I was on the brink, but there was muffling, so it was not quite clear to me what I was on the brink of. Muffles have that effect, they make things uncertain and imprecise, it is in their nature. Much of the time muffles are not unwelcome. It is a small mercy to be muffled against the sundry horrors with which the world is rife. I am tempted to list them, but I will forego the opportunity, partly because my horrors are unlikely to coincide with your horrors. We will have differing lists. That which I am ecstatic, yes, ecstatic, to be muffled against may be a source of thrill and pang for others, and vice versa.

Not that we should confuse a brink necessarily with a horror. Some brinks border horror, but others do not. That is why it was so unhelpful, in the circumstances, to be muffled. I did not know what I was on the brink of, so I did not know whether to shrink from it, or to embrace it with open arms. Those are two common responses to being on the brink. Making a quick about turn or striving desperately forwards are two others. In all cases it is obviously a bloody good idea to know the nature of the brink before deciding what to do.

But how to make an informed decision when there is muffling? Therein lies the beauty of brinkmanship. This is a much misunderstood term. What it means, in essence, is to follow the tenets of Brinkman. Like his near-namesakes Superman and Spiderman, Brinkman is a superhero. His adventures have been recorded in comic books, television serials, and motion pictures, most recently the blockbuster Brinkman 7 : Back From The Brink! which, I am afraid to say, is somewhat less exciting than that exclamation mark may lead you to believe. It certainly lacks the punch and sheer emotional engagement of my bemufflement on an unidentified brink. As I said in my review of the film,

Brinkman 7 : Back From The Brink! is somewhat less exciting than that exclamation mark may lead you to believe. It certainly lacks the punch and sheer emotional engagement one might experience if one were on an actual brink, especially with attendant muffles.

The six earlier Brinkman films were not only full of thrills and spills, but contained lots of scenes where Brinkman was given the opportunity to expound his tenets of brinkmanship. I saw all of the films, several times, and I took notes, because I wanted to be prepared, when on a brink, to know just what to do.

It is in Brinkman 4 : The Brink’s-MAT Robbery that Brinkman comes closest to dealing with muffles. This is the film where Brinkman is called in to help solve the so-called “crime of the century”, when robbers stole twenty-six million pounds’ worth of gold, diamonds, and cash in a raid on the Brink’s-MAT warehouse at Heathrow Airport on 26 November 1983. In this fictionalised version, the befuddled coppers think the name of the warehouse is a reference to some sort of mat or rug which Brinkman uses to bridge the gap over a brink and what lies beyond the brink, and make an urgent call on the Brinkphone. Even though Brinkman has no idea what they are talking about – he does not own such a mat or rug – he is a superhero, so he changes into his costume of red and green and yellow jumpsuit with an orange winged helmet and visor, both of which have a startling and garish letter B emblazoned upon them, and he leaps into the Brinkmobile and heads across town to police headquarters. On his way there, he drives into an area of mufflement. Though he is not actually on any kind of brink at the time, it is instructive to watch as he copes. To a soundtrack of pounding music, recorded I think by a group of hairy persons practised in the art of the power ballad, Brinkman revs the engine of the Brinkmobile and utters one of his exclamatory catchphrases – “Crikey!” or “Crumbs!” as I recall – and simply roars through the muffles with recklessness, aplomb, and pluck. I had to put down the pad in which I was making notes to clap my hands in spontaneous applause.

I recalled that lesson when I stood on the brink, muffled. There were two problems. First, as I said, Brinkman was not on a brink when he found himself enmuffled. It would be too charitable to say that, on the contrary, he was on the brink of solving the Brink’s-MAT Robbery, because he wasn’t. He hadn’t even arrived at the police station. Second, he was aboard the Brinkmobile, whereas I was on foot. I didn’t have a Brinkmobile, or an ordinary car, or even a bicycle. There was just me, in my Uggs, on a muffled brink.

I reflected for a long time. Then I shouted “Crikey!” or “Crumbs!”, and I jumped.

NOTE : In spite of the wealth of evidence to be found in the comic books and television serials and motion pictures, there is a persistent misapprehension that Brinkman’s Brinkmobile is not a souped-up jalopy but a ship. This clearly stems from the widespread misunderstanding of the word “brinkmanship”. While it is true that in Brinkman 5 : Ahoy There Brinkman!, Shiver-Me-Timbers! Brinkman spends most of the film aboard a ship, getting into all sorts of flaps with pirates and ghosts of pirates, it is clearly not his own ship. In fact, there are several scenes where it is made explicit that it is one of L Ron Hubbard’s Sea Org ships, though for legal reasons the specific name of the ship was obscured by filmic muffle.

Forgive me if I lapse into a wee splurge of self-referential twaddle, but I thought I would mark the end of the first quarter of the year with a review of my daily essays project. Back on the first of January, in On Perpilocution, I set myself what I described as a “foolhardy” task, to write roughly a thousand words a day on whatever topics arrived in my head. I was pretty well convinced that this plan would fail, probably about halfway through January. (A few years ago, I had the less rigorous ambition of updating Hooting Yard with a daily postage, of indeterminate length, and this collapsed early on when I missed a day.) So I am mightily surprised to have got through three entire months without a hitch.

On three occasions, I cheated, in that I reposted older pieces from the archive, though in each case they were sufficiently elderly that they may well have been new to the less than indefatigable devotee. And one day in February I was pleased to offer Hooting Yard space for a guest postage by the blogger BlackberryJuniper And Sherbet for her expert analysis of the magnificence of Peter Wyngarde, a topic she is far better qualified to address than I am. Other than on those four days, I have managed to bash out around a thousand words.

Including those mentioned above, the essays covered perpilocution, the moustache of Archduke Stephen, Palatine of Hungary, east and west and left and right, potatoes, fogous, naming your child after your favourite reservoir, the falsely negative portrayal of U-boat sailors, voodoo athletics, my father, gulls’ eggs, clunks, Skippy the bush kangaroo, feral goblins, first encounters, tin foil, apps, control of the fiscal levers, Babinsky’s idiot half-brother, the Goliath bird-eating spider, Dickensian characters, true grit, barking up the wrong tree, government-controlled origami, Porridge Island, the devil in the detail, Speed, the Latin Mass and Moby-Dick, quadruple points, truculent peasantry, The Love Song Of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, scree, blessing cotton socks, the collapse of civilisations, the administration of lighthouses, groovy bongos, Balaam and his ass, replacement bus services, “the Scottish play”, groaning minions, having the prize within one’s grasp, nitwits, gods, the lambing-hall boogie, Pontiuses, the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge, certain books I have read, the magnificence of Peter Wyngarde, sand robots, birds, my own Zona, The Wellspring Of Debauchery, a yapping dog and a bramble patch and a bog, the dubbin club, jelly, Belgian archery, marshy punting, a darkling plain, silent monkey, counting corks, the screaming abdabs, the air, a spook’s briefcase, etiquette, “on and on and on,” dreams of Pointy Town, chairlift dingbats, mods and rockers and widows and orphans, the plains of Gath, curlews, the thing that smelled of birds, pickles and pluck and gumption, fate, reggae for swans, the newty field, a couple of art exhibitions, Soviet hen coops, certain ants, bravura bunkum, Captain Nitty, the bad vicarage, sudden darting movements in the insect world, the pecking order, my transformation, bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix, the naming of nuts, razzle dazzle and its avoidance, the balletomane Nan Kew, King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring System, Its Janitor, And Its Chatelaine, King Jasper’s bones, and eggheads. I think there is a pleasing variety of subject matter, and I have done my best not to bang on and on about the same old guff day in day out.

I do wonder how many people actually bother to read all of these outpourings, and have had a few crises of confidence, when siren voices called to me to chuck the whole thing in, and put my feet up, and return to conventional itsy bitsy blogging. But, as Outa_Spaceman discovered with his cardboard signage project in 2011 – which inspired the idea of the daily essays – a plan such as this has its own momentum. I reached the point a fair few weeks ago where I could not imagine allowing the day to pass without its allotted screed.

Two things occur to me on looking at that list above. One is that I have made use of almost none of the suggestions made by helpful readers in response to my plea, in On Perpilocution, to nominate topics I might profitably address. This may make me seem dismissive and ungrateful. I am anything but. I am consciously keeping many of those suggested titles in reserve. Bear in mind we have three-quarters of the year yet to come, and who knows when I might be struck by a more severe case of vacancy-between-the-ears than has yet afflicted me? The sense of security in having a batch of possible essay titles available to me in times of mental befuddlement is most welcome. So thank you – and keep ’em coming!

The second thing that occurs to me is that it might be interesting to rearrange the essays into something approaching alphabetical order, for the forthcoming paperback edition. This should be available very shortly, I hope, entitled Hooting Yard Quarterly, Volume I Number I, Spring 2012. Alphabetical order would grant the collection an encyclopaedic air, and it has long been my ambition to present the world with an encyclopaedic body of knowledge wrung from my cranium. This might also help me to identify gaps. Well, we shall see what the next quarter of the year brings. By the end of June, if all goes according to plan, there should be another ninety-one essays, on divers topics, posted here daily.

Do bear in mind this is serious work undertaken in a serious frame of mind, with not a jot of levity.

So lost, so hopelessly lost is he in the peasouper of history, that very few people today realise King Jasper, of the Pickles play King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring System, Its Janitor, And Its Chatelaine, and of its later adaptation as a ballet by Crepingeour, was a real person of the past. Whether he was a real king is moot, as we shall see. But there is no doubt at all that King Jasper existed. His bones rest in a box in my allotment shed.

I came by the bones through a secret network of kings’ bones collectors. It is not so secret now I have told you about it. We do our collecting underground, in the shadows, under cover of night, far from places where common folk tramp. It is highly unlikely you have ever seen us at work, collecting bones of kings and trading them among ourselves. A couple of ribs from King X might be swapped for a femur from King Y.

More often than you might imagine, the bones of a king will be scattered hither and yon. If his throne was usurped by a wicked nephew, for example, a toppled king when killed might be chopped to bits, and those bits buried in pits at spots dispersed across the kingdom. The wicked nephew will arrange this, and pay off the gravediggers accordingly, in fear of vengeance from beyond the realm of death. He will have been brought up on tales of grisly and ghostly avengers, heard at his governess’s knee. He will believe that only by scattering far and wide the king’s bones can he avert an awful fate.

Even when a king dies, at peace, in his bed, or accidentally, after a surfeit of lampreys, his bones may still be scattered. Buried with all due pomp, of a piece, in one place, the dead king’s corpse will feed the worms and rot, and when all that remains is a heap of bones it can happen that the grave will be opened, at dead of night, by ignorant peasants. Immured in rustic poverty, the peasants will not have been brought up by governesses, but they will have heard the weird tales of the village Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, and believe in the talismanic properties of kingly bones. So, fighting and squabbling over the opened royal grave, each peasant will snatch a bone or two and carry them away, to be hung on a nail on the wall of their hovel as a lucky charm. And later, when their villages are laid waste by marauding barons or barbarians or both, the bones, along with all the other pitiful belongings of the peasants, will be scattered and strewn across the burning ruination of the land.

I would not claim that we kings’ bones collectors act from some mystical belief that by uniting the scattered bones of a particular king we are somehow calling him back from the dead. Perhaps one or two of my fellow collectors entertain such delusions. The rest of us are simply collectors, as we might be of stamps or coins or foopball programmes. Nor do we all necessarily seek to gather all the bones to complete a king. Some go just for shins, or skulls, or phalanges. But from the moment I joined the secret network, I was intent on collecting each and every bone of King Jasper I could lay my hands on. Why?

Why?, indeed. As I said, it is not even clear that King Jasper was a genuine king. Doubts were first raised shortly after his death, before even worms and rot had reduced him to naught but bones. His head, it was said, was not a kingly head. It was large and lopsided and had the pallor of curd. His gait was not a kingly gait, for he moved in an ungainly lollop. His crown was unbejewelled, and, on close examination, made from pewter and tin. He sat uneasy on the throne, a furtive look in his milky half-blind eyes, as if he had no right there to sit. Questions were raised and bruited abroad. If King Jasper were truly a king, why was the lady of the castle a mere chatelaine, and not a queen? And was it true, as some said, that the castle janitor had a large and lopsided head with the pallor of curd, that his gait was an ungainly lollop, and that instead of wearing a janitorial tatty cap, atop his bonce he sported an odd pointy hat made of pewter and tin?

I knew of all these doubts and questions. I was, after all, the author of a fat and breathtaking biography of King Jasper, albeit unpublished and, according to certain sour-faced kingly chroniclers, unpublishable. I keep the manuscript in the same box in which I keep the bones, in my allotment shed. The pages I scribbled upon over untold years are suffused with the charnel pong of the king. Lately it has occurred to me that I might use them to make a papier maché model of King Jasper, moulded around his reassembled bones. But first I have to complete my collection. There is a knuckle to be tracked down and exhumed, buried in some faraway field, dropped a century ago by a baron or a barbarian from a bag of looted peasant gewgaws. I must listen to the gossip on the grapevine of the secret network, alert for hints and clues. Then one night I shall set out with my spade.

King or janitor, it makes no difference to me. I have already made his throne, from the cobblings of a dozen discarded chairs. It is covered with a shroud in the corner of my shed. And when the missing knuckle is at last dug up, and all the bones put together and encased in my mashed up manuscript moulded into kingly shape, I will have a mannequin to plop on to the throne. I will haul it out of the shed and on to my cart, and trundle it along the country lanes for mile after mile, reconstructing the legendary journey made by King Jasper as he traversed his kingdom. It is said that he stopped off at many villages along the way to do a spot of repair work or mopping, just like a janitor. But he never lost sight, half-blind as he was, of his eventual destination, the electrified castle perched on a bleak promontory overlooking a bleaker sea, wherein awaited the chatelaine who had stolen his heart.

Heart, spleen, liver and lights… all are long rotted away. But I have his bones. All but one.

If I knew the first thing about the ballet, I would tell you all about Crepingeour’s ground-breaking work King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring System, Its Janitor, And Its Chatelaine. It was literally a ground-breaking ballet, in that some of the steps choreographed involved tremendously heavy thumping, in big boots, upon caked mud. But alas and alack, I completely lack ballet chops. So instead I will turn my attention to King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring System, Its Janitor, And Its Chatelaine, the play by Pickles on which the ballet is based. My source is Basing Ballets On Pickles Plays : A Study Of Crepingeour And His Followers In The Crepingeourist School by Biff Blunkett, the noted balletomane and Crepingeourist. I had best press on before I get bogged down in further folderol.

The plot of King Jasper’s Castle, Etcetera is so convoluted that I am not going to attempt to summarise it here. What you need to know is that the setting is a castle, belonging to King Jasper, situated on a bleak promontory overlooking a bleaker sea. The castle’s electrical wiring system is as complicated as the plot of the play, if not more so. Its maintenance and seemingly endless tweaking and repair is the responsibility of the janitor, who is employed by the castle’s chatelaine. Neither the janitor nor the chatelaine has a given name, though whether this is an oversight on Pickles’ part, or an oh so clever literary device, is moot. Arguments have been thrashed out on both sides. There are other Pickles plays with nameless characters, some where characters swap their names around between acts, and several where, though every character has a name, those names are unpronounceable in any human tongue, or indeed in bestial grunts, howls, or birdsong. Not for nothing is Pickles labelled a “difficult” playwright, just as he was called a “difficult” child by those paid to watch over him in his infancy.

But King Jasper’s Castle, Etcetera is not, in itself, a difficult play, for either actors or audience. Indeed it is often the case that the cast, whether professional or amateur, will dispense with rehearsals entirely, and simply jump on to a stage impromptu and start performing it. The only people who are disconcerted by this are the scene-shifters, who become all a-dither. Still, from what I have read, that is only to be expected of scene-shifters. See for example Biff Blunkett’s magisterial study Dithering Scene-Shifters In Theatrical Performances Of Pickles Plays. That said, Pickles has to bear some responsibility for the dithering, for his plays have become notorious among scene-shifters for their rapid and bewildering shifts of scene. In King Jasper’s Castle, Etcetera, for example, Act One alone requires twenty-two different sets in its seven separate scenes, as can be tabulated by a competent tabulator with an eagle on the script, as follows:

Scene One : The pantry in King Jasper’s castle – a greyhound racing stadium – hotel lobby – the castle drawbridge.

Scene Two : Electrical wiring cupboard in the castle – plague pit – castle balcony.

Scene Three : Hell.

Scene Four : Bates Motel – interior of giant Jiffy bag – apple orchard – pear orchard – jetty.

Scene Five : The castle larder – the castle oubliette – the O.K. Corral – persimmon orchard – chatelaine’s boudoir.

Scene Six : Uncle Tom’s cabin – King Jasper’s cabin – janitor’s cubby.

Scene Seven : The Great Hall of King Jasper’s castle

Those of you who have not seen the play might infer from this competently tabulated tabulation that it must be hard to follow the action, what with so many changes of scene, even, as we can see, within the same scene, to the point where one calls into question quite what Pickles meant by the word “scene” in the first place. But that would be to underestimate the sheer genius of Pickles’ stagecraft. Also, if you have not actually seen the play in performance you would have no appreciation of its exceedingly slow pace. Think snails, and lame snails at that. Snails on crutches. Snails on crutches battling against a gale force wind. Uphill. At a steep gradient. Think even steeper.

Why, then, does a critic as acute as Biff Blunkett insist, more than once, that the play “fairly rattles along”? Is he obtuse rather than acute? Is he a fool? Has he been watching a completely different play all this time? That is a possibility. It is not only scene-shifters who get all a-dither in the face of Pickles’ dramaturgy, but the printers of playbills and publicity posters too. Blunkett himself has written a magnificent and coruscating study of this very issue in his A Magnificent And Coruscating Study Of The Issue Of Dithering Playbill And Publicity Poster Printers Of Pickles Plays. If you only read one of Biff Blunkett’s verbose and prolix spoutings, this is the one worthy of your attention. The chapter in which he sounds a warning regarding the tendency to confuse King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring System, Its Janitor, And Its Chatelaine with Pickles’ companion piece King Jasper’s Castle, Its Gas Mantles, Its Chatelaine, And Its Janitor is particularly magnificent, though not quite as coruscating as it might be, all things considered. Among the things considered should be the fact that Blunkett was bedridden with double pneumonia and a collapsed lung when he wrote it.

Rumours are afoot that a young hothead Crepingeourist is at work on a ballet based on King Jasper’s Castle, Its Gas Mantles, Its Chatelaine, And Its Janitor. If so, that will be something to see, at least for balletomanes. The rest of us can spend a profitable evening queuing up at a soup kitchen.

I have been commissioned to write the Life of the balletomane Nan Kew. I’ll say it again. I have been commissioned to write the Life of Nan Kew, the balletomane. Now, never having written a Life before, I don’t know what to do. I have no idea how to set this Life in train. I only know one thing about Nan Kew for certain, and that is that her eyes were blue.

I have been advised by a tiptop biographer of many persons of the past that I will have to talk to people she knew. But apparently, nearly all her surviving pals live abroad, in Belgium, Luxembourg, and Spain. Some are even as far flung as Peru. I do not even own a passport, as I have always found travel to be an unbearable strain. I am reluctant even to travel by train. Call me unadventurous, but I stick to my familiar surroundings like glue. I would much rather sit fast than board one of those gigantic lumps of metal they call an aeroplane.

An added problem is that everything I have written to date has been fiction, but of course every last detail of this Life has to be true. That much is plain. She had, though, a very long life, so there are many facts upon which to chew. After doing a bit of research, I can add, to the colour of her eyes, that she was a Jew. And that she had a pet dog, a Great Dane. Other than that, so far, I haven’t got a clue.

It would help if I knew something about the ballet, too. But nothing bores me to tears as much as a prancing ninny in a tutu. If you buy a ticket for the ballet you may as well pour your money down the drain. That’s my view. The sole reason I agreed to write this Life was the prospect of financial gain. I accepted an advance, so I suppose that if I don’t produce a manuscript the publishers will sue. That would be a pain.

Last time I was threatened with legal action I spent six months hiding in a zoo. Granted, as a solution to my problems it was not entirely sane. I pretended to be a veterinary surgeon, there to care for a pregnant gnu. One day my cover was blown and I saw some coppers approach and I ran off down a lane. Just my luck, I was set upon by a ruffian crew. Their bashings to my head did something untoward to my poor poor brain.

That was not the end of my worries, because after that I caught the flu. And I had a migraine. And I had a stone in my shoe. And then I was drenched by rain. Somehow I managed to hobble into a church where I collapsed on to a pew. I let out a little gasp of relief: “Phew” Too soon, for then I noticed that in my collapse I had cut myself and blood was pouring from a vein. I rummaged in my pocket for a jar of wound-soothing goo. It was an ointment containing linseed and mugwort and feverfew. Oh, and with a smidgen of henbane. As I smeared the wound, I heard the uncanny rattling of a chain. Trust my luck, or lack of it, to have taken shelter in a church that had been deconsecrated and was now used for purposes new. In this case, the rehearsal of a ballet, King Jasper’s Castle, Its Electrical Wiring Systems, Its Janitor And Its Chatelaine.

I could not help wondering if it was a ballet Nan Kew had seen and favoured with a review. For at some point within all the legal shenanigans and hiding out I had discovered something else about the balletomane. That she wrote a column for a ballet journal, and the more she wrote the more her reputation grew. I had found in an archive a bound copy of this journal and had a read-through. God it was boring, I won’t do that again. She communicated her enthusiasm for the ballet with a lot of verbal pyrotechnics and ballyhoo. And it seemed to me she stuck to received wisdom, there was nothing she wrote that went against the grain. Not that I know anything about ballet, that’s true. But it occurred to me that if I was going to write this Life, now I knew from where to take my cue. I could bulk it out with quotes from Nan, and who would spot them, I mean, who? In the unlikely event that some ballet nutter did, I was sure I could think up a way to explain. And a combination of plagiarism and controversy could prove a heady brew. At least, from the publisher’s point of view. Who knows what a huge amount of sales my Life might attain? I might even earn back the advance that was my due. I envisioned the launch of the Life, and outside the bookshop an enormous queue.

My attention suddenly reverted to the ballet rehearsal in the deconsecrated church, where they were trying out an exciting scene in which King Jasper is slain. So complicated is the choreography that one cannot tell if he is killed by the janitor or the chatelaine. I am more used to pantomime, so when the culprit was revealed I gave a great hiss and a boo. At which point the ballet dancers withdrew. Fool that I am, my hiss and boo had revealed my presence to the ruffian crew. They came crashing through the church door, armed to the teeth, demented and insane. But hot on their heels came the coppers, so fast they almost flew. In the confusion and brouhaha I managed to flee, but my flight proved to be just another turn of the screw. I ran slap bang into the side of a huge metal crane.

I was taken to a clinic where clinicians prodded my brain. When I woke up, they said “We have some news for you”. I wondered if they were going to tell me I’d gone cuckoo. And that, in so many words, was true. They said, “You have a derangement of the brain. You are in no fit state to write the Life of Nan Kew, the balletomane.” As if to prove their point, I asked “Who?” They said “The balletomane, Nan Kew”.

Bombarded by razzle dazzle, he had hankerings. All was buzz and zip, clash and ring, and he sought the peace that passeth all understanding. Therefore, he dug a burrow, and into the burrow he went tumbling head over heels. He had worms for neighbours. He studied their ways. Their ways were not his, nor were they attractive. Indeed they filled him with disgust. The slightest sound became magnified in the burrow, so he could hear the worms and their ways as clearly as the upper din he had fled. What a quandary. He dug further, to where there were no worms. Now it was hot but silent. His eyes adjusted to the lack of light. The walls of the burrow were adamantine. He rested. Fumes woke him. They came from below. Below it was hotter still, darker still, more silent still. He carried on digging. The fumes were those of rot. They grew more noisome as he dug. He gagged on them but persisted. Suddenly he was sloshing about in a torrent. No up nor down. He was carried for miles. Hissing in his ears. Gulping. Then he was deposited, after many a buffet, on a hard landing. Hard and hot. And there was a glow. And a distant din. As he crawled the glow grew brighter, the din louder. Fathoms deep, below his burrow, below the sloshing torrent, there was razzle dazzle, buzz and zip, clash and ring.

This was a disappointment to him. His hankerings had been betrayed. He was at the core, and could burrow no further. He sought a nook, a hot dark silent nook, but there was no such nook. He crept closer to the glow and din. It was incomprehensible. Thus he felt freed, unloosed from sense. This was a novelty, and not unwelcome. So it was without thought that he flung himself into space. Falling pell mell. Into a jet, elemental, of gas or steam upgushing. Atop the jet he was shot ever higher, passing strata through which he had toiled to burrow, past torrents and worms, and up, up, into cold bright dazzling light and air. Then with a thump he was on land, on the surface. And he rubbed his head and sat up, and looked, and was assailed by razzle dazzle.

And so he roamed until he arrived at the foot of a mountain. And he climbed until the air grew so thin he was panting. It was cold up here, and silent. He was higher than birds.

There is a sort of heroism in pursuing one’s hankerings so indomitably. There is, too, stupidity. He repeated this journey, a journey of escape from razzle dazzle, over and over again. First the burrowing, then the climbing. The sloshing and the upgush. Hot dense fumes and cold bright air. It was the thinness of the air that drove him back down the mountain, down through where birds swooped, down to earth, to buzz and zip and razzle dazzle. The stupidity lay in the fact that it was always down or up he went, and never sideways. Sideways might have been a wiser choice.

His objection to sideways was that it was not truly possible. On this planet, one could only go round and round. Better, he thought, to try down or up. His hobbyhorse was the fatuous idea that one day, one day, he might plunge deeper, or clamber higher. That was why he kept pursuing his hankerings, in the face of common sense. It was put to him that he could go, not just round and round, but round and round and round and round, almost but not quite ad infinitum, were he to adjust his trajectory each time round, ever so slightly, by a fraction of a compass point. This gave him pause. He even obtained a compass.

To get the compass, though, he had to immerse himself in the razzle dazzle and buzz and zip and clash and ring of a major leisure and retail facility. Exposure to it, at such close quarters, sundered what little sense he had. He fell out of the compass shop gibbering. A Good Samaritan gathered him up and shoved him on to a bus. The bus creaked and rumbled off, on a trip that, until it stopped, would take it round and round. Thus he might have gathered his wits and seen the beauty of the plan. He might even have tinkled the bus bell and caused it to stop and let him off at a place as far as could be from razzle dazzle. But it happened that the compass he had bought was subject to magnetic anomalies. Its needle spun like the crackers, this way and that, chaotically. He had no understanding of magnetism, none at all, but he could see something was not right. And so he threw himself off the bus as it crossed Sawdust Bridge. And then he threw himself off Sawdust Bridge into the Great Frightening River. And he threw himself from the river into a rowing boat that happened to be there in midstream. And he rowed. He rowed until he came to the sea. And then he kept rowing. He rowed and rowed. Far from land masses of any considerable size, he reached an atoll. That is where you will find him, staring at his compass, day in, day out. Here, he is annoyed by seabirds. This is the best he can do, for the time being.

I once knew a man whose chief interest in life was the naming of nuts. He devoted much of his leisure time to etymological investigation, to the discovery, for example, of when, where, and by whom a Brazil nut was first called a Brazil nut. The same went for other nuts, the filbert and the hazel and the pea and the macadamia, to name but four further nuts. Or rather three, for the filbert and the hazel are different names for the same nut, just as wolfram is the same element as tungsten, wouldn’t you know?

That the hazel nut and the filbert nut are both the same nut was something my friend learned only after many years of nut name study. He was an unsystematic fellow, with a scatter gun approach, and often distracted. Thus it is less of a surprise than it ought to be that he could study nut names for years and years while remaining ignorant of a fact that even the most cursory knowledge of nuts and nut names would afford you or me.

He was not, you see, much interested in nuts per se, in and of themselves. As far as I know, he never actually ate any nuts. It was their names that obsessed him, and I think it is true that had he not, early on, lit upon nuts as his special field, he might equally well have devoted himself to worrying away, fanatically, about the naming of something else entirely, strains of potato or types of bridge construction. But nuts it was, for him, after it once occurred to him to find out why a coconut was called a coconut. This happened in a fairground, when he was young, and wandered past a coconut shy. Puny and short-sighted and lacking in coordination, he was never likely to dislodge a coconut from its stand with any of his three throws for a penny of a projectile. The said projectile was, he told me, in spite of his fading and unreliable memory, a small rubber ball. By some miracle, with his very first throw he did dislodge a coconut, and was therefore given it to carry home with him as a prize. It was as he walked home, out of the fairground and past the otter sanctuary and along the canal towpath and through a landscape it would do my head in to try to describe to you, and which is in any case barely relevant, that he began to wonder why the nut he had tucked into his satchel was called a coconut. Thus, though he did not know it, was the course of his future life set.

He pored over reference books, encyclopaedias, glossaries, dictionaries, and compendia, both at home and at the municipal library in the town where he grew up. It was a somewhat hopeless and vile and squalid town, but the library was a good one, as was often the case in those days before our current barbarism. It was in the course of his research into coconut etymology that my friend became diverted into both filbert nut and walnut etymology. The heady days of almond etymology lay ahead. As time went on, he pursued his studies of different nut etymologies concurrently.

As I said, he was often distracted. I am sure he would have given all his time to nut names, had that prospect opened before him, but it did not. He had to eat and pay his rent and his gas bill and other living expenses, and thus he found a position as a janitor. He was something of a wizard with a mop, though he discovered that he had to concentrate very hard upon his duties, and could not think too much about nut names while mopping.

It was a janitorial colleague who, mistaking my friend’s interest in the names of nuts with an interest in nuts themselves, gave him a bag of pistachio nuts. He opened the bag, took one nut out of it, and threw the rest away. When he got home he preserved the pistachio nut in a jar filled with some kind of clear jelly suspension and placed it on a shelf in his parlour. It was the first in what went on to become a collection of single nuts, each in its own jar, each jar labelled accordingly. On Sunday evenings he dusted the lid of each jar with a rag and polish, janitorially, and checked that it was sealed tight. Otherwise he paid little attention to the nuts, and later in life he actually moved the jars from the shelf into a cupboard, where he need no longer look at them.

It is important to recognise that there was no end to his studies. Even when he had tracked down everything anyone could possibly wish to know about the name of a nut, he went on to explore the other names given to the nut in other languages. In doing so, he became a masterful polyglot, albeit one with a very limited vocabulary. And, as his memory was faulty, and full of holes, he constantly had to remind himself of that which he had already learned. So, for example, you might ask him to tell you what they called, for example, a cashew nut in, for example, Flemish, and he would stare at you blankly and go off to consult one of his notebooks, which he kept in a cardboard box in an upper room. And while he was up there he might forget what he was looking for, and become distracted, and you would be waiting below, in the parlour, your cup of tea rapidly going cold, and he would be gone so long that eventually you would give up on ever being enlightened about the Flemish word for cashew nut, and you would sigh and quietly let yourself out, only to discover that it was now pouring with rain and you had no umbrella.

Did I explain that I knew my nut naming friend when I was young and he was very old? He was ancient and wrinkled, and once I tried to joke with him that his head had taken on the appearance of a giant walnut. This remark fell flat, as he had no sense of humour whatsoever. He was interested in the names of nuts, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else in the world. A curious case, certainly, but I liked him immensely, and he taught me a lot. I know, thanks to my friend, the etymology of the name of any nut you care to call out, in your sleep, tossing and turning, and frantic, your moorings lost, now and forever, until the dawn, when you awake, safe in port.

Good evening. My name is Guus. If I may, I will tell you an anecdote. I am an ancient and somewhat crumbling gent, and it might be thought that I would have a veritable storehouse of anecdotage to draw upon, but there is only one tale I am called upon to tell, so that is the one I shall repeat this evening. There has been the odd occasion in the past when I have had a bash at telling a different anecdote, but I get howled down and beseeched to tell, yet again, the one I shall tell you now. It is the story of how I brought the good news from Ghent to Aix, on horseback.

The horse upon whose back I brought the good news from Ghent to Aix was called Roland. Unlike me, he is long dead. He ended up, pitiably, in the knackers yard in the town of Knackers, which was not one of the towns between Ghent and Aix we sped through. Roland ended his days in Knackers because he died while I was upon another mission, one which nobody ever wants to hear about. If there were any demand for the anecdote, I would probably dub it “How I Brought The Faintly Dispiriting News From Ghent To Knackers”. Though it is unlikely that horses go to heaven, I did take the trouble to erect a little cross in memory of Roland at the roadside leading in to Knackers. Shortly thereafter I learned it had been uprooted and chopped up for firewood by cold peasants. Rule one : never trust a Knackers peasant.

But we must go back a few years, to when Roland was still hale and hearty, in a horse sense, and I was slumped in a tavern with my pals Joris and Dirck. You may wish to be given potted biographies of them both. Well, dream on!, as the young persons say. This is all about me, me and my horse Roland, the late lamented. Granted, both Joris and Dirck played their parts in bringing the good news from Ghent to Aix, parts I have always acknowledged. I have not tried to airbrush them from history, to make of them unpersons, as if I were Starling, or do I mean Stalin? At the same time, let us not pretend that the good news would have failed to reach Aix had Joris and Dirck not set out with me from Ghent. I would have made it to Aix in any case, mounted on Roland.

Roland, being a horse, was not with us in the tavern. He was tied up outside, feeding from a nosebag, alongside Dirck’s horse, which for some unfathomable reason he called Roos, and Joris’s, a roan which he had not even bothered to give a name. Within, Dirck and Joris and I were glugging from tankards of foaming grog, in the throes of carousal. I cannot remember what we were carousing about, perhaps it was simply that we were Ghentpersons, or Ghentniks, having a lark.

Anyway, late in the evening an official from the post office came crashing through the door. He was sweaty and frantic.

“O calamity! and O disaster!” he cried, “The post office hot air balloon has suffered a puncture! How, now, shall I send the good news to Aix?”

“Leave it to me,” I said, resolute and determined and utterly fab, “My horse Roland is tied up outside feeding from a nosebag. I shall mount my steed and gallop like the wind.”

The post office person fell to his knees and kissed my boots in gratitude. I mussed his filthy hair, and then he ceased to grovel and whispered the good news into my ear. Meanwhile, Joris and Dirck were looking at one another, and at me, casting significant glances.

“You will need us as backup,” said Joris.

I did not think I did, but I could see no harm in allowing them to join me. If I left them behind they might plot against me, or at the very least spread unwelcome gossip.

And so we untied our horses and galloped off, at moonset. Roland, in a weird psychic presentiment of his future fate, headed in the direction of Knackers, but I yanked him round and, in mid-gallop, I turn’d in my saddle and made its girths tight. Then I shorten’d each stirrup, set the pique right, rebuckled the cheek-strap, and chain’d slacker the bit. If one is a skilled horseman, one can make such adjustments while galloping at great speed. Jealous of my expertise – insanely jealous, actually – both Dirck, on Roos, and Joris, on his nameless roan, tried to shorten and set and rebuckle and slacken. Had I been paying attention, I would have laughed at their cack-handed nincompoopery. As it was, they somehow managed to keep pace with me all night, as we passed through Lokeren, Boom, and Duffeld, then Mechelm and Aershot, where up leap’d of a sudden the sun. In the mist, I was amused to note that the cows all looked black, like silhouettes. I reminded myself to practise my cow shadow puppetry when I got back to Ghent. It is always a hit at children’s parties.

By the time we reached Hasselt, Dirck was no longer able to spur Roos on. I had never had much faith in a steed with such a foolish name, and it came as no surprise to me when I heard the quick wheeze of her chest, saw the stretch’d neck and staggering knees, and sunk tail, and horrible heave of the flank, as down on her haunches she shudder’d and sank. As Joris and I sped on, I shouted back at Dirck, telling him to get a nosebag of hay for his horse and to take it to the Hasselt Horse Hospital, of which I had heard good report. This was a lie. I did not even know if there was a horse hospital in Hasselt. My fibs were meant, I think, for Roos rather than Dirck. When I can, I like to spout encouraging words to beasts of burden. It’s a Ghent thing.

Joris must have said something to his roan, because to my surprise it kept going, past Looz and Tongres. It was only when we got to Dalhem, with Aix in sight, that the horse suddenly keeled over, dead as a stone. Whether or not Dalhem had a horse hospital mattered not a jot. The roan was beyond all help and had passed into whatever realm horses pass into when they are no longer of this mortal world.

“At least give the damned horse a name before you bury it!”, I shouted at Joris, as Roland and I galloped ever onward. I never did find out if he named the horse, nor even if he had it buried. I never saw hide nor hair of Joris again. The last I heard of him, he was wandering the puddle-pitted streets of Dalhem, raving, and not in a good way. By all accounts it was madcap raving, the unbearable raving of the horseless. Such raving afflicted me, in Knackers, when Roland neighed his last. But that is another story, an anecdote nobody seems to want to hear.

Roland and I made it to Aix eventually, bringing the good news. No sooner had I imparted it to the burgesses, and poured a celebratory glass of wine down Roland’s throat, than up in the sky the post office hot air balloon, its puncture repaired, hove into view. Shortly afterwards, it bumped down to land in a cow-strewn field on the outskirts of Aix, and postie clambered out of the balloon basket and came running with a wax-sealed parchment, and I learned that I had misheard the whispered news from the post office person in the din of carousal in the tavern in Ghent. The news was not good after all. It was faintly dispiriting.

I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to discover I had been transformed into a Beatle. Somehow, uncannily, I was Ringo Starr! So unnerving was this experience that I bashed myself repeatedly on the head with a pair of drumsticks I found at my bedside and knocked myself out, relapsing mercifully into unconsciousness.

But again, I had uneasy dreams, and when I awoke I discovered I had been transformed, but not this time into a Beatle. Now I had become an entirely new Me. Outwardly – indeed, inwardly – I was exactly the same as I had been the previous day. Yet it was clear to me, as I leapt out of bed and plunged my head into a bucket of icy water and shuffled into my kitchenette for a breakfast of devilled hare and jugged kidneys and turned on the radio to listen to an early morning concert of argumentative German improvised racket, that something had changed, something decisive and irreversible. But what?

I decided that the simplest way to work out what had happened to me would be to go about my usual routine, but to monitor myself. So I spent a profitable three or four hours faffing about with the inner workings of my wristwatch. When I was done, it would not only tell the time, but it would keep a continuous check on the state of my soul. If all my tweakings were correct, then at nightfall, when the day was done, my watch would spit out a printed report, with handy bullet points. I could pass this to a consultant for analysis.

The difficulty would be to find a competent analyst. I did not require the services of a brain-quack, but of someone learned in such fields as ornithology, geology, origami, athletics, trellis work, and rustic wisdom. If necessary, I would have to consult separate experts and then correlate their findings. It was going to be an uphill struggle.

Luckily, I am used to uphill struggles, for my chalet is at the foot of an important mountain and every day I have to clamber across scree and up treacherous snow-covered slopes to get to the newsagent’s. That is the first part of my routine. I buy a copy of The Daily Hatchet and a pint of warm untreated goaty milk sloppings, and then I climb ever further up the mountainside, panting, until I reach my other chalet. I have always thought it best to have two chalets, one in which to sleep and ablute and eat breakfast and another in which to while away the day staring out of the window at snow and sky and the various types of birds which flit and swoop in that sky. There are of course other elements to my daily routine, manifold and multiform, but they need not detain us here. Or do they? All of a sudden I am assailed by doubts, and I am only part of the way across the scree. My legs are like jelly. On impulse, I turn back, back to my morning chalet, and I unlatch the door and slam it shut behind me and collapse on the carpet, across which I can see a beetle scurry. An insect, that is, not Ringo.

I lie on the floor wondering if the newsagent will be alarmed by my absence, and by his unsold copy of The Daily Hatchet. Will he call the helicopter police? Will they come in search of me, swooping across the sky, just like the birds? Unlike the birds, will they come scrambling down on rope ladders and kick in my windows and Taser me and haul me up into a chopper and ferry me across the mountains to their sinister compound? Will I be dragged to a cellar and tied to a chair and interrogated under Klieg lights? Will they mistake me for Ringo Starr? Will I be forced to sing Octopus’s Garden, or will they demand that I tell them tales of Thomas The Tank Engine? All these, and other panicky questions throb in my brainpans until I remember that I am not Ringo, I am neither a Beatle nor a beetle. But what have I become? I get up and I go to my cupboard and I take out a hammer and nails and planks and I barricade myself into the chalet.

I have blotted out the daylight, so I deploy an array of blubber candles here and there, on sideboards and mantelpieces and tabletops and counters. When lit, I gaze at the flames, one by one, and I ponder how curious it is that this light is brought to me by what was once the innards of that mighty sea beast, the whale. Will my own innards, in some future state, shed light upon the world? Is that to be my destiny, in my transformed state? Hours pass, with no hint of police helicopters, and one by one the blubber candles sputter and gutter out, and I am left in darkness. Is this, then, my fate, to become some kind of nocturnal being, like an owl or a bat? There are worse fates.

I rummage through the nooks of memory to try to recall what I have learned of the bat and the owl through years upon years of study. I remember little, save for sounds of squeak and hoot and that both bat and owl have the gift of flight. Can I, now, in my transformation, fly? I flap my arms, testing the air, and discover that, yes!, I can fly. I rise so fast that I crash into the chalet ceiling and bash my head and knock myself out.

When I come to, from uneasy dreams, I find I have been transformed yet again, this time into my final glorious state. Look upon my works, ye puny, and despair! For I am become Yoko, and I shall prevail!

Let us get to grips with the pecking order once and for all.

Humdrum pecking. Actuaries, beleaguered and sullen due to the theft of their tables, congregate in the corridor of their building. The janitor has recently been this way with his mop. There are stains on the ceiling. What pecking there is is humdrum, but never frightful. Ghosts patrol the corridors in the upper reaches, ones that once might have haunted clippers of the line, icy fogs notwithstanding, nor palpable. Cutter’s blague. The forensics are not yet in. Raiments of the emboldened.

Dismal pecking. Creatures with livid eyes and snouts, balanced on a knife edge. The stragglers from the Panzer division. Cellophane wrapped around finger food piled tottering on a table, the legs of said table ornate and carved and rich in detail but the detail no longer understandable to the hoi polloi creeping into view from across the lake. Bane of the sugar free. Pecking so dismal it breaks the heart of the uncluttered hordes. Pinking shears and crab apples of the lost.

Gummy pecking. Sacred and profane, there are blots on the landscape. Indescribable colours of the sky and the distant boom of tankers. In all sorts of ditches, all sorts of ditch life. Any pecking as likely as not gummy, within reason. At altitude, deeply unpleasant. Several reports appearing in the press of tocsins rung. That would be the hot press, the steam iron, the oil canister. Stones in the stool. Skimping on lather. Failsafe devices with not a button to be seen.

Lax pecking. Camped out, under Bulstrode’s wing. Cloth of gold and a pattern of miseries. Taps turned on and off. Pewter syndrome. You can’t die from it, not exactly, but you can try. Call on the ones holding the platters. Such lax pecking. It grieves you fit to bust. Well might there be hydrangeas to be tidied into tiers beside the paddock. A rotogravure spoke volumes. Mustard and cress on the blotting paper in the drawer of the desk, and the desk locked.

Untoward pecking. Shrews and pipits. Fungus in the pan. A thief on either side and the ribbons blown away upon the wind. Corks popped, distemper, Falangeist troops out in force. Thrum of the Chesapeake, grit in the oyster. No pecking has ever been so untoward. Teeming pond life packed into a plastic bag and discarded in the gutter. They said it couldn’t be done, but it was, and nightly at that, at that. You had to build it yourself.

We looked into these peckings and we tried to place them in order. It was hard work. Not as hard as breaking rocks, no, but hard. We were not in chains. We sorted the peckings this way and that, hysterical with liberty. Half the time they did not bother to supervise us. They dropped no hints. They sat in their cubby, feet on the table, corpses. When it rained we took shelter in the lea of an orchard. If we looked hard we could see the great stone crucifix far in the distance, on the hill.

Stunned pecking. A plate of mashed potatoes in triangular formation. Jutting out, a handle. The lure of the fire pig. Boats tied up in the harbour, for the time being, until cock crow. God bless them every one. There is absolutely no chance that you will sell an insurance policy to the chaplain. Watch as he pecks, stunned, without even saying grace. Clackety clack on the tracks. Pearls of wisdom. Cone shapes shimmering in milky light.

Flamboyant pecking. Go now, hoist the hoistings. Werewolves have been here. They leave a spoor. Mutterings in the tavern. The steps are filthy. The door is scratched. The peckings are flamboyant. The seeds were strewn, oh long ago, long ago. Who can guess what foliage will one day erupt here? It will happen at night, that’s for sure. Or at dawn, when the hooter sounds to summon the serfs. What will become of the castle walls? Ask the shoemaker.

Brisk pecking. It was in Todd-AO. It had to be. The plans were in a satchel and the satchel on your shoulder. Rubbed by a rubbergloved rubber. So comforting. Say a fond farewell to pins and needles. Carry the satchel far from here. There is no risk it will explode but we want to be on the safe side. We have seen the brisk pecking that sometimes precedes our calamities. There is a list of them pinned on a board in the annexe. It could do with a lick of paint.

Stricken pecking. Such a hateful fellow. Where does he get his shoelaces tied? Those are Satanic knots if ever I’ve seen ’em. He played a blinder, I’ll give him that. Below the waterline, surprisingly. King for a day, but what kind of king, and what day of the week? You had to assume there was something stricken in the pecking. That raft of subsidies. Raft, raft. Time enough to light the lamps when all is said and done and the socks are hung to dry upon the line.

Intransigent pecking. Partial recall. You woke from your coma. Daffodils at the bedside. Litmus paper on the lino. How curious to see pecking with such intransigence. Difficulties of the shadow appointments. Something lurking in the corner. Something nasty in the woodshed. Something lacking in the cabinet. But there is a glossy catalogue to pick from. Highly recommended. Slowly dwindling. Just out of sight, in the twinkling of an eye.

We thought we were done but there was more sorting to do. So we sorted some more. We came up with one order and then another order. And all this time we ourselves were under orders. At the point of a rifle. Behind barbed wire. Till kingdom come.

Many years ago, in the last century, I began to write an epistolatory novel. The opening sentence, as I recall, was

Dear Professor Talc, Thank you for sending me an envelope full of flies.

There were not many sentences after that, three or four perhaps, before it petered out. I did not even get as far as finishing the first of what, I suppose, ought to have been dozens or hundreds of letters. I have no plans to revisit this abandoned work and to try to make something of it. It was a rather foolhardy idea to make one of the protagonists an entomologist, when I know virtually nothing of entomology. I might have been on firmer ground had I had one, or both, or all of my letter-writers be an ornithologist. Though my knowledge of that subject too is scanty, I am able to blather on about birds in a reasonably fluent manner. I cannot say the same about insects. So had I, for example, begun my novel with the line

Dear Professor Talc, Thank you for sending me an envelope full of feathers.

I might have continued. I might have written a long, involved, and emotionally charged epistolatory novel about a gang of corresponding ornithologists. I might, in my mid-twenties, have written a bestselling blockbuster, the paperback edition with a glossy gold-embossed cover, on sale at all the best airport bookstalls. I might have tasted early success, on a global scale, and as a consequence become a very different type of writer. Instead of languishing, as I do, in penury and obscurity, I might today be lounging on the balcony of an Alpine chalet, hearing the approach of my fawning valet, Jarvis, bringing, on a silver tray, my lunchtime tipple of aerated lettucewater along with the usual pile of urgent pleas from Hollywood moguls seeking to obtain the film rights to my latest book. I might have been looking forward to spending the evening leaning against a mantelpiece at a glittering and sophisticated cocktail party, the cynosure of all eyes. But it was not to be, and all because I wrote “flies” instead of “feathers”, and was thus stumped as to what on earth I could write next.

There is a lesson there, I suppose, but one I have learned too late. Or have I learned it at all? This morning, for example, I awoke with the phrase “on sudden darting movements in the insect world” clattering around inside my head. Before I had even leapt out of bed to ablute I decided it would be the title of today’s essay. And thus it proved. But in the thirty years since I abandoned my novel about a gang of corresponding entomologists, have I learned anything more about insects? Have I learned enough, at least, to write something informative and involved and emotionally charged about insects and their human students? The answer comes easily. No, I have not.

Here is what I do know. That there are certain insects which have the facility to make sudden darting movements, so sudden, so darting, that they fill one – well, me – with wonder. Sometimes these insects will be still for a considerable length of time, so still they might be in suspended animation, or dead, and then – whizz! – in a split second, in the blink of a human eye, they have darted off, to a distant spot, where they might resume their eerie stillness.

This is not true of all insects. Ants, for example, those tiny creeping things beloved of Horace Donisthorpe, are not in general given to sudden darting movements. Consider leafcutter ants, which we admire for their stolid implacable scurrying. They do not suddenly flit from their column, distracted by who knows what ant-distraction. Nor do any number of slow lumbering beetles, which we might encounter toiling slowly across our carpets, bent on to us unfathomable beetle business.

But if we turn our attention to, say, the Gerridae, commonly known as water striders, water bugs, magic bugs, pond skaters, skaters, skimmers, water scooters, water skaters, water skeeters, water skimmers, water skippers, water spiders, or Jesus bugs, these are insects much given to sudden darting movements. Pay a visit to a pond and you might profitably watch them, standing still upon the water on their thin spindly stilten legs, before their attention is caught by some tiny waterborne being which serves them for nutriment, upon which they will pounce and devour. Where you or I would take a knife and fork and ever so slowly raise a portion of food to our mouths, the water strider cannot afford such leisure. If it crept towards the tiny waterborne being at snail’s pace, the being would sink or fly out of reach. Hence the evolutionary necessity, for the water strider, of its sudden darting movement. So too for flies, and other insects I might name were I more learned in entomology than I am.

It is diverting to imagine what a human might look like were we able to make sudden darting movements on a par with certain insects. Let us say I am standing beside you at a bus stop when you spot, across the road and some yards to the left, a toothsome snack for which you have a sudden insatiable hunger. One moment, there you are next to me, and then, in the blink of an eye, you have made a sudden darting movement, and appear, as if teleported, across the road and some yards to the left, stuffing your face in a somewhat disgusting fashion with the snack item.

In The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986), Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle suggests this sudden darting facility by jerking his head in spasms. It is rather disconcerting, to see a human act so, and reminds us of the gulf that lies between us and the insect world. Perhaps we ought to be thankful that we are incapable of such sudden darting movements as are made by flies etcetera. Life is stressful enough as it is.

A water strider, snapped before it made a sudden darting movement out of shot