In spite of its spelling, the word “fogou” is pronounced not, as we might expect, fog-ooh, but foo-goo. This helps to differentiate it from the exclamation one might make were one to find oneself suddenly engulfed in a peasouper. “Fogou” was brought to my attention by reader Rob Howard, who suggests that the word surely exists for the sole purpose of being spoken aloud by Mr Key on his radio show. Mr Howard may have a point. Of course, when the time comes for me to read this present essay on Hooting Yard On The Air, the existence of the word will at last be justified, much as Dennis Hopper’s bombs in the film Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) achieve their purpose when they explode. I will have to say “fog-ooh”, too, but listeners should not interpret this as an indication that the ResonanceFM studio has become enswathed in a chill and spooky mist. If that eventuality does indeed occur, by dint of the mysteries of coincidence and synchronicity, I will endeavour to make that absolutely clear to listeners.

And there the matter might rest, save for the fact that your curiosity has been whetted and you probably want to know, now, what “fogou” means. Some of you may already have jumped to the conclusion that “fogou” is what you say when you are listening to a piece of classical music and suddenly realise it is “a polyphonic composition constructed on one or more short subjects or themes, which are harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, and introduced from time to time with various contrapuntal devices” (Stainer and Barrett), but you would be wrong, wrong, wrong.

Pack up an overnight bag and go to Cornwall. Plot your journey on a map and arrange to visit Halliggye on the Trelowarren estate near Garras, Carn Euny, Boleigh near Lamorna, Pendeen, Trewardreva near Constantine, which is known locally as Pixie’s Hall or Piskey Hall, Chysauster, Boden Vean near Manaccan, Lower Boscaswell, Porthmeor, Higher Bodinar, Castallack, Treveneague, and Penhale Round. In each of these places you will find one of the fogous which have thus far been discovered by the types of people who go searching for fogous, or evidence thereof.

If, having done as you were told in the previous paragraph, you still don’t know what a fogou is, God help you. Actually, that is somewhat harsh. I should try to be a kinder Mr Key. So, though I am not God, I will help you.

A fogou is an underground, dry-stone structure found on Iron Age or Romano-British defended settlement sites in Cornwall. Similar structures have been found elsewhere, particularly in the Orkney Islands, where there is a fogou at Castle Bloody on Shapinsay. Quite why our ancestors built them is a matter of conjecture. They may have been used for magic rituals, or they may have been used for the storage of gulls’ eggs. There may have been magic rituals calling for the use of gulls’ eggs, possibly, which would kill two conjectures with one stone. I was going to say “kill two birds”, as the saying is, but having just mentioned gulls, twice, or more precisely their eggs, also twice, and the gull being a type of bird, I did not want to tie myself in verbal knots. Come to think of it, a knot is also a type of bird, so that little “killing two conjectures” sally didn’t get me very far. And the knots get even more entangled when we consider that, whether it is birds, gulls or knots, or conjectures we are killing with one stone, one of the discoveries that has been made in the remains of fogous is of large stone balls, or petrospheres, possible symbols of power within prehistoric society, and thus connected perhaps to ritual magic, whether or not that magic depended on the use of gulls’ eggs.

It is all a bit of a muddle in my head, to be honest. But now you know what a fogou is, and you can go looking for them, in Cornwall, or in the Orkneys, should that be your bag, daddy-o.

When I went to live in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs, opposite my windows, at the Hotel de Pontchartrain, there was a clock. For more than a month I did my utmost to teach her how to tell the time by it, but, even now, she can hardly do so. She has never been able to give the names of the twelve months of the year in correct order, and does not know a single figure, in spite of all the trouble I have taken to teach her. She can neither count money nor reckon the price of anything. The words which she uses in speaking are often the very opposite of those which she means.

Thus Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his Confessions (1782/1789), of his companion Thérèse Levasseur. I like to think of her as the patron saint of those of us who lack a certain simple facility. Now, I can tell the time, I can name the months of the year in the correct order, I am reasonably good with figures, I can count money and reckon prices, and I usually use words correctly, unless I specifically intend not to. But when the time comes to write my own Confessions, it will be necessary to admit that I get hopelessly confused by left and right and by east and west.

This will not come as a surprise to those of you who read On Perpilocution a couple of days ago, where I blithely announced that Madagascar is a big island off the western coast of Africa. Madagascar is, of course, a big island off the eastern coast of Africa, which most of you will know without having to consult an atlas or gazetteer. The thing is, I didn’t need to consult an atlas. I could – I can – picture the location of Madagascar in my mind’s eye. The problem is that I experience a certain befuddlement, in trying to recall which direction is called “east” and which is called “west”, and as often as not I get it wrong. It will amuse you to be told that, as I tippy-tapped those words on New Year’s Day, I actually paused to hold my hands out in front of me, and looked from left to right, and right to left, to remind myself which way was east and which way was west, and, mentally satisfied, typed “west”, having convinced myself that my right hand represented “west” – which of course it did not, nor ever will.

I would like to be able to say that I am on slightly less shaky ground with right and left than with east and west, but in truth they flummox me almost as much. I remember a particular incident from my childhood. I was about ten years old, and had been to a friend’s birthday party, and his father gave me a lift home. All went well until we reached “the top” (as my family called it), an intersection where two main roads crossed. Approaching from the south, I had no problem telling Mr Hughes to continue straight ahead. I have never got my north and south mixed up. But I then told him to take the first turn on the right, so we whizzed straight past the first turn on the left, which would, shortly, have taken us, with one more left turn, to my house. And on we whizzed, there being no right turn for quite some time. It was a dark winter evening, but I knew of course that we were heading away from, rather than towards, home. I cannot fathom why I did not point out my mistake immediately, but as I recall I waited until we had gone a mile or so, with no right turn in sight, to pipe up. When I did so, Mr Hughes became somewhat exasperated. Once he had executed a U-turn, he of course depended on me to tell him when we needed to turn – right, this time – before we again reached “the top”. Brilliantly, I guided us down the wrong turning, one or two roads before we ought to have turned, and we then became hopelessly lost in the maze of the estate wherein – somewhere, but where? – my house lay. A journey that ought to have taken ten minutes thus took at least half an hour, and I think Mr Hughes was very glad to see the back of me when eventually I skipped out of his car and up the path to my door. I suppose he must have found his way out of the labyrinth eventually, unless, decades later, a by now withered and white-haired old man is still driving round and round the estate, ever more tetchy, while Mrs Hughes and all the little Hugheses, now grown, sit pining in their parlour.

There is an argument to be had that the well-groomed moustache is representative of all that is best in a certain apprehension of Western civilization, where gravitas, punctilio and rectitude are prized as essential qualities. Clearly the moustache cannot, in and of itself, guarantee that the pinnacle of social conduct has been achieved. We need only think of the luxuriant moustaches of, on the one hand, the savage Ancient Gauls and, on the other, the hippies and motorbikeists of nineteen-seventies America (think Easy Rider) to recognise the absurdity of that conceit.

And yet, within a larger context, one that includes manners and customs and dress and even carriage and posture, the moustache is incontrovertibly the icing on the cake, as it were. Remove the moustache and you remove a crucial – I would go so far as to say a necessary – element of civilization at its most civilized.

Consider for a moment the splendid moustache of Archduke Stephen, Palatine of Hungary (1817-1867), previously Archduke Stephen Francis Victor of Austria, governor of Bohemia from 1843 to 1847.

It is no accident, I think, that in this photograph the gaze of Archduchess Hermine of Austria is concentrated fixedly upon that moustache. Dapper as he is in his coat and trousers and shiny shoes, insouciant as he leans against a weighty carved wooden credenza, an imaginary clean-shaven Palatine would cut far less impressive a figure. Indeed, one cannot help thinking that Emperor Ferdinand I of Austria would have withheld the governorship of Bohemia from him until such time as he sprouted an appropriate moustache.

The Archduchess, incidentally, was not the wife of the Archduke, for he never married. It is quite possible that any prospective brides were intimidated by the moustache, perhaps intuiting that the Archduke’s mental and emotional energies were devoted to its cultivation and care, leaving little to spare for connubial shenanigans. Such a conclusion is borne out by careful and painstaking study of the countenance of the Archduchess in the photograph. You might want to deploy a magnifying glass, but I think you will agree with me.

There is a story, which I have just made up, that Archduke Stephen, finding the coffers of Bohemia alarmingly depleted, once made use of his moustache to raise much-needed funds. He staged a competition, open to all the citizens of Bohemia, the challenge being to make an accurate estimation of the number of individual hairs in his moustache. Each Bohemian paid a crown to enter, and having done so qualified to write down their chosen number on a scrap of paper, the gathered scraps being collected by one of the Archduke’s henchmen, together with the crowns. It is said that a barber from a Bohemian village was brought to the palace, armed with a comb and a counting-stick, about the size of a modern safety match, and was ordered to count one by one the hairs in the Archducal moustache. Before this humble yet numerate artisan could complete his task, however, Archduke Stephen’s father died, and he inherited the title of Count Palatine of Hungary, and left Bohemia for good, taking all the crowns with him but leaving the scraps of paper with numbers written upon them, shoved all jumbled up in the weighty carved wooden credenza against which he is seen leaning in that photograph. The exact number of hairs in his magnificent moustache never was calculated, more’s the pity.

A couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to learn the word perpilocutionist, defined as “one who expounds on a subject of which he has little knowledge”. Aha!, I thought, with the gleam of recognition, that’s me! Long ago, I jettisoned that dull-witted advice to “write what you know about” and took it upon myself to write about absolutely anything that occurred to me, including that of which I was profoundly ignorant – ornithology, for example. The American economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell has written that “it is doubtful whether the most knowledgeable person on earth has even one percent of the total knowledge on earth”, and, if that is indeed the case, I would be hobbling myself horribly before even putting pen to paper, were I to confine myself to my own paltry pocketful of knowledge.

My delight at the discovery of the word was somewhat tempered when I failed to track it beyond a few websites. There is no place for it, I am sad to say, in the OED, which makes me immediately suspicious. At first glance it seems to have a respectable Latin provenance, given its figurative meaning as “one who talks through his hat”. But while the “per” (for “through”) and the “locution” are clear enough, the Latin “pil” refers to hair rather than hats, as in words such as depilation and caterpillar. Still, I suppose the idea of talking through a full head of hair is akin to talking through a hat, if we picture such a pose in our mind’s eye, and the word is far too useful to discard now, simply on the basis that some wag might have made it up. After all, I have been known to invent words from time to time, and I don’t always bother to define them.

Identifying myself as a perpilocutionist grants me a magnificent opportunity, of course. Although I have been blathering on for years about things I know little or nothing about, I have done so circumstantially, or accidentally, or unwittingly, as it were – that is, in the absence of a conscious, declared aim or intention. But what would happen if I devised a project to address at least a percentage of the ninety-nine-point-nine percent of knowledge of which I am ignorant?

Take, as an example, Madagascar. I know that it is a big island off the western coast of Africa. I know, because once I looked it up in a reference book for reasons I have forgotten, that the capital is Antananarivo. (How excited I was, the other day, to shout the word at the television screen while watching an episode of University Challenge when Jeremy Paxman sought just that answer from the octet of not-so-tinies!) I know, or at least I think I know, that Heinrich Himmler once suggested Madagascar as a land of settlement for the Jews of Europe. Other than that, I would be hard-pressed to tell you a single thing about the place. Does that mean I am incapable of writing an essay entitled “On Madagascar”? Hell, no! As a perpilocutionist, I am in a perfect position to cobble together a thousand words on the subject, on any subject. And it is important to note that I need not precede my frantic tippy-tapping at the keyboard with any research whatsoever, particularly that pathetic excuse for “research” that consists, in these benighted times, of a quick browse of the Wikipedia. No, the Madagascar of my putative essay would be the Madagascar nestled in my ignorant head, brought forth, miraculously, through the spouting of blather.

It is no doubt foolhardy, but I have conceived the idea of writing, here, a daily essay, of which this is the first. The likelihood is that, long before reaching number 366 (this being a leap year) I will jack it in, abandon it, slap my forehead in astonishment at my own witlessness. But today, at least, it is a plan, and we shall see how it progresses. I am going to need 365 further topics, so if any of you would like to suggest subjects I ought to address, please use the Comments to do so. Please note that each essay’s title will begin with the word “On”.