It was late on a winter’s evening when I turned on to the lane leading to the Bad Vicarage. There was ice in the puddles and the thorn bushes glittered in the moonlight. On the other side of a filbert hedge a peasant person was worrying the ground with an agricultural tool.

“Good evening, peasant!” I called, “Can you tell me who is vicar nowadays in the Bad Vicarage?”

It was twenty years since I had been in these parts. I doubted that the Bad Vicar of the olden days was still in residence, but I wanted to make sure.

“Good evening to you, sir,” said the peasant, resting from his twilight labours and leaning on his implement, “The vicarage is bad indeed, as bad as any vicarage in Christendom. But the vicar whose sinecure it is is, shall we say, a fair to middling vicar. I would not call him good, but he is by no means as bad as the Bad Vicar of old.”

“Thank you,” I said, and felt compelled to add “You are, I may say, very well-spoken for a peasant.”

“I am a so-called New Peasant,” said the peasant, “My soul has been re-engineered by the Great Helmsman, all praise to him. It was he who ensured the destruction of the Bad Vicar, after all.”

“Is that so?” I asked, “Then praise to him indeed, as you say. Yet for all that, the Bad Vicarage is still bad, in spite of its fair to middling vicar, and though you are a New Peasant, here you are at nightfall, tilling the fields or whatever you are doing with that agricultural implement, just as an old peasant would do.”

“The countryside is the countryside, sir,” he said, gnomically, and he went back to work.

I carried on up the lane, my mind a welter of chaos. If the Great Helmsman had wrought the ruination of the Bad Vicar, why had he left the Bad Vicarage standing? And why, installed in it now, was a fair to middling vicar? Were there no good vicars in these parts? My uncle, for example, was a good vicar. Why had he been passed over for the sinecure? But then, was he still alive, or had he been one of the many victims of the Bad Vicar, mourned and unmourned? These and other questions tugged at the reins of my sanity as I approached ever closer the great forbidding gate of the Bad Vicarage.

As if to signal a shift in the very nature of things, just as I raised my hand to grasp the bell-pull dangling from the gate, the bright moon was of a sudden blotted out behind a cloud. I shuddered, but yanked the rope, only to hear a dull flat clunk rather than a clang. A bad bell for a bad vicarage. What else should I have expected?

But the clunk had the desired effect, for peering between the railings I saw the door of the Bad Vicarage creak open, and emerging from it a fellow I took to be the fair to middling vicar. He was young and spry and came bounding up the path to open the gate for me.

“You are the vicar?” I asked.

“That I am,” he cried, with unwarranted bonhomie, “Come, visiting stranger, for the night is a chill one, and you must warm your collywobbles beside a roaring fire.”

And soon enough the two of us were sat in armchairs by the fireside, slurping from beakers of hot and vitamin-enhanced goaty milk froth. Clearly, in destroying the Bad Vicar, the Great Helmsman had spared his goats. I could hear them, tethered in the back garden, bleating and occasionally butting their heads against the wall.

“Explain to me,” I said, coming straight to the point, “How it can be that this vicarage is still a Bad Vicarage, when you yourself, armed with the sinecure, are not a Bad Vicar?”

The fair to middling vicar laughed, slopping some of his milk froth onto the threadbare rug at his feet.

“This will always be a Bad Vicarage,” he said, “The rugs are threadbare, the floorboards are rotting, the paint is chipping, the roof is falling in, the heating is clapped out, the drains are clogged, and the goats are maddened.”

“Could you not see to it that repairs are made and the goats inspected by a veterinary surgeon?” I asked.

He laughed again, but this time it was a hollow laugh of infinite despair.

“What would be the use?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “If both the repair persons and the veterinary surgeons were unstinting in their efforts, it would no longer be a Bad Vicarage. It would become fair to middling, and in time, possibly, even good. Imagine that.”

He put his drained beaker on the rug, stood up, and went to stand by the window, peering out, his back turned to me.

“You have come here, ” he said, after some minutes of eerie silence, “On a cold winter’s evening, uninvited, unannounced. I sense you are no stranger to this place. I can hear in the bleating of the goats that they know you, that they have encountered you before. Just before you arrived, I received a message on my metal tapping machine from the New Peasant stationed behind the filbert hedge at the entrance to the lane. He told me you had no need to ask for directions, that you made your way here with practised steps, indeed that you minced hither as directly as a crow in flight. You nestle in the armchair by the fire and slurp the hot and vitamin-enhanced goaty milk froth from the beaker I have given you, and you know damned well that the rugs are threadbare, the floorboards are rotting, the paint is chipping, the roof is falling in, the heating is clapped out, the drains are clogged, and the goats are maddened. You know the Bad Vicarage as well as you know the back of your hand. Who the devil are you?”

And he spun around to look at me, and I looked back, my red eyes gazing at him like firebolts.

“I am the Bad Vicar,” I said, “Come to regain my sinecure.”

And, at my summons, the maddened goats, their tethers loosed, came crashing through the window.

It was said of Captain Nitty that he had the gift of the gab. We shall not pause here to define the gab, but instead press on, press on, for time is tight. Time is as tight as Captain Nitty’s tunic, a size too small, the collar of which constricts his throat, thwarting the gab. And without the gab this man is nothing.

Why, then, does he not tear off his tunic and cast it to the winds, or at least loosen his collar, so that he might give vent to the gab? To answer that question, or questions, we need to know something of the regulations, and the esteem in which they were held, then, there. They were draconian and pitiless and unyielding. Yet a man would think no more of bending them than he would of tearing off his own head and tossing it into a stream.

It is in midstream, of a rushing gurgling torrent, that we find Captain Nitty, on this nineteenth century day. He is in it up to his eyeballs, breathing through a leather and gutta-percha contraption strapped to his head, covering his mouth and nostrils, and with a tube, reinforced with the wire from pipe-cleaners, rising above the level of the torrent into the mephitic air. No gab from Captain Nitty, in the circumstances.

But gab, or something like it, from the riverbank, where Captain Nitty is closely observed by howler monkeys disporting in the trees. Howl, then, rather than gab. The monkeys watch his slow progress as he toils along the river, against the current. Are their howls howls of encouragement or of mockery? Captain Nitty hears them not, for the same contraption that affords him the ability to breathe muffles his hearing, its thick woollen earflaps tugged tight against his head by means of a strap buckled under his chin, as tight as his tunic.

It is, perhaps, a mercy he can hardly hear the howler monkeys. Each step is a struggle, and now and then he loses his footing and is submerged in the torrent. He manages to pull himself upright through pluck and vim. For balance, he has a stick. It is not a branch torn from a riverbank tree, but his regulation stick, thick, of tropical wood, with a golden knob. He holds it horizontally in front of him, just above the surface of the water, for at all costs he must not get it wet. Even when he loses his footing he takes care to hoist the stick higher, keeping it in the air though the top of his head is briefly below the waterline.

Here in midstream there is no tree cover to block out the sun. Its burning brilliance batters down, reflected in the golden knob on the end of Captain Nitty’s stick, the golden knob itself as bright as a miniature sun. Captain Nitty must keep one eye closed in consequence, that he is not blinded by it. As he makes his painfully slow progress upriver, he now and then switches the position of the stick, so the golden knob is on his left or his right, to rest one eye and employ the other. It is difficult for him to judge distance with but one working eye. He thought he would reach the rapids at least two hours before he does so.

River rapids! Bane of the unwary! But Captain Nitty is nothing if not wary. He has the gift of the gab and he has a nose for danger. He has been called reckless, and teased for his excessive gung ho. Just as promised, there is a small wood and canvas boat tied to the trunk of a tree at the river’s edge. Captain Nitty makes for it, and clambers in. Now at last he can remove the contraption from his head. His senses are assailed, by the howling of the howler monkeys, now deafeningly loud, and by the stink of rot and foulness and disease and death. He places his regulation gold knobbed tropical wood stick carefully in the bottom of the boat, and lifts the oars, sliding them through the tholes. One would think, watching him, that he has rowed a boat before, but he has not.

But of course there is nobody watching him, nobody human, only the howler monkeys and the billions of tiny buzzing winged things with which the air is riddled. Captain Nitty pulls on the oars and heads inexorably for the rapids. Now he has his back to the shining golden knob on his stick, laid at his feet, and he can keep both eyes open. On the other side of the rapids, if he negotiates them without being tossed from his boat, he has been told to find a patch of land by the riverside and set up camp. He has, in his haversack, the makings of a tent, a stove, a flag, a pack of playing cards, and a Bible. And at nightfall, as the howler monkeys howl and nocturnal birds hoot and screech, and the raging torrent roars, Captain Nitty will cast off his tunic, and hang it up on a clothes line improvised between two trees, and while his sausages cook on the stove he will give vent to his gift of the gab. He will plant his flag and name his camp and name all the land around. He will sing rousing hymns. He will bless the Lord, O Captain Nitty’s soul: and all that is within him, bless his holy name, bless the Lord and forget not all his benefits, who forgiveth all Captain Nitty’s iniquities; who healeth all his diseases, who redeemeth his life from destruction, who crowneth Captain Nitty with loving kindness and tender mercies, who satisfieth his mouth with good things, so that his youth is renewed like the eagle’s. The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with Captain Nitty after his sins; nor rewarded him according to his iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed Captain Nitty’s transgressions from him. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth Captain Nitty’s frame; he remembereth that he is dust. As for Captain Nitty, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children; To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them. The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, Captain Nitty and his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O Captain Nitty.

He has the gift of the gab, and sausages to eat, and an empire to build.

Today is Saint Patrick’s Day. Around the world, persons of Irish heritage – often extremely tenuous – will find in the feast day an excuse to get drunk and sing mawkish songs, and to generally engage in what they laughably call a craic. I am of Irish heritage myself, on my father’s side, but view the sentimental attachment to the Emerald Isle with contempt, so instead of glugging Guinness and tunelessly wailing “O Danny Boy” with tears coursing down my cheeks, I shall turn my attention to ants.

For today we also celebrate the birthday of Horace St John Kelly Donisthorpe (1870-1951), one of the greatest of British ant experts. Independently wealthy, by dint of the family textile business in Leicestershire, Donisthorpe went to the University of Heidelberg to study medicine, but left before qualifying due to a “too sensitive nature”. From the age of twenty, he devoted the rest of his life to the study of ants and beetles.

Over the years, he hunted down ants in Aviemore, Chobham Common, Box Hill, Nethy Bridge, Parkhurst Forest, Rannoch, the New Forest, Matley Bog, Sandown, and Weybridge Heath, but his favourite stamping ground was Windsor Great Park, where he was granted special permission to collect as many ants as he liked, and where many of his discoveries were made. I ought not, perhaps, use the phrase “stamping ground”, as that summons a picture of Donisthorpe stamping his big boots upon the ground, surely inadvisable in the circumstances. I have never collected an ant in the wild myself, but I assume one must tread lightly and oh so carefully.

Donisthorpe was the author of over eight hundred books and papers, including British ants, their life history and classification (1915), Myrmica schencki Emery, an ant new to Britain (1915), Some notes on a paper by Dr. Leach on ants and gnats in 1825 (1918), A list of ants from Mesopotamia; with a description of a new species and a new variety (1918), Guests of British ants (1927), Descriptions of some new species of ants (1931), On the identity of some ants from Ceylon described by F. Walker (1932), On a small collection of ants made by Dr. F. W. Edwards in Argentina (1933), Rhopalomastix janeti, a species of ant new to science (1936), Five new species of ant, chiefly from New Guinea (1938), The genus Lioponera Mayr, with descriptions of two new species and an ergatandromorph (1939), Descriptions of several species of ants taken by Dr. O. W. Richards in British Guiana (1939), The ants of Norfolk Island (1941), Descriptions of new ants from various localities (1941), Description of a new species of Crematogaster Lund, subgenus Physocrema Forel, with a list of, and a key to, the known species of the subgenus (1941), Descriptions of a few ants from the Philippine Islands, and a male of Polyrhachis bihamata Drury from India (1942), A myrmecophilous woodlouse (1943), Myrmecological gleanings (1943), On a small collection of ants from West Africa, associated with Coccidae (1945), Ireneopone gibber, a new genus and species of myrmicine ant from Mauritius (1946), New species of ants from China and Mauritius (1947), Some new ants from New Guinea (1947), A second instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A third instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A fourth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A fifth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A sixth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1949), A seventh instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1949), An eighth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1950), Two new species of ants from Turkey (1950), and Two more new ants from Turkey (1950). Rare indeed was the ant which eluded Donisthorpe’s eagle eye.

One thing that is clear from that (partial) list of his publications is Donisthorpe’s enthusiasm for new ants. This was to prove controversial, and he was considered to be “overeager” to identify new species of ants. Indeed, of the thirty new species he identified, twenty-four were subsequently deemed to be insufficiently distinct to be considered separate species or to be synonymous with previous valid species. An example of what we might call his pernickety attempts to identify wholly new types of ant is his description of Polyrhachis hosei, where Donisthorpe admits at the outset that “the general description of P.(M.) byyani would do equally well for this species”. He then details a small number of very minor differences, such as “a larger and more robust insect”, “pronotal spines longer”, “the scale has a somewhat wider arch”, and so on.

Indefatigable ant collector that he was, Donisthorpe was fiercely protective of those he gathered up, and would never allow them to mix with ants collected by others. The following reminiscence, by R W Lloyd in a letter to the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine in 1951, allows us a glimpse of the man, though unfortunately it concerns beetles rather than ants:

Mr Donisthorpe was a very fine Coleopterist, but he had that curious ‘kink’ shared by one or two other people, that he would only put in his collection beetles he had taken with his own hands. Luckily for him he was a man of leisure and he was able to go about the country when he heard of any rare beetles being taken. It led, however, to some curious results, as on a celebrated occasion when a collector in the New Forest got a very rare beetle – Velleius I believe it was – and advised Mr Donisthorpe, who telegraphed him to put a tumbler over it on the ground and keep it there until he was able to go and collect it himself.

When he was not collecting, cataloguing, peering at, and writing about ants. Horace Donisthorpe liked to throw lavish and rambunctious parties at his home in Kensington Mansions, and managed to dissipate much of his fortune in doing so. Just as I shall not be celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in carouse and revelry, nor will I paint the town red in memory of Donisthorpe. But we should all remember him on this, his 142nd birthday. What better way to mark it than to let him have the last word, in the form of one of the many, many notes he contributed over the years to The Entomologist’s Record & Journal Of Variation?

Homoptera devoured by a bird.

At a recent meeting of the Entomological Society of London, my friend Mr. Eltringham gave an account of some attacks by birds on Lepidoptera, and he said that all such occurrences should be put on record. This no doubt holds good with other insects as well as Lepidoptera, hence the following note.

On June 20th, 1927, at 6.30 a.m., I was looking out of my bedroom window into the garden when I noticed a starling, which settled on a lavender bush, all covered with “cuckoo-spits.” It proceeded to deliberately pick out from the froth all the larval Frog-hoppers, and eat them. I should think this is not a very usual proceeding, as otherwise a flock of Starlings would clear a garden in a very short time, and none of the insects be left. The late Dr. Sharp did, I believe, say that the object of the froth was to attract a wasp, which preyed on the Frog-hoppers! This, however, is not the view usually held by scientists.

Further reading and listening.

Many of the ant-papers by Donisthorpe listed above can be read online, following the links at the Global Ant Project.

Untold thousands of you may have been particularly eager to read this essay, under the misapprehension that it would be devoted to Certain Ants, the legendary quartet of improv racket makers of long ago. You will not be disappointed for long, because if you click here you can listen to a vintage recording.

The other day I visited two current art exhibitions, at galleries across the road from one another. Physically proximate, their contents could not have been more different, and it is instructive to compare them. Well, not really instructive, as that implies learning something, and I learned nothing. My head grows ever emptier as days go by. This is entirely deliberate, as I am signed up to a course of evening classes in the mystic oriental discipline of Goon Fang, the aim of which is to achieve a state of oneness with the universe by emptying the head of all non-essentials. For the true Adept of Goon Fang, almost everything is inessential. I can by no means describe myself as an Adept, for I am at the “Wearer of a Dashing Cravat” level, so low in the hierarchy that, to deploy an analogy with sea creatures, I would be one of those weird blind flat albino beings that skitter near the sea bed, demersal rather than pelagic. I still have far too much in my head.

Thus it was on the recommendation of my Goon Fang Master that I visited the first exhibition. While hitting me repeatedly on the bonce with a stout stick, he explained that whole swathes of my brain would be emptied of content by my spending half an hour in the gallery. He was right, but then he always is. So decisive was the emptying that, in order to write this piece, I have had to reconstruct the forgotten details of my visit through a Goon Fang technique I cannot divulge to the hoi polloi.

The exhibition at the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery presents a series of “installations” and “interventions” which aim to “interrogate” notions of “reified re-re-re-representation” in late capitalist “faff”, “twaddle”, “the Other”, and “pap”. I apologise for all those inverted commas, but the expensively-produced catalogue insists on them. So what did I see? Well, in one room – sorry, “space” – there was an “Occupy” tent, which had apparently been erected outside a cathedral for months on end, next to which was an opened milk-carton, an abandoned mitten, and some breadcrumbs. The title of this “work” was a lengthy quotation from some preposterous Slovenian “philosopher and cultural critic” whose name I cannot recall, other than that it had at least two ‘Z’s in it. Several nanoseconds spent gawping at this “installation” made me realise the great wisdom of my Goon Fang Master, for I could actually feel my brain emptying itself out. Had I spent more time in the gallery, and taken in some of the other exhibits, I might, to return to the sea creature analogy, have been floating upwards from the sea bed so rapidly that I would suffer from the bends. I shall have to ask my Master what to do in those circumstances.

But quite frankly, I could not bear to spend a moment longer in the midst of this drivel. I went outside for a cigarette and it was then I noticed, across the road, another art gallery. On impulse, and narrowly avoiding a collision with a bicycle wanker, I pranced towards its entrance, not even bothering to find out what was on show.

It turned out to be an absolutely fantastic display of over three dozen Vanbrugh chicken paintings. They all looked remarkably similar – a white chicken with a red crop, pictured in a sort of generic farmyard setting – but I am one of those people who know the great secret, that within each of the paintings there is hidden a tiny, talismanic emblem. Find them, and correlate them, and you end up, not just with a series of Vanbrugh chicken paintings, but with an esoteric key to unutterable mysteries. As they are unutterable, I can say nothing more about them. What I can say is that I spent a profitable seventeen hours closely scanning the paintings with my pocket microscope, until I was thrown out of the gallery by a factotum. I was back, waiting impatiently at the entrance, the next morning, and for several days after that. There were lots of paintings to study, some of them quite huge, and finding all those hidden emblems was no easy matter. In some cases, that tiny little brushstroke you think is the edge of an emblem turns out, after all, to be nothing more than an exquisitely rendered Vanbrugh chicken feather. In others, you can spot the emblem relatively quickly, but wreaking the meaning from it can send a man mad.

On one day, I asked my Goon Fang Master if he would accompany me to the gallery. How naïve of me! I fully deserved the bash on the bonce with a stout stick I received. My Master explained to me, in an exasperated manner, that to seek ultimate meaning in the Vanbrugh chicken paintings went against all the tenets of Goon Fang. The sooner I returned to the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery and gazed upon twaddle, the sooner would my brain empty out, and the sooner would I rise to the surface of the sea, become pelagic rather than demersal. He had a point.

He had a point, and I had a throbbing head. But I could not tear myself away from the Vanbrugh chicken paintings. I had found all but three of the hidden emblems, but the jottings in my notebook, made with my trusty propelling pencil, were worse than meaningless until those last three were added. Find them, and I could correlate them all, and be given the key to unlock whatever it was I had to unlock to gain access to the unutterable mysteries. I was driven on by the thought that, if I was privy to those mysteries, I could get hold of a stout stick and bash the Goon Fang Master’s bonce in retaliation. That might teach him a thing or two! As I said, I was hopelessly naïve.

Thursday came, and I was distraught to discover that the Vanbrugh chicken exhibition had been taken down, the paintings loaded on to a lorry and driven to an important sea port and loaded on to a container ship and taken away to a far and foreign land. I wrapped my cravat tighter around my neck and slumped in the doorway of the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery, ruined by art.

Boffins recently conducted a study which showed that, of all aquatic birds, the swan was least responsive to reggae music. As so often happens in science, the findings were counter-intuitive. We would expect swans to be more susceptible to reggae than, say, coots or herons, but it is difficult to argue with the boffins. At no fewer than a dozen sites, including ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres, they set up scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae music, from dawn till dusk, and in some cases from dusk till dawn too. Careful observation of the behaviour of all forms of bird life in the experimental zones, and analysis of electroencephalograms generated by sensors attached to the heads of selected birds, were combined with several other avian-reggae methodologies, and the results were clear. While some coots, herons, ducks, reed warblers and moorhens showed a marked response to roots stylee rhythms, every single monitored swan was utterly impervious, and went about its business, by turns gliding with matchless elegance through the water or savagely attacking things, as is the swanny way.

In one phase of the experiment, the non-stop pounding from scores of loudspeakers of classic tracks from Peter Tosh, Misty In Roots, King Tubby and others was accompanied by the display, on hoardings erected next to the experimental ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres, of large portraits of Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie, and Jah Rastafari, the latter two being more or less indistinguishable. Most of these portraits were daubed in red and gold and green and black, irrespective of the range of the colour spectrum visible to birds, which is a separate area of study and one which neither I nor the boffins have pursued. Herons proved to be the birds most drawn to Jah, in some cases seemingly almost hypnotised by the combination of sound and image, though buffleheads scored highly here too. Once again, swans showed no response whatsoever to the visual stimulus, gliding past the hoardings with matchless elegance or savagely attacking unrelated things in the vicinity, as is the swanny way.

The study has sent shock waves through both the reggae and the aquatic bird communities, one upshot being a particularly vituperative war of words erupting in the correspondence columns of the leading academic journal devoted to both fields. It was in a long article in Aquatic Birds And Reggae Weekly that the boffins first announced their findings, with lots of diagrams and even a photograph or two of a boffin attaching a brain sensor to the head of a reed warbler. Now the letters pages have been expanded to fill over half of the magazine, as rival boffins contend with each other. Perhaps the most constructive reaction has been from Professor Lars Talc of the School Of Applied Swan Studies at the University of Qaasuitsup in Northwest Greenland. Working with a team of reggae experts and swan lovers, he has posited the idea of creating “reggae for swans”, a specific sub-genre of the music designed to somehow bash into their birdy brains a deep and responsive enthusiasm for the music which they seem to shun.

As part of the project, one group has been assembling as much documentation as possible on any pronouncements Jah Rastafari made, or is alleged to have made, on the subject of swans. Certain wicked persons in Babylon have been putting it about that the material thus far gathered is all forged, counterfeit, or otherwise false. Wicked or not, this charge is convincing in the case of a woollen knitted baggie beanie hat on to which has been embroidered the phrase “I And I ♥ Swans”. It is exceedingly unlikely that this hat actually belonged to Jah himself, as is claimed.

Professor Talc has also suggested that the scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae music erected next to the ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres in the experimental zone be made permanent. Indeed, he has gone as far as to say, from his quiet retreat in the Arctic wastes of Northwest Greenland, that wherever on earth swans are to be found, they should be subjected to constant reggae music blasting out of loudspeakers. This has not gone down well with fuddy-duddies who wish to preserve the peace and tranquility of many ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres. Nor does the idea find favour with wet blanket bird welfare types who accuse the Professor of swan cruelty. In response to the latter charge, he has issued a long-winded and in places incomprehensible press release, in which he states baldly that his eventual aim is to create what he calls “a modified swan”, genetically programmed not only to enjoy reggae music but actually to require it in order to remain alive. No wonder Talc has been compared to a latter-day Frankenstein.

There are no swans in Africa.

It came as something of a shock when I learned that my fate was written in the stars. I had no idea that every last particular of my life, from cradle to grave, was foretold in the barely visible movements, thousands and millions of miles away, of fiery burning rocks scattered across the sky. As soon as I learned this, I was avid to know what lay in store for me. Only then did I realise that I could not read the stars, so I went to consult a stargazer.

He ushered me in to his observatory, high on a promontory, and tapped a spindly finger on the end of his telescope. He bade me peer through it, and I saw manifold stars, impossibly distant, burning bright in the night sky.

“Gosh!” I said, “How lovely they are. Yet to me, senseless, devoid of meaning.”

“That is where I come in,” he said, lighting his pipe and puffing on it with the air of a great sage. Then he faffed about with some gubbins and projected the image seen through the telescope on to a canvas screen.

“See this star?”, he said, pointing with a pointy stick at one bright twinkle among the myriad, “This is your guiding star.”

I could only say “Gosh!” again.

“The official name of this star is B76428-552,” he said, “But that is a dull as ditchwater name for a star, so, as with other stars, we give it a more memorable nickname.”

“And what is the nickname of my guiding star?” I asked.

“We call it Fascist Groove Thang,” he said, “It is among a cluster of stars nicknamed after pop records made thirty-odd years ago, when it was first observed through my mighty telescope. I have kept a careful eye on it ever since. That is how I knew you would come to visit me in my observatory today, though I must have misread the signs and portents, for you arrived ten minutes later than I expected.”

“Ah,” I said, “The delay was on account of important roadworks at the Blister Lane Bypass. My bus was diverted down a side road rife with lupins.”

The stargazer puffed his pipe, even more sagely.

“Still, that is a conundrum, and one I must puzzle out. The stars ought to have foretold the important roadworks. They almost certainly did. Much more likely that I somehow misread the signs and portents. I am getting a bit slapdash in my dotage, and my eyesight is no longer what it was. Once it was piercing, like a hawk.”

I commiserated with him, recommended some proprietary eye-drops, and then begged him to reveal what the stars told him about my future. He used the pointy stick to describe arcs and angles across the screen, and finally pointed once again at Fascist Groove Thang, so bright! so twinkly!

“Well, Ivan Denisovich,” he said, “It seems that next Thursday, you will meet a tall, dark stranger, you may have a stroke of good luck, and an opportunity may arise at work. Also, there may be an incident involving a dog, or possibly a tortoise.”

“Wow!” I said, “The person who told me that my fate was laid out in detail in the stars obviously knew what they were talking about. That’s four things that will happen on just one day of my allotted span.”

The stargazer’s countenance suddenly darkened. He took a long, sage, puff on his pipe and he frowned.

“I hope you do not intend to ask me, as some others have done, what is writ upon the stars regarding the precise duration of your allotted span,” he said.

Now, call me a fathead, but the blindingly obvious had not even occurred to me. Of course, if my fate were foretold, that would include the date and indeed the circumstances of my death.

“Actually, no,” I said, “Right this minute I am more concerned about this business with the tortoise next Thursday.”

The stargazer relaxed.

“I did not say it would necessarily be a tortoise. I said there might – might – be an incident involving a dog or a tortoise.”

“Well,” I said, “Could you not peer a bit harder, or describe slightly more precise arcs and angles with your pointy stick, or do whatever it takes to read my guiding star, Fascist Groove Thang, more closely? I would really like to know if there definitely will be an incident, and if so, whether a dog or a tortoise will be involved.”

And I meant it. This is not the place to explain my preoccupation with tortoises – particularly with Thursday tortoises – but it is very real, and exhausting, and occasionally almost fatal.

“I can draw up a chart,” said the stargazer, “Which will break next Thursday down into ten-minute chunks. I will have to observe Fascist Groove Thang more closely, through an even more powerful telescope, in an even bigger observatory upon an even higher promontory. But if that is what you wish, so be it. Bear in mind that the chart will be unintelligible to one with such a puny brain as yours, so I will have to interpret it for you. And of course one must always take account of the vicissitudes of cloud cover. But I think I should be able to come up with a definitive narrative of events, rich in detail, including even the name of the tortoise, if it turns out there is a tortoise involved in the incident, if of course there is an incident.”

“That would be dandy,” I said, and I forked over the stargazer’s hefty fee.

But would it be dandy? Bitter experience told me that tortoises on Thursday spelled ruination and destruction of all my hopes, ever since that picnicking fiasco in Shoeburyness. The less said about it the better, if I wished to retain my sanity. I went to sit in the stargazer’s waiting room, while he pootled off to a bigger observatory on a higher promontory. He had not told me how long it would take him to read my fate in the stars, but he said that if I went and peered through his telescope at Fascist Groove Thang from time to time, I might be able to discern the signs and portents of his return, and the cast of his countenance, and whether the news he brought back with him was good, or bad, or worse… even fatal.

He has been gone now for six days. Tomorrow is Thursday. I have no idea what tidings he will bring, for all I have seen through his telescope is a scattering across the sky of burning fiery rocks, impossibly distant, devoid of meaning, senseless, senseless.

We wish to insert, into the subject’s mental and emotional innards, the qualities of gumption and pluck. For this purpose we resort to specially prepared pickles.

The first step is the preparation of the subject. A ravening hunger for pickles must be created and maintained. There are various methods, most of which involve prolonged starvation accompanied by the eventual provision of jars packed with pickles, and potable water. There are ethical questions to be dealt with, but these can be swept aside, in grand and foppish manner, by appealing to the greater good. Note that one must on all accounts avoid a situation where one is asked to define the greater good, or to say what it is greater than. If necessary, flee, scarper, or assume sudden cretinism.

Once the subject has been imbued with a desperate pickle craving, the pickles can be supplied. As stated, these must be specially prepared pickles, ones which impart gumption and pluck. So, actually, the first step is not the starvation of the subject but the preparation of the pickles. You have to have the pickles ready, for that moment when the subject is hammering their fists upon the skirting board or dado rail of the locked rumpus room, screeching for succour. At this point you must be ready to skip into the room, beaming and jolly, and bearing jars of pickles and a pot of potable water. It helps, too, to have an electrified pole, akin to a cattle prod, with which to zap the subject should he or she attempt to shove you out of the way and scamper from the room in search of unpickled foodstuffs. Usually the subject will be sufficiently weakened to make such shoving and scampering unlikely, but some subjects are wilier and more cunning than others. Wiliness and cunning are the characteristics we wish to expunge and replace by gumption and pluck.

What, then, must one do to the pickles? What indeed? It is not as if the ordinary common or garden pickle is somehow magically engumptioned or implucked, in and of itself. It is not. It is just a pickle. For our purposes, we must have recourse, as so often, to the wisdom of the ancients. More accurately, we must impart a modern twist to the wisdom of the ancients. The ancients, after all, did not have a ready supply of pickles in jars. They may have had certain items pickled in amphorae, yes, but that pickling process was probably undertaken for reasons other than the preparation of tasty and toothsome snacks. Bear in mind that we want the subject to shovel the pickles down their gob with unalloyed gusto, not to gag and become overwhelmed with nausea, as might happen if the pickles are of the kind favoured by the ancients. The ancients were uninterested in gumption and pluck, generally speaking, qualities which became valued later in history.

You will be pleased to learn that you need not remove the pickles from their jars. Simply align the jars in a row upon your counter, then cover them with a tablecloth or blanket. Do ensure that the tablecloth or blanket is freshly boiled and laundered and bears no trace of grime or grease or filth or minuscule creepy crawly life form. Then make passing gestures with one’s outstretched arms over the entableclothed or enblanketted line of pickle jars, palms downward, while intoning the following incantation in a low, ghoulish murmur:

“Spavin. Gecko. Distemper. Hod. Blackguard. O. O. O. Crusty. Bingle. Poop deck. Flan.”

Repeat hundreds of times until you see an eerie, almost invisible vapour – a piquant vapour – rising from the tablecloth or blanket. Then remove it, with one deft flick, revealing the pickle jars. They will look exactly the same as they did before you covered them, but if the wisdom of the ancients is to be trusted, they are now jars packed with pickles ready to be modified. It is a sobering thought that one could, if one were a malefactor, imbue the pickles with one or more of the seven deadly sins. Imagine the havoc one could unleash! But one does not, for one is working for the greater good, is one not?

Injecting, with a syringe, essence of gumption and pluck into the pickle jars is a simple enough matter which need not detain us here. Seal the tiny holes made in the jar lids by the syringe with special wax. Leave for half an hour, then turn all the jars upside down one by one to ensure that the waxen seals hold fast.

There is one further magick bit of flummery to enact before taking the jars to the subject imprisoned and starving in the rumpus room. Obtain an infant and gently tap each pickle jar against its fontanelle, while you imitate the song of the wheatear.

When you have taken the jars and the potable water into the rumpus room, make a quick exit and lock the door again. If you press your ear against the door you should, if all goes well, hear the subject unscrewing the lids from the jars and gobbling down the pickles and glugging the potable water. In no circumstances should you unlock the door just yet. Go for a stroll in a scented garden for the blind, making at least three circuits of the path. When you return, fling open the rumpus room door and bid the subject to go forth, with gumption and pluck.

There have been cases where the subject has failed to respond in the expected manner. If this happens, review very carefully your preparations at all stages of the process. We all make mistakes.

It was blue, it rotated, and it smelled of birds. The blue was cerulean, the rotation was slow and juddery. It was a general sort of bird smell, one could not with any certainty say ‘ostrich!’ or ‘guillemot!’, much as one might wish to. That slow, juddery rotation was accompanied by a very faint clanking noise, so faint that a passer-by, huffing and puffing up the hill, might think he imagined it, as he reached the top, put down his bag, and lit his pipe, perplexity furrowing his forehead as he puffed on the savagely bitter cheap Serbian tobacco, the flesh around his piggy eyes crinkling. If moles or other burrowing creatures had created a temporary tussock on the hilltop, the passer-by might sit on it a while to rest his legs, perhaps take off his big boots and socks, and pick in a desultory way at the sock wool before examining his feet with greater diligence. Flesh the colour of curd, little red sores on his toes, but his eyes would be drawn to that cerulean blue, and he would forget his feet. His socks were blue, too, but that was just a coincidence. His boots were dappled and dun, like a cow’s colouring might be, in a land where there were cows to be seen, unlike this land.

If fog came down and swirled about our passer-by, he would be reluctant to move. With his piggy-eyed vision occluded, that clanking noise would seem less faint, as his hearing grew sharper. Perhaps, too, once he had tapped out his pipe on a stone and the last wisps of the acrid Serbian smoke dispersed, he would become aware of the smell of birds, where there were no birds’ nests.

At the bottom of the hill there is a sordid tavern where miscreants and ne’er-do-wells plot acts of the utmost fiendishness, and cackle as they do so. The tavern’s walls are trimmed with gimp passementerie. It is Shrove Tuesday, so pancakes are being served. Unfortunately, the pancakes have been made with contaminated flour, and in days to come this scene will be referred to as The Mass Poisoning Horror Of Cackpod, Cackpod being the name of the village at the bottom of the hill, or one of its names, for it has others, in other tongues, this being a country of ten different languages, some of them spoken by only a smattering of citizens, and that smattering in its collective dotage.

Our traveller, with his foul pipe tobacco, is not in his dotage, and he crashes excitedly through the tavern door, having scurried down the hillside at the first hint of the fog lifting. There is something in his manner that suggests he is unused to the company of ruffians. There is a throbbing in his pituitary gland and beads of sweat upon his brow. He has of course put back on his socks and boots, and tucked his pipe into the breast pocket of his Austrian Postal Service jacket. Standing at the bar of this repulsive tavern, he asks the landlady for a refreshing, minty potage, with foam on top. He is thinking about cerulean blue, juddery rotation, and the smell of birds, and in his frazzled mind he is swept back to that day years and years ago when he danced a fandangoid hoocha with a floozie who wore a cerulean blue frock and span around like a wild thing as she danced, and though she did not smell of birds she had something of the look of a crow, bright black eyes and a corvine nose, and, yes, her hat was made of feathers, was it not?

The ne’er-do-wells ignore the newcomer, for they are too busy gobbling down the poisoned pancakes which, within hours, will find them writhing and groaning in the sawdust of the tavern floor. Emboldened by the first few sips of his foamy potation, however, the traveller asks the landlady, “I say, what is that thing on top of yon hill, that blue rotating thing that smells of birds?”

His voice is loud, and resounds in the stifling fug of the tavern, and there is a sudden silence. The landlady busies herself, pointedly polishing a tankard with a rag. Every single rapscallion stops chewing on his pancake. A dog that had been curled asleep at the foot of the pianola gets to its feet and pads slowly out of sight into a dark back room. The clock above the bar stops ticking. All is still, and silent, and heavy with menace.

Eventually – it seems as if hours have passed – the ancient dog reappears, and lies down in the doorway. The sounds of chewing and munching and clinking tankards start up again. The landlady flings her rag on to the floor and dishes up more plates piled with pancakes. Queasily aware that he has said something untoward, the traveller slurps down his potage and takes his leave, edging past the sleeping hound. He does not know that within hours all the pancake eaters will be dead and gone, that the dog is tormented by nightmares, that the tavern will be condemned and fall to ruin.

He steps outside. The sky is black. He peers with piggy eyes up to the top of the hill, but the blue rotating thing that smells of birds is engulfed in darkness and no longer visible. He turns to trudge towards Cackpod railway station. The image of that floozie flickers before him, and now he remembers how she winched him onto a ship from the rock where he had been abandoned for forty days, and how they danced and danced the tarantella, and how her frock was blue, and how she span, and how as midnight struck on the tavern clock she turned into a crow.

[Originally posted in July 2006.]

There I was, crumpled and decisive, standing between two trees on the edge of the Blister Lane Bypass. The trees were both yews, I think. I was looking for curlews. The first one I saw was made of plastic, it was a toy or perhaps a decorative figurine. It had been abandoned in the gutter. Then I saw a second curlew, swooping across the blue, blue sky. I did not know it then, but within hours there would be no blue to be seen, for dark and brooding thunderclouds would waft in from the east. A third curlew appeared in my mind’s eye. It was gigantic and ferocious and terrifying. I shuddered. I walked away from the yews, in the direction of Bodger’s Spinney, pulling my resplendent teal cardigan tight about my torso. There was a fourth curlew, an embroidered one, on my necktie. Why in the name of heaven was I wearing a necktie? All of a sudden this length of fabric wrapped around my neck felt like a hangman’s noose. I took it off, with violent jerks, and discarded it in a puddle, where it would remain until discovered later that day by a scavenging hobbledehoy from The Bashings, that gloomy cluster of huts which sane people shirk. Oh, as the tie dropped into the puddle I saw a fugitive reflection in the water of the embroidered curlew, so that made five. It was still only ten in the morning.

By five past ten I had seen another dozen curlews, or it may have been a single curlew seen twelve times, I cannot be altogether certain. I was standing on Sawdust Bridge at the time, feeling hopeless and disgruntled and cantankerous. The tunic I was wearing beneath my cardigan, which I had stolen from an ingrate, was playing havoc with my [invented skin disease], and rashes were appearing. My doctor had prescribed a daily dose of some sort of bean mashed up into a bowl of milk of magnesia, and I had forgotten to take my dose that morning, so keen was I to see curlews.

Later I took a mop and began to clean the floor of one of the corridors in an ugly building which shall remain nameless. I was indoors now, so unlikely to see any curlews. But lo!, little Maisie – a polka-dot-dressed orphan whose parents perished in the Tet Offensive – came rushing up to me clutching her stamp album and showed me her latest acquisitions, a set of twenty bird-related thematics issued by the Tantarabim Interim Authority. I could not help but note, as I shared my Brazil nuts with starving Maisie, that eight of the stamps depicted curlews.

On my way home, as the evening closed in and dark thoughts of skulduggery frolicked in my throbbing skull, I saw a dead curlew on the canal towpath. Bird detectives had already thrown a cordon around it, so I was unable to take a closer look.

That night, by candlelight, I took out my ledger and gave names to each of the twenty-six curlews I had seen. Alcibiades, Bim, Chumpot, Dromedary, Eidolon, Flaps, Gash, Heliogabalus, Inthod…. That is how I started my list. Then I recalled that I had set out to see forty-four curlews. I gnashed my teeth in misery and dejection. And I recalled that I had forgotten to wring out the mop.

You will recognise the above as an extract from Dobson’s pamphletto A Description Of And Reverie Upon Forty-Four Curlews (out of print). Note that I use the word “pamphletto” to distinguish this work from the general run of pamphlets spewed out by Dobson. Note, too, that at this time, and in this place, I am not going to explain the difference between the pamphlets and the pamphlettos. Let it gnaw away at your mental innards, if you will.

Our purpose today is to subject the text to analysis. I have been asked innumerable times – well, numerable, in that I can count the times I have been asked, on the fingers of one maimed hand – whether Dobson is telling the truth, or making the whole thing up. No matter how rigorous our analysis, irrespective of the analytical techniques employed, I am afraid to say this is an unanswerable question. One would need to delve deep into the biography of the pamphleteer, deeper than anyone with working wits in their head has ever seen fit to delve, to pronounce the passage true or false. It may even be a combination of the two, partly fact and partly fiction. Or Dobson may have sincerely believed it to be true, when it was actually an hallucination, or a series of hallucinations, brought on by exhaustion or the jangles or entrancement by a tiny sinister gnome-like fellow dressed all in green. It is unlikely we will ever know.

This is not to say that we cannot analyse the passage, using certain techniques developed by Blötzmann, to ascertain the more important question of whether Dobson would have known a curlew when he saw one. After all, he was a man of boundless ornithological ignorance, as is attested not only by his inamorata Marigold Chew and by several of his acquaintances, not all of them shady characters, but by the pamphleteer himself, in his own words, notably in the pamphlet My Boundless Ornithological Ignorance, Together With A Paean Of Praise To Googie Withers (out of print). And careful study of the present text reveals that, in spite of the promise in the title to describe forty-four curlews, Dobson barely has a word to say about their appearance. Let us tabulate, in an objective tabulating manner, what he does say.

Curlew Number One : plastic

Curlew Number Two : swooping

Curlew Number Three : gigantic, ferocious and terrifying, but also imaginary

Curlew Number Four : embroidered

Curlew Number Five : Curlew Number Four reflected in a puddle

It is with reluctance that I am going to abandon my exciting tabulation, or tabulature, so soon, but quite frankly Dobson has nothing whatsoever to say about the other twenty-one curlews he claims to have seen that day, at least nothing that persuades us they were actually curlews as opposed to, say, godwits or pratincoles or starlings. At no point does he describe what he is looking at in the kind of detail we would like if we were to be convinced that he knew what he was talking about.

This is the level of piercing insight one is able to gain by applying Blötzmannist analysis techniques to a piece of text, although of course it is only piercing when the text under scrutiny mentions birds. Absent birds, and you are left rudderless, disorientated and whirling ever more rapidly into a maelstrom of mental chaos. Or so I am told. By Blötzmann himself. Shouting his head off. On the blower.

NOTE : Many thanks to Vincent Byrne for “pamphletto”. (And “booklettes”, not yet deployed.)

And the Lord came unto the plains of Gath. And he was footsore, having walked for many days without rest. And he sat him down upon one of the tussocks which grow upon the plains of Gath. Then there came a widow woman driving before her a goat. And the goat was thin and bony and of Satanic mien. And the Lord said unto the widow woman:

“Woman! I am your Lord and I am footsore having walked for many days without rest. I have great thirst. Succour me with milk from your goat. This I command.”

Thereupon the widow woman did stop upon her journey and she tied her goat with a halter to a post that was stuck fast in the earth upon the plains of Gath. And she sat down upon the tussock next to the Lord and took from her pouch an infusion of herbs and roots all rolled in the leaf of a phryxinga shrub and one end of this she ignited with fire from heaven and she breathed in the fumes thereof.

“My goat is old and tired and thin and bony and has no milk to give,” said the widow woman.

“Then thou shalt roast in the pits of hell for eternity,” said the Lord.

But before the Lord could make good his threat there came passing upon the plains of Gath several more widow women, some with goats and some with widows’ mites. And the Lord was sore affrighted. Then the widows all together began a keening and a caterwauling and made so mighty a din that the Lord placed his hands over his ears. And the goats did join in, braying, and the widows’ mites did join in, buzzing. And so great was the racket of the keening and the braying and the buzzing that the sun itself trembled and hid and darkness fell upon the plains of Gath.

Then from out of the darkness there came a minstrel toiling across the plains of Gath. And when he came upon the Lord and the widow women and the goats and the widows’ mites he did stop and he placed his lyre upon the ground and listened. And when after many hours passed and the hubbub ceased the minstrel did speak unto the widow women.

“Women! I have come far, for I am of a brutish Germanic tribe, a stranger in the plains of Gath. I am a minstrel, but I have put aside my lyre for I am bewitched by the din of your keening and caterwauling, and the braying of your goats, and the buzzing of your widows’ mites. Come follow me, on the long journey back to the tenebrous Teutonic forests from whence I came, that you might keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz to my tribespeople, for your racket will be as balm to their ears in the land of Improv.”

But before the widow women could follow the minstrel from that place, the Lord rose up from his tussock and with great fury he shouted,

“Is there not one among you who will give succour to your Lord in his grievous state upon the plains of Gath in the darkness?”

And there was silence. And then the sun did reappear, flooding the plains of Gath with light, and close by the tussock a fountain burst forth from the soil, shooting a jet of pure bubbling water high into the air. And the Lord did stand beneath it with his head upturned and his mouth open and he drank of the water. And when he was sated he took a rod and a staff and began to smite the widow women and the goats and the minstrel in terrible rage. But the widows’ mites were tiny and they buzzed away from the scene of the smiting. They buzzed to a cluster of huts just beyond the horizon where there lived a satrap and his minions. And hearing the buzzing of the widows’ mites the satrap and his minions took up their clubs and their staves and their sticks and they did rush like flies across the plains of Gath to the tussock where the Lord was in a great frenzy. And the lyre of the minstrel lay shattered and broken upon the ground.

And the satrap and his minions did set upon the Lord with all their might. And when he was bashed senseless they carried him away across the plains of Gath to their cluster of huts where they locked him up in durance vile. And the widow women and their goats did lick their wounds and dust themselves down and they were joined by the widows’ mites and they did follow the minstrel on a long journey to the tenebrous Teutonic forests where they did keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz and bewitch the tribespeople of Improv, yea unto every generation.

And in his dungeon in a cluster of huts upon the plains of Gath the Lord did bewail his fate. And there came unto him an angel, saying:

“Lord, I am an angel sent by another, greater Lord than thee. I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally. And sparkle out among the fern to bicker down a valley. It is the valley of the shadow of death and the valley along which you must walk unless you buck your ideas up. I shall fling open the doors of your prison if you will but pledge to crawl upon your belly across the plains of Gath and beyond, all the way to the far remote tenebrous Teutonic forests, there to seek forgiveness from the widow women and their goats and their widows’ mites and the minstrel. Do as I command, and when again they keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz, place not your hands over your ears, but stand upon a podium and wave a baton. And your eyes shall glint and your lank and greasy tresses will become as a bouffant. And you will be called Maestro.”

And the Lord did as he was bid by the angel, and he betook himself upon his belly to Improv in Ülm.

Here endeth the lesson.

There is an old joke, a proper chestnut, which begins “A mod and a rocker and a widow and an orphan walk into a bar…” The Oxford English Dictionary does not tell us why we use the word chestnut in this context. It says that the usage “probably” originated in the United States and, curiously, that “the newspapers of 1886–7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose”. What was in the air in those two years that suddenly made this a debatable issue? Perhaps there was a spate of chestnut madness, similar to the carrot madness that ran rife in Belgium and northern France in the 1850s. No convincing explanation has ever been given for the latter episode, and it happened too late to be addressed by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds (1841).

The bar into which the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan walk in the joke is usually specified to be a seafront bar, no doubt on account of the infamous seaside resort pitched battles between mods and rockers – though not between widows and orphans – in the mid-1960s. Interestingly, however, in one persistently popular variant of the gag, the punchline depends heavily on the bar being the drinking den known as the Tip Top Annexe, a rather seedy establishment on the Crescent in Aden, when it was Prince of Wales Crescent in the British Protectorate of Aden. This was close to the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, where Arthur Rimbaud fetched up on his arrival in Aden in August 1880. There is an echo of Rimbaud in some versions of the joke, when the rocker, or sometimes the widow, is said to have “dried [him- or herself] in the air of crime”. The joke works well enough with or without this observation, as indeed it does when it is not set in the Tip Top Annexe, so long as the punchline is modified accordingly.

In his study Draining The Last Vestiges Of Humour Out Of The Funniest Gags, the pop psychologist Dr Desmond Drain frets away, like a dog with a bone, at the idea that the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan are not, as we would assume, four persons, but two. In this reading, the mod is the widow and the rocker is the orphan. He goes on to posit, in further garbled analytical posturing, that they are a couple in love, smitten with each other, who, before entering the bar – which may or may not be the Tip Top Annexe – have had a tiff, because of a crime committed, either by the mod/widow or the rocker/orphan, where one sides with, or personifies, law and order, and the other represents the forces of crime, disorder, and even, at a pinch, existential chaos. Dr Drain’s own preconceptions and prejudices regarding the values inherent in the different types of music championed by mods and rockers tend to colour his argument, as does the fact that he was orphaned at an early age, when his parents died in the riots which occurred during the outbreak of citrus fruit madness in south coast seaside resorts in the 1970s. Whether or not one gives credence to his interpretation, most people agree that the joke works better with four protagonists rather than two.

Or rather, with five protagonists, for let us not forget that essential addendum, the barman who serves their drinks. Tip Top Annexe types like to have him wearing either a fez or a pith helmet, but any sort of headgear serves equally well. He does have to wear something on his head, however, simply to be able to incorporate into the joke the part where he takes it off and places it on the bar counter. As an experiment, I once told the joke without including this detail and, as expected, it fell completely flat. In fact, some among my audience were so miffed, in spite of being fully aware they had been assembled for the specific purpose of experimental joke-telling research, that they stooped to pick up pebbles and shingle from the beach and pelted me with them, until I had to make a run for it to the safety of the railway station. At least it was pebbles rather than shivs, otherwise it would have been like a scene from Brighton Rock. It was probably not a good idea to conduct my research at the seaside.

In some variants of the joke, though intriguingly not always those which insist upon the Tip Top Annexe setting in Aden, the barman’s appearance is given, and he closely resembles Arthur Rimbaud. We are told he has “the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile” (Verlaine), and is “sympathique… speaks little, and accompanies his brief comments with odd little cutting gestures with his right hand” (Bardey). It is with one of these cutting gestures that the barman accidentally knocks over the absinthe ordered by the mod – or sometimes by the rocker – leading directly to what today’s barbarians might call the “LOL moment, innit” midway through the joke, a particularly clever insertion as it is often taken as the punchline. That the joke then continues only serves to heighten the uproarious hilarity of its side-splitting conclusion. Where the odd little cutting gestures by the barman are absent, the glass of absinthe, or lemonade or vapido ague, is knocked over by another agency, which might be a gust of wind, a stray dog, or an invisible sprite.

It is the venerability of the joke, its status as an old chestnut – not a carrot nor a piece of citrus fruit – which has led, in years of telling and retelling, to so many variations. Their profusion has persuaded some that an effort ought to be made to recover the Ur-joke, stripped of all inessentials. One such attempt, attributed to the japester Fat Billy Cannonball, which has gone down a storm at certain northern seaside resorts, dispenses with the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan, and has Arthur Rimbaud himself, walking into the bar of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers on Prince of Wales Crescent in the British Protectorate of Aden on a specific day in August 1880, and ordering an absinthe, or “this sage-bush of the glaciers”, as he puts it. I have yet to hear this version in its entirety, but I have already been rendered helpless with mirth, and must roll about on the floor, convulsed, as if in the throes of a fit. Excuse me while I do just that.

I once had the unnerving experience of meeting, at a cocktail party in an Alpine skiing resort, a real, living and breathing chairlift dingbat. To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. Like most people, I believed that the Alpine chairlift dingbat was a figure of myth, a boogie man of whom tales were told to frighten the tinies. But no. Here he was, leaning against a mantelpiece, nursing a glass of sfizziggio, telling amusing anecdotes to a rapt audience.

I turned to my companion and hissed, “You cannot seriously expect me to believe that this charming and insouciant fellow is a chairlift dingbat?”

My companion, who had steered me through the crowds to this corner of the room purposely to introduce me to the chairlift dingbat, put her finger to her lips.

“Hush,” she said, “Just wait and see.”

We waited for a break in the conversation and, when it came, my companion, with her effortless social skills, did as she had promised, drew the chairlift dingbat away from the mantelpiece, and introduced us. We talked for over an hour that evening, and parted, very late, having arranged to meet for het ontbijt in a spectacular Flemish cafe in the foothills of an important Alp the next morning. He failed to appear. When I returned to my hotel, all waffled up, I bumped into my companion in the lobby.

“No show,” I complained, “And I still don’t believe he is a chairlift dingbat. We talked for an hour at the cocktail party last night, and he was nothing if not sophisticated and amusing and insouciant. He betrayed no sign of being what you persist in claiming he is.”

“Did you ask him outright?” asked my companion.

“Of course not!” I protested, “It would be an unforgiveable social gaffe to ask such a question at a sophisticated cocktail party.”

“That is true,” she conceded, “And come to think of it, he is unlikely to have given an honest answer. Chairlift dingbats are careful to protect their anonymity when not actually lolling in the corner of a chairlift.”

“Meaning…?” I asked.

“Meaning that they carefully cultivate the demeanour of a chairlift dingbat but are adept at sloughing it off the moment they step out of the chairlift on to terra firma,” she said.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was too stodged with waffles to care.

“I am going to lie down in the dark,” I said.

As I lay in the dark, I thought about all I knew – or thought I knew – of chairlift dingbats. That they lurked, unseen, in the corners of chairlifts, waiting to accost the unsuspecting chairlift passenger on his ride to or from the top of an Alpine peak. That they had the appearance of singularly unappealing Swiss yokels and gave off an overpowering whiff of goat. That the babbling to which they subjected their victim was largely unintelligible. That within the confines of the chairlift, creaking on its cables, suspended over the treacherous snow-covered mountain slopes, to be trapped with a chairlift dingbat was a fate too horrible to imagine. That so repugnant was the mere presence of the chairlift dingbat that many a victim felt compelled to throw open the door of the chairlift and hurl themselves to certain death on the treacherous snow-covered mountain slopes below. That when the Alpine politti came to investigate the suicide, there was never a trace to be found of the chairlift dingbat, save for vestigial traces of goaty whiff, soon dispersed in the sparkling Alpine chill.

I sat up in the dark of my hotel room and poured myself a stiffener from the bottle of vapido ague on the bedside table. It was simply incomprehensible that the sophisticated chap who had amused me with anecdotes at a sophisticated cocktail party the night before could possibly be a chairlift dingbat. Dammit, surely such maddening creatures did not even exist, were but the invention of Alpine mythmakers and storytellers. Obviously the cocktail party guest and my companion were in cahoots, playing a trick on me, even now were probably sat together in the spectacular Flemish cafe laughing their heads off at my expense. I took another swig, put on my Christopher Plummer-style Tyrolean jacket, and headed out into the streets of the skiing resort. The air was cold and clear and crisp.

I had sat in the spectacular Flemish cafe a couple of hours ago. Now it was boarded up, and there was a sign in the window. “We have moved”, it said, in several different languages, in many of which I was fluent. I rummaged in my Tyrolean jacket pocket for my gazetteer, to ascertain the location of the new address. The cafe had moved to the summit of the important Alp at the foot of which lay the resort. It was now accessible only by chairlift.

I made my way to the chairlift station, and towards the worst horror of all.