Parts One, Two, and Three. And now, Part Four …

Buttercase’s map of Sumatra was his first and, arguably, finest cartographic achievement. Having abandoned his shipmates, his first step was to enter the general store in Blimbing, and, using the small sum of cash he had stolen from the purser’s hatbox, he bought a knapsack, some cakes, a compass, a shirt, a fetching little hat, a jar containing a substance no longer obtainable on earth, although it was quite common at the time, a guide-book, some clips, a lead-lined smock, and a windjammer, among other things. Then he set out on foot to cover the whole island. It took him five years. He began by keeping to the coastal routes, tramping from Blimbing all the way up to Oleleh, then along the eastern coast, through Edi, Balei, and Rupat until, once past Telok Betong, he returned to his starting-point. He took the opportunity to call in to the general store and have his clips de-rusted and his hat stitched. Then he headed off into the interior, zigzagging his way nor’east, nor’west, nor’east, nor’west, until he reached Segli. All this time he had been taking copious notes, and he was now ready to begin work on his map. He returned to Blimbing on a motorbike and holed up in a shack. Sustained by Rumanian beans and hooch, he worked for a further two years, using an enormous sheet of Waterbath paper and a collection of coloured pencils. A stupendously detailed description of the map appears in Crone’s Anthology Of Sumatran Maps Concocted By Felons (Hooting Yard Press, 1937), to which the reader is referred.

But that’s quite enough about maps for the time being. Of more interest is the fact that at around this time Buttercase fell in with a gang of ne’er-do-wells who haunted the more disgusting sinks of vice and iniquity in Blimbing and, when it was learned that he was an accomplished accordionist, he was invited to join their jazz band. The band was led by the scrofulous but benign cornettist Lip Suk Jab, a Korean who had been hounded out of his country following the infamous Unserrated Postage Stamp Scandal of 1922. Suk Jab’s musical gifts were slight, but what he lacked in technique he made up for with what can only be described as stage presence. Slightly less than five-feet tall and impossibly rotund, he held audiences in thrall. Several critics have attempted to explain precisely what it was about the man that was so spellbinding. Was it his occasional impersonations of Constantin Brancusi or Cicely Courtneidge? Was it the metal harness he strapped to his head which emitted incandescent light? Was it the pocketfuls of custard triangles with which he showered the audience at the end of each show? Who can say? What we do know is that, when his regular accordionist was drowned in a freak dandelion-hammering accident, he cajoled Buttercase into joining his band.

The next thirty years passed in a whirl. Cartography was all but forgotten as Suk Jab’s band – known variously as The Crumpled Ships, The Amnesiac Lane Octet, Lip Suk Jab And His Big Aluminium Kettle, Shimmying In Ponds, The Norwegian Hooters, or Go Wild With Lip Suk Jab And The Mullet Babies – toured endlessly through Sumatra, Java, Borneo, New Guinea, Timor, and the Yukon. There were shows virtually every night of the week, in hotels, dancehalls, casinos, scout-huts, community centres, bingo parlours, caves, factories, deserted mineshafts, and temples. Lacquered gits clutching recording contracts followed the band everywhere. Broadcasters from the burgeoning Dutch East Indies Radio Corporation were forever dragging the band into studios. Buttercase took up the bassoon and the ondes martenot in addition to his favoured accordion, although he was never able to play either of them with much conviction.

This idyll ended on 14th January 1959, when disaster struck. The band, billed as The Authentic Sound Of Geriatric Slobbering, were booked to play at the Fop Palace, a nightclub in Selwyn, hard by the banks of the Macmillan, which had become the in place to be for the local population of trappers, Mounties, card-sharps, detectives, rustlers, and circus performers. The journey from Borneo had been exhausting, and half the band had contracted dengue fever. Lip Suk Jab himself was under investigation by the Javan Secret Police following his involvement in a stamp collecting scam, and had become convinced – rightly – that agents pursued him at every step. Indeed, on the night in question, eleven Javan plainclothesmen were loitering in the snug bar at the Fop Palace, ready to make an arrest. As if this were not trouble enough, Buttercase’s accordion had been sabotaged by thugs employed by a rival Sumatran jazz combo; as soon as he played an F sharp, explosives secreted within the instrument would detonate, blasting the accordion, its player, and anyone and anything else within a five-hundred yard radius to smithereens.

By quarter to midnight, when the band were due to begin their set, the Palace was packed. The Javans, skilfully disguised as a group of Lithuanian business executives, had fanned out from the snug and taken up strategic positions around the stage and at the exits. Never one to tolerate sickness, Lip Suk Jab had summarily dismissed the dengue-stricken members of the group and was busy rehearsing four locals in a back room. None of the callow Yukon youths had ever played a musical instrument before, but so awe-inspiring was Suk Jab’s tuition that, by the time the lights went down, Biff, Skip, Chump, and Dib felt confident enough to attempt the banjo, tuba, sackbut, and kettledrums respectively. The locals gave them a rousing cheer, which was only slightly muted when they were followed on stage by Buttercase and the other two long-serving band members, whose names we may learn later. The seven of them started to bash out a scorching opener designed to set the scene for the arrival of their leader. You will be pleased to learn that Buttercase played the bassoon on this number. The deadly accordion rested behind him on a rather intriguing stool, carved entirely from the tusk of a narwhal and engraved with scenes of piracy and racketeering. He had received this piece of scrimshandy from a Bolton mustard merchant after a concert in Wetter in 1946.

Towards the end of the number, Lip Suk Jab made his way towards the stage. As he paused to screw the last bolt into his incandescent metal head-harness, four of the Javans pounced. Before he knew what had hit him, the cornettist was gagged, handcuffed, and frogmarched out by a side exit into the wintry Selwyn night. The rest of the Javan detectives joined them, and they hurried down to the banks of the Macmillan, which was of course entirely frozen over. Hastily lacing up their ice-skates, and muttering incomprehensible messages into their walkie-talkies, the agents careered across the river at breakneck speed, narrowly avoiding bashing Lip Suk Jab’s head into an ice-trapped tugboat in midstream. Once they had made it to the other side, they put the cornettist back on his feet and, having removed their skates, ordered him to march with them four miles to the airfield where their bi-plane was waiting. As they set off, midnight struck.

To be continued …

Part One, Part Two, and now …

“Well, lad,” said the navigator to Buttercase as the two sat in the stifling squalor of the Indescribable’s chart room, “As you can see, I’m plotting our course on these portolans. It’s exacting work. I am a very ancient, craggy man, the sort you sometimes hear referred to as a sea dog, or old salt. I have been at sea since I was much younger than you are now, first as a deckhand, then as a bilge-boy. Only in my fifties did I aspire to the position of navigator. It took twenty years of arduous study for me to reach my present state of knowledge, where I can be entrusted, single-handed, to take this mighty steamship across the world, issuing instructions to the louts on the bridge to steer this way or that, to correct the course by so many degrees, to hold fast to port or starboard, etc etc.” He spat into his mahogany spittoon. “My training began when I became a second deputy assistant to the navigator’s mate on a fine old wooden ship the name of which escapes me. Aye, your memory plays some rum old tricks, lad, when you get to my age. Day and night I watched the chief navigator, bewildered at the subtlety of his art. I perched in a little hammock just above his left shoulder, making careful notes of all he did in my notebook. I rarely slept. Eventually – oh, it was a long time – I felt I had gained some semblance of understanding.

“Then disaster struck. At midnight on the fourth of June 18–, a storm blew up, and that delicate ship was smashed asunder on some rocks. Only three of us survived. We managed to clamber into a dinghy, as the tempest howled around our ears. For fourteen weeks we drifted in the pitiless ocean, subsisting on rotten biscuits, pemmican, and the occasional seahorse we were able to spear with our bayonets. I passed the thirst-crazed days having frantic arguments with Mufton and Hairball, my companions, who became steadily more and more enraged with me, because I kept whingeing about my notebook. I had lost it in the very teeth of the storm, you see, and thus all my years of navigational study were as nought. You can understand why I whimpered so, can you not? Eventually they grew so sick of my moaning that they hurled me over the side. In the middle of the night, they grabbed me, Mufton taking my legs and Hairball my arms, and they swung me overboard, cackling like maniacs, and I splashed into the freezing sea, helpless and alone. Luckily I had secreted the remainder of the biscuit supply in my blazer pocket. There was no moon; I could see nothing. I trod water for hours, terrified that at any moment I would be attacked by all sorts of fiendish aquatic monsters. But none came. I munched the biscuits and moistened my parched lips with the last few dregs of my spittle. The silence was unendurable. I croaked old hymns, dredged up from memory. Sleep, I knew, would be fatal, even for a few seconds. Just as I was about to pass out, my luck came in. An enormous crab clawed its way up on to my scalp, where it perched, tweaking my hair agonisingly in its pincers. The pain kept me awake, and I began to hallucinate, but the visions were so mundane that I will not bore you with them. Suddenly, as dawn broke, I felt solid ground beneath my feet. Peering around, I saw that I had drifted on to an island. Crawling on to the strand, I shovelled a few handfuls of nearby crustacea into my mouth, swallowed them having hardly bothered to crunch them, and fell into an exhausted sleep.

“When I awoke it was pouring with rain. For as long as I remained on the island the rain never ceased. Bear that in mind, as I tell you the rest of my adventures.” The old sea dog took a plug of tobacco from behind his ear and lodged it between his teeth. “The island on which I had fetched up was small, but well-provided for in terms of foliage and nourishment. It was the shape of a dromedary. The air stank. After eleven weeks – during which I was absolutely drenched by the rain – I was rescued by a passing ship, the captain of which was the most devilish cur alive. His name was Lapwing, his flesh was orange, he wore a violet hat, and his pipe-smoke curled around his head so that he was forever in a fog. His crew were so terrified of him that they all assumed a permanent crouch, and suffered agonising back pain as a consequence. The ship’s doctor – a saintly man named Bagshaw, or Shawbag, I forget which – hardly had a moment’s rest. He was forever having to rub linaments and ointments on to the men’s backs to sooth the rictus, and had constructed a fascinating piece of equipment, an oak frame almost like a rack, on which four men could lie at a time, having their bodies stretched to counter the effects of their crouching, the doctor making incremental adjustments to a large red wheel with a special lever inserted in a hole in the rim. The dastardly captain knew nothing of this. The treatment was always administered at night, while he slept, and the machine was hidden from him during the day behind huge crates of cargo – tin, bitumen, custard – in the darkest recesses of the hold.

“When they hauled my soaking body aboard, Captain Lapwing immediately set me to work as the doctor’s assistant, replenishing the linament jars and holding Bagshaw’s massive fringe of hair out of his eyes as he went about his duties. I was also put in charge of the small colony of badgers which lived below decks. Procuring food for them was no easy matter, but I too was terrified of Lapwing, and I soon learned to entice a bowl of badger food from the least promising ingredients. It is a skill that has not deserted me. You may have noticed, lad, that I still keep a little team of badgers in my cabin. Dobbin is my favourite, rather frisky for his species, but a treasure nonetheless.”

“I hate to interrupt you,” said Buttercase, “But shouldn’t you be paying more attention to the charts?”

Those of you who recall the newspaper reports of the Glub expedition will be aware that Buttercase never reached the Antarctic. The navigator was so inept that he took the ship not to the Southern seas, but to the lemur-riddled western coast of Sumatra, in the Dutch East Indies.

To be continued …

Part One is here : now read on …

The Paraffin Shed was the smallest of a cluster of buildings, far from the railway itself but owned nevertheless by the company, which charged pitiful rents to the tenants. Among the other buildings were a tavern, an ink factory, a menagerie, a cork shop, an igloo, a massive, empty prison, and a warehouse full of bones. The Paraffin Shed was rented by a retired sea-captain, whose name is unfortunately not recorded. In later years, Buttercase remembered him as by turns gruff and amiable, languid and crusty, corrosive and vibrant, insensible and bereft. Although it may be thought that he spent long hours entertaining his small visitor with seafaring yarns, tales of exploration and derring-do upon the high seas, rattling narratives of piracy and bilgewater, there is no evidence that he ever did so. As far as we know, all that ever took place was that, upon Buttercase’s arrival, the boy unhitched the tub from his back, unscrewed the stopper, the sea-captain poured a paltry amount of paraffin into it, demanded his money and held out his vast and hairy hand for receipt of the coins, whereupon the lad paid him, replaced the stopper, hitched the refilled tub on to his back, bid the old salt farewell until the morrow, and began the long trudge back towards his parents’ hut.

Did he ever visit any of the other buildings? He may have done. What would have happened had he encountered, in the warehouse of bones, a slobbering giant wracked with the dropsy? Or blundered into the menagerie and come face to face with a starving bison? Or been lured into the ink factory and had his tub of paraffin stolen from him by the snag-toothed serf detailed to stand guard at the door, his mouth forever filled with sticky, raspberry-flavoured confections, the juice of which dribbled down his chin and fell in droplets upon his outlandish pantaloons? What turn might have been taken in the life of the cartographer-to-be had these things happened? There is rich material here, but we must turn our backs upon it, and follow the young Buttercase back to the rep-divided hut, to which, daily, he returns, as twilight descends upon the land, and howls are heard far off in the distance, or perhaps the occasional spurt of gunfire, or a hoot from the rickety train, trundling on its way, with or without passengers, with or without freight.

He was sixteen years old when he was flung into prison, and twenty when he was released on a special licence, having been recommended by the prison governor to accompany an Antarctic expedition as general factotum, accordionist, and toothbrush maker. Up to the very minute the steamship Indescribable chugged out of the harbour, Buttercase was handcuffed to a prison guard. The two had become fast friends during the seven-week journey from the prison to the small seaside town from which the expedition sailed. Clump, the guard, was a small, flickering man who drew maps in his spare time. Never having set foot outside his homeland, his exquisitely illuminated maps of Far Cathay, Beach, Zimpagu, Hoon, and Yssicol were the products of a fevered imagination all too rare in men of his profession. Buttercase, of course, was awestruck. He repeatedly badgered Clump to make him a gift of one of his maps, but the prison guard refused for reasons we can only guess at. Not that we will bother.

As they made their way on foot across the country for forty-nine days of that abominable winter, Clump nevertheless gave Buttercase a far more valuable gift – a pencil. It must not be forgotten that in those days, convicted felons – especially those released on licence – were routinely deprived of pencils, as they were of pencil-sharpeners, pencil-cases, pens, protractors, rulers, compasses, crayons, set-squares, and many other items of stationery and graphic equipment. The king himself had renewed the ban in the very year of Buttercase’s release. Clump was taking a terrible risk. Perhaps he was in his cups when he hastily shoved the pencil into Buttercase’s pocket. The great cartographer later recalled that the prison guard had tears in his eyes as he did so.

On the deck of the Indescribable, Clump removed the handcuffs from his young charge’s puny wrist. The two embraced. Doughty explorers, some already kitted out in their Antarctic furs, bustled Clump off the ship; they were impatient for Buttercase to begin his accordion lessons. Prisoner and guard never saw each other again. Clump came to a bad end. On his return to the prison, he had his pencils counted, and his furious blushes confirmed the governor’s suspicions. Dismissed from the service, he fell on evil days, and died two years later, drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office in Tantarabim.

To be continued …

[NOTE : Clump is the first, but by no means the last Hooting Yard character to meet his end drunk out of his brain on the floor of a post office. The same fate befalls a music critic in The Phlogiston Variations, I think, and quite possibly one or two others. This was also the first appearance in my work of that realm of mystery known as Tantarabim.]

In a comment on yesterday’s piece of Hoonery, Banished To A Pompous Land pleaded for the resurrection of a story which has – unaccountably – never been reissued since its original appearance in the Massacre anthology published by Indelible Inc twenty years ago. Here, then, in several parts over the next few days, is Accidental Deaths Of Twelve Cartographers, No. 8 : Ken Buttercase. Please note that Nos. 1-7 and 9-12 were never written. With some misgivings, I have transcribed it exactly, resisting the temptation to mop up certain infelicities.

The parents of the great cartographer Ken Buttercase were employed by a small railway in a remote country. They lived in a wooden hut which served as a signal-box. A threadbare curtain of rep divided the hut into two halves. In one half, the Buttercases ate and slept and baked and washed; the other half contained the signalling controls and was also used to store an ever-changing collection of broken locomotive machinery. Once a day, at noon or thereabouts, a cart would trundle to the door of the hut; two railway workers would deliver some broken bits and pieces and take others away. Mr or Mrs Buttercase would sign one chit for the deliveries, another chit for the pieces removed, and help the two officials – one of whom was tubercular – to load and offload the invariably rusty pieces of metal.

Their duties left them little time to devote to their only child. Let us examine these duties in some detail. The railway itself was not busy – the one train passed the hut four times a day; heading north at 4 a.m. and 4 p.m., and heading south at 10 a.m. and 10.15 p.m. Before its passing, the signals had to be set; the cranks, winches, levers, pulleys, knobs, fulcra, and transistor motors all had to be adjusted with frightening precision. In order for this to be done, the broken locomotive-parts had to be shoved out of the way, into the other half of the hut. They could not be kept outside, exposed to the elements, as the company regulations forbade such a practice. Nor could they be stored permanently on the other side of the rep curtain, as not only was this – as we have seen – the family’s living quarters, it also served as the work-room devoted to carrying out the many other tasks they had to perform, which we shall examine in due course. Once all the broken stuff had been moved out of the way, the signalling equipment could be set. Readjustment, back to the original coordinates, took place once the train had passed, after which the day’s conglomeration of broken bits and pieces could be shifted back to the other half of the hut.

There was a great deal of paperwork. Buttercase’s parents carried this out at the tiny wooden escritoire next to the oven. Every day an inventory had to be taken of the heteroclite jumble of rubbish cluttered on the other side of the curtain. The railway provided pre-printed forms to be completed for each item, in the form of a questionnaire, detailing such things as time of delivery (to the minute), exact dimensions, percentage of surface area covered in rust, visual evidence of sabotage, signs of unlawful hammering, pounding, twisting, or breakage, and so on. The forms had to be handed over to the officers on their daily visit, whether or not they removed the piece in question. Multiple forms were therefore necessary if a piece remained in storage for more than twenty-four hours; but this was rare. Mrs Buttercase usually wrote the details out in rough, then her husband copied the information on to the form in his best handwriting, which was rarely neat enough for the officers, particularly the tubercular one, who lambasted Mr Buttercase accordingly.

There were other forms to be completed. It was necessary to count the number of passengers aboard the train each time it passed. It trundled along reasonably slowly, which helped – but the windows were filthy with grease, which made it imperative to peer with great concentration. The accuracy of the figures could always be checked by comparing the Buttercases’ calculation with that made at the next hut along the line, although this was rarely if ever done, and it could always be argued that passengers had leaped or fallen off, or jumped aboard, between the signal-box and the next hut, not that this was likely, as hardly any passengers ever used the railway anyway. The passenger-count forms were collected on a monthly basis by another, more important, railway official, who wore a tall hat like a funeral director’s and arrived at the hut astride a gigantic horse. When he called, the Buttercases had to feed both the man and his steed with buns and glucose syrup.

Other duties included buffing up ceremonial shields and brasswork, making flags and pennants, procuring rainwater, cooking sausages for the company hound, sharpening the pencil-sharpener, cleaning the rails, slaughtering insects which trespassed on the railway, keeping the paintwork up to scratch, dismantling the signals on public holidays, and carting huge amounts of sand and grit from one side of the track to the other.

Little Ken was bidden to undertake only one task. Every day a small amount of paraffin had to be collected from the Paraffin Shed, which was four hours’ walk away across the desolate, bandit-strewn moors. He would leave mid-morning, carrying a special tub on his back, supporting it with ropes crossed over his shoulders and under his arms. His parents gave him a flask of turnip soup for sustenance along the way. The bandits of that country were fierce and ruthless, but they were unforgiveably careless, and had little idea of how to conduct an ambuscade. Buttercase was always able to spot them long before they would have been able to waylay him, and he took the necessary precautions. Sometimes he would hide behind a stone until they went away. Or he would wait for them to set upon a less observant traveller – perhaps a pedlar or minstrel – and then dash swiftly past while they were otherwise engaged. His other alternative was to make long detours, which he often did, approaching the Paraffin Shed by a bewildering variety of different routes. Was it this early familiarity with the highways and by-ways of his homeland which stirred his first cartographic impulses?

To be continued …

And while we are on the subject of Hoon …

Splattered with seagull droppings, the Woman of Twigs stood at the very edge of the cliff, her back to the sea. Barefoot, she rocked gently back and forth on her impromptu podium. The villagers were gathered about her, wretched and snivelling. Some carried pitchforks, or dainty little tin boxes full of bip. They were all ears as they waited for the Woman of Twigs to speak. She had blindfolded herself with a threadbare bandage, bound her hair into tufts with flaxen yarn and roots, and held in her hands a ribbon of bloody silk. Precisely at the moment that the thousandth wave of the day crashed against the rocks below, the Woman of Twigs ceased her rocking, cast the ribbon to the winds, and, shouting to make herself heard over the screeching gulls, began:

“You asked me to save the village from Doom. I have communed with a variety of weird and tiresome shades to seek guidance. You are correct, your village is imperilled. There is only one way to rescue it from the coming agony. Three of your number must travel many miles distant, to the town of Hoon. There, they must find a churn, possibly broken, the churn of Hoon, which has had engraved upon it a rather fetching likeness of myself. Do not ask why. Having scoured Hoon for this churn, and found in Hoon this churn of Hoon, it must be brought back here, with due haste, and hurled into the boiling sea from this very spot on the cliff’s edge. That task complete, your village will once again know glee. I have left unmentioned one crucial point. The three who will venture to Hoon, there to find and return the Hoon-churn, must all be called Ned. That is all.”

Work began at once on building the chariot. In the kitchens, the villagers boiled up huge iron pans full of mud and silt dredged from the riverbed. Trees were felled in the spinney. The smithy at his anvil beat out a goodly number of nails, spikes, and very sharp hooks. Within a week, the foul-smelling but indestructible vehicle was ready. Volunteers fanned out across the countryside to trap a suitable beast of burden. Horses, oxen, even a crippled reindeer of great elegance, were sighted and stalked, but another week elapsed without success. Eventually it was decided that the three Neds would have to travel under their own steam, pulling the chariot by themselves. Ned, Ned and Ned agreed, drooling with excitement in their eagerness to set out on so glorious a journey, one that would save the village and bring them renown.

They left the village at a gallop, in the middle of the night. Without maps, they relied entirely on local lore and superstition. From infancy, each Ned had been imbued with a long catechism of saws and proverbs. Now, each had engraved upon his skull a different couplet, handed down through the generations:

If you wish to go to Hoon / Spit three times and follow the moon

Hoon’s beyond yon crumpled hedge / Hemmed around by gorse and sedge

When you see eight pebbles strewn / You’re eight days and nights from Hoon

They travelled without pause, two dragging the stinking chariot while the third lay bundled in it, sleeping or feeding from a polythene bag full of curdled slops. At first they followed the course of the Great Frightening River, until suddenly it wormed its way underground. For eighteen months they travelled through a desolate landscape, flat, grey, and curiously redolent of shurd. But as they entered Hoon’s hinterland, things changed. In rapid succession, they passed an asbestos works, a barrel of rainwater, a customs post, damp hectares, elk encampments, fenceposts, grotesque wooden carvings, horrifying shrubbery, improbable water tables, jerrybuilt huts, a kaolin quarry, lumps of disgust, monstrous gulches, nebulous stretches of pointed brambly things, ornithologists’ hideaways, parakeet enclosures, quarantine sheds, rusk markets, strange gobbets of sludge, a tremendous farmyard, urn burials, a vacuum, wrestling pythons, extravagant banks of yellow fog, yeast traffickers, and a zither-crushing factory. Ned said to Ned and Ned, “Soon we shall be in Hoon. I can feel it in my water.” He was not mistaken.

The great South Gate of Hoon was over a thousand years old, and completely overgrown by clumps of hideous, fleshy foliage oozing poisonous sap. All attempts to destroy this abominable vegetation had met with failure, and it had not been possible to open the gate for at least two centuries. Rather than blasting a hole in the town wall, a ramshackle lift contraption was knocked up close by. Two wooden platforms, one either side of the great wall, were raised and lowered by an exciting system of pistons, pulleys and winches operated by a team of gate-keepers wearing boa constrictor masks. In return for their labours, they exacted a hefty price; unfortunately the three Neds were utterly penniless. Muttering among themselves, our heroic trio decided to proffer gifts in lieu of payment. Ned offered the gate-keepers his cap, which was made of rusted whisks. Ned presented them with a sick toad he had been pampering for the past month. Ned gave them a handful of silt scraped from the underside of the chariot. Well pleased with these gifts, the gate-keepers allowed the exhausted threesome to clamber onto the platform.

Two days later, the three Neds were lowered to the ground on the other side of the wall. At last they were in Hoon! Finding the possibly broken churn of Hoon could only be a matter of time. They would be implacable, ferreting into every corner of the ancient town. As soon as they disembarked from the wooden platform, however, they were set upon by a whirling tangle of ruffians who bashed them senseless, stole the shirts off their backs, emptied their polythene bags of slops into the gutter, wholly dismantled the chariot, had at them with ferocious scimitars, and left them for dead. And indeed, Ned and Ned were dead. Ned was carted off by a passing stretcher patrol, but panted his last breath an hour later, by which time the ruffians had scampered away, heading for the mountains. They stopped by the kaolin quarry to eat their packed lunches, and then, as night came down, they strode up the mountainside, these ruffians, their gazes fixed on the sky above, to look at the numberless stars, to view the boundless firmament.

A story from the last century …

There were four hundred of us. Lars carried the water in a shallow basin, spilling a small amount of our vital supply each time he stumbled over concealed heaps of bauxite or other points of geological interest. Helga was able to top up the basin by melting patches of snow with her bunsen burner, but there was very little snow on the lower slopes, and what there was had invariably been shat on by pigs, wildebeeste, geese, and bats. By the second day, Lars had managed not only to spill the entire water supply, but had also cracked the basin in half by accidentally bashing it against a rogue shard of basalt. The rest of us were furious. Venables wanted to hurl Lars over a precipice. Van Gob brandished his rifle with menace, muttering threats. Lars merely sulked, squatting in the bracken and whittling away at a small piece of wood he had painted crimson some years earlier. The tension mounted.

Then Horst discovered some strange blueish flecks in a piece of rock. Gritting his teeth, he set about it with his iron hammers, and we were astonished to watch incandescent liquid spurt forth, forming a bright arc over the ramshackle encampment of pitched tents we called home. Glubb was the first to drink the liquid, for his thirst was the stuff of legend. He collected some in a battered tin cup and swallowed it at a gulp. Moments later, just as we were lighting a bonfire, his eyes glazed over and he stamped his feet in a demented rhythm. He began to declaim, slowly, in a booming voice quite unlike his usual prissy prating. He said:

“I have seen red shelves stacked with a thousand corks. The corks have teeth-marks in them, as if they have been gnawed, by a billy-goat or other beast of the field. Then, and only then, a vision of mud. I have listened to the sound made by chaffinches, and walked a hundred miles in driving rain, burning clay until it explodes, tying endless knots in brown canvas flags. My breath is the breath of a man who has the gift of tongues, a man who has spoken with corncrakes. Gemstones have I for ears, and putty for a hat. Wrap me in chrysanthemums, inveigle me with truncated proverbs – I shall not hear, for I hear only the clanking of broken churchbells set swinging high in towers when the air is still and the sky has vanished. I say to you that I am as of Ack, that which has a light known not unto you. Nor shall it ever be known unto you, for yours are the eyes and ears of pebbles lying scattered on the floor of the vasty deep. I have lavished you with ice and wood and Ack, and now I must begone from your sight. Farewell.”

So saying, Glubb marched away, uphill, towards the summit. He did not look back. We never saw him again.

The next morning, Lars was detailed to return to the sordid village at the foot of the mountain to get a new supply of water and a new basin in which to carry it. Lip’s attempt to glue the cracked basin back into one piece had failed, because the paste he used was contaminated. Waving farewell to Lars, and leaving Lip to catch up with us after extricating his arm from a narrow vertical crevice in the mountainside, we pressed on. Brabant took snapshots along various stages of the climb. There was a particularly good one of Helga making final adjustments to her snorkelling gear before diving to the bottom of the Imaginary Lake At The Mountain At Hoon, which has enticed so many earlier pilgrims on this route. Brabant himself was heroic, urging us onward whenever we became disconsolate or morose. He handed out his special biscuits, which tasted of bones, but were as nutritious as pemmican. On the eighth day, while everyone else was asleep, Brabant shaved off his massive walrus moustache. When we awoke, not one of us recognised him. Charming japes like this kept our spirits up.

It was on the eleventh day that we became worried about Lars, who had still not rejoined the party. Venables, Piccolo and Chasuble volunteered to go back in search of him. Before they left, Father Todge offered Mass. Just as Lip was about to take the communion wafer, we were distracted by a thunderclap, and the rains began. We sheltered under a limestone outcrop that seemed terribly crumbly. Van Gob did sterling work shoring it up with some of the zinc and titanium rods which he carried in his knapsack for such an emergency. The only sour note that day occurred when Dennis, spotting a lame horse through his tin telescope, witlessly left the shelter in order to parley with it. He was struck by lightning and incinerated. The horse whinnied and limped away.

Some days later, the rains stopped at last. Delaying only to bury what was left of Dennis, we made rapid progress towards the summit. Jean-Pierre and Istvana carried my wheelchair over ravines and gullies, at the bottom of one of which I noticed a huge pile of cutlery. It was perplexingly free of rust.

As we climbed higher, a yellow foul-smelling mist descended. On the fortieth day, Annette’s flask disappeared in a puff of roseate vapour. Brabant’s head took on the appearance of a turnip. It was he who announced that we had not brought enough oxygen tents. I began to knit furiously, doling out scarves, balaclavas, and woolly leggings to the company as fast as I was able. But we all realised things could not continue for much longer. When we estimated that we were four days’ climb from the summit, we gathered in Strob’s big tent for a meeting. Tempers were frayed, and Minnie’s attempts to jolly us along by singing selections from Ezra Pound’s Cowboy Songbook met only with hissing. We chewed what was left of the pickle supply and tried to iron out a strategy. After some aimless discussions, Venables announced that he had carried out an inventory. His eyes gleamed dangerously as he said:

“I have divided the inventory into three distinct categories, as follows. Category A, supplies we have exhausted; category B, supplies which we will exhaust within the next eighteen hours; and category C, supplies of which we have a huge and unwarrantable surplus. My inventory gives the following results: A – asbestos, bails, crimping irons, doilies, electric shoes, febrifuge, grey bags, and harpoonery; B – ip, jumble, kohl and largesse; C – muck, nose cones, operating tables, polevaulting equipment, querns, rosary beads, starch, talc, urns, varnish, whisks, expropriated jam, yashmaks and zobb. Hmm. You all look rather surprised. I don’t blame you. We have not been sensible of our peril. We cannot – ”

He was interrupted by a commotion at the entrance flap. We all looked round, and were startled to see Lars, heavily bearded, broken sunglasses hanging off one ear, struggling into the tent. He was carrying a giant bolt of sailcloth which appeared to be threaded with gold. Ashen-faced, Lars lurched to the podium and began to speak. We could hardly hear him, for he was close to death, and his words were mere gasps. It was only later I realised that he was revealing to us the knowledge he had kept hidden all along, thus consigning us to an icy fate on this terrible mountain. Why had he not told us before? As it was, none of us caught his meaning at the time. We heard only incoherent wheezing, which we dismissed as the raving of a dying imbecile.

We buried Lars in a shallow grave and proceeded to unroll the sailcloth. The thread was indeed spun of gold, but if the cloth had any significance it was not apparent. Using Helga’s cutlass, we cut it into sections to make hoods, blankets, bandages, and tourniquets. The next day, before we continued boldly on, Curwen challenged Horst to a wrestling match. The two of them had been arguing for days, following a brouhaha over the pitons. We formed a circle around

[The manuscript breaks off at this point. We are indebted to Waldemar Ng for this translation from the Hungarian. Unlike earlier translators, Ng had access to the actual woodblocks on which the narrator carved his journal. It is now over forty years since they were discovered, wedged in a crevasse halfway up the mountain at Hoon. Did the expedition reach the summit before they vanished without trace? We shall never know. The woodblocks, incidentally, are housed in the Museum at Ack-on-the-Vug, where they are guarded by a surly curator named Mungo. Gifts of raw meat and insect repellant are likely to melt Mungo’s cold black heart, should one wish to examine the woodblocks at leisure.]

Ned! Ned! Prick up your ears, for you must listen out for the sound of clopping hooves! It is a sound that betokens the coming of the preacher man astride his horse. The horse has been shod with iron horseshoes by the fat florid farrier at the fearsome fiery forge. While he waited for his horse to be shod the preacher man stood by the horse trough in the market square, preaching. He preached of a sulphurous vision of times to come, and the villagers trembled. Then the farrier’s urchin came running to tell him his horse was duly shod, and the preacher man stalked off to the farrier and paid him for his labour and mounted his horse and came a-clopping along the high ridge, silhouetted against the darkening sky. As night fell, he dismounted from his horse and tied it with a halter to a sturdy tree trunk by a brook, and he unrolled upon the ground his sleeping bag, a secondhand sleeping bag that once had belonged to an Antarctic explorer. Then the preacher man dipped his tin cup into the brook and gave water to his horse, and dipped the tin cup again and drank it off, and then he made a fire using gathered sticks and kindling. The moon looked down upon him, and he looked up at the moon. He shook his fist at it, but shouted no imprecations, for he did not wish to cause his horse alarm. The horse was timid.

Ned is tucked up in a makeshift bed on the balcony. The stillness of the night is punctuated by the hacking of his cough. Ned is tubercular, hence the balcony. His parents had not the means to send him to a high and healthful Alpine sanitarium, but their simple home has a balcony, so that is where they put him. Out there, he will be the first to hear the clopping hooves of the preacher man’s horse, when at last he comes a-calling. In the fug of their parlour below stairs Ned’s parents huddle around their radio, listening to dance tunes by Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra, and to strange buzzes and whistles and hisses and hums and crackles which interrupt the broadcast now and then, as if some alien intelligence far away in the boundless firmament is trying to communicate with them. There is a fire in the grate, made with gathered sticks and kindling, and it crackles like the radio.

The preacher man tied a nosebag filled with feed to his horse, and then he squatted by the fire and plucked from the griddle balanced over it the sausages he had cooked for his supper. As he chewed, the stars twinkled in the black sky. He could not bear to look up at them. He stared instead into the fire, and saw imps and demons dancing, and souls in torment. The horse shuddered, and kicked the sturdy tree trunk, but weakly. The preacher man had rescued it from the knackers yard, paying a pittance to the knackerman. He had yet to give the horse a name. In a pocket of his preacher’s black suit, as black as the sky, he had a list of the names of racehorses. He would pick one, all in good time, for this horse, if it lived. Musing over the names of racehorses was sinful, but like all men, he was a sinner. There was gristle in his sausages.

In the bed upon the balcony, Ned, his ears pricked up to hear the clopping of hooves, should they come clopping, cannot stir. He is tied to the bed with bindings. His parents had listened to a radio programme in which Blötzmann propounded his views on the treatment of the tubercular. Several parts of it had been inaudible due to buzzes and whistles and hisses and hums and crackles, and they had pieced together afterwards what they understood. Balcony air, plenty of milk, and binding to the bed. Ned hears nothing but the racking of his cough and the howling of distant wolves. He stares up at the stars, and gives them names. In one of his pyjama pockets he has a list of the names of racehorses, a list he has committed to memory, and he passes his tubercular time allotting the names to the stars in the sky.

Morning came, and the preacher man kicked the embers of the fire and smeared his face with the ashes. Birds were twittering in the trees, and he cursed them. He had specific sets of curses for different types of birds, and he knew all their songs, he had learnt them long ago at his mother’s knee. He cursed his mother too. He pictured her in her cell at the lunatic asylum, perched on an Alpine slope. She would greet the morning with her own demented song. He was thankful he no longer had to hear it. The horse was still asleep. The preacher man pissed into the brook. He fought a craving to eat an eel for breakfast. He awoke his horse and mounted it and set it a-clopping with a kick.

As dawn comes, Ned falls asleep, bound to his balcony bed. Below, his parents tend to their cows and their poultry. They keep their eyes peeled for the postman. They are expecting a parcel.

Outshone by the sun, the stars were no longer visible, so the preacher man could gaze up at the heavens without fear. His horse clopped along, back on the high ridge, out of the valley.

Ned’s head is awash with dreams. He dreams of cows and poultry and racehorses, all horribly intermingled, cows with chicken heads and racehorses with beaks and feathers and chickens that snort like racehorses. Stars burst and explode, birds sing, and alien beings from far in the boundless firmament buzz and whistle and hiss and hum and crackle. And there comes a sound of the clopping of hooves, at first very quiet, as if from afar, but it grows louder and louder, closer and closer, and Ned wakes from his dreams, and still he hears the clopping of hooves, and he rises as far as he can from his makeshift bed and weakly he calls to his parents below, “Ma! Pa! I hear the clopping of hooves! The preacher man is come!” and the effort of calling makes him cough and cough, and he collapses back on the bed on the balcony, thin and frail and tubercular. But his parents do not hear him, for they have spotted the postman, in his little red van, chugging along the lonely road below, and they run down the hill to wave him to a halt.

Up on the bridge, the preacher man’s horse, exhausted, collapsed beneath him.

The birds fall silent. The radio crackles. Ned coughs.

There is no parcel from the postman today.

The picnic fly is among the most vexing creatures ever created by the Almighty. While it is indubitably true that He moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, it baffles the brain to wonder what moved Him to move in such a way that He felt inspired to think up, fashion, and let loose upon the world the picnic fly.

There is a body of opinion that the picnic bee, picnic wasp, and particularly the swarm of picnic hornets are more vexing than the picnic fly. Bee, wasp, and hornet, runs the argument, have tiny pointy envenomed protuberances with which they can sting any patches of bare flesh paraded by a picnicker, sometimes, though not often, resulting in an agonising death. The picnic fly, on the other hand, is by comparison harmless. This argument carries much weight, and even as I write I find myself wondering how it can be that I can possibly justify a claim that the picnic fly is the more vexing flying beastie. But I shall plough on regardless of common sense. That is my way.

Picnic flies usually go about in small swarms. They will hover in the air, at about human adult head height, at something of a loose end, awaiting the arrival of a brake containing picnickers with their picnicking appurtenances. Upon the arrival of the brake in the buttercup-dappled meadow by the gurgling brook, the picnic flies will disperse upon the air, temporarily. They do this because no picnicker in their right mind would lay the picnic blanket on ground immediately below a hovering swarm of picnic flies.

Note : this is not to say that all picnickers are necessarily in their right minds. Some are deranged or otherwise have dislodgements of the brain which cause them to make foolish picnic decisions. The terms “picnic fool” or “picnic fathead” have been coined to describe such persons. Neither are terms which should be bandied carelessly about. It is advisable to be on firm ground when uttering the charge.

Each picnic fly will now watch carefully as the preparations for the picnic are made by those who tumble out of the brake. Timing, for the picnic flies, is of the essence. They will not reconvene, forming a hovering swarm at human adult head height over the picnic, until it has been fully assembled. Thus, the picnic blanket is laid out and, if there is a hint of wind, stones will be collected to weigh down the corners. Folding chairs may be unfolded and placed around the blanket for the elderly, the infirm, or the picnic-inexperienced. The hamper or hampers will then be removed from the brake, and the contents arranged upon the blanket. In addition to cups and beakers and plates and saucers and bowls and dishes and cutlery, cutlery, cutlery, there will be sausages and pies and fruits of various kinds and bloater paste sandwiches and flans and tarts and Laughing Cow foil-enwrapped cheese triangles and biscuits and trifle and marmalade and pickled onions and butter and roll-mops and salads and iced buns and sliced cold meats and pastries and boiled eggs and chocolate buttons and boiled sweets and toffee and pork scratchings and puddings and potato snacks and soup in flasks. Other flasks will contain tea, and there will be lemonade and wine and Tizer and dandelion-and-burdock and beer and sherry and cans of Squelcho!. Depending on the picnic demographic, there may also be laid out, near to but not on the blanket, tennis racquets and tennis balls and medicine balls and the appropriate kit for sword-fights, archery contests, and hammer-throwing.

Within seconds of the last item being laid out and each picnicker sat or sprawled, the swarm of picnic flies will suddenly reappear, hovering directly over the picnic blanket. Taking their turns, a few flies at a time will separate from the swarm and make darting flights down towards the blanket, where they will plod on their tiny suckered feet across, say, the icing on an iced bun. They will regurgitate some sort of godawful gack from their innards on to the icing, then suck it, together with a modicum of the icing, back up into their tiny but ravenous fly’s maw. Momentarily sated, this grouplet of picnic flies will return to hovering-height, and another contingent will descend.

It is important to note two things about the activity described. First, that it all takes place in a matter of a few seconds, if that. Also, that flies are pretty tiny, as well as quick, so the disgusting business with the regurgitation and the sucking is not generally visible to the unassisted eye of the picnicker. What usually happens is that one of the picnickers – it may be a chap with a decisive moustache and a blazer and cravat – flails his arms in an attempt to swat the fly. Unfortunately, by the time the chap’s brain has sent the signal to his arm to flail, the fly will have done its unseemly feeding and be halfway back to the hovering swarm. I told you they were quick. And because the unseemly feeding is not apparent to the unassisted picnicking eye, what then happens is that another picnicker – it may be a demure young lady in a bonnet, clutching a slim volume of twee verse, or a bluestocking with a thick hefty book of intractable German philosophy – will pick up the iced bun with her free hand and take a dainty bite from it. Along with bun and icing, she will then of course swallow what remains of the picnic fly’s godawful gack, that part of it which it did not suck back into its maw.

I would argue that this is precisely why the picnic fly is the more vexing. At least you know where you are with a bee or a wasp or a hornet, singly or in swarms. If they cannot be swatted away, and a picnicker is stung, then the first aid kit can be fetched from the glove compartment of the brake, and salve and bandages applied. As I said, agonising death is rare, and basic cosseting will usually be all that is required. The picnic flies, being smaller and quicker and more determined than bees, wasps, and hornets, will be as near as dammit impossible to swat away, and their predations of the sausages and pies and fruits of various kinds and bloater paste sandwiches and flans and tarts and Laughing Cow foil-enwrapped cheese triangles and biscuits and trifle and marmalade and pickled onions and butter and roll-mops and salads and iced buns and sliced cold meats and pastries and boiled eggs and chocolate buttons and boiled sweets and toffee and pork scratchings and puddings and potato snacks will be all the more relentless. Each and every picnicker will climb back into the brake with a small amount of godawful gack in their stomachs, or lodged in their gums, with who knows what dastardly eventualities.

The best one can hope for is that at least some of the picnic flies will be fated to drown in the soup or tea or lemonade or wine or Tizer or dandelion-and-burdock or beer or sherry or, if they manage to negotiate the narrow opening in the lid, the cans of Squelcho!.

Does anyone remember the rhyme children used to sing, long long ago?

Wod & Pym, the choc ice men
Clattering towards the buffers
Their choc ices melt in the noonday sun
They’re such a pair of duffers!

That was the version I knew, which I sang lustily, with my tiny pals, as we skittered and scampered and made mischief in the bomb craters. I had absolutely no idea what we were singing about, and I had forgotten the song itself, until, the other day, I heard it on the radio. I was listening to a play. It was dull and foolish and badly acted, and beset by awful hissing and feedback, which may or may not have been deliberate. I would have switched the radio off had I had the chops to rise from my pallet of straw and cross the barn to do so, but I had a splint on my leg and a bandaged head and no sense of purpose. So I just lay there listening, in the small hours of the morning, before the crows began to caw, before the milkman started on his rounds.

There was a scene in the play, set, as far as I could gather, in the dystopian ruins of a bombed city, where the protagonists, a milkman and his floozie, were having a terrible row about crows. Exhausted by shouting, they both fell silent, and then, as from a distance, I heard the song, chanted by children somewhere in the rubble. It faded, there was hissing, and the pair started arguing again.

It would be nice to be able to say that hearing the song again after all these years brought memories of childhood flooding back, but it didn’t, not really. It did make me sit up on my pallet of straw, as best as I was able. Alert, I scribbled the words on the back of a cornflake packet. I might never sing again, if my childish caterwauling could have been called singing, but I felt a great sense of urgency to know more about Wod and Pym. Who were they? Why were they clattering towards buffers? Did their choc ices really melt in the noonday sun? Had they ever really existed? I suppose I thought that if I could find answers to those questions I could learn something, too, about my own life, about my past, about the trajectory that had taken me from the bomb craters of a ruined city to this barn, through the roof of which the rain came in, when it was raining, where my only visitor was the milkman on his morning rounds, where the only sounds were the cawing of crows and radio broadcasts, where time passed slowly, and there were no clocks.

When the milkman came that morning I pressed the torn scrap of cornflake packet into his hand, and pleaded with him to find out everything he could about the rhyme. He said he was a busy milkman, but that once a fortnight the mobile library parked on a patch of ground hard by the dairy, and he would try his best to help me. I told him he was a saint. He said he must be getting on, as he had much milk to deliver. I asked him to turn off the radio as he left. They were playing music now, Xavier Cugat or some such, and I could not bear it. Outside, the crows were cawing.

They say there was once a grisly murder in this barn. I have seen no ghosts. There is an ethereal albino hen that haunts my dreams, with its terrible eggs, but I do not think that counts.

The milkman was as good as his word. I do not know how many days passed before he came bearing a few pages torn out of a reference book, for I did not keep a tally. He gave me the pages, and a bottle of milk, and asked me if I wanted the radio turned on before he left. Again I compared him to a saint, and he blushed. One does not often see a milkman blush. I told him I was done with radio broadcasts, and that he could take the radio set away with him, and if he did not want it for himself then to drop it into a pond. He thanked me and unplugged it and left. He did not say what he would do with it. I listened out for a splash, but the rain was dripping through the roof, relentlessly, and the bandages around my ears would have muffled any other sound.

What I learned from the pages torn from the reference book by the milkman was that Wod and Pym were, indeed, true historical characters, from the previous century. They were a pair of chancers, continually thinking up money-making schemes, schemes invariably doomed to failure, sometimes leading to spells of imprisonment, sometimes leading to riot in small shabby townships. They made and sold decoy ducks, pin cushions, alarm bells. They planned but did not realise a crocus plantation. They hawked taffy. And with the coming of the railways, they devised their travelling choc ice shop. The idea was to be constantly mobile, aboard a locomotive, selling choc ices to hot and eager tinies at each railway station they stopped at. But neither Wod nor Pym gave a thought to refrigeration, and the train they commandeered crossed desert and prairie, not realms of ice and snow. This was the flaw that sunk their scheme, and for which they were ridiculed by the tinies gathered at hot sun-bashed stations along the line.

Hence the song I had sung in my very different childhood, when it was cold, when the wind howling through the ruins chilled my bones, when I sucked icicles and shivered in the porch of the ruined dancehall, wherein those adults who had not yet fled the city danced to the sounds of Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra, piped through a Tannoy, loud as bombs.

I have written before about hiking pickles, and I make no apology for turning to the subject once again. It is, I would attest, a topic of endless fascination. Most reasonable people would agree that there are few spheres of human activity which lend themselves to the likelihood of becoming embrangled in a proper pickle as hiking. When we consider just three of the challenges with which the hiker must contend – weather, terrain, and human folly – it is hardly surprising that pickles are a commonplace of the hiker’s lot.

But let us not make the mistake of muddling the pure hiking pickle with such other pickles as one might be plunged into when hiking. Take, as mentioned, the terrain. A hiker might be hiking in the fells, and, in the enshrouding mist, come suddenly upon a tarn, so suddenly that he fails to break his hiking stride, and instead finds himself ankle- or knee- or, good heavens!, waist-deep in tarn-water. In itself, this is not a proper pickle, as the hiker merely needs to turn around and hike back out of the wet tarn on to the dry fell. There will be a bit of a pother about drying out the tarn-soaked boots and socks and trousers, never an easy task in the moist air of the enshrouding mist, but this hardly constitutes a pickle. The hiker can sit on a stone and smoke his pipe and consult his map of the fells while awaiting a sunburst. No, for it to be a proper pickle we would have to add the detail that, lurking in the tarn, below the surface, is an unimaginably tangled tangle of subaquatic creeper or nettlevine, possibly with an eerie primitive sentience, such that at the first hint of the hiker’s legs invading its watery domain, it wraps itself round and round, with the rapidity and colossal strength of a boa constrictor, thus entrapping the hiker helplessly. Up on the remote fells, in the mist, his cries for help will be unheard, except by the birds of the fell, and other creatures. If he dares plunge his arms into the tarn, to make an attempt to untangle his lower limbs from the fiendish vegetation, then his arms too will become entangled, making his predicament all the more terrible. This, you can be sure, would be a proper pickle. But is it a hiking pickle per se?

I would argue that what we have here, in this mercifully theoretical scene, is not a hiking pickle but a tarn pickle, or even an uncanny subaquatic sentient vegetation pickle. The fact that our hiker hiked across the fells to get into this pickle is, in a sense, incidental. Given the mist, and the tarn, the very same pickle could happen to, say, a farm-person in search of a lost sheep, or an athlete in training for a prize race, or a commando parachuted on to the fell with instructions to survive until picked up in a week’s time. You get all sorts of people on the fells, and not all of them are hikers.

The true hiking pickle, then, is one in which the action or deed or pursuit of hiking is fundamental to the pickle itself. What we must –

Excuse me, I have just been handed a piece of paper, rife with scribbling.

I see, when reading it, that the scribbling is pertinent, not just to the topic of hiking pickles in general, but to the specific theoretical pickle I have just described. I had better copy it out, so that you may read it too, and to avoid accusations that I am trying to set myself up as the sole authority on this breathtakingly exciting subject.

A Counterblast To Mr Key’s Assertion That The Theoretical Pickle Described Is Not A Hiking Pickle

In attempting to portray the pickle as a tarn pickle or an uncanny subaquatic sentient vegetation pickle, Mr Key posits three non-hiking persons to whom the pickle could have happened. I will take each of these three in turn and demonstrate, in each case, the absolute wrong-headedness of Mr Key’s argument.

I. The farm-person in search of a lost sheep. It is well known that farm-persons know every inch of their land. Be it fell or meadow, field or dale, they know every blade of grass, every pebble, every ditch, every sprig. They certainly know where a bloody tarn is. Even in an enshrouding mist, high on the fell, the farm-person would never plunge inadvertently into a tarn. And even if we wildly surmise that he did, he would, like all farm-persons, be wearing wellington boots, from which he could easily extract his lower legs and leap with great agility out of the tarn and on to the fell, before the submerged creeper or nettlevine had sufficient purchase to entrap him, the outer part of wellington boots being smooth, unlike a hiker’s boots.

II. The athlete in training for a prize race. In this case, Mr Key’s error is so blindingly obvious that a slow-witted monkey would not make it. We have an athlete scampering across the fell, his brain focussed entirely upon the finishing tape of the prize race he is in training for. So, when he plunges all unawares into the mist-hidden tarn, does he stop and allow his legs to be entangled by creepers and nettlevines? Of course he doesn’t! He keeps on running, like the tiptop athlete he is, emerging on the other side of the tarn before any eerily sentient vegetation has a chance to bring him to a halt.

III. The commando parachuted on to the fell with instructions to survive until picked up in a week’s time. Commandos are armed to the teeth. Within seconds of having his lower limbs entangled, the commando would have unsheathed a knife so sharp it would make you shudder, and hacked and slashed at the vegetation to free himself. If, in the process, he hacked and slashed his own legs, he would not care one jot, for as well as knives and guns he has packed in his kit swathe upon swathe of bandages, and sachet upon sachet of disinfectant unguents, and as soon as he has clambered commando-fashion out of the tarn and on to the fell, he will smear and patch up any wounds he has inflicted and be on his way, bent on survival.

It is thus clear that the pickle Mr Key describes is indeed purely a hiking pickle, and could not in any circumstances short of arrant stupidity be considered as any other type of pickle whatsoever.

I stand – no, I hike – corrected.

Well, this is exciting! Today I received in the post a personal letter from “one of the greatest clairvoyants in France and throughout the world”, David Phild! You know, David Phild, Clairvoyance, Numerology, Astrology, Medium, Magical Sciences and Remedial Magnetism! And he has written to me with the thrilling news that all good things will come to me in 2012. Just consider this:

All January – General improvement

18 February – Enormous Money Win

In March – An encounter with love

All April – Lucky at gambling

One day in May – Huge success

In June – Luxury travel

July – A loved one returns

19 August – Big secret revealed

September – Colossal inheritance

October – Good health confirmed

November – Your luxury home

24 December – 12 Sumptuous Gifts

David’s letter was obviously delayed in the post by those scallywags at the Royal Mail, which explains why the predictions for the first quarter of the year didn’t come to pass. There is a very simple reason, which is, as David says, “Important! You will not succeed without your Celestial Owl. Ask for it immediately.” I am going to ask for my owl as soon as I have finished writing this, so at least the rest of the year will go according to plan.

What I like about David is that he does not raise false hopes. He takes pains to point out that by asking for the Owl of Celestial Protection I will not actually receive a real bird in the post. No, what I get will be more valuable than that – a medallion!

This Magnificent Golden Talisman of Great Value has Recognised powers of Protection from evil spells, from misfortune and from health problems.

The engraving and the consistency of your medallion make it one of the most powerful protection domes. It is recognised as fabulous by the greatest Grand Sages and Mediums in the World.

The catalysis of the golden metal and the structure of your skin will generate a variety of beneficial waves that will be your rampart against evil. Some vibrations extinguish witches’ spells as well as spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle against you.

The very composition of the medallion provokes a type of recuperative energy that prevents you from wasting money and having to pay out amounts pointlessly that gradually plunge you into ruin. Under the protection of the Talisman, you will see that a single pound will enable you, under certain conditions, to live for as long as if you owned one hundred pounds.

The Owl can also reactivate your energy and your drive by inundating your cells with a redeeming force of renewal. You will be able to feel better, faster, and for longer, without any medical treatment.

Who wouldn’t want an owl like that?

David’s letter warns me that “what I am doing for you must remain our secret”, so very cleverly, the owl medallion is designed to look like a piece of cheap mass-produced tat., which clearly it is not. I contacted several Grand Sages, using ethereal powers not dissimilar to David’s, and they all confirmed that the Owl of Celestial Protection is absolutely the bee’s knees in the field of talismanic celestial protection through the medium of embossed owl on trinket. “There is no more powerful owl,” said one of these Grand Sages, whose name I didn’t quite catch, though I understand he resides on a mountain peak in a distant eastern realm, obscured by clouds.

I admit to being slightly disappointed that, fantastic as the owl is, David nowhere states that it is anything but silent, and emits no hoots. Quite frankly, even though my Owl of Celestial Protection is a free gift, I would prefer one that hooted. I am sure the construction of a battery-powered hooting medallion cannot be beyond David’s wit. If he needs financial help for its development and protection, he can use the thirty-two pounds I am sending him, as he requests, though nominally this sum is to guarantee my receipt of the Sublime and Detailed Revelation of the 12 Major Visionary Phases. As far as I can gather the free owl doesn’t work without the paid-for revelation, or vice versa. Perhaps I need to clear this up with the Grand Sages before committing myself.

POSTSCRIPT : I had the devil of a time trying to get in touch with the Grand Sages again, what with the weather and the aether and a severe case of the Blavatskys, so in desperation I turned to Het Internet. It made for interesting reading, not least in demonstrating just how selfless “dear David” is. While he is offering me a free owl which will protect me against “spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle”, there is little else about him on the interweb except spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle, much of it quite vicious. The man is sorely in need of his own owl, with or without battery-driven hooting. Indeed, I am so appalled at the contempt in which he is held, I have a good mind, as soon as I receive my owl in the post, to send it back to him, that he may be celestially protected from the brickbats of the spiteful hordes.

In the meantime, I have set to work on the design and production of a Hooting Yard Owl Medallion. Clutch it to your bosom, and you will be granted the power to scamper up mountainsides and shimmy up flagpoles and disport yourself in other high places, there to crow your unstinting devotion to Mr Key from dawn till dusk, and from dusk till dawn. Await your personalised letter, offering you this fabulous owl entirely free of charge except for the charge that has to be levied on the advice of Mr Key’s bank manager.

For previous episodes of Maud, see here

Herewith my report of the events of the 14th inst. If I am required at a future date to give similar accounts of the 14th ult. and the 14th prox. I will be happy to oblige, present circumstances permitting.

My name is Dr Slop and I am a mesmerist, duly certified as such by the Worthy Fellowship of Victorian Mesmerists. On the morning of the 14th inst. I received a summons to the bungalow adjoining the bungalow of which I had recently taken possession. I was given to understand that the maidservant of the bungalow, one Baines, of slovenly yet devoted disposition, had taken leave of her senses and was giving vent to her inner life, in spite of being a person of the lower orders. In a matter of such urgency I dispense with the social niceties and I swept with élan and steely determination out of doors without wearing a hat.

Upon opening the gate of the adjoining bungalow and proceeding along the garden path, I was disconcerted to encounter a cad. The cad began to explain that his dearest wish was to entice the lady of the bungalow into the garden, and could I assist in persuading her? I cut him short with a clean gentlemanly thrust of my fist into his windpipe, a ploy I learned when serving overseas in the tropics, where it saved my bacon on more than one occasion. The cad collapsed upon the garden path and will not, I warrant, pester the lady for some time to come. My ears were offended by his unmanly gasping and gurgling noises, so before continuing to the front door I kicked him in the head several times.

I rapped upon the door of the bungalow with great urgency, whereupon I was ushered inside by a sloven I took to be the maidservant, Baines. Before I had the opportunity to place her head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands in order to mesmerise her, her mistress cried weakly to me from the breakfast parlour. She insisted that I join her for a breakfast of devilled kidneys before dealing with the patient. My own preference has always been for kedgeree, bloaters, and raw liver as the first meal of the day, and indeed I had already eaten double helpings of all, and had additional portions tucked in my pockets in case of sudden peckishness, but one does not refuse a breakfast invitation from a neurasthenic lady, so I sat at the table with her and tucked my napkin under my chin.

While I waited for Baines to pile my plate high, the lady, who I was given to understand had already eaten one devilled kidney, began to rock back and forth on her chair. Her pallid face blushed crimson, her Pre-Raphaelite tresses stood stiffly on end as if she were attached to one of those newfangled electromagnetic machines, and she began to declaim incomprehensible gibberish in a grating and disturbingly masculine voice. This was no mere attack of the vapours.

I leapt up from my chair and was about to place the lady’s head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands over her, when Baines, behind me, dropped the plate and clutched at my arm. Before I was able to berate her for the unseemly and socially reprehensible nature of her action, she gibbered something. Incapable of understanding her strangulated lower class vowels, I slapped her several times across the face, then several more times, and demanded that she speak slowly and clearly and in the best approximation she could manage of civilised human speech.

I must commend her efforts, for by listening closely I learned that in all likelihood the lady’s alarmingly unladylike plight was due to some malign tampering with the devilled kidneys, which had been prepared by a person from Porlock who was the devil incarnate and who was chained up downstairs in the basement where he had been acting as a skivvy but today had been recklessly entrusted with cooking the breakfast.

Apprised of this information, I tossed the maidservant a penny, as one might to a performing monkey, and proceeded with élan and steely determination down to the basement to confront the fiend. The sloven had spoken the truth, for there he was, red and horned and cloven-hooved and goaty. I was about to place his head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands over him when something quite unprecedented happened. Nothing in all my experience, not even when I was serving overseas in the tropics and was regularly subject to all sorts of weird and mind-numbing doo-dah, was anything like this.

One moment I was taking a quick bite out of a bloater from my pocket preparatory to manoeuvring the vice into position, the next I was chained and red and horned and cloven-hooved and goaty and gazing back at… myself. I, or he, had not even swallowed the mouthful of bloater. Somehow the person from Porlock, the devil incarnate, had exchanged bodies with me, in an instant. I watched in horror as he proceeded up the stairs with élan and steely determination, bent on who knows what maleficent purpose. I rattled my chains and wept.

Thus far, I have nothing further to report. So loud does the steam hiss through the pipes in this basement kitchen that I cannot hear anything of what is transpiring upstairs. I must wait for Baines, I do not know for how long. My only solace is that the length of my chain is sufficient to allow me unhindered access to the pantry, where there are handsome supplies of kedgeree and bloaters and raw liver.

Q – What is your claim to fame?

A – My claim to fame, though modest, is one of which I am tremendously proud, and which I never tire of shouting from the rooftops, with the aid of a Tannoy. I cocked a snook at Pook Tuncks.

Q – That is flabbergasting. Tell us more.

A – Gladly. One springtime day I was bustling along the boulevard, bustle bustle, when across the way I spotted Pook Tuncks. He was standing, stock still, in the lee of a linden tree, lost, I thought, in thought. I hailed him. “Ahoy there! Pook Tuncks!” I boomed, “Thou Jesuitical duck-mesmerising versifier!” And I cocked a snook at him, and bustled on along the boulevard without waiting for a reply. When cocking a snook, one does not entertain a response, or the point is lost.

Q – What happened next?

A – My bustling continued until I arrived at a snackbar. It was called Big Pingu Snackbar and was situated at the intersection of the boulevard and Erebus And Terror Street. It is no longer there. The property is now I think a palazzo di tat. This then extant snackbar I entered, and strutted to the counter, where I ordered a snack before sitting down at a table by the window where I had a good view of the boulevard. I had bustled too far along from Pook Tuncks and the linden tree for either to be visible, though other linden trees I could see.

Q – What form of snack did you order?

A – A pickle-packed sandwich and a beaker of milk. Service at the snackbar was woeful, which is perhaps one reason why it closed down. I had to wait a long time, sitting looking out of the window, before a grim-faced bepimpled sallow stooped skivvy brought my snack to the table. No napkin was provided, so there was an altercation. I insist on several napkins in snackbars, one for my lap, one on which to wipe my hands, one with which to dab my lips, one to mop up any spillages I might cause during my snacking, and one for later use, which I pop into my pocket. But I was given no napkin at all, until I made loud complaint. The loudness was unassisted, in that I did not have recourse to the Tannoy I use nowadays to bruit my claim to fame abroad. My voice can be loud enough in the confined space of a snackbar, and the Big Pingu Snackbar, despite its name, was not a big snackbar. The skivvy was at first unwilling to bring me a napkin, which I thought odd. Surely, I thundered, the napkin is an essential component of any snackbar’s toolkit? My use of the word “toolkit” as it is deployed by management consultants and pointyheads bewildered the skivvy, or at least she pretended bewilderment. It was hard to tell. In my experience snackbar skivvies can be past masters at dissembling. My insistence and loudness and eye-popping frenzy did persuade this one to fetch my napkin, but she brought just one. I lowered my voice, just a tad, and explained that I required several napkins, though I did not itemise the uses to which I would put them, as I have done for you. It was not, in my view, any business of the skivvy’s. I was patronising the snackbar and I wanted my napkins, it was really as simple as that.

Q – This is all very interesting, but what of Pook Tuncks? Did he detach himself from the lee of the linden tree and pursue you into the snackbar?

A – I have yet to conclude the anecdote of the napkins.

Q – Well, let us pass on that. I think the listeners are agog re Pook Tuncks.

A – It is, I promise you, an anecdote both instructive and amusing and well worth the hearing.

Q – Be that as it may, this programme is called “My Claim To Fame”, not “Napkin World” or “Annals Of The Snackbars”, and your claim to fame is that you cocked a snook at Pook Tuncks, so perhaps we could concentrate on that.

A – I would not want it to be thought I am some kind of napkin monomaniac, so, reluctantly, I will desist. But I must ask, do those napkin and snackbar shows exist, or did you just make them up for the purposes of your argument?

Q – I am merely the host and presenter and, if you like, anchor of “My Claim To Fame”, so I am not familiar with the full schedule of programmes. I cannot say for certain whether those I adverted to exist or not.

A – Could you find out, while I sit here twiddling my thumbs?

Q – Now is not the best time. Perhaps at the end of the show you and I could go together to see the programme director, within whose head is gathered such a body of knowledge of the schedules that it would dazzle you.

A – That sounds like a capital idea.

Q – So, Pook Tuncks…

A – And if there is not currently a snackbar and napkin strand, then I would be happy to present such a programme, daily, at breakfast time, or even before breakfast, at dawn, or before dawn, in the middle of the night.

Q – I am sure the programme director would be only too willing to discuss that with you.

A – Good, that is settled then.

Q – Then let us proceed. Did Pook Tuncks come crashing into the snackbar, hot on your heels, to berate you for cocking a snook at him?

A – No, he did not. I never saw hide nor hair of him again, ever after. I like to think my cocking a snook at him must have given him pause, and caused him to retreat, away from the boulevard and the lee of the linden tree, into reclusion and solitude and the bleak existence of a hermit, shuttered in a hut on a remote promontory far from humankind. Such is the power of my snook, when cocked.

Q – Gosh.

[Tinkly, hesitant, music, followed by the weather forecast.]

Often, if you are out of doors and crane your neck at such an angle that you are looking up at the sky, you will see a flock of birds. Not always, but often, often enough in any case to make my opening sentence credible. I strive, as a writer, to be credible. I think all writers do. We want readers to believe what we are telling them, if only temporarily, during the act of reading. This is the case even with persons who write of outlandish and preposterous things, for example those kinds of science fiction stories set in the distant future on far-flung planets, where characters with names like Zybog and Kagvond try to prevent an explosion at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215, while menaced by intergalactic beings with tentacles and metallic parts. This is obviously tosh, but the writer will try to make it credible. As soon as you put the potboiler or pulp magazine aside, you can dismiss what you have just read as piffle. The important thing is that you believe it while you are reading it.

So I do not think it is outwith the bounds of reason to claim that, in peering up at the sky, you will often see a flock of birds. It depends where you are, of course. Some areas are more bird-haunted than others. If you are in a desert, you might see a flock of vultures, circling over potential carrion, but probably not as often as, at the seaside, you might spot a flock of seagulls. In fact at some seaside resorts, particularly those with gigantic rubbish tips in the vicinity, it is hard to look up at the sky without seeing teeming seagulls. The desert and the seaside are extreme cases, geographically, but the fact that in both, or rather above both, one might glimpse flocks of birds is telling, I think, in terms of my argument.

Not all birds fly about in flocks. Come to think of it, not all birds fly. The ostrich, for example, is a flightless bird, and a remarkably stupid one. That being so, you are unlikely to read a sentence such as

Above, a huge flock of ostriches swooped in the blue sky, silhouetted against the blazing sun at noon on Thursday.

which would probably cause you to fling the book across the room in exasperation. On the other hand, you might find it credible if the sentence was

Above, a huge flock of ostriches swooped in the beige sky, silhouetted against the blazing suns at noon on Thursday at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215, where Zybog and Kagvond were doing battle with intergalactic beings with tentacles and metallic parts while trying to prevent an explosion which would have unforeseeable effects on the space-time continuum.

In this context, flying ostriches might be credible. Much depends on your tolerance for science fiction. If it is low, you might still fling the book across the room in exasperation, and go to find something else to read.

If a writer wishes to entertain you, however fleetingly, with a scene in which a flock of birds is visible in the sky, they will need to do a spot of ornithological research to ensure that the birds they mention are indeed ones that fly about in flocks. One of the reasons for this is that no writer is omniscient, and it may well be that among their readers are persons who know more than they do about particular subjects. The ignorant but wily writer can get around this by being non-specific, as in this example:

“Gosh, Primrose, look! There is a huge flock of birds in the sky!”

The risk here is that the ornithologically-competent reader could find themselves wondering what type of birds, precisely, are being pointed out to international woman of mystery Primrose Dent in your exciting espionage thriller. In their wondering, they are likely to become distracted and disengaged from the convoluted plot you are doing your best to keep moving briskly along, and they might fling the book across the room in exasperation. It would be better, then, to write

“Gosh, Primrose, look! There is a huge flock of starlings in the sky!”

as starlings do in fact fly in flocks. Your bird-brainy reader will be entertained, and may even impute to you more ornithological knowledge than you actually possess. This is not without its own risks, but generally speaking the reader will bask in their delusion so long as you do not get too carried away. Just because you know that starlings fly in flocks does not mean that you can start blathering on about their feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, and what have you, unless of course you already know about these things. If you do not, but still feel impelled to write about starlings’ feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, etcetera, to add a piquant starlingy quality to your prose, then for God’s sake submit your manuscript to a trained ornithologist before unleashing it upon the world. This is particularly important if, in devising the character of international woman of mystery Primrose Dent, you decide it would be apt to make her a starling expert. If you cannot be bothered to do the research, or cannot afford the services of an ornithology adviser, your best bet would be to make Primrose Dent an intergalactic woman of mystery, and have her scooting about bent on espionage at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215. That way, she can be an expert on space-starlings rather than real, earthly starlings, and you can write whatever you like about their feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, etcetera, because you will be making it all up. Just don’t forget to make it credible.

It may be that you wish to peer at flocks of birds in the sky without ever writing a word about them. In that case, take a pair of binoculars and a packed lunch, and stride up into the hills, and gaze. Even in areas less bird-haunted, sooner or later a flock of birds will appear in the sky, God willing.