I have not read Geoff Dyer’s new book Zona : A Book About A Film About A Journey To A Room. As the title indicates, it is devoted to a film, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979) and to Dyer’s obsession with it. I vaguely recall seeing Stalker, probably around the time of its release, and have not seen it since. Clearly it did not make a great impression on me, unlike the same director’s Andrei Rublev (1966), which I saw in the mid-seventies and from which I can still remember certain scenes. Reading a couple of reviews of Dyer’s book led me to wondering which film I would choose to write an obsessional book about.

It then struck me that, much as I might be given to enthusiastic ravings about, say, Celine And Julie Go Boating (Jacques Rivette, 1974) or The Falls (Peter Greenaway, 1980), or Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942), or Even Dwarfs Started Small (Werner Herzog, 1970), or pretty much anything directed by Guy Maddin, it is unlikely I will ever sit down and concentrate and write about them at length.

Dyer’s Zona is, apparently, “one long movie summary, a shot-by-shot rewrite” of Stalker, which I assume indicates that he gives us a detailed account of the film and wanders off into discursive byways. (At one point he provides us with the useful information that, after the completion of Sympathy For The Devil / One Plus One (1968), Mick Jagger said of Jean Luc Godard “He’s such a fucking twat”.)

Taking a similar approach, might it not be interesting to consider not just one of my favourite films but, say, three of them, and construct a narrative that intermingled them, had elements from each colliding, happily or otherwise, stirred them together in a pot and made something new and strange? I think this is what young persons call a “mash up”. What would happen were I to sprinkle together, in chronological order, Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945), Noroît (Jacques Rivette, 1976), and Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988)?

Certain choices, or strategies, seem compellingly obvious. Hans Gruber and his criminal gang could invade and hold hostage the occupants, not of the Nakatomi building but of the coastal castle which is the setting for Noroît. Ah, but the castle is home to a pirate gang rather than a law-abiding Japanese corporation. So Giulia, the pirate leader, could be replaced by Laura Jesson’s well-meaning but exasperating friend Dolly Messiter. Ruthless German criminals pitted against Francophone female pirates, both perhaps to be outwitted by New York cop John McClane, who is attempting to rescue Laura, aided by Erika and Morag, the avengers. Dr Alec Harvey can sit in a police car with Sergeant Al Powell, parked close to the castle, perhaps in the lee of the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing.

Noroît is partly based on The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), long attributed to Cyril Tourneur but now thought to be the work of Thomas Middleton. These echoes of dark brooding Jacobean tragedy should serve to remind us that in Brief Encounter, the part of Dr Stephen Lynn, Alec’s colleague from whom he borrows the flat for his unseemly and sordid – and ultimately abortive – assignation with Laura, was played by an uncredited Valentine Dyall (1908-1985), an actor whose sepulchral tones made him famous as the Man In Black, host of the long-running BBC radio series Appointment With Fear. I do not know if Valentine Dyall ever acted in any Jacobean tragedies, but if he did not, he should have. He did do some Shakespeare.

We would have to find a role for Dr Stephen Lynn, perhaps applying his professional medical knowledge in the closing scenes of Noroît, where at a torchlit nocturnal masked ball Morag and Erika and Giulia, oops, I forgot, Dolly Messiter, get a bit carried away with the stabbings. I suppose John McClane should be wandering about in the dark somewhere, too, bloodied and in his vest.

I realise that I have not yet managed to insert any steam trains, nor Albert Godby nor Myrtle Bagot from the Milford Junction tea room, nor Holly Gennaro-McClane, nor the pirate castle musicians. But fear not, space will be found in my narrative for all of them.

I am in something of a quandary about the title, for though one can cobble together various combinations of, here given in alphabetical order, Brief and Die and Encounter and Hard and Noroît, no one admixture springs out as obviously preferable. For the time being, while I continue to worry away at it, like a dog with a bone, I shall refer to it as My Own Zona, echoing Geoff Dyer.

Cast, in order of appearance:

Hans Gruber – Alan Rickman (1946- )
Giulia – Bernadette Lafont (1938- )
Laura Jesson – Celia Johnson (1908-1982)
Dolly Messiter – Everley Gregg (1903-1959)
John McClane – Bruce Willis (1955- )
Erika – Kika Markham (1940- )
Morag – Geraldine Chaplin (1944- )
Dr Alec Harvey – Trevor Howard (1913-1988)
Sergeant Al Powell – Reginald VelJohnson (1952- )
Dr Stephen Lynn – Valentine Dyall (1908-1985)
Albert Godby – Stanley Holloway (1890-1982)
Myrtle Bagot – Joyce Carey (1898-1993)
Holly Gennaro McClane – Bonnie Bedelia (1948- )
Castle Musicians – Jean Cohen-Solal, Robert Cohen-Solal, Daniel Ponsard (dates unknown)

And here is the seaside castle where the action takes place:

Let us consider the birds of the air, with their feathers and their wingspans and their tiny little heads. It is an arresting thought that many of the birds we know today are descended from the fierce and rapacious pterodactyl of prehistory. Though we should not forget that many modern birds are themselves fierce and rapacious. We need only think of the swan, for example, or dozens of different types of gull.

You can test the fierceness and rapaciousness of a seagull by placing a paper bag full of breadcrumbs on the wall abutting the promenade at a seaside resort. Stand well back, and wait. Sooner rather than later, a seagull, or seagulls, will swoop upon the paper bag and frenziedly slash it to ribbons to gain access to the breadcrumbs within, which it will gobble up so greedily that many of the crumbs will be scattered upon the paving. Further birds – other gulls, or pigeons – will then descend upon the leavings, and within seconds not a trace of breadcrumb will remain, and the shreds of paper bag will be blown away on the winds.

This is an example of the sort of violence Tennyson must have had in mind when he wrote of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” in In Memoriam A. H. H. (1849), even though no blood has actually been spilled. The seagull is a scavenger rather than a bird of prey, the chancer of the avian world. But what I wish to advert to here is, let us say, attitude. A seagull may not slash at and tear to shreds something quick and alive, say for an example a vole or a hamster or, indeed, you, standing there at the seaside, but that is a mere accident of evolution. It is certainly imbued with all the fierceness and rapacity of its prehistoric ancestor. Ask the paper bag.

Of course there are other birds, befeathered and bewinged and with tiny little heads, which are more docile. One thinks of budgerigars. One does not think for too long of budgerigars, because quite frankly their charms pall rather quickly, unless one has a particular “thing” for them. It was long thought that the budgerigar’s natural habitat was a cage plopped on a sideboard in an ornate parlour or drawing-room crowded with knicknacks and gewgaws, lit by gas, which perhaps tells you most of what you need to know about them. Their heads are particularly tiny, in relation to their bodies.

The tininess of birds’ heads in general means that there is not much room inside them for the brain, which in itself is therefore a tiny thing. We might wonder at how much, or how little, cognitive ability resides in the average brain of the average bird. Not much at all, we will conclude. As a life form, birds are pretty thick. Yet their lack of intelligence has not prevented them being masters of the air, nest-builders, hunters and scavengers and even – in the case of Newfoundland crows – skilful exploiters of the possible uses of twigs. We should not be tempted to discount the powers of birds simply because most of them are stupid.

The thing most types of birds can do that we cannot is, of course, to fly. That is where their wings are so decisive as appendages. Mankind has had to fashion wings out of balsa wood and straw and string, and still he cannot fly. I think this may be to do with the fact that we cannot flap our arms with sufficient rapidity. An interesting question to ask is if you would accept a putative Faustian bargain, that you would be granted the ability to fly in return for having your brain shrunk to the size of a budgerigar’s, with the commensurate diminution in mental capacity. To give your reply to that question some import, we would have to predicate that the process be irreversible. I think all of us would cry out an impassioned “Yes!” if we thought we could fly about for a couple of days, stupid as a bird, and then resume our normal flightless daily lives with reswollen brains and our wits intact.

Let us further assume that we could choose not just to be granted the gift of flight but actually to become a bird. Which bird would you pick? Most of us, I think, would avoid the fate of becoming a budgerigar, or indeed an ostrich. Not only is the ostrich particularly moronic, but it cannot fly. I suppose a very stupid person, who did not know these things about ostriches, might accept the Faustian bargain and then choose to be transformed into an ostrich, with the net result of simply being turned into a life form even more stupid than he started out as, without the compensation of being able to fly.

It occurs to me that there may be a profitable opera or stage musical to be made from that notion. It would of course be a tragedy. The part of the protagonist would have to be written with exceeding care, for there is a risk that an audience would be resistant to identifying closely with such an irredeemably thick hero. So perhaps a comedy would be more appropriate. One can readily imagine packed theatres loud with laughter at the antics of Ostrich Man. It would be cruel laughter.

Birds, too can be cruel, but they do not laugh. At least I am unaware of any birds that laugh, as opposed to birds whose song can be interpreted as chuckling or guffawing. But such interpretations are mere anthropomorphism, a besetting sin. Can birds commit sin? I am sure this is a question theologians must have asked, over the centuries, but I am not familiar with their arguments. I would assume that the answer must be “No, birds are incapable of sin”, for the simple reason that they are so damned stupid.

Another thing birds can do that we cannot is to lay eggs, but that is a topic so plump with possibilities that it deserves an essay of its own.

Today’s essay is a guest postage by BlackberryJuniper & Sherbet. When she told me she was planning to write On The Magnificence Of Peter Wyngarde, I realised this was a perfect topic for the Hooting Yard daily essays, but one which I was not qualified to address. This is an abridged version. You can read the full mad frothing at the mouth here.

Have a proper look at this exhibition of early seventies utter cool, and ask – who else can carry off leather pants in this way, and a moustache, and still be astonishingly intelligent and a slightly louche action hero also?

Now, I don’t mean for a moment to be merely dribbling over one of the most gorgeous actors still alive, in a horrible sexist way. I would sincerely love to meet Peter Wyngarde and have, umm, a croissant and some orange juice with him. I would love to chat and hear stories, and just listen to the marvellous George Sanders-esque voice. I truly think the man is one of the best actors we had, before some people got hot under the collar that despite always being a ladies’ man on TV, he got arrested for some business in a toilet in Gloucester with a truck driver in 1975. (The fact that his acting colleagues often called him ‘Petunia Winegum’ as a nickname testifies to the fact that being gay wasn’t a secret among people that knew him.) Since some people weren’t ready to handle the fact that the leather trousers were active in a way they hadn’t expected, his career suffered and got halted, really. What a total bloody shame! After all those sudden 1965-67-ish appearances in staples like The Avengers, The Saint, Armchair Theatre and The Prisoner, he drifted away. Just when it was all getting going.

Now, I haven’t looked into his career in any great detail, but if he’s in something I will watch it and keep it, as he never disappoints. Such presence, such confidence. I think this used to be called brio, as in – full of energy, life and enthusiasm. And class!

My earliest Peter Wyngarde memory is a masked Peter Wyngarde, as seen in Flash Gordon (1980). Which is one of the most perfect films ever made and I wouldn’t change a hair on its head whatsoever. Why so many people dislike this film so strongly is completely beyond me. What does it matter that the actor playing Flash Gordon apparently wasn’t acting very well? I thought he did fine, they didn’t paint him as a great brain – more as a character that had heart and energy; Sam Jones did fine with that brief, I reckon. What is there to dislike about the intense, insane over-colourisation: all that GOLD, and green, and red, and orange, and shininess everywhere?? Every time I watch it I am cheered up even if the sound is down! And if the sound is up, I get to hear Ornella Muti purring and sulking, Melody Anderson cheerleading and offering Suzanne Danielle the elixir that will make a night with the Emperor Ming doable (his sexual weirdness is hinted at several times, in a rather titillating way). And then there’s Emperor Ming himself, Max von Sydow, who despite his marvellous face makeup and great costuming, still manages to attract my attention by doing more evil hand-rubbing acting than anyone I have since seen in a film; more pregnant pauses before evil sneering. And of course, Brian Blessed yelling ‘DIVE!’. And the Queen soundtrack… the Love Capsule music is always overlooked and so sensually splendid I bought the whole soundtrack just for that, those few seconds…

And then, there’s the voice that I didn’t really identify properly until about three years ago. I have watched this wonderful soul-edifying frothy film of excellence about a thousand times, and yet, oddly, I had never really connected the cast list. I think I forgot George Sanders was dead, and imagined the voice of Klytus, Ming’s state torturer, was him, somehow. Then one day, I really listened and realised that (a) George Sanders had indeed been dead since 1972, and Flash Gordon was a 1980 film, and (b) that voice didn’t really sound like George Sanders at all – it was too deep and way more nuanced. So the fact I had been dribbling all this time over a masked person I had only just realised starred in one of my other favourite films was …well, I have a quiet life, I was very excited.

The other favourite film was Night of the Eagle (1962). I can’t recommend this film highly enough. Spoiler alert!! It is about a scientific and sceptical professor who is doing very well in his rising career at a small university, but is unaware this is because his wife is working protective voodoo on his behalf; as she is actually battling the forces of greedy and voracious bad magic, summoned up by the Head Teacher, Margaret Johnston. At the end she summons a huge thoughtform eagle to get rid of Wyngarde’s character, but a wonderful contrivance with an old eight track player sends it against her instead, hence the title. End of Spoiler. This is the face of Peter Wyngarde I had been very familiar with for years –

Which doesn’t look at all like the first picture, does it? I had no idea it was the same person. It’s a genuinely scary film, with some good jumpy moments. Go and feast your eyes on the acting talent that is this man, on YouTube – the whole film is up there.

Another thing I had been wanting to see for ages was the Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense (1984). I started to watch them in the day, and an episode came on with That Voice! Putting down my toast and honey, I see that Peter Wyngarde is there, complete with wonderful moustache, and robed as a devil-worshipping priest. I think it’s slightly likely that he was a little bored by this acting assignment, as I have rarely seen him loucher in something; then again, it’s a very slight story. There’s a funny scene near the end of the episode (‘And the Wall Came Tumbling Down’) where Wyngarde’s character is supposed to be dead on the floor. The scene’s focus is away from him, to the actors still alive, upright and talking, gesturing. Of course, I was just staring at Peter Wyngarde on the floor, loving those cheekbones and eyebrows. I don’t know how long the scene may have taken to film, but he gets bored being on the floor and makes a face, licking his lips and the tip of his moustache very obviously. It made me laugh out loud.

In speaking of his TV and film stuff, I am leaving out his notorious record, recently re-released on CD – When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head. I’m not even going to attempt to tell you about this – you have to go and listen to it! It’s a concept album, its very funny, full of social commentary. There’s rap, to country music – imagine! There’s much talking – its got ATMOSPHERE fizzing to the tip of the champagne glass he offers you at the start. It was removed shortly after its initial release, for offending loads of people with the song ‘Rape’. Listening to it as the feminist I am, I think its not meant to be taken literally at all, and there was a lot going on in there about attitudes of the times, being mocked, quite harshly.

But the true gem, of any length or consistency, that I have – that, as a nation, WE have – is his excellence in the ITC shows Department S, and then the spin-off Jason King, where Wyngarde is a novelist, international travelling playboy and sleuth, as only the early seventies could dress and cast a man. I mean, look…

People make much of how kitsch these series are today; how camp, how unreal, how …silly. Now. You’re talking here, with someone who violently adores Flash Gordon, so are these things going to bother me in the slightest? I really think not. It is all silly, and light; and yet so disarming. Fun. Escapist. Occasionally very clever in terms of story telling, and even thought provoking. The ensemble of the team of the Department S series was great, and it’s quite shameful that it was only the one series. But then there was Jason King, so at least my favourite character is still about.

He would say things like ‘I abhor violence’, before gracefully launching himself across a room to box someone’s ears in that very theatrical and obviously unreal way they did in those TV days. And his hair would not ruffle; his handkerchief would remain dandily in the pocket. And you can’t see it, but his sleeve turnbacks would also remain blissful and unpeturbed. I have no idea why this is so important to me; I think it ties in to my sense of screaming for order in a life of chaos. Wyngarde’s portrayal of Jason King managed to make me actually want to BE him as this character. He managed to be astonishingly arrogant, yet also vulnerable and emotional. Intelligent, and strangely clueless at times. And so stylish in terms of fabric and colour that I think it really did get burned into my brain forever and affect the way I see clothes even now.

I think what I saw there, in his portrayal of that character was an amazing ability to disregard the categorisations of other people, and sail through life as HIMSELF. To not be afraid, to not be cowed, to speak out and say your piece and hold your head up while doing so. And not be afraid to be clever.

And then you see Peter Wyngarde’s actual life, and see that for the time he was in, he was too big to handle, too large for the life around him, for the narrow minded among us. He did get cowed, in the sense that his career got stalled so badly he had to go and do theatre work abroad and it never really recovered here when he got back.

Long Live the Peter Wyngarde of the past, the present, and the imagination… King of Cool, and Much Underrated Brilliant Actor. May I take on those traits I see in him, and glide through life with the same casual insouciance and verve. I wish I may.

Pontiuses is the name given to the healthful and invigorating physical exercise system devised by Joseph Pontius in the early twentieth century in Germany. It is broadly similar to the rival system known as Pilates. Well, actually, it is completely dissimilar, but I am all of a dither what with one thing and another. Only a person in the throes of a dither could possibly confuse their Pontiuses with their Pilates, for they have nothing whatsoever in common save for being physical exercise systems developed in the early twentieth century in Germany by men called Joseph whose surnames began with the letter P. I will try to stabilise my dither so I can continue this essay in prose of glistening clarity.

If you were to stumble upon a grouplet of Pontiuses-practising persons in a field, or in a municipal leisure facility, the first thing that would strike you would be their “gear”. Not for the Pontiusesist the leotards favoured by Pilatesists. No indeed. Here is a first-hand description of the outfit commonly worn when getting into the Pontiuses groove:

I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top; my French dublet gelte in the bellie as though (like a pig readie to be spitted) all my guts had bin pluckt out; a paire of side paned hose that hung downe like two scales filled with Holland cheeses; my longe stock that sate close to my docke, and smoothered not a scab or a leacherous hairie sinew on the calfe of the legge; my rapier pendant like a round sticke fastned in the tacklings for skippers the better to climbe by; my cape cloake of blacke cloth, overspreading my backe like a thorne-backe, or an Elephantes eare, that hanges on his shoulders like a countrie huswives banskin which she thirles hir spindle on; & in consummation of my curiositie, my hands without glooves, all a more French, and a blacke budge edging of a beard on the upper lip, & the like sable auglet of excrements in the rising of the anckle of my chin.

Readers of a Tudor bent may recognise that dandyish apparel as being broadly similar to the costume worn by young Jack Wilton, the narrator of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). What am I saying, “broadly similar”? It is identical. Clearly I have yet to subjugate my dither. I must marshal my forces. Perhaps I ought to go and do some Pontiuses myself.

Now you might think it would be difficult, or at least inconvenient, to perform invigorating exercises when dressed up to the nines like a foppish Elizabethan roister doister. As indeed it is. But therein lies the key to the magnificent efficacy of Pontiuses. Or at least, one of the keys. Apparently, there are several, if we are to credit the title of the “guidance” published by Joseph Pontius, The Several Keys To The Magnificent Efficacy Of The Pontiuses Physical Exercise System Devised By Myself On A Thursday Afternoon In Düsseldorf During A Downpour (1929). I give it in English, though the book, all nine hundred pages of it, was written in Solresol, the artificial language devised by François Sudre and expounded in Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solresol (1902), a signed copy of which Pontius had committed to memory. Not being able to speak or read Solresol myself, I have no idea what Pontius has to say in his “guidance”, but I am not going to let that stop me. I am manfully overcoming my dither and shall press on.

I said that the first thing that would strike you were you to come upon a grouplet of Pontiusesists would be their clothing. Hard upon the heels of that sensation would come a second, as you were made dizzy by the sight of what at first glance would look like people engaged in haphazard jumping about while having spasmodic fits. You might even cast your eyes about to spot a rabid dog, foaming at the mouth, assuming all the people had been bitten by it. But gradually you would begin to discern a pattern, indeed a profound order, in what seemed to be mere frantic cavorting. If it turned out there was a rabid dog in the vicinity, that would be mere coincidence, though you would be advised to report its presence to a public health official on doggy duty in his booth or kiosk, if you could find it. Sometimes these officials hide themselves away so they can spend their days uninterrupted by hound-troubled citizens. It is quite scandalous.

Scandal was something that dogged Joseph Pontius too. But then, the Weimar Republic was riddled with scandal, from top to bottom, so when the inventor of Pontiuses was arrested and charged and convicted and imprisoned in a case of unseemliness, it barely made the headlines. He did not waste his time in gaol, however, adapting his physical exercise system for the confined space of a cell. Rather than seemingly haphazard jumping about, the incarcerated Pontiusesist throws himself repeatedly at the walls in a strictly regulated sequence of spasmodic lurching movements. Reluctantly, Pontius had to discard the preening Tudor gallant’s apparel and approve the practice of Pontiuses while wearing the harsh grey sackcloth of Weimar prison uniform.

What this means is that there is a deal of difference between Pontiuses In Prison and plain old Pontiuses. Even I can tell them apart, even when my senses are muffled by dither. Which, I am pleased to say, they are not, any more, today, for I have smashed the dither to bits, simply through willpower, and I did not even need to perform any Pontiuses to get me this far, which makes me wonder if the exercises are actually worth doing. Probably not, I would aver. I think I shall put my feet up and have a cup of tea instead.

[My thanks to R.]

The lambing-hall boogie may refer to two distinct, yet allied, phenomena. First we need to be clear what we mean by the lambing-hall. Almost invariably, this is the farm building wherein newborn lambs are brought fumbling and puling into the world. In the specific context of the lambing-hall boogie, however, it refers to the site associated with the other extremity of the lamb’s life. Certain evil farmers mischievously give the name “lambing hall” to the barn – often cavernous, windowless, and grisly – in to which lambs are led to the slaughter. Those of you who have bathed in the blood of the lamb, the better to become Christ-like, will be familiar with this latter designation, as will those of you who have read Thomas Harris’s potboiler The Silence Of The Lambs, or have seen the film adaptation starring Jodie Foster as rookie FBI agent Clarice Stalin.

Incidentally, if I may digress for a moment, the agent’s name is often given, erroneously, as Clarice Starling. Even the potboilerist himself refers to her as such throughout his text. Yet the parallels between the fictional law enforcement officer and the non-fictional pock-marked moustachioed Georgian petty thief who rose to become the paranoid and demented tyrant of the Soviet Union are surely too obvious to need repetition here. For my part, I have gone carefully through each page of my paperback copy of The Silence Of The Lambs, Tippexing out the extraneous letters “r” and “g” in each mention of Stalin, and then, using a black biro, slightly thickened the “a” and the “l” to close the gap created between them. Laborious though the process is, it makes for a much more satisfying read, for one is no longer distracted by what seem to be frequent and irrelevant references to a starling, the passerine bird known to congregate in vast flocks often numbering in the thousands, or even millions. I was once reading the potboiler, as yet unmodified with Tippex, when I paused to look out of my window and saw a flock of starlings in the sky, blocking out the sun, but that is an anecdote for a later occasion.

The primary definition of the lambing-hall boogie, then, is that it is the name given to a riotous dance which may be organised by the evil farmer after he has cut the throats of all the lambs he has corralled into the cavernous grisly barn. The sawdust on the floor is awash with the blood of lambs, and into this gruesomeness the evil farmer will inveigle his farmhands and their extended families. First they roll about in the sawdust until they are smeared and splattered with lambs’ blood, and then they dance. Perhaps the closest non-rustic equivalent of the dance is the pogo once practised enthusiastically by punkists in the latter part of the nineteen-seventies. But the music to which the farmpersons leap and hurl themselves about the blood-soaked barn could not be more different from punk music as we know it. Evil farmers are wont to employ for the evening a so-called chamber farm orchestra, which performs a combination of baroque minuets and oompah marches, overlaid, or possibly underlaid, I don’t really understand the technicalities, with funereal dirges on cello.

Intriguingly, there is some evidence that Josef Stalin may have taken part in several lambing-hall boogies during his youthful years in Georgia. Clarice Stalin, however, did not, insofar as we can glean from Harris’s text. Further research on this matter is probably pointless, at least in the case of the rookie FBI agent, for the simple reason that she is fictional.

The secondary definition of the lambing-hall boogie is, as I indicated, allied to the first. If you have spent any appreciable time in a rustic milieu, you will know that you can barely pass ten minutes without being buttonholed by a toothless ancient or drooling village idiot eager to regale you with barely comprehensible countryside lore and legend. Much of this can be airily dismissed with a wave of your elegant hand, swathed in an Italianate silken glove, but occasionally it pays to sit with the crone or idiot and to listen carefully. That is how I learned of the undoubtedly real terrors of the other lambing-hall boogie, where “boogie” refers not to a dance but to a boogie-man or sprite or hobgoblin or wraith or phantom or possibly even to the devil himself.

This figure, with the head of a blood-soaked lamb and the body of either a goat or a hedgehog or a starling, is said to appear from within an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, when the pogoing farmpersons are sprawled, exhausted and nauseous, on the bloody sawdust in the barn. It wreaks its terrible vengeance by casting a hypnotic spell over all those gathered, condemning them to a calendar year of rustic drudgery, flooded drainage ditches, pricking by thorns, torrential rainfall, maddened cows, and other such miseries of countryside existence.

There is some conjecture that the lambing-hall boogie may have somehow entered the body of, and commandeered the brain and soul of young Josef Stalin. There is further conjecture that there exists a suppressed text by Thomas Harris in which Clarice Stalin goes in pursuit of the lambing-hall boogie in an attempt to bring him to justice. I have spoken to someone who claims to have seen the manuscript, who reports that the potboilerist mires the whole business in unnecessary confusion. In his version, the lambing-hall boogie, as it emerges from an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, is erroneously given both the head and the body of a starling, making it effectively identical to the bird itself. My informant tells me that the bulk of the text then has Clarice Stalin chasing a starling across the continental United States, armed with a butterfly net.

Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. These are gods. They are not toys or trinkets, plastic figurines or dolls made out of scraps of wool or straw. They are gods. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. These too are gods. Mighty, imperious gods. Geb is the Great Cackler, Hapi the Father of the Gods, Anubis the Jackal, Khnum the Lord of the Cool Waters, Ra the Sun God, Maat the Goddess of Truth, Aten the Lord of All, Sekhmet the Mighty One, Hathor the Mistress of Heaven and Horus He Who Is Above. Bow down before them for they are powerful deities. While you cower in your ditch, grovelling, they bestride the heavens. Not toys, I say, but gods. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. The devourer, the throne, the tearer, the sky, the opener. Above you the sky is black and fat with stars, for it is night, illimitable and desolate, and you are an uncomprehending mite alone on a burning planet, sprawling in your ditch. They are gods. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. Big, towering, potent gods and goddesses. Aker the Double Lion God. Khepri He who comes into existence. Sobek He who causes fertility. Taurt the Great Lady. Seshat, ah Seshat, the Lady of the Library, and Seth the Lord of Upper Egypt. These are the gods. You are not in Upper Egypt, nor in Lower Egypt. You are not in Egypt at all. But wherever your ditch is, in this night as hard as iron, you abase yourself before these gods, because you must. The time for toys and trinkets, for the bauble and the gewgaw, is long past, and you have left all fripperies behind you. Now there is simply you and your gods, locked together, in the face of the stark blank sky. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. The Chief of Heaven, the Lady of Heaven, the King of the Dead, the Hidden One, the Lady of the House and the Great Goddess. Bow down, bow down. You have a forelock. It is there to be tugged, so tug it. Tug it in obeisance to Thoth, the Great Measurer. And to Ra, to Ra, to Ra!

Now plant your brow in the muck on the floor of the ditch and cast your mind back to that golden happy childhood when you plashed in the paddling pool on a sun-blazed summer’s day. The water was cool and delightful, the water in your paddling pool. Did you rush home wrapped in your big yellow towel and worship Khnum? Did you thank Khnum for the coolness of the water? Dried and cooled, did you clutch your library ticket in your tiny hand and scamper excitedly to the public lending library to borrow a book of fairy stories? You would have looked for something with pictures of elves and wizards and peris and hobgoblins, and found a compendium, perhaps, carried it on tippytoe to the issuing desk bathed in the glorious sunshine streaming through those enormous library windows, had it stamped, and borne your borrowed book away, out onto the path in the bright afternoon. When you got home, safe in your bedroom strewn with pillows and cushions and patchwork quilts and throws, did you cry out in gratitude to Seshat?

Mut. Nut. Horus. Seth. Anubis. These are gods. All-powerful and eternal. I can picture you, a few summers later, older but no wiser, traipsing around in the park at lunchtime. You have a bag of breadcrumbs and you intend to cast them upon the grass as food for sparrows and magpies and starlings, for linnets and ravens, for bufflehead ducks and grebes. Sitting on the rusty bench with its rusty plaque in memory of one long dead who sat here often and adored the view, the view of rooftops and chimneys and football fields and allotments, of tennis courts and orchards rich in cherry trees, I see you casting your crumbs to the birds, and I know that you are not giving thanks to Aten or Geb or Sekhmet or Ptah. No. Still at this time, despite your riches and your bravura, your poor head is filled with visions of Itzpapalotl, Coatlicue, Temazcalteci, Tlaloc, Mayahual, Cihuateto, Huixtocihuatl, Popocatepetl and the like, for these are your gods. In the grip of your delusions, it is perhaps not coincidental that you like to sport a yellow polo neck sweater like the one worn by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and even have your hair cut in a similar mop, though you are not yet going grey, and you insist that you have not seen the film, for you profess a devotion to the silent screen. In your pantheon, Abel Gance rubs shoulders with Oxomoco, Lilian Gish with Quetzalcoatl. You have seen Broken Blossoms more than a dozen times, and sometimes you like to pace the back streets of Limehouse as if in search of the opium dens that are no longer there, the dens from which Sherlock Holmes emerged twitching and shattered in The Man With The Twisted Lip. Those fog-enshrouded days are as distant now as the bright summers of your paddling pool youth, yet you cling to your false gods as you feed the birds and ducks in the park, shaded from Nut’s glittering sky by the overhanging branches of sycamores and hazel trees, on the bench by the magnificent iron railings which were replaced after the war in which you were wounded thrice. You were shot in the stomach, burned by flaming barrels, and crushed by falling masonry, but now there is not a scratch on you, and you have forgotten that terrible day in Scheveningen. You were treated well in the field hospital, but what did you do, once you could again use your hands? You scavenged scraps of wood and built a little toy altar and put it on your bedside shelf, praying to Ixtlilton, your god of healing, for having saved you from the realm of Mictlantecuhtle.

So let us spring forward again now, another ten, twenty years, and now your hair is grey, but no longer cut à la Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Your yellow polo neck is threadbare now, and you use it as a dust-cloth. There is much dust in your home, for the air is never still there. Draughts curl in under the doors and around the window frames, for much of the wood is rotting away under sustained attack by weevils and woodworms, microscopic forms of life you have ignored for too long. Baleful, greasy, plump, a little cracked, you shuffle from room to room, pointlessly, as if you have been kennelled. All your money is gone, exhausted by your postwar debaucheries. You have a blighted reputation and constant pins and needles. That is what accounts for your restlessness, this shuffling from bedroom to pantry to parlour to outhouse, from attic to cellar, and back again, up and down and round and round and always with your liver-spotted fist clamped around a little tin medallion of Montezuma as if that might fend off the night, the darkness, the vastness of eternity. You have a kitten, but it hates you. You have not yet been subjugated by Bastet, but that time is drawing nigh. So you call your kitten Karen Carpenter and feed it with fish that you pluck from ponds, or with eels you thieve from the back-kitchens of canteens, and your kitten hisses at you and claws you and loathes the sight of you. You are fearful of the light in those green eyes, for you rightly sense that they see into your soul, your small and puny soul, all curdled by a life of waste and delusion that Centeotl would bring you corn, that Chantico would warm your hearth, that the wind cried Ehecatl. The gods are in readiness for you and the wind is cold.

Yes, it is night now, and you are in your ditch. The wind is cold and the sky is black and there are no birds, not even crows. Your kitten tore that pitiful tin medallion from your hand and dropped it down a well. You are alone, but for the gods. Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. You have sunk to your knees. That blurred black and white image of Lilian Gish, stricken by panic in The Wind, is fading fast. Like Sherlock Holmes, you too are twitching and shattered, but no opiates brought you to this. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. There is no longer any traffic, no car horns, no rattling carts, no clanking steamer plying across the strait. Despite your wealth, you never did fly in an aeroplane across oceans and continents. You never did go and live in that house on stilts that you pictured in your mind’s eye when you were young. Parks and ponds were your domain, parks and ponds. And now this ditch, a trickle of foul brackish water running through it. You cup some in your hands and splash it on your burning brow but it is not the cool water from the paddling pool given to you by Khnum all those years ago. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. There came that day, that Thursday, when your nerves were so brittle and the pins and needles became too much, and you flung your Montezuma medallion across the pantry and cursed your gods, and the kitten crept up to you and fixed its green eyes on you. You retrieved your tin gewgaw and fled to the park to watch the grebes, but you were shaken. You have not been still since then, you are like the gusts of air swirling around your house, the house you lived in then. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. These are the gods. And Ra. And Anubis. And Thoth, the Great Measurer, Thoth who is ready to take your measure now. Be still. Be measured. Be still.

It was my intention today to use this space to compile a list of nitwits. The idea was to save you, gentle readers, from having to work out for yourselves who was, and who was not, a nitwit. You could simply memorise my list and then, whenever you saw or heard a nitwit, you could cry “Nitwit!”, and pay the nitwit in question no further regard, thus freeing up your time for more salubrious pursuits than being exposed to nitwittery. If your cranial integuments were unequal to the task of memorising the list, you could print it out and carry it with you at all times, in pocket or reticule, hoisting it out to check it when in the presence of a possible or probable nitwit.

I am not suggesting that you do not know a nitwit when you see one, but I thought it would be helpful for you to have a ready made list. Ah, but already your eyes are scanning the splurge of text below this line, and you see no sign of a list. Did my plan gang agley, and if so, why, for heaven’s sake?

Well, jumping out of bed before dawn and plunging my head into a pail of ice-cold water, as ever, I began compiling the list within that same head, wet and freezing. There would be time enough to write down the names of this first flurry of nitwits when I repaired to my escritoire after breakfast, breakfast today being eggy, accompanied by a single smokers’ poptart, washed down with liquefied vitamin-enriched pap. The difference between common or garden pap and liquefied pap is that the latter is runnier, and can be poured into a beaker for the swigging therefrom. Common or garden pap, while still runny, when compared say to a potato or a block of suet, is usually served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. I know these things.

But I am leaping ahead of myself. Let us return to where I was doubled over with my head plunged into a pail of icy water. The names of seven or eight nitwits sprang to mind before I lifted my head, took a gulp of air, and replunged. During the second immersion I thought of several more nitwits. One more deep breath, and the third and final plunge, and before I was even wrapping a towel around my freezing head I had a mental list of at least a score of nitwits.

I just need to clear something up here before we proceed. I may have given the impression that I am only capable of thinking of the names of nitwits at such times as my head is immersed in ice cold water. Not so! I can as well summon the names of a legion of nitwits with my head wrapped in a towel, or indeed not wrapped in a towel or any other swaddling, just plonked atop my neck breathing in the air, fresh or foetid as may be. Don’t get the wrong idea.

So, as I prepared my breakfast eggs ‘n’ smokers’ poptart ‘n’ pap, with my habitual ritualistic precision, I congratulated myself on having made a splendid start to my nitwit list. And here I must confess that self-congratulation is my fatal weakness. I have been known to give myself a thunderous round of applause simply for completing a mundane task, for instance making my breakfast, or tying my bootlaces. In my defence, I would point out that I only do this because it was recommended to me by the author of the only self-help book I have ever read. In Clap Yourself Stupid! – Ten Steps To A Dementedly High Level Of Self-Esteem, Dr Bruce Terrific – pictured on the back cover wearing splendid moustachios and a cravat – suggests not only applauding oneself but also patting oneself on the back using a patented arm-extension device, striking one’s own medals from milk-bottle caps, and playing tape recordings of the cheering of hysterically overexcited crowds, cleverly modified so they sound as if they are bawling one’s own name through tears of happiness and joy. I have found these methods work wonders, and it is now at least three weeks since I have compared myself to a worm wriggling in the muck.

More names of nitwits popped into my head, now dry and slightly warmer, as I ate my breakfast. I was impatient to get to the escritoire and to start writing them down. At this point, I began to wonder whether I ought to simply scribble the names down, one after another, on sheets of notepaper, or if it would be better to make use of a stack of index cards. If I gave each nitwit their own individual card, I would have space for annotations. These could prove invaluable. Already, in my mental list of nitwits, I had two nitwits with very similar names, differing in fact by only a single letter. Granted, they were both nitwits, through and through, but the nature of their nitwittery varied – one was a saintly nitwit, the other a knave and jackass – and it would not do to mix them up. It also occurred to me that, as my list lengthened, there may be a similar similarity in the name of a nitwit and the name of one who was not a nitwit by any stretch of the imagination. I did not want the users of my list to call its reliability into question by making the assumption that I had included a non-nitwit on a list of nitwits or, worse, that I had declared one who was quite clearly not a nitwit to be a nitwit. Were that to happen, I would run the risk of being called a nitwit myself. Perish the thought!

If only the thought had perished. But it began to gnaw at me, before I had even finished my breakfast, before I had even got as far as my escritoire, and my notepad, and my stack of index cards, and my pot of propelling pencils. Should I be on the nitwit list?, I asked myself, over and over again. Sometimes I answered no, sometimes yes, sometimes I left the question hanging, and it hung over me like the sword of Damocles, to the point where I got all wibblywobbly and frightened and jellylegged and fretful. Hoping for some kind of succour, I reached for my self-help book and stared at the photograph of Dr Bruce Terrific. His black and white eyes gazed back at me, curiously unreadable, fathomless, cold. It was like looking into the unreadable fathomless cold eyes of a swan.

I received no succour, no answer. Mopping up the last bit of egg with the last corner of smokers’ poptart, I decided I could not take the risk of being dubbed a nitwit. If I were called a nitwit, I might become a nitwit, my name at the top of my own list of the names of nitwits. It was a prospect too horrible to contemplate. I banged my fork on my plate and stood up, and I walked right past my escritoire, out through the door, into the freezing cold, and I gulped the icy air, as dawn came crashing across the sky.

Dennis Beerpint’s latest poetry collection, a slim volume of twee verse entitled Groaning Minions, is an experiment in what the weedy ex-beatnik calls “fictional autobiography”. “Fictional”, note, not “fictionalised”. In a preface he makes his intentions clear:

By any measure, my life has been one of unremitting tedium. Nothing remotely interesting ever happens to me, nor do I cause anything of remark to occur. My motto can be encoupleted as “Neither a mover nor a shaker be / Just write verse relentlessly twee”. In my advancing years, however, rightly celebrated as probably the greatest poet ever to tread the earth, I am constantly beset by eager young whippersnappers beating a path to my door, clutching their notebooks and propelling pencils and tape recorders, desperate to hear me tell tales of my life so they might be the one to write the Life. It always amuses me to watch them doze off as I explain that, no, I never swapped beekeeping tips with Sylvia Plath, I was never declared insane like Ezra Pound, I never saw my work turned into a hit West End musical like T S Eliot, and I never even shared a Lemsip with Andrew Motion. Having scurried breathlessly up the path, the wannabe biographers trudge away a couple of hours later, their notebooks empty, their cassette tapes blank.

It has occurred to me that if anyone does ever succeed in writing my Life, the book will be so damned boring that nobody will ever want to read it. Thus I have taken it upon myself to invent a life of thrills and spills and adventures and extraordinary excitement, all of it chronicled in the form of twee and vapid verse. Let future biographers pick over the contents of the present volume, and rewrite it as prose. That will keep them occupied, and I will no longer have to heave myself out of my armchair and answer the doorbell to another panting whippersnapper, and parry a legion of pointless queries about the part I played in the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent and many another world-shuddering kerfuffle.

Beerpint appears to be teasing us here, because there is not a single mention of any of those world-shuddering kerfuffles in the forty-nine poems in the collection. Instead, we get a sort of Ruritanian fantasy, with the fictional poet born and brought up in an eerie and phantasmal castle, surrounded by the groaning minions of the title. Indeed, he gets rather carried away by these minions, whose incessant groaning he is at pains to account for. One, it seems, has a burst appendix. Another groans because he is overtired. A third is a minion of melancholic disposition whose groaning is

Both religious, like a tortured Christian martyr

And existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not going to quote directly from the book, what with Dennis Beerpint’s fondness for unleashing savage packs of wolves at any hint of copyright violation, but perhaps I can be forgiven just the one couplet.

The poet’s growing obsession with the groaning minions is apparent when one considers that, though they make only fleeting appearances in the first half of the book, from poem number twenty-six onwards they are increasingly dominant. In fact, the concluding set of six villanelles seem to consist of nothing but groaning, as if Beerpint’s very psyche has been invaded and overtaken by these minions of his childhood. This is both perplexing and worrying when we lift our eyes from the page briefly to remind ourselves that they are entirely fictional and never actually existed. The unrelenting focus on the groaning minions also means that, in terms of chronology, Beerpint never gets beyond the years of his youth. He thus undermines his own stated purpose of fobbing off the doorbell-ringing wannabe biographers, who are still left in the dark about the poet’s involvement, or otherwise, in such world-shuddering kerfuffles as the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent.

It may be that he has a second volume of “fictional autobiography” in the works, but quite frankly, let us hope not.

Among thespians, there is a somewhat laughable superstition that one must never mention the title of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” in a theatre, on pain of who knows what catastrophe. Hence the euphemism. I say “laughable”, but you will note I have avoided giving the play’s title myself. And I have used the euphemism as the title of this piece for a very good reason. Judging by the events of recent days, it would seem that the theatrical curse has come visiting the decidedly untheatrical world of Hooting Yard.

Let me explain. The other day I was exercising my brainpans thinking up subjects for future essays in this series. In a particularly sparky staring-out-of-the-window-at-crows interlude, it occurred to me to write about groovy bongos, Balaam and his ass, replacement bus services, and that which I am now too fearful and full of collywobbles to name. You will, I hope, have read and digested and given much thought to three of those topics, which appeared here on Saturday and Sunday and Monday. The fourth, which I refrain from typing, is due today.

Anyway, I was quite happy to have decided upon four days’ worth of subject matter in a single crow-observance session, so I decided to go out for a walk. I put on a hat with earflaps to counter the cold, and a Tyrolean jacket not unlike the one worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), and I headed towards Nameless Pond. On my way there, I met an acquaintance, who joined me on my circuit of the pond.

“So what have you been up to, Mr Key?” asked this person.

“As it happens, Mr Spraingue, I have had a very profitable morning staring out of the window at crows while thinking of topics for my daily essays,” I replied.

“I would be most interested to hear what those topics might be, Mr Key,” he said.

“Then let me list them for you in the order I suspect I shall be writing them, Mr Spraingue,” I replied. By this time we had reached Nameless Pond and begun our circuit. “First I shall tackle groovy bongos, then Balaam and his ass, then replacement bus services, and when those three are done I shall turn my attention to -” and I mentioned by name the subject which sheer unbridled terror prevents me from repeating here. At the time, however, neither I nor Mr Spraingue had any inkling that aught was amiss. We continued to walk the well-trodden path around the pond, and soon enough we were speaking together of other things, including windows and crows and Chris Huhne and his speaking clock mother. Later I returned home and took off my Tyrolean jacket and hat with earflaps and sat down at my escritoire and began to write about groovy bongos.

Over the next couple of days, though I took my regular walks in the vicinity of Nameless Pond, I saw neither hide nor hair of Mr Spraingue. This is not an unusual circumstance, for he is not a man of routine habits, and days or weeks can pass without our seeing each other. I was unperturbed.

I was unperturbed, that is, until this morning, when I received a message on my metal tapping machine. The message came from a mutual acquaintance of myself and Mr Spraingue. I was told that, no sooner had we parted, after our circuit of Nameless Pond the other day, than Mr Spraingue fell victim to a sequence of calamitous events. He trod in a puddle. In shaking the puddlewater from his Chelsea boot, he lost his balance and toppled over. In toppling over, he bashed his head on a pondside bench. The bench, placed there for wayfarers to rest their weary legs, was made of metal. The trajectory of Mr Spraingue’s toppling meant that the part of his head which bashed against the bench was his ear. Because the bash was not unduly violent, and because he is a manly uncomplaining type of fellow, Mr Spraingue got to his feet and dusted himself down and went on his way. Fatefully, however, in toppling he had thrust out his hands to break his fall and the palm of one hand had landed slap in the midst of a patch of reeking pondside muck. Within this muck lurked many minuscule creeping and crawling things, blind and writhing and riddled with infection. One such tiny, barely visible being attached itself there and then to Mr Spraingue’s hand. Before brushing the mud from his Italianate topcoat, he rubbed his ear, throbbing from the bash anent the metal bench. In so rubbing, he dislodged the tiny creeping thing, which scurried into the shelter of his ear. The rest of the day, I was told, passed uneventfully for Mr Spraingue. He felt none the worse for wear. In the middle of the night, however, he woke up screaming. He leaped from his bed and cut mad capers about his bedroom, repeatedly bashing his head against the walls. When he could not be becalmed, Mrs Spraingue, his inamorata, ferried him to hospital in their gleaming bright red sports car. Medicos shot him full of powerful tranquilisers, so at last he stopped screaming. Assuring Mrs Spraingue that they would keep Mr Spraingue in an induced coma while they worked out what was wrong with him, the medicos insisted she go home and get some rest. Meanwhile, inside Mr Spraingue’s head, the minuscule blind creeping thing had wriggled its way through his ear and burrowed into his cranium, where it had now set about munching his brain jelly. Mr Spraingue’s brain was gigantic in comparison to the tiny being, but its appetite was huge. It will not take many days for it to eat his brain entire. In all this horror, it is perhaps a small mercy Mr Spraingue will never learn that, driving home in the cold misty night, his inamorata stalled the gleaming bright red sports car on a level crossing, in the path of a thunderous oncoming express train, its carriages packed with hundreds of crippled orphans heading for a better life in an Edenic garden city. In the inevitable collision of train and car, all perished, the driver, the orphans, their governesses, and Mrs Spraingue.

It seems clear to me that none of this would have happened had I not been so reckless as to speak aloud the title of this present essay which, for your safety and mine, I have replaced with the euphemism used by theatrical persons when they speak, in the theatre, of The Tragedie Of Macbeth.

It is often remarked that, in an age of mass transportation, what we have lost is the thrill and glamour and sheer romance of travel. It is true that were a modern day Richard Hakluyt to publish a modern day version of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, the navigations, voiages and traffiques would already be familiar to millions, and the discoueries few, if indeed there were any at all. Journeys that were unimaginable even to our fairly recent ancestors we now undertake at the drop of a hat. But was the thrill and glamour and romance inherent in the travel, or does it depend above all on the attitude of the traveller? If the latter, we can still experience the sensations of Hakluyt’s voyagers, of explorers treading into the unknown, of wide-eyed wonderment and awe.

If our attitude is all, then we need not hark back to the past in our choice of transport. However appealing the steam train and the hot air balloon and the vintage car, what they offer is nostalgia. Yet it is possible to find thrills and glamour and romance in bang up to date transport systems if we screw our heads on properly, that is to say, if we adopt a true traveller’s attitude. Consider, for example, that often overlooked wonder of the age, the replacement bus service.

You arrive at the railway station for a routine journey. Perhaps you are simply commuting from home to work, or paying your regular visit to Great Aunt Flo in her seaside retirement home, or taking your monthly trip to a distant city with a castle and an exciting zoo. You already have your train ticket, and as you prance into the station you take it from your inside pocket, ready to present it to a uniformed factotum. It is then you espy, emblazoned with a magic marker pen across a board, a notice telling you that all train services have been cancelled and there is a replacement bus service in operation.

You become aware of fellow passengers standing around the railway station looking lost, tutting and muttering and in some cases seething. They are annoyed and irritated and frustrated. One of them is already shouting his head off at a uniformed factotum, who is blinking frantically and parroting the “line” he has been given by his superiors. You, by contrast, have not a care in the world. You are a true traveller. Bright of eye and determined of gait, you turn on your heel and stride out of the station, seeking the bus stop. And there it is!

There is a bus waiting there for you, its engine already grumbling. A rapid glance confirms that it is indeed the replacement bus service bus that will ferry you to your destination. There is another factotum, wearing a peaked cap, standing on the kerb by the open door. You show him your train ticket, he acknowledges it with a manly nod, and you board the bus and select a seat. At this point, while you wait in a state of high expectation for the bus to rev and slowly ease away from the bus stop, at the outset of your journey, you might take from your bag a piece of fruit, an apple or a pear or a Carlsbad plum, a snack to calm your nerves.

Eventually, your waiting is over. A few more passengers have clambered aboard, some still tutting and muttering and seething, but you block them out of your consciousness. In regrettable modern parlance, they are, or appear to be, bus wankers. But you are of a higher calling. You are a replacement bus service voyager, with the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum now tucked away in your bag. And the door hisses shut and the engine revs and away you go.

“Make it new!” was Ezra Pound’s battle-cry, and that is exactly what happens to your oh so familiar train journey. You stop at all the same familiar stations, yet, crucially, following a parallel yet different trajectory, from an unfamiliar angle, and you stop, not at a platform within the station but at a bus stop outside it. And all along that trajectory, everything you see you see from an unfamiliar angle, including the railway tracks themselves, sometimes visible from the window of the bus, sometimes occluded, as when the bus needs must follow the line of the road where it veers away from the railway line due to the terrain, the physical geography, or historical imperatives. Trees, shrubs, huts, outbuildings, factories, orchards, canals, aerodromes, coppices, lakes, duckponds, churchyards, volleyball courts, swimming pools, chimneys, follies, otter sanctuaries, car pounds, statues, industrial estates, science parks, gin palaces, clock towers, unoccupied plinths, standing stones, plague pits, recently-landed alien spacecraft… each and all, seen from a different angle, are made anew, made unfamiliar. And here and there, scattered along the line, groups of railway employees, with no trains to run, are gathered, smoking pipes or playing improvised games of boules using pebbles or staring at the sky and at the birds in the sky, the engine drivers and ticket collectors and inspectors and buffet stewards gathered together with porters and maintenance men and signalmen, ripp’d from their familiar context, they too are made anew.

You disembark from the bus at the bus stop outside the railway station for which you set out, whether to go to work or to see Great Aunt Flo or to visit the castle and the exciting zoo. You know where the waste bins are inside the station, but here, outside, from this angle, at the replacement bus service bus stop, you must cast your eyes about until you spot one. Only then can you take from your bag and discard the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum. And, that done, you can wend your way, now on familiar pedestrian territory once more, but having travelled as a true traveller, with thrills and glamour and romance.

22:21 And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab.

22:22 And God’s anger was kindled because he went: and the angel of the LORD stood in the way for an adversary against him. Now he was riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him.

22:23 And the ass saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way.

22:24 But the angel of the LORD stood in a path of the vineyards, a wall being on this side, and a wall on that side.

22:25 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam’s foot against the wall: and he smote her again.

22:26 And the angel of the LORD went further, and stood in a narrow place, where was no way to turn either to the right hand or to the left.

22:27 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff.

22:28 And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?

22:29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.

22:30 And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.

22:31 Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.

22:32 And the angel of the LORD said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me:

22:33 And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.

22:34 And Balaam said unto the angel of the LORD, I have sinned; for I knew not that thou stoodest in the way against me: now therefore, if it displease thee, I will get me back again.

22:35 And the angel of the LORD said unto Balaam, Go with the men: but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou shalt speak. So Balaam went with the princes of Balak.

There is more to the story of Balaam, but it need not detain us here. The crucial point is that we have no evidence the LORD, having opened the mouth of the ass – that is, given the gift of human speech to Balaam’s donkey – remembers to close the mouth of the ass, or take away the gift of speech, before Balaam and the donkey trot away with the princes of Balak. We must therefore assume that it continues to speak.

That, at least was the conclusion of the dipsomaniacal Irish playwright Finbarr na [Unpronounceable Thicket of Consonants], who in 1959 produced his most famous work, The Donkey Dialogues. When the play begins, Balaam and his ass have taken leave of the princes of Balak and gone a-wandering throughout the Middle East and beyond, ending up – surprise surprise! – in Dublin. They roam from bar to bar, drinking pints of porter, and regaling their fellow-drinkers with what are supposed to be comic skits. Much of the so-called humour relies on the idea that Balaam is a foolish glutton while the donkey is imbued by the LORD not only with a human speaking voice but with His Ineffable Being. The donkey is, in other words, in this reading, God.

Unsurprisingly, the playwright was accused of blasphemy and more than one priest personally socked him on the jaw.

Of more interest perhaps is what has been done with Finbarr’s work in a new adaptation for television. Balaam and his ass are no longer relocated to Dublin, they barely drink at all, and the comedy dialogues are jettisoned entirely. Speaking in generic BBC peasant accents (à la Lark Rise To Candleford) the pair traipse back and forth across the sun-bashed verdant fields between Lark Rise and Candleford, exchanging observations about the peasantry, the weather, and ancient hostilities between the Israelites and the Moabites and the Amorites. Thankfully, there is no attempt at humour.

Whereas in the original, it was difficult for an audience to suspend disbelief at the absurd picture of a talking donkey in an Irish bar, it seems perfectly plausible, in the rustic setting, to have a man and a donkey trudging across the fields chatting to one another. Plausibility alone does not make for good drama, however, and there have been mutterings in the production suite. In the planned second series, Balaam’s ass will be stricken with a mysterious and seemingly incurable donkey disease, allowing for the introduction of a new character, a maverick young veterinary surgeon newly arrived in the countryside muck from the urban metropolis.

There is also talk of giving the talking donkey its own Saturday night television chat show, in which it will interrogate movers and shakers (Rolf Harris, Benedict Cumberbatch, Yoko Ono) on their knowledge of peasants and weather and Israelites and Moabites and Amorites and smiting with sticks.