting around in my head to find a topic for today’s essay, but it was difficult to think straight because of that confounded sun. Usually, gazing vacantly out of the window works a treat, but how can a man gaze out of the window into the awful glare of relentless battering sunlight? I have always been perplexed by its popularity. Blindingly bright and ridiculously hot, the sun is better considered as John Donne’s busie old fool. It has long been my contention that the reason the Middle East is a powder keg of demented Islamist nutcases has more to do with climate than religion. They all get so frenzied and bad-tempered and psychotic because of the sunlight and the heat. In this weather, I might well be tempted to fire round after round from a Kalashnikov into the air, had I a Kalashnikov.

Normally, at such times, my thoughts turn easily to a different sort of madness brought on by the sun. As an Aztec fundamentalist, I mourn the passing of the practice of human sacrifice designed to assuage the anger of the Sun God. But those were simpler times, I suppose. Nowadays one would probably need to apply for a permit from the council just to set up a stone altar upon which to splay one’s victims out, preparatory to gouging them open and wrenching out their still-beating hearts. There would be paperwork, risk assessments, equalities monitoring forms. Who would have the energy to tackle all that bureaucracy while the sun beats down so?

Instead, mopping my brow, I thought instead, as I so rarely do, of Rod McKuen. His “Seasons In The Sun”, adapted from Jacques Brel, seems to me a very foolish response to sunlight. “We had joy, we had fun”? Really? As my friend Robert Matthews said so pertinently more than thirty years ago, “You have to define fun, or you will have none”. Rod McKuen signally fails to define the fun he thinks he was having in his seasons in the sun. If he came right out and said he was tearing out the hearts of sacrificial victims splayed on a stone altar, and that he had fun doing so, then fair play to Rod. But he doesn’t. I think we have to agree with Nora Ephron, who said his verse was “superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly”, and with Karl Shapiro, who pronounced magisterially “it is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet”.

Incidentally, and while we are speaking of both risk assessments and Rod McKuen, I can reveal that I was taken to see the mawkish troubadour, performing at the Royal Albert Hall, when I was but young. I was taken either by my father or by one of my older sisters. So far as I know, whichever one took me was never charged in a court of law with imperilling the sensibilities of a still formative juvenile mind. Had a proper risk assessment been carried out, surely the doors would have been barred against me? In the event, we must all count ourselves fortunate that I was not permanently scarred by the experience. A Rod McKuenised version of Hooting Yard simply doesn’t bear thinking about.

Back in the present, it was not so much a season in the sun as a morning spent avoiding the busie old fool. I pondered the idea of donning a yellow polo neck sweater and sculpting my grey mop into a magnificent bouffant, pretending to be Christopher Lee and going to find a virgin police officer to set fire to. Not quite Aztec sun worship, but it would pass the time. Then I had a stomach-churning vision of Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man remake and had to lie down with a cold compress on my forehead. I was only revived when I pondered the idea of Nicolas Cage starring as Rod McKuen in a biopic of the latter. If this film is not yet in production then it damned well ought to be. It would make a fitting addition to the Cage canon. There could even be a scene set in an inaccurately rendered mockup of the Royal Albert Hall, where Cage/McKuen croaks his winsome piffle and we see, sitting in the audience, Mr Key as a tiny. The youngster chosen to play me would have to be able to express a subtle range of reactions, somehow suggesting that the titanic grandeur of Hooting Yard is nascent within his cranium, imperilled by McKuen yet resisting an awful descent into superficiality, platitudes, and silliness. Perhaps I ought to set to work on the screenplay.

I wrung out the no longer cold compress and decided to go for a walk around Nameless Pond. As far as I am aware I do not yet need a council permit to do so, and it was simply a matter of preparing myself against the sun’s onslaught. The busie old fool was still high in the sky, blistering hot, bright and golden, and deeply irritating. I fashioned a protective shroud and stepped out of the door.

I had not gone ten paces when I was set upon by a whirling gaggle of urchins, who pelted me with birds’ eggs and thrashed me with nettles.

“What what what?” I cried, “Unhand me, teeming urchins!”

I was tempted to add “Get back to your tenements!”, as if I were Keith Pratt, but something about my assailants gave me pause. They did not seem like the usual rampaging members of what used to be called, in less queasy times, the lower orders. My intuitions were confirmed when one of them stood forward from the pack. I could not help noticing that he wore atop his bonce a crown of golden cardboard, upon which the sunlight was reflected, blindingly.

“We shall continue to pelt you with birds’ eggs and thrash you with nettles until you attach to your frankly weird shroud a sprig of shick-shack,” said the urchin.

“I beg your pardon?”, I said, shielding my eyes from the horrid glare of the sunlight.

“It is Oak Apple Day,” he said, When we commemorate the Restoration of 1660. All hail Charles II, the true Sun King!”

And they pelted me with birds’ eggs and thrashed me with nettles until I retreated indoors, where I rummaged about in a drawer for a sprig of oak apple. O! how I wished I had instead that Kalashnikov.

One two three four five six seven. All good children go to heaven.
Eight nine ten eleven twelve thirteen. That won’t be the fate of Lothar Preen.

This pretty little rhyme was devised by the maestro himself, Lothar Preen, he of the majestic bouffant, flailing baton, psychopathic personality disorder, and criminal associations in the dockyard taverns of the Marseilles underworld. One can see here Preen the self-mythologiser, relishing his seemingly inevitable descent into the bowels of hell. There will be no heaven for him.

We do not of course know what became of Lothar Preen after death, save that his corpse was eaten by worms. So great had his legend grown that his grave, in the pretty little churchyard at St Bibblybibdib’s, was dug up, a few months after he had been buried, just to make sure he was actually dead and gone. That is when they saw the worms, gobbling up what was left of the maestro, by the light of their tarry torches on a foul October night. The churchyard did not look so pretty then.

Some said that is how he would be remembered, as supper for worms – the worms that had even gnawed through his conductor’s baton, which was buried with him, alongside his favourite tea-strainer and oodles upon oodles of unpaid bills. But of course that is not why we remember Lothar Preen today. We remember him for the magnificent recordings of The Phlogiston Variations, of Clamp’s Fifth, of The Pretty Little Tea-Strainers song cycle. We remember him, too, for the incident in a Marseilles dockyard tavern when he stabbed a rival maestro in the eye, as if he were Marlowe, and for the many many wells he poisoned, and for feeding that cellist into a sausage mincer. He was never convicted of any of these crimes, for it was said he committed them when the balance of his mind was disturbed, when he was unhinged. But quite frankly, was he ever hinged, from the moment he first became conscious, in the pretty little convent hospital of St Spivack’s, as his mother lay dying?

His childhood alone is a tale of unhingements, best avoided by those without strong stomachs. For every example of precocious musical genius, there are twenty or thirty murders, stabbings, slicings, loppings, poisonings, stranglings, and other gruesome and grisly doings. Few people have been able to read his memoir, A Childhood Of Precocious Musical Genius And Murderous Psychotic Unhingement, without keeping a bucket beside them in which to vomit.

Vomit, indeed, seems to have played an important part in the life of the adult Preen, if we are to believe his accounts of riotous carousing in the more insalubrious taverns down at the Marseilles docks. It was in such squalor the maestro would hold court, his bouffant a thing of blinding grandeur. When he was not stabbing rival maestri in the eyes, he was jabbing at them verbally, taunting them with his superior baton flailing technique, or simply waiting for them to keel over drunk before giving them a good kicking in the head. It is part of the legend that at no time did he ever pay for a single drink during these nights of high debauch.

His finances, or lack of them, were always a mystery, and in the years since his death various lawyers and accountants have been kept busy untangling the chaos he left behind. There are claims that Preen’s Byzantine wheeler-dealings are at the root of the world’s current financial meltdown. That one man could be responsible for the global chaos seems on the face of it absurd, until we pause to consider that the man was Lothar Preen. Of what was he not capable?

This is a man, remember, who quite apart from all the murders and stabbings and slicings and loppings and poisonings and stranglings and other grim and grisly doings, was capable, in what we might call his more humane moments, of gathering together thousands of pretty little birds – siskins and linnets and wrens and hummingbirds and jackdaws – and training them to sing the long, complex, and breathtakingly beautiful choruses from Prog’s comic opera based on the life of Charles Hawtrey (1914-1988). That the maestro devised his own grand finale, in which the birds are savaged by cats and then electrocuted one by one, we may deplore yet recognise as a characteristic and ineffable Preenian touch.

“Preenian”, “Preenesque”, “Preenish”. It is a mark of his genius, perhaps, that none of these words has entered the vocabulary. In the last analysis – actually, in the first analysis – he was simply unique. Did those worms beneath the soil in the pretty little churchyard of St Bibblybibdib’s know how fortunate they were, to be gnawing and munching the rotting remains of the great maestro? One bit of him, of course, they did not get to eat, and that was the bouffant, which was removed from his head before burial, and placed in a preserving jar. It has had its own adventures. Initially sold at auction in order to settle at least one of the debts he left unpaid, the bouffant-in-a-jar was stolen from its (anonymous) purchaser, who was found, the morning after the sale, chopped into a thousand pieces. It was next seen adorning the beer-stained counter of a tavern in a particularly sordid Marseilles tavern, but disappeared after a knife-fight among thugs. A year or so later, it turned up next to a waste bin on a pretty little towpath next to an unimportant canal. The bouffant, in its jar, is currently thought to be under lock and key in a bank vault, though by all accounts it is the kind of vault, and the kind of bank, favoured by criminal gangs planning heists which can later be immortalised on screen.

Lothar Preen himself has never been depicted in a film. No cinema would dare to show it.

Fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen. I am the maestro Lothar Preen.
Eighteen nineteen twenty twenty-one. When I am gone they will blot out the sun.

And they did. It is still pitch dark.

Natty Dread. Like it or lump it, it has become clear to any thinking person that Emperor Haile Selassie, or Ras Tafari, was indeed a living god. Admittedly, the thinking done by those persons is conducted with brains ravaged by pot, but that does not make their thinking any less cogent. Well, it does, and perhaps they might think a teensy bit more cogently with clearer heads. But they would surely reach the same conclusions regarding Haile Selassie and Jah Rastafari and the escape from Babylon and all that business. Natty Dread indeed.

It has long perplexed me that F. R. Leavis, in expounding his so-called Great Tradition, wholly ignores Emperor Haile Selassie. Notwithstanding that Leavis was batty rather than natty, and while today we might dismiss his prescriptive insistence that the only great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and poor demented D. H. Lawrence, it beggars belief that Leavis can construct his grand edifice without placing Jah at its pinnacle. It is true that Jah did not actually write any English novels, and can thus safely be left out of account, but that just won’t do, will it? Not for me, anyway, or I and I, I should say.

If one trawls through the collected works of Austen, Eliot, James, Conrad, poor demented Lawrence and Leavis himself, the first thing that strikes one is that Jah does not even get a mention. One retrawls, with closer attention, hoping to find stray references one has missed the first time round, but again emerging empty handed. This actually takes rather a long time, given the sheer amount these people wrote, and as one begins the third, desperate, trawl, one begins to wonder if it might not be better simply to ravage one’s brain with pot and call it a day. But one persists, as one must, where Emperor Haile Selassie is concerned. Once again, one finds not a trace of Jah. Truly we are in Babylon.

It is of course always possible that, had either Austen or Eliot or James or Conrad or poor demented Lawrence or Leavis issued dub versions of their work, we might find what we are looking for. To take just one example, Mansfield Park In Dub, had it ever existed, would I think be a more sure-footed text than the original. It would probably also find room for natty dread. I say ‘probably’, rather than ‘certainly’, for one does not wish to engage in fruitless conjecture. Fruitlessness must always be avoided. That is not a lesson I have taken directly from Jah, incidentally, except in a roundabout way. But then a roundabout way is by definition indirect. Could it be, I wonder, that one can approach His Highness The Emperor Haile Selassie, Jah Rastafari, similarly indirectly, in a roundabout way, in the works of our canonical authors, albeit in the absence of dub versions of their books? This will of course necessitate a fourth, even more eagle-eyed, trawl. Still we must put off the ravaging of our brain with pot.

And so once again we slump against a tree-trunk with a huge pile of books next to us. Above, in the higher foliage, monkeys cavort and chatter. They are not, so far as we can see, monkeys with typewriters, who might, given time, type out the complete works of Austen and Eliot and James and Conrad and poor demented Lawrence and Leavis. Could they, in a fraction of the time, type out dub versions? Setting aside the copy of Under Western Eyes we have just opened, for the fourth time, we look up and count the monkeys. Nine monkeys, for which we will require nine typewriters. Entrusting our pile of books to the safe keeping of a dreadlocked rasta slumped against a neighbouring tree, his brain ravaged by pot, we set off for the nearest typewriter shop. By one of those curious coincidences one meets in certain songs by Sumner, the name of the shop’s proprietor is F. R. Leavis.

“Are you any relation?”, we ask.

There follows a lengthy and somewhat ill-tempered account of distant cousinage. We are relieved to hand over the cash and make our exit from the shop, nine secondhand but reconditioned typewriters heaped upon our barrow. Under the neighbouring tree, the pot-ravaged rasta is leafing through The Mill On The Floss.

“Have you found any trace within the text that Eliot is conscious of the divinity of the Emperor Haile Selassie?” we ask, more to make conversation than in hope of a coherent reply.

“There is great sufferation in Babylon,” he says, puffing on his pot, “You wouldn’t have a dub version of this novel, would you?”

“Not yet,” we reply, “But soon, I hope, soon!”, and we point at the barrow of typewriters and then at the monkeys cavorting and chattering atop the trees.

With the assistance of the affable rasta, we set up the typewriters in a line along the beach. Then we coax and cajole the monkeys down from the trees, using fruit as a lure – another reminder of the perils of fruitlessness. Soon enough they are tippy-tapping away, taking occasional rest breaks to pick nits from each other’s hairy coats. Waves lap against the sandy shore. The sun blazes in the sky. Eschewing the offer of pot, and instead glugging a tumbler of lemonade, we keep our brain unravaged, our head clear. But our heart is thumping, for what we are witnessing, watching our monkeys typing away, is the birth of a brand new Great Tradition, one which will propel F. R. Leavis into the dustbin of history, one in which Jah Rastafari assumes his proper place atop the pinnacle of English literature, in dub. Natty indeed. Natty dread.

I have never read Touching The Void, Joe Simpson’s 1988 account of clambering, crawling, and hopping down a snowy Peruvian mountainside with a broken leg. It was recommended to me, by someone whose recommendations I generally trust, but for some reason I never got round to it. Today I learned, via the Grauniad, that the book has become a set text for teenpersons in our self esteem ‘n’ diversity hubs. I was startled, as I had no idea they were still encouraged to read. It was not this revelation, however, that was the point of the story. Rather, it was that various scallywags have been conversing with Simpson through the medium of Twitter. All this social networking and internettery can bring writers and readers together, you see.

(As I know myself. In a fit of madness, I once sent an email to Alain De Botton to berate him for not knowing the difference between deprecate and depreciate. He replied, the sensitive soul, within about thirty seconds, to protest that he did know the difference, and went into a lengthy and convoluted justification of his misuse. I was not convinced.)

Anyway, I am afraid I must report that, rather than taking the opportunity to applaud Joe Simpson for his valour and grit and gumption, the teenpersons have been whingeing at him. Much of this is not worthy of comment, but I have to applaud the youngster who coined the term “crevasse wanker”.

Now I tend not to use the language of the gutter myself, not from any sense of prudery, but simply because I consider it a bit lazy. I once knew a man whose every single utterance included at least one “fuck”, and usually more. It was very tiresome to listen to him, and after a while one wanted to stuff a rag into his mouth and have him whipped out of town, as they might have done in an earlier, less barbarous age. Or perhaps I mean more barbarous. If so, it would suggest that a certain modicum and type of barbarism is actually a good thing. I must ponder that.

Generally speaking, the rarer the fuckery the more effective it is. Pansy Cradledew, for example, a woman of great elegance and grace, lets rip with a “fuck fuck fuck!” about once a year, on average. So unexpected is it that jaws drop, glass tumblers shatter, and birds fall stone dead from the skies. Ms Cradledew’s last outburst, at some point in the year of Our Lord MMXI, was occasioned by some finicky faffing with thin strips of cardboard and adhesive paste in the course of constructing a cardboard model of an important building. She was not using the proprietary paste known as Cow Gum. Perhaps that is what caused the sudden fuckery.

If one must swear more often than annually, then I think one should at least approach the task with mad creativity. The baroque flights of sweary fancy in the scripts of The Thick Of It are a model here, but I think it is no accident that they are, precisely, scripted. Few of us could come up with those verbal fireworks spontaneously. The sadly-unnamed Twitterer who called Joe Simpson a “crevasse wanker” belongs, I think, in Malcolm Tucker’s company. It is a phrase of genius. I only wish I could think of occasions when I might use it myself.

Knowing not a jot about Joe Simpson, and not having read his book, nor seen the film documentary which was adapted from it, I have no idea if he deserves to be called a crevasse wanker. But without for one moment discounting the valour, grit and gumption of those who pit themselves against nature’s terrors – mountains, oceans, uncharted territories, polar wastes – there is something faintly laughable about the whole business, is there not? I have read more widely in the accounts of Simpson’s predecessors in earlier centuries, and part of the pleasure, if not most of it, is in the contemplation of the sheer foolishness at large. The following quotation, very dear to me, seems to sum up an entire ethos. In Ex Libris : Confessions Of A Common Reader (1998), Anne Fadiman writes

Who but an Englishman, the legendary Sir John Franklin, could have managed to die of starvation and scurvy along with all 129 of his men in a region of the Canadian Arctic whose game had supported an Eskimo colony for centuries? When the corpses of some of Franklin’s officers and crew were later discovered, miles from their ships, the men were found to have left behind their guns but to have lugged such essentials as monogrammed silver cutlery, a backgammon board, a cigar case, a clothes brush, a tin of button polish, and a copy of The Vicar Of Wakefield. These men may have been incompetent bunglers, but, by God, they were gentlemen.

Incompetent bunglers, gentlemen, and very probably crevasse wankers. It is a term we can also apply to the doomed Scott and his chums, perishing at the South Pole a hundred years ago. I am beginning to think it would make a splendid title for an anthology.

Incidentally, does one have to be British to be a crevasse wanker? Perhaps I am blinkered, but somehow certain foreign persons seem less preposterous when pitting themselves against the etcetera etcetera. For example, Werner Herzog’s various forays, and accounts of others’ forays, into inhospitable wildernesses are, to be sure, ridiculous, but there is a mad grandeur about them. Could Aguirre, The Wrath Of God be retitled Aguirre, The Amazonian Jungle Wanker? I think not.

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.

Duff, for those you woefully ignorant of its meaning, is all that stuff on the forest floor – dead plant material, leaves and bits of bark and needles and twigs, that has fallen to the ground and lies there, rotting, rotting. As it rots it is enmingled with the top layer of soil and this is what scientists call the O horizon. I am not a scientist, so I stick to duff.

Some would have you believe that the duffle or duffel coat is so called because it is made from coarse thick woollen material originally made in the Belgian town of Duffel. Likewise the duffle or duffel bag. Although this is almost certainly true, and not really open to doubt, we should not overlook the fact that long long long ago, primitive shambling savages lumbering about the primeval forests fashioned for themselves clothing and bags made from the duff on the forest floor, thus duff coats and duff bags, easily tweaked to become duffel or duffle by the vagaries of human speech.

Of course, it was all so long ago that no one living has ever seen a primitive shambling savage making a coat or bag out of duff. Intuitively, one might think the thing would simply fall apart. Perhaps when first gathered up from the forest floor, the duff would be wet and sticky and thus hold together. But time, heat, drying out, and certain exertions on the part of the savage would surely make a duff coat fall to bits soon enough. And one wonders what could possibly be carried in a duff bag without it, too, being rendered useless.

Clearly, then, our primitive shambling savage forest-dwelling ancestors must have devised a method of strengthening the matted duff. They may have used rudimentary needlework, or perhaps a type of glue or gum. The best way to find out was to conduct an experiment. That is why I had myself parachuted, stark naked, into a forest. I should point out that the parachute was made of tough synthetic twenty-first century fabric, not from duff. I have never argued that primitive shambling savages made duff parachutes, so I was not being inconsistent. Once I had landed, high in some tree cover, I unhitched myself from my harness and clambered down to ground level. I had made an appointment to meet up with my research team in twenty-four hours time, in the Cow & Pins, a somewhat insalubrious tavern on the edge of the forest.

Standing naked and alone in the dark dense forest, I found it easy to imagine myself a primitive shambling savage in the dim and distant past. I grunted a few times. I spotted a tiny wriggling creepy crawly on the trunk of a tree and plucked it off and popped it into my mouth and chewed it and swallowed it. It tasted foul. I began to feel like a monkey. The strange thing is that within five minutes of landing in the forest I had actually become primitive and shambling and savage. I quite forgot about my appointment. I forgot about my everyday life. I forgot language. I grunted and scratched and ate creepy crawlies.

I might be there still had I not taken the precaution of carrying, on a lanyard around my neck, a pochette containing a portable metal tapping machine. It buzzed and beeped and I took it out and held it in front of me, wonderingly, as if it were a magic box, which, in some ways, it is.

“Calling Mr Key! Calling Mr Key!”

In my primitive shambling savage state, I was so surprised at the voice issuing from the magic box that I dropped it in the duff. The voice grew more urgent, until I picked it up and grunted at it.

“Ah, you’re there, safely landed I assume?”

My brain was a chaos, but suddenly I remembered everything. There was a bitter taste in my mouth.

“Ack!” I spat, “I’ve been eating creepy crawlies plucked from tree trunks!” I cried.

“Well there’s no time for that. You have twenty-three and a half hours until you are to meet us in the Cow & Pins, in your duff coat, with your duff bag. Get cracking! Over and out.”

Next time I conduct an experiment I must remember to appoint a less peremptory research team.

I do not wish to get bogged down in the detail of how I spent the next several hours. Let me confess that more than once I prayed to high heaven, wishing I were in a provincial town in Belgium rather than in the dark dense forest. It is not being melodramatic to say that I knew, more fully than ever before, despair. I wept. I howled. I scrabbled in the duff – duff that, far from being wet and sticky and holding together at least for a few minutes, as I had imagined, was bone dry and frangible and fell through my fingers even as I picked it up from the forest floor.

Do you have any idea how damnably difficult it is to stick one tiny fragment of duff to another tiny fragment of duff using only some goo that you find smeared here and there on trees and leaves? How tiresome it is when you have used up all the available goo and have to go plodding off to find more? How in dragging with you your patiently-stuck-together duff-fragments they snag on a stray twig and become unstuck and fall apart so you have to begin all over again? How the occasional roar of Sabretooth jet fighters screaming across the sky over the forest jangles your nerves and makes you a butterfingers?

With twenty minutes to spare, I trudged into the saloon bar of the Cow & Pins to greet my research team. I was dressed in a fetching duff coat and duff pantaloons, with a duff cap on my head and duff socks on my feet. I had a duff bag slung over my shoulder, empty, because it was too weak to carry any weight.

“Mission accomplished!” I yelled.

In the corner of the pub, there was a gang of scientists sat around a table.

“Look!”, one piped up, “The O horizon!”

And they sprang up from their chairs and picked me up and carried me off to their science van and drove me to their lab, where I have languished ever since, prodded and probed and poked at, and fed, now and then, on bitter, bitter creepy crawlies.

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.

A few days ago, reading A Land by Jacquetta Hawkes, I came upon this;

During a Lyme horse-show a storm developed, and after a terrific flash of lightning three people and a baby were seen lying on the ground under an elm tree. The three adults were dead, but the baby, Mary Anning, ‘upon being put into warm water, revived. She had been a dull child before, but after this accident became lively and intelligent and grew up so’. Lyme was already conscious of its proximity to the past; a local fishmonger displayed million-year-old fishes on the slab among the day’s catch, while Mr Anning himself was an established fossil hunter, often no doubt bringing back to his shop the fragments of reptilian spines which were familiar enough to have acquired the local name of ‘Verterberries’. From very early years Mary went with him to the cliffs, and when he died, she carried on the trade because she and her family needed the money. In 1811… this twelve-year-old girl found the first complete ichthyosaur… in another two years she had uncovered the first flying reptile or pterodactyl. Perhaps her own favourite was a baby plesiosaur.

This struck me as a fascinating tale – the baby struck by lightning who thereafter transcends her humble background (though she remained poor) by making discoveries that fundamentally altered our understanding of prehistory. The first person to exhume a pterodactyl! I decided then and there to make Mary Anning – of whom I had never heard before – the subject of one of my daily essays. And so, today being the day allotted to her, I was somewhat astonished to note that she was also the subject of today’s random article on the front page of the Wikipedia.

“My oh my, what a coincidence!”, I said to myself. Actually, I said it aloud, to Pansy Cradledew, who agreed that it was a startling example of synchronicity. Unfortunately, her use of this term led us to a brief discussion of the works of Gordon Sumner, who had something to say about synchronicity in the years before he turned his attention to playing the lute and having Tantric sex with Trudie Styler. To paraphrase H P Lovecraft, the most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to contemplate the doings of Gordon Sumner for more than twenty seconds. After that, at least within my cranium, there is a sort of automatic shutdown.

When I came to, I pondered whether to calculate the probability of the Mary Anning hoo-hah. There must be millions of articles on the Wikipedia, and I assume the daily random one is selected by some sort of robotic algorithm. My reading of A Land was occasioned by a recent article about it in the Grauniad, allied with the fact that I had a copy of it, a 1959 Pelican edition, inherited from my father. It is a book I have been familiar with all my life, or rather, I have always been familiar with its spine – just as Mary Anning was familiar with her father’s collection of reptilian spines – on my father’s bookshelves and then on my own. Until I read the Grauniad piece, though, I do not think I had ever opened it. There does appear to be something inexplicably woohoohoodiwoo about the coincidence.

If I had the cast of mind of a primitive savage, or a New Age airhead, I might be tempted to delve into the possible significance of l’affaire Mary Anning, as I am beginning to think of it. Is her shade attempting to contact me from beyond the grave? Am I being coaxed into a study of pterodactyls? Which other neglected books from my father’s collection should I at long last take down from the bookshelf and actually read? Such questions could keep a fool’s brain occupied for aeons, or at least until bedtime.

Instead, I found myself thinking about the millions of articles on the Wikipedia, and how, today at least, Hooting Yard and the Wikipedia are as one. We both train our beady eyes on Mary Anning. It is true that the Wikipedia has rather more to say about her, and might be the preferred website for spotty urchins who, charged with writing a school self-esteem ‘n’ diversity hub essay entitled What It Feels Like To Be Struck By Lightning And Discover A Fossilised Pterodactyl, hasten to copy and paste swathes of text so they need neither think nor work. (That all too typical essay title, incidentally, would only encourage them to “feel”, rather than to think. History teaching nowadays appears to be a branch of the “journey” undergone by weeping contestants on lack-of-talent shows. Imagine you are a victim of oppression by cold heartless empire-builders wearing pith helmets. How do you feel? OMG it’s been an incredible journey, innit.) But while the Wikipedia may be more informative than Hooting Yard, strictly speaking, here the reader will find a slightly different angle of approach, no less valuable in its way.

And then the further thought occurs that perhaps I ought to strive to replace, or at least complement, the Wikipedia, by writing a matching piece for all its millions of articles. Of course I would by no means allow other “users” to edit my work. We don’t want the hoi polloi and the ignoramuses to come paddling in our pond, do we? But slowly, gradually, Hooting Yard could become the default reference source on the interweb. I must draw up a schedule, a plan of campaign. I could simply write about whatever subject is the Wikipedia’s random article of the day, but it might be better to tackle topics in some order of priority. That way, I can safely place until the very last, after I have addressed millions of other subjects, “Sumner, Gordon : this page is intentionally blank”.

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.