Are bongos inherently groovy? It’s a good question. There are countless examples of the addition of bongos to a lineup by those desperate to impart grooviness to their combos. Sometimes it succeeds incontrovertibly, as in the transformation wreaked overnight when Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra became Groovy Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos. It is important to note here, however, that though the pulsating rhythm orchestra itself became indubitably groovy, Claude Grimes himself did not. He was a straightlaced and somewhat starchy figure upon whom the mantle of grooviness never sat comfortably, and it would have been better for all concerned had he dubbed the new lineup either Claude Grimes And His Groovy Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos or Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Groovy Bongos. Either of those would have been accurate, for they were grooviness incarnate with added bongos. Yet for all their grooviness, few could hear it when they were distracted by the patent absurdity of stiff, unfashionably-dressed Claude Grimes trying to pass himself off as groovy. That is why, shortly after the bongos were added, the combo retired from live performances and kept to the recording studio, where they could give vent to their newfound grooviness uninterrupted by hepcats hooting ridicule at Claude Grimes.

No one listening to those scratchy old 78s today could dispute just how groovy they are, and how that grooviness reaches its apogee in the bongos. But ’twas not ever thus. At around the same time as Claude Grimes was haunting the lobbies of talent agencies on the lookout for a bongo player, another bandleader, Pook Tuncks, had the same idea. One might think that with a name like Pook Tuncks, he had quite enough grooviness to be going on with, because it is by any measure a groovy name. It was of course a pseudonym, taken from an 1864 entry in the Journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the Victorian Jesuit poet wrote “Tuncks is a good name. Gerard Manley Tuncks. Pook Tuncks”. But Pook Tuncks the bandleader was on a mission to become ever groovier. Almost one hundred years after Hopkins, in 1954, he wrote in his own Journal:

I have it in me to become the grooviest person ever to bestride the earth. By my own reckoning, I am currently at a high level of grooviness. I need to screw my courage to the sticking place and take certain steps to become even groovier. My spies tell me that Claude Grimes is planning to add bongos to the lineup of his combo. Even though he is laughably ungroovy there is no doubt that he will impart grooviness to his pulsating rhythm orchestra by doing so. He will be hot on my heels. If I am to propel myself further into the stratosphere of grooviness and leave Claude Grimes a barely visible speck in the far distance, I too must have bongos in my lineup! Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness must become Groovy Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness With Bongos, or perhaps Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Groovy Fantasticness With Bongos.

So Pook Tuncks too haunted the very same lobbies of the very same talent agencies, in the shadow of Claude Grimes, and within days of the latter snapping up a groovy bongoist, so too did Pook Tuncks. At least, he thought his bongoist was groovy. Most bongoists are. But, fatally, Pook Tuncks plucked the wrong bongoist from the pile. Classically trained, with many a certificate and diploma hanging in frames on the walls of his bongoing room, the new recruit was simply unable to get the hang of the happening sounds of fantasticness so dizzyingly played by the combo. A terse entry in Pook Tuncks’s Journal is smudged by tears:

His bongoing is leaden.

Ironically, then, the decidedly ungroovy Claude Grimes was celebrated for the grooviness of his combo, at least after they retired to the studio, whereas the once impeccably groovy Pook Tuncks lost every atom of grooviness he ever had. And the impetus behind these divergent trajectories was bongos.

What we can learn from this is that, contrary to received wisdom, bongos are not inherently groovy. Other factors have to be taken into account. For one thing, the demeanour, attitude, and aptitude of the bongoist are critical. No one becomes groovy just by thumping a pair of bongos, even though the bongos may be groovy in themselves. Much less does the bandleader automatically bask in reflected grooviness simply by dint of adding bongos to the lineup. A certain alchemy has to occur, whether the bongos are added to pulsating rhythms or to happening sounds of fantasticness.

A grooveologist recently posited the intriguing question of what might have happened had Claude Grimes recruited Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, and Pook Tuncks Claude Grimes’s. A rival grooveologist made the compelling point that the pivotal factor may be the bongos, not the bongoist. Had Claude Grimes’s bongoist swapped his bongos with Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, could that have made a vital difference? This takes us into the treacherous territory of whether the grooviness or otherwise of bongos depends upon the bongoist, which in turn forces us to ask if the grooviness or otherwise of any individual bongoist is reliant upon their bongos.

In an ideal world, of course, one could match up groovy bongoists with groovy bongos, while they are still loitering full of hopes and dreams in the lobby of a talent agency. But even then, can the grooviest of bongoists, armed with the grooviest of bongos, necessarily impart grooviness to the combo to which they are recruited? The tragic decline of Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness, insert the Groovy where one will, would suggest not. He was last seen in 1962, in the gutter outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool, sloshed and stricken and holding out a begging bowl to trendy with-it young persons, who passed him by, neither knowing nor caring who he was.

It is with great pleasure that I have come to this charming – if windswept – seaside resort, at the invitation of the Dobson Memorial Lecture Organising Committee, to speak upon that most fascinating of topics, the administration of lighthouses. First of all, I must confess that it is a topic of which I am almost wholly ignorant. Ask me about ponds, or badgers, and I can rattle on like a maniac for days on end. But I have never even set foot in a lighthouse, and can think of no conceivable reason why I should ever want to. Much as I adore ponds, I am terrified of the sea, for the sea is a fearsome and horrible thing, progenitor of countless nightmares, a vast and unpitying force of nature, hideous to behold and murderous in its immensity.

Still, I have promised to speak of lighthouses, and I am not a man to shy away from a challenge. As luck would have it, my oldest and dearest friend, the Reverend F. X. Heliogabalus, has spent the best part of his life engaged in the administration of lighthouses, and he has been kind enough to share with me some of the more thrilling details of his career.

You may think it odd that an ordained clergyman, indeed a Jesuit, should devote his life to such a calling. Heliogabalus spends his days on horseback, galloping across the land from one lighthouse to another, his pipe clamped in his jaws and his catechism tucked into the pocket of his soutane. The man hardly knows the meaning of rest. Sometimes he will accept an invitation to sleep overnight when a kindly lighthouse keeper offers him a mattress upon which to sprawl, but more often this most driven of priests will ride his trusty steed through the night, careering with alarming speed along clifftop paths whose tempest-racked fences have been broken or uprooted, and where both man and horse are in constant danger of plunging hundreds of feet into the churning waters below.

I beg your pardon. I must pause for a sip of milk of magnesia.

What is Father Heliogabalus up to, charging from lighthouse to lighthouse? I have asked him this question many times, and he simply refuses to answer, merely clamping that pipe in his jaws and raising his eyebrows in a manner I find confoundedly vexing. Oh, there have been times when I have felt like dashing the man to the ground in a fit of deranged violence, but he is much stronger than me, and indeed much taller; at seven and a half feet in height, he is bigger than most people I have come across as I wend my way through life on this blissful and miraculous planet. But I digress. The invitation to give this talk prompted me to ask Heliogabalus once again about life as an administrator of lighthouses. I tracked him down to a filthy harbour south of Hooting Yard, where he was being forced to pause for a few days due to his horse having contracted lockjaw. Heliogabalus was curled up in a chair in the corner of the veterinarian’s waiting room. It was the kind of chair Michael Caine might have sat in in one of those mid-1960s films about swinging London. A number of sick animals – a badger among them, I was distressed to note – huddled together fearfully in the opposite corner of the room, staring wild-eyed at the Jesuit and every now and then emitting whimpers of abject terror.

“I have this effect upon beasts of the field,” said Heliogabalus, languid and unconcerned, “They regard me with dread, as well they might.”

I wondered whether to pursue this comment, and decided against it. I have said that Heliogabalus was my oldest friend, but I admit that there are times when he scares me fair out of my wits. As it was, I had no opportunity to say anything, as my old mucker continued to speak:

“I understand that you wish to know something of my lighthouse administration activities, Key,” he sneered, “Otherwise you will suffer humiliation when called upon to speak of the subject at some godforsaken seaside resort. Is that correct?”

He did not wait for a reply, but – his voice growing louder, and causing the pitiable assortment of ailing badgers, stoats, hedgehogs, lampreys, pigs, cormorants, axolotls and bison to start up a soul-wrenching cacophony of squealing, hissing, whining and other, indescribable noises – he stood up, towering over me, and thundered:

“Imagine a world, Key, a Godless world, bereft of divine order, in which each lighthouse keeper is allowed to do as he or she wishes. Picture them, hundreds, nay, thousands of lighthouses, each running to its own timetable, each setting its lights flashing and rotating and signalling and whatnot whenever the keeper feels like it. What is the result? Chaos, pure and simple! Chaos leading to shipwrecks, tugboat accidents, buoy disasters, general nautical mayhem and the Lord knows what other kinds of marine catastrophe. Is that the world you wish to inhabit? Eh? You would be no better off than one of these sickly beasts here” – he gestured violently towards a tiny hummingbird with a stab wound on its head which was trying to hide behind the veterinarian’s chaise longue – “these foul beasts which quiver and quake at my every word. No, that is not the world we wish to live in. In our world – in God’s world – we must make sure that lighthouse keepers do their work according to a plan. I carry in my saddlebags a thumping great book of over nine hundred pages. It is a manual of lighthouse administration. I have memorised every word in that book, Key. Indeed, though it pains me to say it, I know it better than I know my Bible. So as I traverse this evil land astride my sick and neglected horse, I go from lighthouse to lighthouse to ensure that the keepers are following the rules laid down in the manual. And if they stray from its commands, I smite them.

“Think not, Key, that the commands are onerous. Most of them are simply common sense. But the devil works to undermine the sensible workings of each and every lighthouse. I have seen with my own eyes, for example, a lighthouse keeper of many years’ experience failing to sharpen his pencil over a wastepaper basket. Does he not know that wood-shavings are a cause of fire? That by his actions he could burn down his lighthouse in a matter of minutes? Again, I have seen a lighthouse keeper using a frayed rope to tie his boat to his jetty. It is barely imaginable!”

Such was his excitement that Heliogabalus began to hurl pieces of cutlery at the cowering animals.

“Tell me, ” I ventured, “Do you just call round to these lighthouses and declaim instructive passages from your manual?”

“Why, no,” he replied, chucking a sugar spoon at a weasel, “I am not a harsh man. While in one saddlebag I keep the manual with which to strike terror into the hearts of ingrates and backsliders, in my other saddlebag I carry a selection of useful supplies, the items the keepers do not receive in their regular hampers from the lighthouse equipment warehouse. I bring them things such as gigantic rolls of blotting paper, hard-boiled eggs steeped in maple syrup, specially darned flags from every continent, buckets filled with a solution for the removal of dried ink from hair, reticules for the blind, nozzles to be attached to burst cartons -“

At this point the veterinary surgeon entered the room to announce that the Jesuit’s horse was fully recovered. Heliogabalus took my hand, and nearly crushed it in bidding me farewell. Within seconds he was gone, galloping away to administer his peculiar justice tempered with mercy to the lighthouse keepers of the land. I am glad I am not one of them.

Every now and then, civilisations collapse. Usually this happens after a gradual decline due to an immensely complicated set of factors which future historians seek to understand and explain. Sometimes, the collapse is sudden, as when barbarian hordes come sweeping o’er the plains on horseback, bringing ruin and desolation in their wake. Barbarians have their part to play in gradual collapses too, just not so dramatically.

In understanding why civilisations collapse, then, it would be a great boon to historians were they able to sit down on a sofa with a barbarian and have a chinwag. What were you thinking, as you swept across the plains on horseback, accompanied by your horde?, the historian might ask. Was it your settled intention to cause the collapse of any civilisation you happened upon, or was its destruction an unforeseen consequence of your penchant for havoc and mayhem? Were you pernickety in your choice of civilisations to sweep towards, or was it a more haphazard process? Give me some insight into pillage. And so on.

The benefits of such direct evidence from the mouths of barbarians have not been forthcoming, partly because the barbarians involved are long dead, each and every man jack of them, and partly because, being barbarians, they are, or were, incapable of coherent speech. Barbarians, remember, merely grunt.

Two recent developments, in different fields, promise to pull the rug from under this dispiriting state of affairs. Actually, I am not sure “to pull the rug” is the appropriate metaphor, but ipsum dipsum, let it stand. First, separate investigations into the reanimation of the dead, mediumistic communication with the ethereal realm, shamanism, and séance etiquette have coalesced to the point where it may well be feasible to plop a long dead barbarian on to a sofa and actually engage him in conversation. However exciting this prospect is – and make no mistake, it is! – it is made somewhat less so by the fact that any such conversation is likely to be one-sided, consisting on the one hand of searching, piercing questions delivered in a series of well-turned phrases in a plummy baritone, and on the other hand, of barbaric grunting.

That is why the second recent development may prove so decisive. Boffins in Switzerland (where else?) are putting the finishing touches to some kind of contraption that, fitted to the head of a grunting person – whether he be a barbarian or not – and with wires and nozzles poking, variously, into the mouth and the brain and certain glands, is able to “translate” the grunts into any of a dozen or so modern languages. I placed inverted commas around the word “translate” because it is not yet clear if the resulting print-outs, created with biro-nib on a gelatine wafer attached to a docking hub – are, strictly speaking, what we would understand as translations of grunts in the commonly accepted sense. But billions of Swiss currency units are being poured into this research, so I expect it will come good in the end.

The implications dizzy the mind. We will have, at first hand, the accounts of individual barbarians as they describe the process of congregating in a horde, supplying themselves with arms and victuals, mounting their horses, and sweeping o’er the plains to loot and pillage and lay waste to sundry isolated villages on their implacable way towards a more advanced civilisation, the collapse of which they will then bring about, either deliberately or inadvertently. For the first time we will be able to apprehend a grunting enhorsed barbarian raining death and terror where’er he roams as a person, a person like you or me, subject to the same whims and pangs, jumping through the same hoops, balancing upon the same ledge over the awful existential abyss. The only difference between us is that we are quick and alive, breathing in the air of the twenty-first century, and he is barbaric and dead and can but grunt. But such fripperies ought not divide us. Already, even before the reanimation of the dead, and improved mediumistic communication with the ethereal realm, shamanism, and séance etiquette, and the final tweakings to the contraption with poking wires and nozzles and biro-nib and gelatine wafer and docking hub, human rights lawyers and Guardian columnists and Occupy protesters are suggesting that it is due time barbarians were allowed to play a full part in society, given the vote, and a living wage, and, most importantly, legally protected from being offended by the so-called civilised.

Far too many people dismiss a dead grunting barbarian on a sofa as a “zombie”, or similar pejorative description. However, those who show such disrespect may temper their views when techniques for the reanimation of the dead are perfected. For then, just one barbarian, reanimated for the purpose of an historical chinwag, might seize control of the machinery and bring back to life his entire horde. Then, in their inimitable barbaric fashion, they will exact their own revenge.

You are all familiar, I assume, with the phrase “Bless his (or her, or its) cotton socks”, sometimes given as “Bless his (or her, or its) little cotton socks”. But I wonder how many of you are aware of the ceremonial rite from whence it originates? Well, because I care about these things, and do not wish to see you plunged in ignorant darkness, I am going to tell you.

The Blessing of the Cotton Socks (only very rarely given as the Blessing of the Little Cotton Socks) is almost as old as the wearing of cotton socks by persons of all ages and stations in life. It is well to remember that for most of human history, not only were no cotton socks worn, but no socks at all. Oh, our ancestors wrapped various materials around their tootsies to keep them warm, but even in relatively recent times, when civilization was pretty far advanced, the sock as we know it, if it was worn at all, would have been made of rough, prickly, scratchy fabric. Now I do not wish to career pell mell into a history of textiles and costumes and cloth manufacture and so forth, for the simple reason that, were I to do so, I would betray my unfathomable ignorance of such matters, and you would mock me, and call me a fool, just as, admittedly in a different context, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull called the person who was kissed by a witch one night in the wood a fool. Mr Anderson had his reasons, and so would you, so it is best if we avert the possibility of you feeling it necessary to call me a fool. Let us just accept that the ceremonial rite known as the Blessing of the Cotton Socks came into being shortly after it became common for cotton socks to be worn, by humans.

Now, I realise how easy it would be for me to pull the wool over your eyes and make up a ceremony. That might even be what you expect me to do. I could cobble together some farrago of twaddle, littered with little details that make it seem convincing, and you would go away happy, or happyish, or, I don’t know, possibly not happy at all, rather dejected and downcast and brimming with black bile. I always have to bear that possibility in mind. Don’t think for a moment that I simply tippy-tap this stuff out, endlessly, day after day, for no apparent purpose, without giving careful thought – very careful thought – to my readership, even if, upon reflection, I have absolutely no idea who most of you are. Upon further reflection, I realise it is perhaps reckless of me to make the assumption, as I did in the very first words of this piece, that you are familiar with the phrases “Bless his (or her, or its) cotton socks” or “Bless his (or her, or its) little cotton socks”. For all I know, you may never have heard the words before. Well, you will almost certainly have heard the words, but perhaps not in that precise order. Individually, yes, broken up, in separate contexts, I am as sure as eggs is eggs you will have come across all those words. But hearing them, or reading them, in isolation, snipped or chopped out of the phrase, is not the same thing at all as hearing, or reading the phrase. Let me put them in alphabetical order and you will grasp what I am driving at.

Bless. Cotton. Her. His. Its. (Little.) Socks.

I placed parentheses around “Little” because, in common usage, the phrase is equally valid with or without it. I suppose I could have done the same with “his” and “her” and “its” because they are alternate choices, depending on whose (or what’s) cotton socks are being blessed. One would only use more than one of them if more than one person’s (or thing’s) cotton socks were being blessed, for example if there were to be a double blessing, of the cotton socks of, say, a boy and, say, a girl, but in that case one is more likely to say “Bless their (little) cotton socks”, rather than the somewhat clunky “Bless his and her (little) cotton socks” or “Bless his (little) cotton socks and her (little) cotton socks”.

Ah. I say “Ah” because, in speech, “Ah” often precedes the blessing. Interestingly, “Ah” also comes at the beginning if we rearrange the words of the blessing in alphabetical order, as above. Well, it is perhaps not that interesting. Christ, what a palaver.

All these reflections have made me realise, better late than never, that I would be wasting your time, and mine, by scribbling some drivel about the – entirely genuine – ceremonial rite of the blessing of cotton socks. Of far more interest, it seems to me, is a related blessing, the one adverted to in the title of Jefferson Airplane’s 1969 live album Bless Its Pointed Little Head. Though even then, the “it” referred to was a being whose tootsies were ensconced in (little) cotton socks, or so I am told by my sources, who shall remain nameless, and wholly unblessed.

I failed to mention, in yesterday’s essay about his love song, that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer. So let me put that right without further ado. Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer, a noted mountaineer. Elsewhere, I wrote of him that “Physically, [he] was not really cut out for mountaineering. He was described by a contemporary as ‘a figure of untold puniness’, and he was indeed tiny and weak, short-sighted, lanky and prone to swooning fits. He was terrified of gnats, horseflies and fruitbats. He had an oversensitive digestive system and had to subsist mostly on thin soup or broth. It was difficult to find a mountaineering team willing to recruit so wretched a specimen, so Ah-Fang did most of his clambering up sheer rock faces solo, a man alone testing himself against the elements”.

This description was called into question by Brian Phantasm, who took me to task in the pages of Puny Mountaineers Monthly, accusing me of getting my Ah-Fangs mixed up. As if! There were not exactly dozens of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who were accomplished mountaineers, in love with Mrs Gubbins, and perished in the Hindenburg disaster. Granted, there may have been a couple of others, but – tellingly – Mr Phantasm – sorry, Doctor Phantasm – though what he is a doctor of God alone knows – the doctoring of signatures on counterfeit documents, probably – um – I think I have lost my thread. Let me begin that sentence again. Granted, there may have been a couple of other Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who met the necessary criteria, but – tellingly – Doctor Phantasm does not identify the one he accuses me of getting mixed up with the Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp I was writing about. I hope that is clear. I am becoming somewhat befuddled in defending myself against these outrageous charges, and outrageous they are, as is Doctor Phantasm’s dress sense, but it is best to cast a veil over that, and a very thick veil, made of many blankets, as if he were a prisoner being ushered between police car and police station, covered to outwit the press photographers. It is my fond hope that one day Phantasm himself will be placed under arrest, and then he might stop attacking me in the pages of little-read magazines.

Our initial falling out, some years ago, was occasioned by a piece he wrote in News Of The Screes, a small circulation mountaineering journal devoted, as its title suggests, to scree, the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders. It was an ill-written and intemperate rant, the gist of which, when one got past the swearwords, was that the word “scree” should be dropped and replaced by “talus”, which means the same thing and has become the scientifically-approved term. “Scree” is of Old Norse origin, whereas “talus” derives from French. Now, I am neither Norse nor French, and Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was Sino-Dutch, so my championing of “scree” is not based on any infantile sense of chauvinism. But champion “scree” I do, without apology, in all weathers. It is clearly the more apposite word for the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders which serves as its definition. Go to a scree and have a go at clambering across it if you don’t believe me. Better, be there when tumbling rock fragments from the upper slopes come crashing down to add to the scree, and raise the earflaps of your mountaineering hat to listen carefully. I am sure you will agree that “scree” beats “talus” hands down, whatever our French amis and scientists might say on the matter.

I wrote a letter to the editor of News Of The Screes, arguing my point and suggesting that Doctor Phantasm was an oaf and a dunderpate and probably a forger of doctored signatures on important documents. Thus our war of words began, and it continues to this day. So when he writes to accuse me of mixing up my Ah-Fangs, I swat his article aside as I might swat one of the gnats Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was so affrighted by. That is my Ah-Fang, of course, not one of Brian Phantasm’s putative unidentified Ah-Fangs.

My Ah-Fang spent much of his mountaineering time clambering across scree. His puniness was such that he often grew exhausted, panting, panting, panting, while barely across the scree, whatever the steepness or otherwise of its gradient. For remember that some scree is steeper than other scree, depending on its geographical location and indeed the circumstances of its geological formation, whether created by dint of mechanical weathering by ice, chemical weathering by mineral hydration and salt deposition, thermal stresses, topographic stresses, or biotic processes. [Note to self: make a study of the word “dint”.] Sometimes Ah-Fang was so puffed out from clambering over a mere few yards of scree that he collapsed upon it, gazing hopelessly upwards to where the summit he aimed to ascend vanished in the clouds. Could there be a more pitiable image of a mountaineer?

But we must bear in mind that some scree can prove to be devilishly difficult terrain. All those rock fragments, often loose, can be perilous, even when one is not puny. So let us not mock Ah-Fang, or rather his memory, as the despicable and quite probably criminal Brian Phantasm has done in his latest piece of grievous folderol. No fewer than ten pages of last week’s issue of Screeds On Scree were given over to a disgraceful rewriting of history, in which Phantasm claims that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp used stilts and some kind of anti-panting elixir to cross the scree at the foot of Big Oddly-Shaped Mountain Number Seven in 1929, one of his most famous ascents, and the one for which he was awarded a medal – the very medal I snapped up at an auction of Ah-Fang memorabilia which was then stolen from me by a footpad who bore a striking resemblance to Brian Phantasm. I have no proof, and I have never knowingly met this hellhound, but my assailant had a bouffant and cummerbund and winklepickers identical to those sported by Phantasm in the one grainy black and white photograph of him that I have seen, a copy of which I keep pasted in my Enemies Book (page 149, lavender series).

And so once again I must take up my butcher’s pencil to rebut, or refute, I can’t remember which, the calumnies rained down upon Ah-Fang. But I will continue to defend his memory until the cows come home. And no, they are not coming home now, o’er the rain-soaked loam.

A recent survey suggests that the truculence of peasants comes top in a list of baronial dissatisfactions. A huge percentage of barons expressed the view that a truculent peasantry caused them greater mental anguish than the crumbling of castle crenellations, outbreaks of disease in cows, and torrential rainfall.

Elspeth Grimpenmire, of pollsters YouBaron, said “This is an important finding. It shows that subjugation of the peasantry is high on the list of policy initiatives most barons would support. For the king to faff about with pie in the sky ideas about improving the lot of belligerent rustics shows just how out of touch he is.”

The king has not issued an official statement in response, although a palace spokeschamberlain insisted that plans were well under way for increased smiting, burning of villages, destruction of crops and associated mayhem.

No one from the peasantry was available for comment. That doesn’t really matter, as they are all illiterate and would be incapable of reading any snag-toothed babble reported here in any case.

Questions were raised about the reliability of the survey, however, when it came to light that only three barons were polled, each of whom was an empanelled official of the Association of Brutish Barons. From its grim headquarters in a castle keep on the edge of a marsh known locally for the poisonous vapours which hover in a mist o’er it, the Association regularly sends out marauding gangs of ruffians to bash up and lop the limbs off selected peasants. These gangs will usually haul back to the castle carts piled high with whatever agricultural produce they can gather from the peasantry’s pitiful patches of tillage, together with a few hostages.

An Association spokesbrute explained “If we don’t terrorise the peasantry, who will?”

Doctor Dust, an alchemist and necromancer retained by the Association as a consultant, recently passed his hands in oddly significant sweeping movements over a bowl containing a decoction of boiled amphibians, herbs, blood, semen, twigs and black bile and, after gazing into it for an hour, announced something which, unfortunately, came out as gibberish. But it is thought his eldritch manoeuvres, accompanied by various portents seen in the sky, suggest an uprising of the peasants at a future time.

“What Doctor Dust can see in his mysterious bowl is all the more reason to suppress the rabble in the here and now,” said a brutish baron, sharpening the blade of his bloodstained axe upon a whetstone, “We should certainly pay no heed to those so-called enlightened barons.”

The reference is to a newly formed groupuscule, the Association of Enlightened Barons, whose castle headquarters, far from being engulfed by poisonous marsh vapours, is decorated with pretty pink flags billowing in a balmy breeze.

“We like to think of the peasantry as stakeholders,” said one enlightened baron, “And though it may be hard to do blue sky thinking under this leaden pall, with threats of a downpour, we are convinced that they need not be truculent and belligerent, if treated with a little loving kindness and offered the prospect of a future world with many enticing leisure and retail facilities.”

Interestingly, even the peasants themselves ridicule this fatuity. We cannot quote them for obvious reasons, and as it happens most of the peasants we approached for an interview were to be found drunk out of their heads on some gruesome brew, fighting among each other, or lying unconscious in ditches.

Such scenes are welcome to the brutish barons, who will take the opportunity to charge out of their castles on horseback and trample the distracted and insensible peasantry under the clattering hooves of their mighty steeds.

“I often find it gives my horse quite a fillip if I let him crush the skulls of a few peasants while out on an afternoon gallop,” said one baron, “Though of course that is not the only method we use to crush their skulls and other bones. That is why we have dark dank dungeons in our castles, where the more truculent peasantry can be subjected to episodes of barbaric cruelty that would make the devil himself blanch. Even the most belligerent rustic tends to be a little more tractable after he’s had most of his bones crushed.”

In spite of the galloping horses and the dungeons, there has to date been no diminution in the truculence of the peasantry. Some commentators put this down to social factors such as the baronial tendency to have great feasts, with hunks of venison and pig’s heads and puddings made from wrens and quail and coot and partridge and widgeon, and foaming tankards of mead, while the peasants subsist on gruel. Others claim this is the natural order of things, and to tamper with it would turn the world upside down and bring chaos and, ultimately, undermine our entire understanding of the cosmos.

One enlightened baron pops his head over the parapet to offer a different view.

“It can seem one must be on the side either of the brutish barons or of the truculent peasantry,” he opines, “But luckily there is a so-called Blairite third way. It will come to pass.”

We shall see.

You will recall the film Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are aboard a bus which will explode if it goes below fifty miles per hour, having been primed with a bomb by cackling evildoer Dennis “Don’t try to grow a brain, Jack!” Hopper. I have been wondering if a similar adrenalin-thumping conceit could be applied to the writing of prose.

I am not suggesting I do anything so foolhardy as to ask a disgruntled and slightly maimed ex-police officer to hitch me up to a bomb which will detonate if I stop writing… well, I suppose that is what I am suggesting. Cowardice, or sheer common sense, persuades me, however, to hit upon a less perilous incentive.

I have just spent ten minutes staring vacantly at the screen trying to think what that incentive might be.

In Speed, Dennis Hopper is gleeful when a television reporter describes the fiendish quandary into which he has placed the bus passengers as “the whim of a madman”. He repeats the phrase to himself, chuckling. Now I am an almost inhumanly sensible chap, and not a madman at all, but perhaps the whim of a madman is precisely what I need to give vent to, if I wish to prime my prose with the innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum of the film.

Of course, not everyone would agree that Speed is an appropriate model. Dennis Hopper rather overdoes the criminal mania, Keanu Reeves is wooden, and the best that can be said of Sandra Bullock is that she is irritating. And even though Keanu’s fellow bomb-defusion expert Jeff Daniels is killed off, you know that Keanu himself, and Sandra Bullock, will escape unscathed, and Dennis Hopper come to a grisly end, because it’s that sort of film. But predictability has its own special charms. And predictability plus innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is clearly popular, when we consider that Speed reportedly earned its makers over three-hundred-and-fifty million dollars. Now if I could only devise my madman’s whim, perhaps I could make a similar sum from a piece of prose.

The glum bat of misery swoops o’er my bonce as I stare at the screen and, regretfully, admit to myself that this present piece of prose is not the one that will earn millions. Having said that, should any readers feel impelled to deposit a vast sum of money into the Hooting Yard Paypal account, I would be most grateful.

But, just as Sandra Bullock has to keep her foot on the accelerator of that bus, I have to keep tippy-tapping away. It is true that I will not be blown to kingdom come if I stop. In fact, nothing at all will happen. I do not need to grow a brain to know that. Indeed, I have the freedom to get up and walk away and make a cup of tea, so I think that is what I shall do, right now. If I had a University of Arizona Wildcats tee-shirt, I would take the opportunity to change into it while the kettle is a-boiling.

You will recall that Sandra Bullock’s wearing of a top with the Arizona Wildcats’ logo proves to be a pivot on which the plot of Speed hinges. When last I saw the film I had not yet learned of that other great mainstay of Arizona life, the regional dish greasy doings. It seems to me that either Jan de Bont, or his screenplayperson Graham Yost, or indeed Keanu Reeves or Sandra Bullock or Dennis Hopper or even poor killed-off Jeff Daniels might, at some point during the production, have suggested adding a further layer to the Arizona reference by mentioning, or – better – showing, greasy doings. It would probably be stretching credulity to have any of the imperilled bus passengers tucking into greasy doings, but Dennis Hopper spends much of his screen time gobbling snacks while watching his madman’s whim unfold, so how difficult would it have been to make at least one of those snacks greasy doings? Now I come to think of it, given that, as I said, the dish was unknown to me when last I saw the film, perhaps we are shown Dennis Hopper eating greasy doings! Obviously I shall not rest until I have confirmed whether or not this is the case, so I shall have to watch Speed again, with an eagle eye on the Dennis Hopper scenes.

It has just occurred to me that I do not know what greasy doings look like. I must embark on further research before my next viewing, or I will not know them if and when I see them, and that would be a bloody tragedy.

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that, were this present piece of prose the bus in Speed, it would be dangerously close to dropping below fifty miles per hour, and thus exploding. Innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is easier to blather about than to maintain, in spite of the cup of tea which I was hoping would fuel a jamboree of thrills and spills. That may be a lot to ask from a cup of tea, but it has been argued that generations of British chaps could not have built an empire without their cups of tea, and I am not trying to build an empire, merely to write deathless prose, and perhaps earn millions, or thousands, or hundreds, or even just a pittance, by so doing.

Yet all the while the urge to cease and stare, not at the screen but out of the window, at trees and crows, grows ever more intense. What would Keanu do?

They say the devil is in the detail, but is that a fact? I decided to find out. First of all, though, I wanted to have a better idea of “the detail”. I was pretty sure I would know the devil when I saw him, but somehow, paradoxically perhaps, “the detail” seemed a more nebulous entity. So I turned, as always, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which, for its main definition, has this to say:

The dealing with matters item by item; detailed treatment; attention to particulars. Esp. in phrase in (†the) detail , item by item; part by part; minutely; circumstantially. So to go into detail , i.e. to deal with or treat a thing in its individual particulars.

Fair enough. That gave me somewhere to start. If the detail is a minute individual particular item of a thing, what better way to test the thesis than by taking something apart, bit by bit, until the devil in all his evil burning foulness is found, lurking within – or not, as the case may be?

The next step was to choose something to dismantle. Now, it must be said that I am not the most dexterous of chaps. On the contrary, I am a bit of a butterfingers. Dangling on string from the ceiling of my boyhood bedroom were many, many Airfix model aeroplanes – Spitfires and Stukas and Messerschmitts and Sopwith Camels and Boeing 747s and Parker Double Teenies and Harrier Jump Jets and so on – all expertly fitted and glued together and their insignia transfers impeccably transferred, but all these were constructed by my older brother, with whom I shared a room until I was about ten or eleven. I think I tried, at least once, to emulate him, but the resulting plastic plane did not turn out well. As I recall, the only successful model I made was a cardboard head of Henry VIII, cut and folded from a template printed on the back of a Kellogg’s Cornflakes carton.

It occurred to me that I could just smash something to bits, for generally speaking violent smashing requires not dexterity but gung ho and a big hammer. Tempting though this was, however, I felt it would be going against the spirit of the project. I am not sure that fragments and smithereens count as “details” according to the dictionary definition. No, I must be methodical, and pick something apart piece by piece, neatly aligning the individual parts on a suitable surface such as a baize cloth laid out and flattened smooth upon a tabletop. Green baize would make the most suitable background to contrast with the gaudy scarlet hue of the devil, were he indeed to be hiding in the detail.

After much reflection, I had a brainwave. I was sitting there staring glumly out of the window at some crows, humming and hawing whether to dismantle an alarm clock or a bicycle pump or an orrery, when it struck me that of course the simplest thing to take to bits would be something that was child’s play to put together in the first place. Child’s play, literally. I scampered off to a toyshop and bought a Mr Potato Head.

For those of you who have put away childish things (First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 13 : 11), and put them away so decisively that you can no longer remember who, or what, Mr Potato Head is, let me remind you. Mr Potato Head is an American toy consisting of a plastic model of a potato which can be decorated with a variety of plastic parts that can attach to the main body. These parts usually include ears, eyes, shoes, a hat, a nose, and a mouth. The toy was invented and developed by George Lerner in 1949, and first manufactured and distributed by Hasbro in 1952. The toy was originally produced as separate plastic parts that could be stuck into a real potato or other vegetable, such as a parsnip or turnip, or even a fruit such as a clementine or a Carlsbad plum. Before leaving the toyshop with my purchase, I checked to see that the model was sold in its constructed state, rather than as a jumble of bits. It would be pointless for me to have to put it together before dismantling it, and in any case, if the devil is in the detail then he would likely be visibly evident within the Mr Potato Head packaging box, his goaty horns and perhaps his pointy fork poking holes in the cardboard or cellophane.

Back home, I took Mr Potato Head out of his box and set him on the green baize cloth upon the tabletop. Was that a whiff of sulphur I smelled? It might have been. Perhaps the devil sensed I was closing in on him, and was giving off hellish vapours in his panic. Thereagain, would the devil panic at being discovered in the detail? He might, rather, be gleeful at being unloosed. I had not thought of that. I sniffed again, and took a very careful look at Mr Potato Head, seemingly so innocent upon the baize. Was I about to take an awful, irrevocable risk? Was I about to unleash Satan from his bondage?

I gazed into the eyes of Mr Potato Head and asked myself, was I being criminally reckless, playing taradiddle with the fate of nations, just to prove or disprove a familiar saying? Was there not an easier way? I came to the conclusion that I have not studied demonology with sufficient intensity to answer the question. And that is why I have made an appointment to see Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit exorcist, to seek his advice, and why Mr Potato Head is still sitting, all his constituent parts connected, undismantled, upon the baize.

What on earth was she blathering on about, that vicar in the studio audience of The Big Questions who said that the government ought to be responsible for origami? At least, I assume she was a vicar. She was dressed like a vicar, with a vicar’s dog collar, but it is always possible that she was an impostor vicar, deliberately or inadvertently. As I recalled in my fifty-eight memories of my father, he was occasionally mistaken for a man of the cloth due to an injudicious choice of 1960s shirtwear (memory number thirty-six).

Vicar or no, origami was one item in a list she recited, the other items on which I have forgotten. She topped it off with “the government should be responsible for these things!” I have added an exclamation mark there to give some idea of the heat of passion in which this declaration was made.

It’s a moot point whether this is a utopian or dystopian vision. Perhaps she was harking back to Gordon Brown’s ill-fated “government of all the talents” – goats – and took it too literally. If a government was to contain all the talents, logically one such talent would be the ability to fold paper in intricate oriental fashion. Thus there ought to be a Ministry of Origami & Associated Paper-Folding, with a Secretary of State supported by junior ministers and private secretaries and an army of civil servants. Five-year plans for the development of origami on our shores would smack too much of Stalinism, but such bonkersness is camouflaged nowadays by different jargon. Plans to roll out the origami stakeholder consultancy initiative on a region-by-region basis amount to much the same thing as Uncle Joe’s madcap schemes, but sound a little less megalomaniac.

Would origami become compulsory? Would each citizen have to set aside, say, half an hour per day to fold a sheet of A4 into the shape of an ostrich? Surely that is not what the vicar had in mind. Think of the sheer increase in the amount of waste paper, as the more cack-handed among the citizenry faffed about, using up sheet after sheet of A4 in abortive and misshapen attempts to make a half-way decent, or at least recognisable, origami ostrich.

If, on the other hand, origami were to remain, as it is now, voluntary, what would be the government’s role? We are already cajoled, through advertisements and leaflets and publicity campaigns, to make sure we eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, but as far as I am aware there is not a dedicated band of fruit and vegetable police who will place us under arrest if we fail to comply. So maybe the Secretary of State at MOAPF would content him- or herself with mere hectoring and lecturing, poster campaigns, television adverts, mass mailings and the like. Indeed, one advantage of having a leaflet about origami plop through your letterbox would be that the leaflet itself could be folded, intricately, orientally, into the shape of a sparrow.

But I don’t know. The problem with such initiatives is that a change in government can lead not just to different priorities but to complete U-turns. Imagine that you have been persuaded, through relentless harrying, to eat your five fruits and vegetables each day while setting aside half an hour to do some intricate oriental paper-folding. All is well with the world, and you have slotted happily into your routine. Then, inevitably, there is a general election, a new government takes the reins of power, and the new Secretary of State for Origami and Associated Paper-Folding strides into the ministry on their first morning. Bright-eyed, dedicated, and power-crazed, the new bod might decide that, instead of encouraging origami among the hoi polloi, it is the sort of activity that needs to be controlled, restricted, licensed. “It is time for change!” the minister announces, a week into the job, “We have seen this country become the laughing stock of the origami and paper-folding world, as our hapless cack-handed scrunched-up excuses for paper squirrels and ducks and electricity pylons bear no resemblance whatsoever to the fantastically intricate oriental paper squirrels and ducks and electricity pylons of our competitors, and even less resemblance to flesh and blood squirrels and ducks and electricity pylons in the real world.” And so the minister outlaws amateur origami of all kinds, and establishes a new national origami and paper-folding baccalaureate, without which no one is even allowed to fold a sheet of paper in half for any purpose whatsoever, on pain of arrest and a long term of imprisonment. Whether that is a good thing or not, I leave the reader to decide.

It is certainly the kind of issue to sharply divide opinion. Just as, thirty years ago, there appeared a book entitled Authors Take Sides On The Falklands, one can imagine the bien-pensant intellectuals of Hampstead and Holland Park cobbling together a hastily-published Authors Take Sides On Origami. Whichever side one is on, it is surely the case that many, if not most, of those who would purchase such a book would immediately rip each page out of it and fold the separate leaves, either intricately and orientally or with cack-handed butterfingers, into paper models of the Secretary of State, adding buttons for eyes. Whether they could display the resulting origami on their windowsills, or have to hide it in an unlicensed folded-paper den, would depend upon the complexion of the government.

It is all very bewildering.

There may be circumstances in which you wish to ascertain whether your dog is barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn’t know; I don’t keep a dog myself. But I can imagine a situation where such knowledge could prove critical. If I speak of the matter in the abstract, that is because of a total lack of hands-on dog-based experience on my part. Some might argue I am precluded from pronouncements about the issue – if we can call it an issue – by dint of this lack, but I beg to differ, much as a dog might beg for a bone from his master’s table. Note that in spite of a deep ignorance of dogs and their ways I am yet able to pluck from the storehouse a vivid illustrative example of common dog (or doglike) behaviour to get my point across. Let those who scoff be hushed, so we can get on with it.

Though for present purposes we need consider only an abstract dog barking abstractedly up an abstract tree, I find that concrete examples can be a boon to the dimwit. Not that I think for one minute that anyone reading this is a dimwit, you understand. Still, it is best to be on the safe side, and a scribbler never knows if or when his words may fall into the clutches of a dunderpate. So for our examples let us take one dog and four trees, a mastiff, say, and a pine and a larch and a sycamore and a wych elm. However unlikely it may be in the real world, let us say there is, in the middle of nowhere, that is in a vast and otherwise featureless flat expanse of land, a row of four trees, planted in a straight line, equidistant, with roughly six yards between them. Blot everything else out of your mind. Well, everything except the dog, which you need to remember, though it has not yet entered the scene. So far we just have the line of trees, the pine and the larch and the sycamore and the wych elm. We could have a line of more, or slightly fewer, trees, but four is a manageable number for the dimwits.

Now, look! Here comes a monkey, scampering towards the trees at high speed. I did not mention the monkey earlier, partly because I did not wish to overtax your brain and partly because, in any case, it will soon be out of sight. The monkey, you see, is being pursued by the dog, the mastiff, and is hurtling pell mell towards the line of trees, up the trunk of one of which it will climb with breathtaking monkeyish agility, and then conceal itself in the high leafage. This duly accomplished, the monkey is, as promised, out of sight.

Enter the dog, panting, in hot pursuit. Those of you who are keen on dogs may wish, at this point, to form a closer bond with our abstract mastiff, so let us dub it Desmond. Imagine Desmond now, stopping short of the line of trees. It is intelligent enough to realise that the monkey must be hidden high up in either the pine or the larch or the sycamore or the wych elm, but not sufficiently savvy to know, just yet, which one. I ought to point out here that I hold no opinion either way on the intelligence of dogs, nor do I have a clue whereabouts in the hierarchy of canine intelligence the mastiff can be placed, as compared, say, to a boxer or a dachshund. Let us credit Desmond with enough nous to realise that, as the monkey is no longer visible anywhere in the vast featureless flat expanse of land, it must have climbed and hidden in the leafage of one of the trees. Remember that Desmond is only an abstract dog, after all.

We now come to the nub of the matter. Desmond thinks that by barking at the foot of the trunk of the tree atop which the monkey is hiding, he can somehow persuade the monkey to climb down and deliver itself into his, Desmond’s, waiting paws. At least, I assume that is what is going through the head of any dog that barks up any tree at its quarry. Whether this is sensible behaviour is another matter entirely. Quite frankly, if I was the monkey, I’d stay put. But we must deal with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, and in the world as it is the dog would bark up the tree, especially if it has been driven to distraction by the antics of the fleeing monkey. That seems plausible.

But which tree does Desmond bark up? According to basic probability theory, the likelihood is that he is going to bark up the wrong one. You can work through the permutations in your head if you like. One of the reasons I limited the line of trees to four is so that you could do so without becoming number-dazed. Add just one tree to the row, for example a cedar, and the chances of Desmond barking up the wrong one grow ever greater.

If Desmond barks up each tree in turn, for a period of, say, a minute or so at the foot of each one, he will sooner or later, to your untold relief and mine, bark up the right one. That is, unless we throw in an added complication. The monkey, being a monkey, might well be agile enough to leap from treetop to treetop, thus from larch to pine to sycamore to wych elm and back again, so that at no point is Desmond barking up the right tree. In these circumstances, we could aver, without fear of contradiction, that Desmond is barking up the wrong tree. Conversely, though the monkey of his original pursuit may avoid the dog’s barking, there may be loitering, in each of the trees, other creatures, such as squirrels, of close or even equal interest to a panting barking desperate mastiff. So you see, even in the simplest concrete example drawn from abstract propositions, things become hopelessly, hopelessly entangled. ‘Twas ever thus, in the wide wide world.

There are people of whom it can be said that they have true grit. “By their grit shall ye know them,” that is what we say, when we talk grit with our coevals. And talk grit we do, rather often nowadays, when we are on the lookout for true grit. We talk grit the better that we shall know it when we see it, and not be seduced by the blandishments of false grit. For sad to say there are more persons abroad in the world with false grit than with true. If you would argue with that, perhaps you will be persuaded by an anecdote.

Many years ago it happened that I was summoned by a Captain of Souls. This fellow, in starched uniform, with epaulettes, had been charged with commandeering the souls of all in my village. It was not a task he undertook willingly, but his continued captaincy depended upon it. His superiors were quite clear on the matter. So the Captain gathered about him his advisers and asked their advice on how best to proceed. In among all the mutterings and mumblings one voice rang out, that of the dwarf Crepusco, who told the Captain he must summon the village bellsman. The bellsman, explained the dwarf, as an important village personage, could expedite the transformation of all the souls in the village, if once convinced he might otherwise be placed in durance vile. So saying, he pointed downwards, to where, far below the Captain’s chamber, there lurked an oubliette, infested with scorpions and hornets and tiny soft squirming sucking things.

“If I understand you correctly,” said the Captain, hushing the rest of the advisers with an imperious raising of one eyebrow, “We frighten the bejesus out of this bellsman and get him to ring his bells in such a fashion that he in turn frightens the bejesus out of the whole village. We then sweep across the tarpoota and capture their souls at one fell swoop while they are defenceless through terror.”

“Indeed so,” said the dwarf Crepusco, “It is a foolproof plan.”

And so a rider was sent across the tarpoota with a letter of summons from the Captain to the village bellsman. In other words, to me. Having delivered the summons, the rider rode away, and I shuddered. It was far from clear to me how I could possibly cross the tarpoota in safety. It was rife with banditti, and not just banditti but marauding ruffians and gaggles of escaped convicts and similar ne’er-do-wells, eye-gougers and limb-loppers and head-boilers. That the Captain’s rider had come and gone unharmed was small comfort. He, of course, was astride a horse, a horse as swift as a swift in the sky, but we villagers had no horses, nor ponies nor bicycles nor motorbikes. The only way I could obey the summons was to cross the tarpoota on foot, which meant almost certain death.

Frantic with worry, I went out of my belltower into the designated smoking area and lit a cigarette. And it was as I was puffing away that I saw, passing by, a stranger with a shovel over one shoulder. Over his other shoulder he was lugging a burlap sack, and printed on the sack, in bold Palatino Linotype lettering, was the word GRIT. I followed him and fell in step beside him and engaged him in conversation. It was always disconcerting to come upon a stranger in our village, and I plied him with questions. Who was he? What was his business in the village? How did he get here? It was the reply to that last that proved decisive. He had, he said, crossed the tarpoota alone, on foot, with just his shovel and his sack of grit and a flask of lapsang souchong and a clementine.

“And were you not set upon by banditti and ruffians and escaped convicts and ne’er-do-wells? Were not your eyes gouged, your limbs lopped, your head boiled?” I babbled, even though I could see he was sound of body, like Felix Randal the farrier, big-boned and hardy-handsome, boisterous and powerful, but by no means, like Felix Randal the farrier, dead. In reply, he said four simple words.

“I have true grit.”

And he glanced back at the sack over his shoulder.

We fell to parlaying. I wanted him as my escort and bodyguard, I explained, for I too must cross the tarpoota, in answer to the summons, but I was puny and weak and cowardly and would surely fall victim to banditti or ruffians or escaped convicts or ne’er-do-wells. The stranger agreed to protect me, but only after exacting a hefty price. We stopped off at a newsagent’s and I leafed through the financial pages of The Daily Tentacle to check current metal prices. Doing the sums in my head, I worked out that I could afford to pay the stranger by melting down a couple of my bells. We shook hands, and arranged to meet outside the post office the next morning, to set off across the hostile tarpoota.

I had not asked him the most important question of all. Was his grit really true?

The wind was howling across the vast and desolate tarpoota as we set out the next day, he with his shovel and sack and flask, and me with a parasol and a can of Squelcho! Not unexpectedly, we had been walking for just five minutes before there came lumbering towards us a ferocious tangle of banditti or ruffians or escaped convicts or ne’er-do-wells.

“Eek!” I cried, dropping my parasol.

“Leave this to me,” said the stranger.

My heart swelled with gratitude as I watched him prepare for the onslaught. Holding the shovel between his mighty teeth, he hoisted the sack from his shoulder and plonked it on the ground in front of him. With surprisingly delicate manipulations, he untied the cord that fastened the sack. Our assailants were almost upon us. And then I saw what I hoped never to see – the grit in his sack was not true grit. It was false grit, a mixture of sand and sugar and shreds of cotton wool. He tipped it out on to the tarpoota, and it blew away on the wind.

“Ah,” he said, taking the shovel from between his teeth, and he gave me a sheepish grin, and ran away. I ran too, but not nearly fast enough, for sure enough I was beset by banditti or ruffians or escaped convicts or ne’er-do-wells. Somehow, I managed to escape them and scamper back to the village, but not before they had gouged an eye, lopped a limb, and parboiled my head. At least I was safe. God knows whatever became of the stranger, who had fled in the opposite direction, with miles and miles of the tarpoota ahead of him. For his base treachery, I like to think he was pecked to perdition by vultures.

I hope, from the foregoing, that I have made crystal clear the importance of telling true grit from false. As for my unmet summons from the Captain, I worried about that for a week or two, until I read in The Daily Tentacle one morning that the Captain himself had been summoned by his superiors. They wanted to know why he had not yet captured all the souls in my village. Like so many superiors, they were impatient, and rather than have the captain travel on horseback, a journey that would have taken many days, they sent him a ticket for a flight by airship. Alas, the airship was the Hindenburg. With the captain dead, his superiors lost interest in my village, and we were left to get on with our quiet orderly lives, far far away across the desolate vast tarpoota.