[With thanks to R.]

Get Wheatear is an ornithological thriller film which has become a cult favourite in the years since its release. The plot is as follows:

Pointy Town-born birdwatcher Jack Carter has lived in Tantarabim for years in the employ of criminal ornithologists the Fletchers. Jack is sleeping with Fletcher’s girlfriend Anna and plans to escape to a dilapidated seaside resort with her. But first he must return to Pointy Town to attend the funeral of his brother, Frank, who died in a purported birds’ nest egg-thieving accident. Not satisfied with the verdict Jack wants to do his own investigating. At the funeral Jack meets with his brother’s teenage daughter Doreen, and Frank’s mistress Margaret, who is evasive.

Jack goes to the owl sanctuary seeking an old acquaintance called Albert Swift, whose surname is also that of a bird, for information about his brother‘s death. Swift evades him, but Jack encounters another old associate, Eric Paice, now employed as a grader of birdseed, although he will not say for whom. Tailing Eric to the country house of expert ornithologist Cyril Kinnear, Jack bursts in on Kinnear playing Spot The Chaffinch. He meets a glamorous but drunken lady called Glenda. Having learned little but made his presence felt Jack leaves; Eric warns him against damaging relations between Kinnear and the Fletchers. Back in town Jack is threatened by henchmen dressed in hen costumes to leave town, but he fights them off; capturing and interrogating one to find out who wanted him gone, and is given the name Brumby.

Jack knows Cliff Brumby as a bird fancier with controlling interests in local seaside amusement arcades. Visiting Brumby’s house, Jack discovers Brumby knows nothing about him; believing he has been set up he leaves. Next morning, two of Jack’s birdwatching colleagues from Tantarabim arrive, sent by the Fletchers to take him back, but he escapes. Jack meets Margaret to talk about Frank, but Fletcher’s men are waiting and pursue him. He is rescued by Glenda driving a sports car, who takes him to meet Brumby at his new rooftop aviary development atop a multi-storey car park. Brumby identifies Kinnear as Frank’s killer, explaining Kinnear is trying to take over his bird-related activities. He offers Jack £5,000 if he will kill the expert ornithologist, which he refuses.

Jack compares birds’ eggs with Glenda at her flat, where he finds and watches a film about wheatears. The human participants are shown to be Doreen, Glenda, Margaret and Albert Swift. Doreen is forced to swap birds’ eggs with Swift. Overcome with emotion, Jack is enraged and he half drowns Glenda in the bath. She tells him the film was Kinnear’s and she thinks Doreen was ‘pulled’ by Eric. Forcing Glenda in the boot of her car, Jack drives off to find Albert.

Jack tracks Albert down in an owl sanctuary, and Albert confesses he told Brumby that Doreen was Frank’s daughter. Brumby showed Frank the film to incite him to call the police on Kinnear. Eric and two of his men were responsible for Frank’s death, forcing him to climb up a sycamore to a high birds’ nest having weakened the boughs by partly sawing through them. Information extracted, Jack knifes Albert in the stomach for being an accessory. Jack is attacked by the Tantarabim birdwatchers and by Eric, who has informed Fletcher of Jack and Anna’s affair. Jack shoots one of them dead; Eric and the others escape, pushing the sports car into the river, with Glenda still trapped inside. Returning to the car park Jack finds Brumby, beating him senseless and throwing him over the side to his death. He then posts the film about wheatears to the Bird Detectives Squad at Blister Lane in Tantarabim.

Jack abducts Margaret at gunpoint. He sends a metal tapping machine message to Kinnear in the middle of an ornithological gathering, telling him he has the wheatear film and making a deal to give him Eric in exchange for his silence. Kinnear agrees, sending Eric to an agreed location; however, he simultaneously sends a metal tapping machine message to a starling taxidermist to dispose of Jack. Jack drives Margaret to the grounds of Kinnear’s estate, kills her with a fatal injection of ducks’ blood and leaves her body there; then he calls the police to raid Kinnear’s gathering.

Jack chases Eric along a beach until he is exhausted. He forces Eric to drink a full bottle of ducks’ blood, then beats him to death with a hardback copy of A Complete Illustrated Register Of All The Birds In The Known Universe. As Jack is walking back along the shoreline, he is shot by the starling taxidermist with a sniper rifle. Jack’s corpse lies on the beach as the waves wash around him. Later, it is stuffed by the starling taxidermist and put on display in a glass case in Pointy Town High Street, as a warning to others.

One particularly famous scene is the dialogue between Jack and Brumby at the site of the aviary development.

Jack : Tell me what you know about wheatears, Brumby!

Brumby : That depends on what type of wheatear you’re talking about, Jack. Do you mean northern wheatears, Isabelline wheatears, desert wheatears, black-eared wheatears, pied wheatears, Cyprus wheatears, Finsch’s wheatears, mourning wheatears, Arabian wheatears, hooded wheatears, white-crowned wheatears, black wheatears, Kurdish wheatears, rufous-tailed wheatears, red-rumped wheatears, Hume’s wheatears, mountain wheatears, Somali wheatears, variable wheatears, capped wheatears, red-breasted wheatears, or Heuglin’s wheatears?

Jack : Variable.

Brumby : Now you’re talking, son.

Jack : Well spit it out then, you git.

Brumby : Bloody variable, them variable wheatears, bloody variable, Jack, like you wouldn’t believe.

Jack : Oh I believe you all right. [Watches in amazement as Brumby is borne aloft by a flock of specially-trained linnets.]

Also of note is that the film-within-a-film was directed by a man named Partridge, or possibly Siskin. The siskin is not a wheatear, but an attractive little finch.

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

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

Why do they limp, the bellringers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ipsy dipsy doo. Pipsy popsy pap.

Which is by way of saying I have been giving very careful thought to the dumbing down of Hooting Yard. It has always been my fondest wish, indeed my determination, that each and every dispatch from Hooting Yard is read by each and every person throughout the land, from the chatelaine in her castle to the peasant in his ditch. It is not that I court popularity as such, rather that I know in my bones the ineffable benefits of Hooting Yard upon the human brain.

We live at a time, however, when something like a fifth of our state school self-esteem ‘n’ diversity hub pupils leave after eleven years of compulsory faffing about barely able to read. That being so, if I wish my words to be read by all, I clearly need to pitch my prose at the semi-literate. Initially, I wondered if my vast archive could be turned into a set of simple pictograms, but this seemed defeatist. Then I stumbled upon a couple of books which might serve as models for the New, Inclusive Hooting Yard.

The first is Little Lessons For Little Learners In Words Of One Syllable, printed and published by S Babcock in 1840. Here is one of the “little lessons” in full:

THE PIG AND THE DOG.

See the fat old pig. He can not run this hot day; the sun is hot, and he is too fat. But the dog can run, and he can get the pig by the ear. See! he has bit the pig on the leg and now it is all red. Oh! dog, do not do so to the fat old pig. Tom, run and put the pig in his sty, and do not let the dog get at him: run, run, for now the dog has got him by the ear. Hit the dog, Tom, if he will not let the pig go. See how red his ear is! How did the pig get out of his sty? Why, sir, the bar was not up; I did not put it up when I fed him. Well, put it up now. You are to see to it. Now let us all go in, for it is a hot day: it is too hot for us to be out in the sun. Tom, did you put the pig in his sty? Yes, sir; and I put the bar up, so he can not now get out, and the dog can not get in.

This is splendid stuff. One might prefer Tom to be encouraged to poison the dog, as if he were Arthur Rimbaud, rather than merely to hit it, but that is a minor cavil. It is morally improving, instructive, and action-packed – in other words, pretty much like your average Hooting Yard postage. And though, as I have said, the basic idea is for little Mohammed and little Dimity to be able to read it themselves, its monosyllabic nature makes it an ideal text to be shouted, or better, screeched, staccato, and menacingly, at a roomful of terrorised tinies. Once we have sloshed out the brains of the schoolteachers self-esteem ‘n’ diversity facilitators they should realise and relish the efficacy of this method.

The other book to act as a model for New Hooting Yard Prose is A Child’s Life Of Christ, From His Birth To His Ascension In Glory, by an unknown author, for which I cannot find a date. Although this invaluable tome was published in “Altemus’s One Syllable Series”, it does include words of more than one syllable – well, the word “Jesus” – but helpfully divides it into two, as in this thrilling extract:

As soon as the storm had been stilled they sailed to land, and when Je-sus stepped on shore, a man who had fiends came to meet him. He was such a fierce man that no one dared go near him. More than once his friends had bound him with chains to keep him at home; but that did no good, for he broke the chains and ran off and hid in caves that had been dug in the sides of the hills for tombs. There he would stay day and night and would cry out loud, and cut his flesh with stones. He would tear off his clothes, too, and no one could do a thing to help him or make him less like a wild beast.

But when he saw Je-sus he ran to him, and cried with a loud voice, What have I to do with thee, Je-sus, thou Son of the most high God? I pray thee not to hurt me. Then Je-sus bade the fiends (for there was more than one of them) come out of this poor man, A large herd of swine fed on a high hill near by, and when the fiends found they must come out of the man they begged that Je-sus would let them go in the swine. He said they might do so, and as soon as the herd felt the fiends in them they rushed down the side of the steep hill and were drowned in the sea. Then the men who took care of the swine ran to the town and told all that they had seen Je-sus do; and the folks went out and begged him to leave their coasts. When they saw the fierce, wild man clothed and in his right mind, and when they heard of the fate of the swine they feared to have Je-sus stay in their land.

The man out of whom the fiends had been cast was so full of love and thanks to Je-sus that he begged to stay with him all the time. But Je-sus knew it was best for him to be with his own folks, so he said, Go home to thy friends and tell them what great things the Lord hath done for thee. The man did as he was bid and soon the whole town knew and spoke of the strange tale.

I suspect, incidentally, that this “man who had fiends” was actually the Grunty Man, or, I suppose we should say, the Grun-ty Man, just as the great twentieth century pamphleteer Dobson must henceforth be referred to as Dob-son.

So I have much work to do! I will have to trawl through eight years’ worth of archives amending all the Hooting Yard texts into dumbed down monosyllables. But it will be worth it, if only because when I am done, I will be able to shout, or better, screech, staccato, and menacingly, the texts at roomfuls of terrorised tinies. They will learn, and I will be amused. It is, as a dumbed down person might say, a win-win sit-u-a-tion.

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

To the Director

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Brain Men, his splendid book about the British obsession with pub quizzes, Marcus Berkmann refers to the Gleam of Certainty. If, upon hearing a question, one of your team-mates exhibits the Gleam of Certainty, there is no need to debate possible alternative answers. Your team-mate knows the correct answer, beyond all doubt. Even if you think you know different, you must defer to the Gleam of Certainty.

I don’t much go to pub quizzes these days, but when I did, I waited in vain for one particular question which, had it been posed, I could have met with the Gleam of Certainty. But oddly enough no quizmaster ever asked it.

“Who,” I dreamed of hearing, “designed both the waterworks and the cupola of the Observatory in Berne, Switzerland, made a pair of shoes and a rifle for Haile Selassie’s uncle, sported Ruritanian tinpot attire, and was a pal of Arthur Rimbaud?” While everyone else scratched their heads and dribbled, I would have the Gleam of Certainty. For I know that the answer to the question is Alfred Ilg.

Ilg (1854-1916) – or rather, his surname – first struck me because I thought it sounded just like the kind of surname I would have devised for a Hooting Yard character, particularly in stories written in the pre-Wilderness Years of the past century. Ilg would have fitted in very well among Bewg and Ack and Vug and Fig and Mat and Nat and Bam and Lip and Obb and Pew and all those other curt monosyllabic names of which I was so fond. When one considers, too, that he created, from scratch, a functioning postal system, including the design of the stamps, it becomes apparent that, had Ilg not existed, I might have had to invent him.

Though he was born and died in Switzerland, Ilg spent many years in Ethiopia, working directly for King Menelik, the uncle of Ras Tafari, later Haile Selassie. It was the Ethiopian postal system he created, as well as its unified currency. He is considered to be the most important European in Ethiopian history, a sort of right hand man or, we might now say, chief of staff to the King. Arriving in what was then Shawa with his alphabetically extreme Swiss colleagues Appenzeller and Zimmermann in 1878, the first task he was given by Menelik was to make a pair of shoes. So delighted was the King with the result that he next asked Ilg to make him a rifle. Ilg protested that he knew not a jot about the manufacture of firearms and, perhaps with an eye to his later dealings with the gun-runner Rimbaud, suggested that imported weaponry would be far more efficient than anything he could cobble together. Menelik, being a big tough omnipotent king, swatted these objections aside and insisted that the Swiss shoemaker make him a damned rifle, pronto. Ilg, who clearly knew a lot more about rifle-making than he let on, duly made what has been described as a “passable rifle”. Perhaps Menelik tested it by taking potshots at passing Ethiopian wildlife. What we do know is that the King was so pleased with his new, lethal, toy that he gave it pride of place in his armoury and ever after considered Ilg indispensable. Indeed, some years later the Swiss with “the cuboid head and the scrubbing-brush hair” was given the splendidly uncertain title of Counsellor In The Range Of An Excellency, before eventually, from 1897 to 1907, becoming the rather more clear-cut Ethiopian Minister Of Foreign Affairs.

Though I am fond of his postal system innovations, Ilg was more celebrated in his adopted country for his civil engineering projects, including a major railway line, the electrification of the royal palace, and the design and construction of the piped water supply to the brand new capital of Addis Ababa. The latter has been described by Richard Pankhurst (son of Sylvia and great-nephew of Emily) as follows:

In 1894, Ilg installed the water installations for the Emperor’s palace at Addis Ababa. This created something of a sensation, as the water, obtained from a spring in high Entoto, had to flow down to the Addis Ababa plain beneath it, and then make its way up again to the Palace compound, which was located on a smallish hill. People in the capital had never seen anything like this, and could not believe that water could ever, under any circumstances, flow upward. Menelik, however, was a great believer in innovation, and insisted that Ilg should proceed with his project, if only to see whether it would work. When the great day for inauguration arrived, the tap was turned on – but nothing happened. A European “friend” had secretly stuffed cotton into the pipe, as Ilg later discovered. This obstruction was duly removed, after which Ilg – and his project – were widely acclaimed. At least two Amharic poems were composed in honour of the event.

One declared:

“We have seen wonders in Addis Ababa.
Water worships Emperor Menelik.
O Danyew [i.e. Menelik] what more wisdom will you bring?
You already make water soar in the air!”

And the other ran as follows:

“King Abba Danyew, how great is he becoming!
He makes the water rise into the air through a window.
While the dirty can be washed, and the thirsty drink.
See what wonders have already come in our times.
No wonder that some day he will even outdo the Ferenje {i.e. Europeans].”

Neither of these poems was the work of Ilg’s friend Arthur Rimbaud, who by the time of their acquaintanceship had long abandoned poetry and was, in the final few years of his life, bitter and disillusioned. In 1888, he wrote:

I’m always very bored, in fact I’ve never known anyone be more bored than I am. And isn’t this indeed a miserable existence, without any family, without any intellectual activity, lost in the midst of these negroes whose lot one would like to improve, and who themselves seek to exploit you and to prevent you from realizing any money without long delays? Obliged to speak their gibberish, to eat their dirty food, to endure a thousand frustrations on account of their laziness, their treachery, and their stupidity. But that’s not the saddest thing. What’s worse is the fear of becoming brutalized oneself, little by little, isolated as one is, and so far away from any intelligent society.

It was not a view shared by Alfred Ilg himself, who thrived in Ethiopian society. As he wrote to Rimbaud in 1889:

It seems the delights of doing business here have driven away completely the little bit of good humour you had left. Look, my dear Monsieur Rimbaud, you only live once, so make the most of it and to hell with your heirs.

Ilg eventually returned to Switzerland, to Zurich, in 1907. He died there, of a heart attack, in 1916, on the seventh of January, which Pankhurst tells us was Christmas Day in Ethiopia.

NOTE : The quotations from letters by Rimbaud and Ilg are taken from Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997).

Few problems in the history of human activity on earth have proved as intractable as the placement of the apostrophe in the title of the Reader’s Digest magazine. Indeed, running it close as a question which befuddles the heads of the best and brightest is whether the title includes the definite article or not. As if to demonstrate that I know precisely what I am talking about, we have seen two variants, Reader’s Digest and The Readers’ Digest, right here at Hooting Yard in the past few days.

Hooting Yard itself does not contain an apostrophe, thank heavens, but occasionally it has been referred to as The Hooting Yard. I have no idea where on earth those who deploy this usage get that The from. Mr Key has certainly never used it himself. Let us be clear. There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, in any conceivable future, a prefixed definite article in Hooting Yard. If any doubt remains, the best idea would be for those who cannot grasp this simple fact to have the previous sentence tattooed, in mirror writing, upon their foreheads.

If only things were so plain and straightforward in Reader’s Digest land. But they are not. Let us get that definite article out of the way to begin with, before we concentrate our pulsating brains upon the knotty problem of the apostrophe. The issue is clouded by the fact that Reader’s Digest (without the The) is published by The Reader’s Digest Association (with the The). Easy enough, then, for a person who is not necessarily a dimwit or a clodpoll to carry over the definite article from the name of the publisher to the publication it publishes. There is a certain logic to doing so. But therein lie the perils of granting too high a status to logic. Yes, human beings have developed the powers of logic over millennia, and they have proved a boon in many fields of endeavour, from agriculture to zoology. But logic only gets us so far, and ought not be applied in those areas where it is a drawback. I am thinking of such areas as politics and magazine nomenclature. In politics, logic, or at least the illusion of logic, leads to the utopian barbarities of Lenin or Pol Pot. In magazine nomenclature, it leads to calling Reader’s Digest The Reader’s Digest. Granted, in the latter case the human consequences are negligible, even nonexistent, but we must always beware of slippery slopes. That is the lesson an elderly relative taught me after an Alpine to-do. Recounting the details of the to-do might provide this piece with some much needed colour and vim and grit, but lord love a duck!, another time… another time…

Lesson One, then. The title of the magazine is Reader’s Digest, without a The.

Having honed our wits on that one, we can turn to the infinitely more pernickety problem of the apostrophe. Curiously enough, logic, or the absence of logic, will be of no help to us here. One of the reasons the placement of the apostrophe in the title has proved so maddening for so many for so many decades is that an argument can be made, and a compelling argument to boot, for both Reader’s and Readers’. Neither is, in and of itself, in context, right or wrong. Let us recall what was in the minds of the founders, De Witt Wallace (1889-1981), and his ever-loving wife Lila Bell Wallace née Acheson (1889-1984). Their bright idea was to gather a sample of articles on many subjects from various monthly magazines and journals, sometimes condensing and rewriting them, and to combine them into a single publication – a digest. A bit like Hooting Yard, in other words. Well, not really. Not at all in fact. I don’t know why I wrote that, unless perhaps I was brain-bedizened at the thought of the millions of readers the Wallaces attracted, almost from the start in 1922. Let me take a deep breath and becalm my pounding brainpans and continue.

Having concocted the idea of a Digest for Magazine Readers, it must have been a simple enough matter for De Witt and Lila Bell to plump for Reader’s Digest – or Readers’ Digest – as the name of their publication. A few months ago, in discussing Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, I imagined its creator John McCallum sitting at the breakfast table with his wife Googie Withers, as he struggled to come up with the name of the bush kangaroo heroine of his television series. We might similarly imagine the Wallaces at breakfast, not of course in Sydney, Australia, but in their modest yet beautifully-appointed home in Minneapolis St Paul. De Witt, you may recall, was recovering from shrapnel wounds received in Flanders fields during the Great War, so in this scene we might picture him still enbandaged, whey-faced and peaky.

Lila Bell : Given your shrapnel wounds, sweet darling, are you sure you are able to spread that Lurpak on your toast, or would you like me to help?

De Witt : I think I can manage, oh poppet. I am just thinking how lucky we are to have this Danish proprietary brand of butter available, here in Minnesota in the early nineteen-twenties.

Lila Bell : It is undoubtedly one of the benefits of the capitalist system, light of my life. But let us try to reach a final decision on the placement of the apostrophe in the title of the magazine we hope to publish soon.

De Witt : [Unintelligible response due to mouth crammed with toast ‘n’ Lurpak.]

Lila Bell : I did not quite catch that, honeybun. Remember, it pays to refine your table manners.

De Witt : [Swallowing, and wiping his mouth with a napkin.] I apologise, dear heart. That was most remiss of me. Let me repeat what I said, this time with a mouth free of toast ‘n’ Lurpak. I think the best place for the apostrophe is – – –

De Witt Wallace is interrupted by a sudden and insistent hammering at the door. Lila Bell goes to answer it, to find a person from Porlock on the doorstep.

Having researched the matter thoroughly, I am able to reconstruct what De Witt Wallace was about to say, to wit:

De Witt : – – – between the R and the S rather than after the S.

And I like to think that, given the chance, he would have continued as follows:

De Witt : The apostrophe placed after the S suggests our magazine is a digest for readers, plural. Which, of course, is what we desire, if we are not to be cast into penury, fire of my loins. We will scarcely be able to build a global publishing empire without a multitude of readers, whose digest we will provide.

Lila Bell : Then I fail to see the logic of your pronouncement, popsy.

De Witt : Ah, pumpkin, but by placing the apostrophe to suggest it is a digest for just one reader, we cleverly instil in each and every reader’s mind that the magazine is for them, and them alone. Even though it isn’t. We are saying, “You are the reader, and this digest is just for you”.

Lila Bell : Gosh!

Thus, Lesson Two : The apostrophe in Reader’s Digest appears between the R and the S, not after the S.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[This piece first appeared on 21 March 2006.]

There was a period, in my early teenperson years, when I became an avid reader of the Reader’s Digest. As far as I recall, the younger of my two elder sisters brought a copy into the house. I suppose I must have seen it before, in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms, but this was the first opportunity I had to pay it proper attention. I was immediately impressed with it as a physical object. It seemed to me like a book rather than a magazine, smaller in size and with a spine. As I write that, I realise that the shape and texture and ‘feel’ of printed matter was always important to me, particularly when I was younger. Anyway, I think I pored over this copy of the Reader’s Digest with such enthusiasm that I somehow convinced my parents to take out a subscription. Copies were then delivered to the door every month for the next couple of years, until I grew bored with it and moved on to other things. I haven’t bought a copy since, and can barely remember the last time I even saw one, so I have no idea if today’s Reader’s Digest (if it still exists?) bears any relation to the magazine I read so keenly.

I used to enjoy doing the word quiz It Pays To Increase Your Word Power, I liked the potted biographies and historical articles, and I was amused by the inevitable monthly piece warning of the evil godless Communist threat to our freedoms. (It would be interesting to re-read those now, when I would probably find my older reactionary self nodding in agreement rather than laughing.) But my favourite feature was the regular series on the human body, invariably with the title formation I Am John’s Spleen or I Am Jane’s Pancreas. Not being of a scientific bent, I don’t think I can have paid much attention to the actual texts. But the titles I found vastly amusing, and still do. Somewhere in the Hooting Yard archive I refer to a supposed Reader’s Digest article entitled I Am John’s Head. It made me laugh when I thought of it and it does so still.

All by way of preamble to the point that my idea for today’s thousandish words was I Am Frank’s Brain, though of course I would have to rejig the words in the title so it began with “On”. But then I thought, oh dear, that is so stultifying dull and self-referential. As any sensible person would, I have a horror of turning into Rachel Cusk, endlessly bashing out solipsistic drivel. Luckily, I stopped myself in time, and took a break to make a cup of tea. As I stared out of the window at crows and clouds while waiting for the kettle to boil, I thought, Aha!, instead of I Am Frank’s Brain I shall write I Am Rachel Cusk’s Brain.

You will be relieved to learn that I soon thought better than to embark on that particular piece of foolishness. It struck me that to enter imaginatively into Rachel Cusk’s brain would be to court invincible inanity, a risk I was unwilling to take. Rimbaud wrote of the “white pointlessness” of the Alps, and I suspect that the vista opened up to me by Rachel Cusk’s brain would be a greyish, off-white pointlessness.

Still, I liked the idea of writing a piece based on somebody else’s brain. I Am Oliver Letwin’s Brain? I Am Heliogabalus’s Brain? I Am Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brain? The possibilities were endless. It would be the devil of a job to pick the most apt brain to pretend to be. And then, of course, other people’s brains can be quite unfathomable. I don’t know about you, but I can’t begin to imagine what strange and unruly shenanigans snap between the synapses in the brain of Julian Assange. How does someone like that manage to get out of bed in the morning? Easier by far, surely, if you are Julian, to just turn over and go back to sleep. Having such a brain might be manageable if it was permanently unconscious.

Spoilt for choice, and having discounted the obvious attractions of I Am Yoko Ono’s Brain and I Am Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s Brain, I wondered if the piece might work if I chose, instead of a real, or indeed fictional, person, a generic type. I Am A Peasant’s Brain. I Am An ‘Occupy’ Protester’s Brain. Both of those would have the advantage of being decisively limited, so there would not be a great deal of material to marshal. On the other hand, neither might make for particularly interesting reading. There may be a few more depths to plumb in the brain of a peasant, what with responses to the changing seasons and perhaps some crumbs of rustic wisdom, but you would probably be better off reading a few passages of Lork Roise To Candleford, or better still, watching an episode of the television adaptation.

At this point I dallied briefly with imagining myself into the collective “brain” of Lork Roise, positing the rustic hamlet as a sort of organic sentient being, but that way madness lies. It would be even more baffling than being the brain of Rachel Cusk, I fear.

When all is said and done, probably the easiest article to write would be I Am A Crow’s Brain. If their raucous cawing is anything to go by, and I hope it is, then crows spend their entire lives being mightily pissed off, at anything and everything. If you don’t believe me, just listen to them. I do, daily, and I have to say I find it very rewarding to do so. No matter how foul my mood, I can listen to that cawing and think to myself that at least I am not as fed up and angry and misanthropic and irredeemably bad-tempered as the crow is.

So we seem to have gone on a little tour of brains, for what it’s worth. This is the kind of thing that would fit quite snugly into the Reader’s Digest. I must find out if it still exists, and, if so, submit this piece to the editor. A whole new career might be opening up before me.

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

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

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

“I see a ship,” I said.

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

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

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

“Bowsprit!”, I cried, triumphantly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I waited for his next question.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is it with these clergymen and their phantasms? The other day we had the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Pontoppidan, babbling on about sea monsters, and now we find that rustic Victorian, the Reverend Francis Kilvert, writing in his diary, on this day in 1872:

This morning I conceived the idea of a poem in the style of Tam o’ Shanter – the scene to be laid in the ruined church of Llanbedr Painscastle. Two lovers who had made an assignation in the church-yard to be terrified by seeing through the windows an assembly of devils, ghosts, lawless lovers and murdered children.

Until I read that, I thought Kilvert’s Diary was akin to Gilbert White’s Natural History Of Selborne, a series of observations on rural life and the natural world, gentle and rather winsome. I did not expect lawless lovers and murdered children in ruined churches. But then, I have never read Kilvert’s Diary, and came upon the above entry in The Assassin’s Cloak : An Anthology Of The World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (2000).

Since 1977, Peter Blegvad has had an ongoing project called “Imagined, Observed, Remembered”, best summarised by Mr B. himself:

I began drawing sundry items thrice – first as I imagined them to be, then as I actually observed them to be, and lastly, after a suitable interval, as I remembered them to have been.

It occurred to me that I could apply this idea – at least, the Imagined and Observed elements – in prose rather than drawings, to the Reverend Kilvert. After all, though I have never read the diary, I have heard of it. Where or when it first swam into my ken I have no idea, but I would have come upon stray references to it in my reading from as long ago as my teenperson years. My Imagined Kilvert, and his diary, would be along these lines:

A nineteenth-century country parson, somewhere in England, elderly, with a long white Victorian beard. Daily, he records the passing of the seasons in his rural idyll, concentrating his attention on flowers and hedgerows and birds. Unlike Pontoppidan, he does not include the peasantry in his natural history, though occasionally a peasant might have a walk-on part in a diary entry, for example to impart a piece of rustic lore or wisdom to the absent-minded vicar. We learn little or nothing of Kilvert’s inner life, nor much of his everyday clergyman’s duties. The diary, which has never been out of print since first published, shortly after his death, is still read because he is a superb observer and recorder of the natural world, and evokes a vision of the quiet English countryside that makes it seem a very paradise.

Hence my surprise at the devils and ghosts and lawless lovers and murdered children. Time now for a cup of tea, and then I shall find out what I can about the Reverend, “Observed”, in Peter Blegvad’s sense, by way of reference materials.

I am delighted to announce that I was right about the beard. Well, sort of. (Has anybody ever written a book-length study entitled The Victorian Beard? I would read it.) Sadly, Kilvert (1840-1879) did not live long enough for it to grow white, for he died – of peritonitis – at the age of thirty-eight, shortly after returning from his honeymoon. I was correct, too, to imagine him as a country vicar. After studying at Oxford, he served a number of parishes in Wiltshire and on the Welsh Borders. Other than that, my Imagined Kilvert is a partial and inaccurate picture of the real one, particularly where the diary is concerned.

Though there is much observation of nature, the diary is far more comprehensive in its concerns – as much social history as natural history. It includes comic scenes such as a funeral at Worcester cathedral where the pallbearers stagger under the weight of a “crushingly heavy” coffin, an account of Kilvert bathing naked and disporting himself upon the beach, and a lengthy discussion of venereal disease conducted at a ruridecanal conference. (Now there’s a useful word – ruridecanal: pertaining to a rural dean and his jurisdiction.) The rustic rev also devotes over forty-four passages to descriptions of women and girls, frankly confessing his “susceptibility to female beauty”. His writing has been compared to Hardy, Hopkins, and even to Proust. “For some time,” he wrote in 1874, “I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was ‘dazzle’. The dazzle of the poplars.”

Far from being “never out of print since first published, shortly after his death”, as I imagined, the diary’s history is much more chequered. For one thing, much of the original manuscript has been lost or (deliberately) destroyed. Kilvert’s widow, who never remarried, lived until 1911 and seems to have removed entire sequences recounting “wild sad sweet trysts” with an earlier paramour. The standard selection we think of as Kilvert’s Diary was made by William Plomer and first published in three volumes between 1938 and 1940. Other editions have followed, but as far as I know it has gone in and out of print.

One thing I could not have imagined was the name of Kilvert’s mother – Thermuthis Ashe. It’s not every day you meet a Thermuthis.

As for the poem he was planning, one hundred and forty years ago today, about two lovers who had made an assignation in the church-yard at Llanbedr Painscastle, I have not been able to ascertain if Kilvert ever wrote it. He did write a number of poems, but none were published in his lifetime. The ruined church, incidentally, was restored in the year of Kilvert’s death. I append a photograph of it, no longer ruinous, below. If you peer at it very very carefully, you might just be able to see an assembly of devils, ghosts, lawless lovers and murdered children.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car. When it begins to rain, and it will, it will, turn on the windscreen wipers. They will swish swoosh swish back and forth across the windscreen of the Japanese car, just like they do across the windscreen of Marion Crane’s car in Psycho, to ensure that, however heavy and pelting the rain becomes, and it will pelt, it will, you will still be able to see the road ahead clearly enough to drive, in the dark and the rain, past Box Hill, towards the forest, in a Japanese car.

Sometimes the rain pelts down so relentlessly that even the swishiest and swooshiest of windscreen wipers, set to their most rapid swishing and swooshing, are barely able to wipe the raindrops from the windscreen, so hard and fast does the rain pelt down, and in the dark of an earthly night it can be the devil of a job to keep a clear view of the road ahead. Such were the circumstances that led Marion Crane to stop at the Bates Motel. Her car was not a Japanese one. She was not on her way to the forest.

I’ve got binoculars on top of Box Hill. I am protected from the relentless pelting rain by an anorak, a sou’wester, and the roof of a bird-spotter’s hideyhole. Because my shelter is dry, more or less, and my vision is acute, I can see clearly through the lenses of my binoculars. I would not need wipers even were the binoculars fitted with them, which of course they are not. I have trained my binoculars on the road below, and now you come sweeping into view, driving to the forest in a Japanese car. I slowly adjust the angle of the binoculars so I can follow your progress.

It is not clear whether there was a hill, like Box Hill, in the vicinity of the Bates Motel, but had there been, then Arbogast might have been stood atop it, with binoculars, watching Marion Crane pull in and park. The private detective would have had plenty of time to scamper down the hillside and jump into his car and rev the engine and tear across to the Bates Motel and forestall the horror. Arbogast was not there, on some putative hill, with binoculars. But I am.

The windscreen wipers of your Japanese car are swishing and swooshing back and forth as rapidly as it is possible for them to do, but now the relentlessness of the pelting rain redoubles, and it is almost impossible for you to see clearly the road ahead, towards the forest. You are driving more and more slowly, and with increasing difficulty, and a voice in your head tells you to pull over and stop in a layby. The voice is a sober and sensible one and not at all like the voice Norman Bates hears in his head, when Marion Crane comes to the Bates Motel.

Through my binoculars, on top of Box Hill, I can see you have pulled in to a layby and come to a stop in your Japanese car. I tuck the binoculars into the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and I scamper down Box Hill to where my own car is parked. It is not a Japanese car. Its windscreen wipers are no more, nor less, efficient than yours, but my vision is acute and I am a fantastic driver, so for me it is child’s play to rev the engine and tear across to the layby where you are parked.

I pull up behind your Japanese car and stop the engine and get out of my car and slam the door shut behind me and splosh through the puddles towards your car. I am wearing waterproof boots. I draw level with the window on the driver’s side of your Japanese car and, peering in, I am disconcerted to see that you are not sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor have you shifted to the passenger seat, nor to either of the back seats. You are not in the car. You must have gone somewhere on foot, through the puddles, in the dark, in the pelting rain, while I was making my way to the layby from the top of Box Hill.

I stand next to your Japanese car and take the binoculars out of the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and peer through them. So relentless is the pelting rain that I wish O I wish I had wipers fitted to my binoculars. I cannot see a thing in any direction. I can only assume that for some reason you have sploshed through the puddles to the forest, the edge of which is about half a mile away. I decide to follow you, in my waterproof boots.

This is ancient and dense forest and no felling has taken place to make a clearing in which a motel might be erected. It would not, in any case, make an apt site for a motel. A sinister house like that adjoining the Bates Motel might be apt, were there a clearing, but there is not. So to find you I have to seek signs, like a tracker. Soon enough, I come upon you, squatting by a fallen log, upon which you have set a camping gaz stove. You are preparing tea, and sausages. Along the log from the stove you have placed a cassette player.

“Hold it right there!” I cry.

You spin around, astonished.

“Picnic police!” I cry, “Don’t move!”

“Dammit!” you mutter.

There are some people who praise picnicking in the British countryside. I do whatever it takes to eradicate it. I place you under arrest. The cassette plays poptones.

Like absolutely everybody else throughout the land – with the sole exception of Nige – I have become enamoured of Scandinavian crime fiction. That is why, the other day, I picked up a cheap paperback copy of Headhunters by Jo Nesbo and have read about half of it at one sitting. It rattles along. I found myself diverted by this passage:

The second [thing that caught my attention] was a quotation from what are known informally as “Pontoppidan’s Explanations” in which he declares that a person is capable of killing another person’s soul, infecting it, dragging it down into sin in such a way that redemption is precluded.

As soon as I felt able to tear myself away from Headhunters, about ninety pages later – I did say it rattles along – I made a cup of tea and devoted myself to discovering what I could about Pontoppidan and his Explanations. The first thing I learned was that no human being has ever resembled a poodle or a pompom as closely as Erik Pontoppidan (1698-1764).

In the Wikipedia, he is listed in the following categories: Danish theologians, Danish bishops, Danish ornithologists, Danish naturalists, Norwegian bishops, 18th-century Lutheran bishops, People from Aarhus. That gives us a reasonably comprehensive picture. As for the Explanations, these appear to be one of his most important theological works, a 1737 official state church explanation of the Lutheran catechism. One might think that makes for rather dry reading, but the part alluded to by Jo Nesbo suggests otherwise. I may have to see if there is an English translation available and pore over it for further references to murder and infection and sin and eternal damnation.

As with so many clergymen of the era, Pontoppidan was also an enthusiastic naturalist and antiquarian. He compiled, in 1763-64, The Danish Atlas, a detailed and ambitious description of Denmark based on information gathered from clergy around the country. His Natural History of Norway (1752–1753), was a description not only of the flora and fauna of the country, but also of the peasant population, their ways of living and thinking, based upon close observation. It is thanks to Pontoppidan that much folkloric material has been preserved.

Among his other works were a standard Danish hymn book, a guide for vicars to help eradicate superstition and reduce devotion to Catholic relics among the peasantry, a four volume history of the Danish church, and a collection of epitaphs transcribed from tombstones.

Of particular interest, at least to me, is that Pontoppidan is one of the earliest sources for our knowledge of that ferocious sea monster, the kraken. In the Natural History of Norway he gives an extensive description of the beast and makes a number of claims, including that the kraken is so enormous it is sometimes mistaken for an island, and that the greatest danger to sailors comes not from the creature itself but from the mighty whirlpool it leaves in its wake. Not that the kraken does not have great destructive power, as Pontoppidan writes “It is said that if [the creature’s arms] were to lay hold of the largest man-of-war, they would pull it down to the bottom”. The image of the kraken dragging a ship down to the bottom of the sea is startlingly similar to the image, in the Explanations, of the soul-murderer dragging the infected victim down into sin. One wonders what tormented phantasms were going on inside Pontoppidan’s head, surrounded by that pompom of snow-white hair and the crisp white ruff.

[This piece is nowhere near one thousand words in length, but I think it best to end there, when I have nothing more to say, than to expand it needlessly by chuntering on. I could copy out bits of Pontoppidanery from the Wikipedia and from the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica and from the 1914 New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopaedia Of Religious Knowledge (Third Edition). I could point out that, weirdly, Erik Pontoppidan has his own Facecloth page, which is “liked” by a total of six people. (I am toying with the idea of becoming the seventh.) But, short of immersing myself in certain of the texts, I think I have learned enough, and told you enough, about Pontoppidan for the time being. It is interesting to me that, just a few hours ago, I had never heard of him, and a stray reference led me to find out that little which I have found out. Now, when next I am at an elegant and sophisticated cocktail party, leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece in my Tyrolean jacket similar to that worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music, and the conversation turns, as it so often does, to the subject of the kraken, I shall be able to pipe up with a learned reference to Erik Pontoppidan. Having grabbed the attention of the gathering, I can then dazzle my listeners with abstruse points of Scandinavian theology and amusing anecdotes of eighteenth century peasant life in Norway. I might even throw in a couple of Danish tombstone epitaphs for added entertainment, by which time every single person at the cocktail party will be hanging on my every word. There is every possibility that, at this point, the cry will go up, from one voice or from many, to “please, please tell us what Erik Pontoppidan looked like, Mr Key!” “Well, those of you foregathered and rapt,” I will reply, “If you have ever seen a poodle, or a white pompom, and imagine either of those in human form, then you can summon in your mind’s eye a portrait of our man.” At which point I might sashay away from the mantelpiece and pay a visit to the bathroom, wherein I shall liberally entalc my hair and head and collar, and then reappear among the party guests, a striking tableau vivant of Erik Pontoppidan. It will then remain for me to select a victim, murder their soul, infect it, and drag them down into sin, in such a way that redemption is precluded – if, of course, it is that kind of cocktail party.]

Over the past seven days I have been posting pieces written in the twentieth century, so I feel I have had a week off from the Daily Essays project. Time, I think, to get back on board, and indeed to remind myself of the perpilocutionary impulse that pinged in my head at the start of the year. Then, the idea was very much to pluck a topic almost at random from the world’s storehouse of topics, and to bash out around a thousand words. As it has worked out, I have been pootling off in all sorts of other directions, and all that conceivably holds the year’s postages together is that (a) they are all roughly one thousand words in length, and (b) their titles all begin with the word “On”.

On Sunday the sixth of May, in the early afternoon, I find myself thinking of the following: Nikita Khrushchev, Kew. Rhone., mountaineering, and an ideal world where a jazz standard called Chutney On My Spats really does exist. I imagine it as an up-tempo Cab Calloway number, later adapted and slowed down and made beautiful and strange by Thelonius Monk or Miles Davis, and then, with added words – but what words? – being sung in arrangements by Dinah Washington or Sarah Vaughan. I don’t know much about jazz, so that last sentence is a pretty good example of perpilocution.

I am keen to stress, though I am not sure why, that those really are the topics bustling about in my brain this afternoon. It would have been easy enough for me to compile a quite different list, to pretend I was thinking about w and x and y and z, and you would never know. But what would be the point? Today, for reasons which are fairly clear to me, but which I will not go into here, the four topics I have listed are uppermost in my mind. What I suppose I ought to do is to pick one and then write about it, for a thousand words or so. But before doing that, I am reminded of a passage, somewhere in an essay by Nicholson Baker, where he tabulates the subjects he has been thinking about on a particular day. It is a long, long time since I read the essay, but if memory serves Mr Baker’s point is that his list of thoughts will be arrestingly different from the list of thoughts that, on the same day, go through the head of the person closest to him, in all ways, his wife – and that their closeness, their attachment to each other, is unaffected by the wildly different jumbles of things occupying their respective brains. That, at least, is what I remember.

This afternoon, as I say, I have arrived at having a head full of Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats by processes I can clearly trace. It is, almost certainly – no, no, certainly, without doubt – the first time in my life that those four specific topics have jostled together inside my cranium. It may be the last time, too, though probably not, now that I have chosen to write them down, together in a list, and given that writing, that list, a life beyond the ephemeral, by posting it on Het Internet. Assuming that cataclysm does not deprive us of the power of electricity, and that international woman of mystery Primrose Dent does not press the big shiny red button that turns off Het Internet, then my list will be preserved, in the aether, forever and ever. One day in the far future, when we are all dead and gone and our children too are all dead and gone and their children too, and their children’s children, when untold generations have passed and humankind has evolved to that state familiar from any number of black and white science fiction films, where our descendants have huge heads and little or no hair, and they all dress in the same space age uniform, or in white robes, unless of course by that time they are merely brains in jars of bubbling fluid, with wiring attached, in that distant future it should still be possible for a person, or an enjarred brain, to access all the billions and billions of pages of Het Internet, and, while browsing in an aimless and desultory fashion, as I am sure they will, stumble upon Hooting Yard, quite by accident, and flick from page to page, from essay to essay, and alight, at last, without particular intention, upon this very piece, and read about Nikita Khrushchev and Kew. Rhone. and mountaineering and Chutney On My Spats, and thus those four separate, unrelated subjects, which just happen to be occupying my mind this afternoon, will occupy the huge pulsating advanced mind of the person or brain of the distant future, which is, I suppose, a kind of immortality.

It is an immortality not granted to whatever collection of gubbins bubbled to the surface of my conscious mind yesterday afternoon, or in the afternoon of the day before, because I did not record it. I did not make such a list. I did not tabulate, as Nicholson Baker did, one day late in the twentieth century, or early in this, I forget which. He made his list to demonstrate the distance, the distinctness, of his thoughts, from the thoughts of his closest companion. I made my list to contemplate my closeness to an unimaginable consciousness of an unimaginably distant future. My future reader – let’s call him, or her, or, by then quite possibly, it, Zagzob, or some such science fiction name – may have absolutely no idea who Nikita Khrushchev was, nor what Kew. Rhone. was, nor indeed have any concept of “mountaineering” as we do. After all, what with geological time, all the mountains might have been flattened, or Zagzob might be living in some kind of clean and gleaming artificial subterranean utopia, or, if there are still mountains, nobody will bother to climb them any more, having other leisure pursuits and adventuresome opportunities, ones we cannot even begin to guess at with our primitive mental blinkers. Zagzob will surely be utterly befuddled by Chutney On My Spats which, though I might dream, does not exist, and never has.

Although, of course, between now, the afternoon of the sixth of May 2012, and the afternoon in the far distant future when Zagzob reads these words, some jazz person of the future might indeed write the piece, and record it, and over the years it may be rerecorded untold times, in all sorts of arrangements and adaptations and versions, until it is considered a standard. It may even be that, as Zagzob scratches his or her or its gigantic pulsating hairless cranium in perplexity, wondering what a Nikita Khrushchev was, or who Kew. Rhone. was, or precisely how one might go about mountaineering, he or her or it, being a jazz buff, might be humming Chutney On My Spats, or indeed playing a version of it on their future Windows Vista Cranial Insertion Pod Hub device.

I find myself wondering if that is an accurate prediction of the far distant future, and hoping that it is so. Perhaps a science fiction writer can iron out the finer details.

Parts One, Two, Three, and Four. This is the fifth and final part.

Back at the Fop Palace, the band were in disarray. Deprived of their leader, they were improvising desperately. Buttercase and the spinettist Chockbung were trying to hold things together by running through some of the older numbers, but the four new players were having trouble with the smoochier passages, and the increasingly drink-sodden crowd began to make ominous hooting noises. Lip Suk Jab’s abduction had been carried out so swiftly and efficiently that the band were still not aware of it. They assumed at first it was some new crowd-pleasing trick which he had not told them about, which would have been in character. Buttercase had never forgotten the time the bandleader had had himself wrapped in sailcloth and carried on to the stage by a team of frogmen, authentically encrusted with whelks and stinking of ooze. The band had been as repelled as the audience – until, of course, one of the frogmen tore a small hole in the cloth, inserted the cornet into it, and the wily Korean let fly with a majestic solo rendition of “Chutney On My Spats” which brought the house down.

If he was up to such a trick tonight, thought Buttercase, he was leaving it a bit late. Several of the burlier elements of the crowd were polishing their scimitars and distributing cudgels. If there was not to be a riot, drastic action was called for. At half past midnight, the cartographer brought a turgid rumba to an end with a high-pitched squeak on the bassoon. He whispered to Skip to relinquish the tuba and passed him the accordion, telling him to do his best. Then, leaving Chockbung and De Strobville to muster some sort of performance out of the hicks, he fled the stage on some pretext and dashed like a maniac through the Palace seeking the cornettist. The eagle eyes which had mapped Sumatra three decades before did not fail him now; within minutes, he had come upon Lip Suk Jab’s cornet, abandoned between the side-exit and the riverbank. From there, it was a small matter to ponder some connection with the tell-tale skate-marks reaching across the ice. Buttercase ran back to the palace cloakroom and, taking advantage of the attendant’s absence, stole a pair of snow-shoes. Delaying only to peer into the dancehall and see that Skip was at least holding the accordion the right way up, he set off across the ice, hoping to heaven that he was not on a false trail. As he clambered up on the opposite bank, he was flattened by the force of an enormous explosion behind him. Alas, Skip had hit a bum note on the intro to “They Call Her Pope Pius IV”. The world of Sumatran jazz would never recover from the loss.

Buttercase eventually made it as far as the airstrip, but of course he was too late to catch up with Lip Suk Jab and his Javan abductors. Luckily, an aeroplane was taxiing ready for take-off, and Buttercase was able to attract the pilot’s attention and get himself aboard in the nick of time. The pilot was an outlandishly moustachioed Dutch hotelier named Van Der Wergo who had been prospecting sites for a leisure complex. On the long flight back to Het Loo in Gelderland he bored Buttercase insensible with a minutely detailed description of his scheme, liberally illustrated with financial prospectuses, architectural diagrams, flow charts, trilingual press releases, and horrid maps. As he brandished these in the exhausted accordionist’s face, Van Der Wergo repeatedly let go of the controls, and it is something of a miracle that he eventually brought the plane safely in to land.

As a reward for listening to all this gibberish, Buttercase was invited to stay at the hotelier’s garish mansion on the outskirts of Het Loo. Although he intended to stay only for a few days, Buttercase ended up spending the rest of his life there. With Lip Suk Jab incarcerated in a Javan prison and the rest of the band dead, he felt understandably reluctant to continue his musical career, with all that would be involved – forming a new band, buying a new accordion, and so on. For a week or two he mooched about Van Der Wergo’s estate, nauseated by the banana-coloured interiors, aghast at the collection of tubular titanium furniture, outraged at the hideous gewgaws which filled every room, each one monstrously ugly in itself, the effect multiplied by sheer quantity. Every day, it seemed, the garrulous hotelier would arrive home with yet more “objets”, as he called them, and tug at his moustachios as he agonised over where to place them to “heighten their effect”. To make matters worse, he insisted on consulting Buttercase over these decisions, dragging him from room to room to contemplate whether a cut-glass pink squid on a green satin cushion sewn with diamante lozenges would look better in the window of the billiards room or set on a nest of tables in the corner of the scullery. Van Der Wergo was generous and affable, and Buttercase was impossibly polite, but the strain of these daily consultations was eventually too much, and the houseguest came down with a nervous malady. Van Der Wergo employed a team of paramedics to give him round-the-clock care. As he slowly recuperated, one of these tireless medicos put it to the hotelier that what the patient needed was some activity – nothing too strenuous, but something that would make him feel useful. Aware that in his younger days Buttercase had had something to do with maps – or one map, at any rate – the mogul offered his guest the position of Chief Cartographer to Van Der Wergo Hotel & Leisure Complex International (Het Loo) Pty. Ltd.

As we all know, Buttercase took up the post. Between 1960 and 1966, he established his reputation as one of the greatest cartographers of the century. From his unutterably tasteless room in Van Der Wergo’s mansion, he sent teams of map-makers out across the globe to draw up sketches for his employer’s increasingly grandiose schemes. Constantly in touch with his juniors via telegraph, he would urge them on to ever more adventurous cartographic innovations. Regularly, the postman would deliver rolls of blueprints and sketches to the mansion, and Van Der Wergo himself would scamper up the staircase to his friend’s room, occasionally knocking over one of the lamentable ornaments in his haste. The two of them would pore over the materials, chuckling with glee and knocking back tankards of hooch. But then the hotelier would withdraw, and leave Buttercase alone to work. Out would come the gigantic sheets of Waterbath paper and the pencils of every conceivable colour, their points as sharp as dirks. And days, weeks, or months later, the map would be finished, and sent by pneumatic tube down to Van Der Wergo’s den, where the hotelier would weep with joy as he unrolled the paper and opened it to his gaze.

On the fourth of August 1966, Ken Buttercase tripped over a peewit while strolling in the mansion gardens. He fell headlong, cracked his skull, and died instantly. That morning, he had put the finishing touches to a new map of Sumatra. Unaccountably, he had quite forgotten to show the location of Blimbing.