“He who would valiant be had better buck his ideas up and stop cowering behind that shrubbery.”

I made this observation to my companion as, during a morning stroll, we spotted a puny nincompoop quaking with terror behind a clump of shrubbery. I could tell he would valiant be because he was wearing the uniform – cap and smock and leggings and boots – of the School of Valour, a nearby institution where, once upon a time, I had given some lectures.

My companion was a little more quick-witted than me.

“It occurs to me,” she said, “That as he who would valiant be is quaking with terror, there must needs be some disaster in the offing, of which we would do well to take note, and if necessary to guard against, or overcome, or stymie.”

“How right you are!” I hastened to agree, “But I wonder what the nature of the disaster is. He who would valiant be would, in the words of the hymn, be valiant ‘gainst all disaster. It could be anything from an erupting volcano to a bittern storm.”

“Indeed it could,” she said, “Though I am not sure a bittern storm fits into the category of a disaster. It is more a natural phenomenon, an anomalous one to be sure, but hardly disastrous.”

“You have a point,” I said, “But a sky teeming with birds in terrible numbers seems just the kind of thing that might frighten this puny nincompoop cowering behind the shrubbery. Look at him!, quaking there, as unvaliant a specimen as has ever worn the cap and smock and leggings and boots of the School of Valour!”

“Well, let us approach him, you and I,” she suggested, “First to discover from his own drooling lips what it is that has him so frit, and second to put some fire in his belly.”

I agreed, and we turned back and pranced arm in arm behind the clump of shrubs. Our appearance – me drastically tall and engarbed in Tyrolean hiking gear, my companion with the elegance of a swan but with a swan’s savagery in her eyes – alarmed he who would valiant be. His quaking grew the more tremulous, and he made the little whimpering noises of a born milksop.

“Hey ho!” said my companion, kindly, “Of what are you afeared, young student of valour?”

“Oh pity me,” he wailed, “For I have been so beset round with dismal stories that my legs are like jelly and I have piddled myself!”

At this intelligence my ears pricked up.

“Dismal stories?” I asked.

“Yes sir, truly dismal stories,” he answered, “I have been so beset round with dismal stories of the lumbering walrus-moustached serial killer Babinsky that I scarce dare to move in case he comes a-leaping upon me with his butcher’s cleaver or other instrument of violence.”

My companion and I withdrew to one side to confer.

“Neither an erupting volcano nor a bittern storm, then,” I said, “But awful disaster in the form of Babinsky!”

“Indeed so,” she said, “Even I quake with something not unakin to terror at mention of that dreadful name, and I, as you know, was one of the top scholars ever to study at the School of Valour.”

“I know it well,” I said, “Though as I recall you never attended any of the lectures I delivered in its august hall.”

“No, I did not,” she said, “For I was too busy learning valour in the field, as we say, armed with sword and cudgel, fighting giants.”

“Then you will have missed my lecture on Babinsky, in the course of which I gave a series of tips to those who would valiant be on how to counter the sense of dread and jellying of the legs and piddling brought about by the very thought of the fiend.”

“Tips which I am sure would be of immediate benefit to the puny nincompoop,” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “And as luck would have it I think I have my lecture notes scrunched up in a pocket of my Tyrolean hiking jacket.”

“Then rummage them out and let us return behind the clump of shrubs so you can impart them to he who would valiant be. When you are done, he will valiant be, I expect.”

“A capital idea,” I said, and duly rummaged.

Unfortunately, when we returned behind the shrubbery, he who would valiant be was lying on the ground in several separate pieces, each soaked in gore. While our backs were turned, he had been set upon by the lumbering walrus-moustached serial killer and chopped to bits by his butcher’s cleaver. We span around, quaking with terror, knowing Babinsky was close. But he had already lumbered away, out of sight, bent on further enormities behind other clumps of shrubbery, elsewhere.

“Gosh!”, said my companion, “That was a close shave!”

“It was indeed,” I said, “Oh look! Up there, in the sky! Do you see that bittern storm?”

“I do,” she said, “And I find it not the least bit terrifying, for I would valiant be.”

“Unlike the puny nincompoop,” I said.

“Unlike the puny nincompoop,” she agreed.

I didn’t have a dog in the fight. I didn’t have a dog full stop. And there wasn’t a fight, exactly. It was more of a skirmish. One gang of warriors armed with swords charged, screaming, at another gang of warriors, also armed with swords. There were one or two clangs of blade against blade, but then the second gang ran away, back to their bivouac, and the first gang, still screaming their heads off, took possession of the area of land on which the skirmish had taken place. It was not quite land, being more accurately described as sodden marsh, but the warriors were well pleased with themselves. Their bloodcurdling screams turned to chanting, and they chanted their victory song, which went something like this:

We have vanquished our foes
Our swords are caked with their blood
Truly they have been ripped to shreds
And the sodden marshland is ours

That is a translation. In the original, the lines rhyme and have a pleasing rhythmic flow. You will note, however, that it is not strictly accurate. The foes ran away before they could be ripped to shreds, and not a drop of blood was spilled. It remains true, however, that I didn’t have a dog in the fight. It doesn’t matter that I had no dog, that there was no fight as such. The statement has its own inner coherence and logic.

Would things have been any different if I did have a dog, and there had been a fight? Let’s imagine that, instead of running away, the second gang of warriors, sploshing about in the sodden marsh, were determined to keep possession of it. When the first gang came charging at them, screaming, the second gang were not cowed, and instead started hacking wildly at their attackers, who hacked back. Swords clashed, stabbings occurred, limbs were lopped. There was much bloodshed. By the time they finished fighting, most of the warriors on either side were either dead or splayed upon the sodden marsh, groaning. Those who could still walk upright retreated. The sodden marsh remained disputed territory. Which gang of warriors took possession of it would depend upon further fighting, perhaps tomorrow, after each side had had the chance to replenish their numbers.

Meanwhile, what about me and my putative dog? For the purposes of vividness, let us bestow upon it a breed and a name. It is a Jack Russell terrier and its name is Skippy. For even more vividness, let us posit that Skippy is celebrated in song, by a chorus of tinies. They sing:

Skippy the terrier, o! what a hound!
Watch him scamper across the ground!
Be it sodden marsh or meadow
Skippy’s a jolly good fellow!

That is not a translation, as you can probably tell by the rhyme in the first couplet and the half-rhyme in the second. By the way, do not fret that the tinies assembled to sing Skippy’s praises are in any danger from the screaming, sword-wielding warriors. We shall place the tinies off to one side, safe behind some kind of barricade. In fact, that is where Skippy, my putative dog, is, and I am too. That explains why I don’t have a dog (Skippy) in the fight. I would not want him to come to any harm, if he existed, that is, not out of any overwhelming love for dogs, for in actual fact I detest and fear them, but because I like to think that if I did have a dog, as a pet, I would do my best to protect it from bloodthirsty screaming warriors armed with swords. I would not be much of a dog owner, would I, if I picked Skippy up and chucked him over the barricade, and commanded him to go and fetch a stick I threw into the clashing melée of warriors? Dogs can be very trusting, and the likelihood is that Skippy would gaze at me adoringly and scamper unquestioningly into the sodden marsh, there to be torn to bits by the razor-sharp blades of the fighting men. They might not stab Skippy purposely, but if he were caught up in the violence, by going to retrieve the thrown stick, he would almost certainly fall victim to what is known as collateral damage. So, if I did have a dog in the fight, even peripherally or circumstantially, he would probably come to a bad end.

I would have to placate the grieving tinies, too, whose hearts were filled to bursting with love and admiration for Skippy, as attested by their song. Though his violent death was caused by the chaotic hacking of swords in a battle which was nothing to do with him, nor with me, whose only action was to throw a stick for him to fetch, the tinies might well blame me. They would cease singing and turn on me, with looks of reproach and accusation. I am not sure how I would go about placating them. I suppose I could produce another putative dog, another Jack Russell terrier, also called Skippy, and by sleight of hand and misdirection pretend it was the same dog, unbloodied and in one piece and alive. But where would I get such a dog, quickly enough to convince the tinies?

All in all, I am thankful that I did not have a dog in the fight. Without the dog, there would be no call for a chorus of tinies to sing its praises from behind a barricade, nor for me to throw a stick into the midst of a mad tangle of clashing screaming blood-drenched warriors for the putative dog to fetch. And with no dead dog, the tinies would not turn on me, with a rage and wildness more terrible than an army with banners.

Gew and Weg, the palindromic chums, went on many exciting adventures. In one such adventure they took a spaceship to Pluto and planted tulips. This was about as close as they ever got to having a palindromic adventure. Had there been a planet Pilut, they would no doubt have gone there instead, but they had to make do with Pluto.

On their way back from Pluto, Gew and Weg discovered they still had a couple of tulip bulbs, forgotten at the bottom of their burlap bag. So peckish on the long journey and far, far from any canteen or cafeteria, they ate them. Soon enough they had flowers sprouting from their ears. It was a look they liked, so they did not cut them.

Interviewed by press hounds when they landed back at the spaceship station on Earth, Gew and Weg had to fend off questions about the tulips in their ears. Would all visitors to that distant planet become human flowerpots?, they were asked. Are those normal tulips or are they some sort of weird Plutonian tulip?, they were asked. Their replies were drowned out by the eager babbling of other newshounds and the sudden blaring of hooters warning of a calamity.

Gew and Weg always liked to intervene in cases of imminent calamity, so they cut the press conference short and scampered off to the hooter control hut. They were mightily disconcerted to discover that whoever had pressed the control knob that set the hooters blaring had already fled. Thus they had no way of finding out the nature of the impending calamity. Whatever it might be, they agreed that the hut was a safe place to be, so they slammed the door shut and flung themselves into a pair of armchairs. They copied this flinging movement from Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer.

Outside the hut all was pandaemonium. But the hut was windowless and soundproofed with cork panels. There is not much chance of a palindromic adventure involving cork panels, observed Gew. Hmm, responded Weg, Kroc le nap? That means nothing. Was Kroc not the surname of the man who started McDonald’s?, said Gew. Yes, said Weg, or rather Yar. Ray Kroc, though he was not the founder of the company, he merely built it into today’s behemoth. Well then, mused Gew, we might have an adventure revolving around Kroc taking a snooze in France, le nap Kroc. Too late for that!, rapped Weg, he died in 1984. Weg copied his rapping intonation from Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer.

After a while Gew creaked the door of the hut open to peek outside. There had been some sort of cataclysm, that was for sure. Come and look at this, he said to Weg. Gosh!, said Weg, when he too peeked outside and saw the results of the terrible cataclysm, No wonder the hooters were blaring! I suppose we can depress the control knob to cease the hooters now, said Gew. Yes, I suppose we can, said Weg.

But as they went back into the interior of the hut and past the pair of armchairs towards the hooter control console wherein the knob was set, the hut door slammed shut by dint of a sudden galey gust, and they found they were unable to open it. We seem to be trapped in the hut, said Gew. Lawks-a-mercy!, said Weg. This was not a phrase that was ever used by Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer. He must have picked it up somewhere else, from a cockney street urchin, perhaps, or a costermonger.

There is not much opportunity for adventure confined to a hut, observed Gew. No, agreed Weg, but we can console ourselves that “tuh” would in any case provide no palindromic excitements. Though the thought occurs to me, he added, that we might embark on an anagrammatic adventure if there are any containers of UHT milk in this hut. Have you taken leave of your senses?, rapped Gew, What possible kind of adventure could we have, trapped in a hut with a carton of UHT milk? Alright, alright, keep your hair on, said Weg, I was merely musing.

Gew and Weg flung themselves back into the armchairs. There was a bit of a fug in the hut because the man who manned the hooter control console was a chain smoker. Though he had fled he had left his fug behind. Both Gew and Weg feared their tulips might wilt in the stifling atmosphere.

I liked Pluto, said Gew, It had a certain something. Agreed, agreed Weg, I found it agreeably Plutonian. Mind you, this hut would be equally agreeable were it not so fuggy. Yes, said Gew, I could quite happily slump in this armchair for a considerable period of time. My only concern is the wilting of our tulips. Well, that and the fact that we are trapped. Now there’s a thought, said Weg. What?, said Gew. Well, said Weg, what with the windowlessness and the soundproofing by cork panels, one wonders if the hut is completely sealed. And if it is so sealed…?, asked Gew, allowing his question to peter out as the penny dropped. If the hut is so sealed, said Weg, then not only will our tulips wilt, but we will wilt too, fatally, as the supply of oxygen is gradually depleted.

Lawks-a-mercy!, said Gew, Then it seems we are to have an adventure after all! A daring escape from a sealed hut! Yes, said Weg, And an anagrammatic adventure, for look!, over on that shelf I spy a carton of UHT milk! How is that going to be germane to our escape?, asked Gew. I don’t know yet, said Weg, But I will hatch a plan.

Next week in The Thrilling Escapades Of Gew And Weg, find out how the derring-do duo escape from the sealed hut using a carton of UHT milk!

In his fascinating new book, beardy intellectual gadfly Slobodan Gadfly posits a world in which the game of ping pong does not exist. He then proceeds to “invent” it through the power of imagination. It would be easy to dismiss the work as pointless pseudointellectual twaddle, and many critics have adopted precisely that line. Here, for example, is Rolf Gutentag, writing in The Pingpongist:

Seldom have I read such a blithering farrago of drivel. My cat could write a more sensible book than this. In fact, he has done. Meat In Jelly, Daytime Naps, And The Torture Of Birds is available now from all good bookshops. But I digress. Even if we accept Mr Gadfly’s preposterous premise of a ping pong-less universe, must we be subjected to page after page of his strenuous mental groping towards some sort of fully-imagined tabletop-based indoor sport played with bats and lightweight balls? As if that were not piffling enough, there is further piffle in store, in the shape of an entire chapter devoted to a wholly imaginary scoring system which turns out, on close inspection, to be identical to the actual scoring system used in actual games of ping pong in the actual world.

Gutentag is positively enthusiastic in comparison to Seebohm “Not Susan” Sontag, writing in The New Pingpongist:

Never, ever, in all my days, have I read such a blithering farrago of drivel. As soon as I finished reading it, I burned it. Then I went out to the bookshop where I had bought it and burned all the copies they had in stock. Then, for good measure, I burned down the bookshop. As the flames licked the sky, I held in one hand a ping pong bat and in the other hand a ping pong ball, and when the fire brigade arrived, with bells clanging, I challenged every man jack of them to a game of ping pong. Look!, I was saying, the game exists! Why pretend it doesn’t and then try to imagine it? The fire brigade could only nod in agreement, thus proving the utter futility of Gadfly’s thesis.

I cannot help but think that Messrs Gutentag and Sontag are missing the point of the book. Quite what that point is I am not sure myself, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to worry my little head about such niceties. And it is indeed a little head, not much bigger than a ping pong ball, on account of certain mishaps in the maternity ward where I was born. I am often asked if life has presented me with insurmountable difficulties due to my tiny, white, and almost spherical head, and my invariable answer is “no, it has not”, for I carry myself with aplomb and meet the astonished gazes of those I encounter with a steely gaze of my own. If they continue to gaze, or to prod me with their fingers as if I were a circus freak, I take from my pocket the ping pong bat I always carry about my person and I thump them smartly on the head with it, several times.

I do not think it is necessary to understand the point of Mr Gadfly’s book to enjoy it. I would go further, and say it is not necessary to understand the point of any book to enjoy it. What, after all, is the point of Rolf Gutentag’s cat’s book? Does it give us new insights into feline life? It does not. Does it, more importantly, tell us of a cat’s approach to the game of ping pong? It does not. Indeed, save for one passage in which the cat-narrator chases a ping pong ball around a confined space, in a state of frenzy, there is no mention of ping pong at all. This absence, or lacuna, makes it a highly unusual book, at least in my experience. And that, perhaps, is the point.

And as much as I enjoyed the cat’s book, so I enjoyed Slobodan Gadfly’s. The opening chapter, in which he paints a vivid picture of a universe in which ping pong does not exist, and never has existed, is a tour de force. It is a world very much like our own, in almost every particular. It even has a few people in it like myself, with ping pong ball-size heads, though of course we are not described as such, for in this alternative universe without ping pong, there are of necessity no ping pong balls. Gadfly has to invent them, just as he has to invent the bat and the net and the rules and the scoring system. And invent them he does, each in turn.

He does not spare us the details of his mental agony. There are false starts, wrong turnings, red herrings, and mind-bogglingly stupid decisions. In chapter four, for example, Gadfly recounts his struggle to imagine a ping pong ball. As yet, he has no concept of either the bat or the net or the rules or the scoring system. He has not even arrived at the idea that the game might be an indoor one played on a tabletop. Indeed, he has not even thought of the game. At this stage, his only concern is the ball – in his parallel universe, a wholly new type of ball which he challenges himself to bring into existence. Laughably, the first ping pong ball he conceives is the size and shape and texture of a medicine ball. It is not absolutely identical to a medicine ball, of course, for they already exist in his ping pong-less world.

While I was reading this chapter, with its tragic undertone, I could not help but become engulfed by my own imaginings. I wondered what my life would be like if, instead of having a ping pong ball head, I had a medicine ball head? It was easy enough to posit a slightly different maternity ward mishap that could have had such an outcome for my head. But I found it far more difficult to picture how different things would have been for me. Would I still go about with a ping pong bat in my pocket, ready to strike the impolite? And if I did not, how would I deal with such people? Trying to fathom the answers to these questions made me all the more admiring of Slobodan Gadfly’s great act of imagination, in inventing, from nothing, the game of ping pong.

Hooting Yard Rating : Seventeen stars.

You may also enjoy : Ping Pong For Cats by Rolf Gutentag, The Fantastic Architecture Of The Burning Cities by Seebohm “Not Susan” Sontag, Ipsy Dipsy Doo Dah by Jeanette Winterson & Will Self.

I am delighted to post another article from Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest. This one is from her invaluable series “The Expectorations Of Various Quadruped Beasts”. Permission to reproduce it here was granted after I made a donation to Miss Blossom Partridge’s Lovely Bucolic Donkey Sanctuary. Though small, the donation exacted was double the amount paid for permission to post Miss Blossom Partridge’s piece on giant albino kangaroos. I have decided to set up a fund to meet what I fear may be ever-increasing costs demanded by the mysterious Dr Grimes, who claims to be Miss Blossom Partridge’s accountant. If you would like to contribute, and so guarantee the opportunity to read more of her excellent work, please whack that PayPal button over on the right of the screen and give generously.

Last week in Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest we considered the sputum of giraffes, so this week, following the extremely complicated scheme devised for this series, we turn inevitably to the spittle of donkeys. We looked at giraffe sputum in a necessarily abstract, theoretical manner, but when it comes to the spittle of donkeys we are going to take a more practical approach, so roll up your sleeves, wash your hands with swarfega, and let’s get down to business!

The first thing you need to do is to find some donkeys. Do not for one minute think you can come a-trespassing in my Lovely Bucolic Donkey Sanctuary, however! It is surrounded by an electrified fence and every hundred yards or so there is a watchtower in which is perched one of my sentries armed with a high-velocity sniper’s rifle. Step over the whitewashed line parallel to the fence and you will be shot in the centre of your forehead. I do not bandy about the word “sanctuary” loosely.

Far better that you go to the seaside, where donkeys are often to be found giving rides along the beach to overexcited tinies. The seaside donkeymaster may not take kindly to you collecting spittle from one of his donkeys, so what you will need to do is to lure one away from the pack. Pick a donkey that is not, at the time, laden with a squealing infant on its back. A small bale of straw ought to be sufficient temptation for the donkey, but you will need to ensure the donkeymaster’s attention is distracted. This can be accomplished by, for example, setting fire to an ice cream kiosk elsewhere on the beach. While the donkeymaster is gazing, open-mouthed at the conflagration, wave the small bale of straw in the face of your chosen donkey and lure it away until you are concealed by sand dunes or some similar seaside beach feature.

Do not fret your little head about being charged with donkey abduction. Once you have collected its spittle, you are going to return the donkey whence you found it, no harm done. Before so returning it, you will again need to divert the donkeymaster’s attention. For this purpose, it can be useful to have an accomplice, a stooge who swims out to sea and then pretends to be drowning, frantically waving their arms and shouting. But we are leaping ahead of ourselves.

Duly hidden behind dunes, or similar, you can begin to feed handfuls of straw to the donkey. As it munches, spittle will be produced from various glands in its mouth. I will not go into the precise physiological details. Just bear with me. Now, while with one hand you tear off portions of straw from the bale and stuff them into the donkey’s mouth, with your other hand you should be holding a bowl under its chin to collect such spittle as it dribbles and drools. Remember that some donkeys slobber while eating more than others, and do not hit any panic buttons. Provided the donkey munches straw for about ten minutes, it should almost certainly produce sufficient spittle to fill your bowl, if not to the brim then as near as dammit.

When you are happy with the amount of donkey spittle in your bowl, transfer it to a flask by means of a siphon and funnel. Pat the donkey on its head to show your appreciation. Then use your walkie-talkie to alert your accomplice, who should come scampering out of a chalet in his swimming costume and hare across the beach and plunge into the sea and swim out and then pretend to be drowning and wave and scream. Peering out from behind the dunes, make sure the donkeymaster is distracted, and lead the donkey back, inserting it among the other donkeys as if it had never been away. If an infant is loitering nearby, pick it up and plop it on to the donkey’s back. Thus, when the donkeymaster turns around to scan his donkeys, he will be even less likely to think one of them has been lured away behind the sand dunes to have its spittle collected. You can now go home.

In your kitchenette, pour the donkey spittle out of the flask into a container. There will almost certainly be a few strands of munched straw intermingled with the spittle, so pick them out with a pair of tweezers and discard them in your bin. Do the same with any other foreign bodies that have found their way into the container until you have one hundred percent pure donkey spittle. This can then be used for a vast range of different purposes, most of which hark back centuries and have come down to us through rustic lore and wisdom.

While you ponder to precisely what purpose you intend to put the spittle of the donkey, take a moment to thank your lucky stars that you live in an enlightened age. Had you been found poring over a container of donkey spittle at virtually any time in those past centuries, you would have been burned as a witch.

I bet you lot would be impressed if I wrote a learned article about stoats.

“Gosh!” you’d say, “We must admit to our suspicion that half the time Mr Key hasn’t got a clue what he’s blathering on about. But with this piece about the small scurrying mammal known as the stoat he has demonstrated extraordinary erudition and a breadth of learning with regard to the natural world which knocks us for six. Never again will we question the fact that he is the greatest writer of the age apart from Jeanette Winterson!”

That is the kind of thing I like to hear, and to make sure you say it I turn my attention today to the stoat, and a learned article thereupon. To bruit my erudition from the outset, I shall begin by giving the Latin name of the stoat – Mustela erminea – and immediately chuck in a literary quotation which makes mention of stoats:

Weasels – and stoats – and foxes – and so on. They’re all right in a way . . . but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, and then . . . well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s the fact.

You will note that by employing this quote from Ratty in The Wind In The Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) I am also hinting at my knowledge of weasels and foxes as well as of stoats. You may already be feeling vaguely intimidated, which is all to the good. “Clearly Mr Key’s learning covers a wider and vaster array of subject matter than that to which he is confining himself on this occasion!” you are thinking, “Today he chooses to enlighten us about stoats, but it may equally well have been weasels or foxes, or the Lord knows what else! Truly we must ask what we have done to deserve the privilege of living at the same time as this most versatile of writers apart from La Winterson!”

Pausing briefly to allow you to get your breath back, to prostrate yourselves in the muck before my shrine, or indeed to get out your chequebooks and donate goodly sums of money to me, I then proceed to throw in another quotation, from another eminent writer, to show that my stoat-reading has not been limited to bestial fiction:

Stoats, though not as numerous as weasels, probably do quite as much injury, being larger, swifter, stronger, and very bold sometimes entering sheds close to dwelling houses. The labouring elder folk declare that they have been known to suck the blood of infants left asleep in a cradle on the floor, biting the child behind the ear.

That is from The Gamekeeper At Home. Sketches Of Natural History And Rural Life by Richard Jefferies (1878). Now, if I started wittering on about vampire stoats sucking the blood of peasant infants asleep in their cradles, the likelihood is that you would throw up your hands and cry, “Lord love a duck! There goes Mr Key, wittering on about vampire stoats sucking the blood of peasant infants asleep in their cradles, painting an unnecessarily gruesome picture of rustic life when it is quite obvious that he has never lived in the countryside and knows little or nothing of its bucolic charms! Why we ever gave him the benefit of the doubt is inexplicable! Let us cast him aside and turn instead to the manifold genius of Saint Jeanette!”

And you would stand up from your prostrate grovelment, tip over the Key Shrine with a contemptuous kick, and tear up the cheque you had just written in my favour. That is what you would do had I not mustered the authority of Richard Jefferies to bolster my picture of rustic gruesomeness. As it is, you can only scratch your heads in wonder, acknowledge that my stoat-learning is greater than your own, and grovel more, grovel better. You probably also feel compelled to double the amount of money for which the cheque is made out. You do that, in a shaking hand, as you await further stoat-revelations from the keyboard of Mr Key. I do not disappoint.

Most people’s encounters with a live Stoat are limited to a glimpse of a sleek, sinuous, brown creature dashing across the road in front of a car to disappear among the roadside vegetation. Seen at close quarters, Stoats are chestnut-brown above, with a sharp demarcation line to pure white underparts. There is always a black tip to the tail. Should you ever have the opportunity to examine a Stoat closely, do not be tempted to look too closely at their teeth: a Stoat bite is unforgettable.

It is safe to say you are overwhelmed. “Mr Key is really pulling out all the stops!” you say, “Not only does he give us a vivid picture of the stoat’s colouring, such that we might draw one with crayons, but he demonstrates his care and concern for us by his warning to avoid the stoat’s vicious fangs! We cannot recall the last time Jeanette Winterson sounded the tocsin to alert us to the biting of small sleek mammals!”

But therein, dammit!, lies my undoing. I have prompted you to cast your minds back – to the view of a dashing stoat through a car window, to remember if or when Winterson ever showed she cared about you as much as Mr Key does. Worse, I have reminded you that some things are unforgettable. Not just the bite of a stoat, but, you now realise, that precise combination of the Latin tag and the Grahame and Jefferies quotations and the paragraph that follows. They seem strangely familiar, the more so when you consider the idiosyncratic capitalisation of “Stoat”. In a flash, you remember that you have read them before, word for word, at the beginning of the entry for Stoat in Stefan Buczacki’s Fauna Britannica (2002).

“Can it be?” you wail, “Can it possibly be that Mr Key knows nothing whatsoever about the stoat and has merely been copying passages wholesale from a truly erudite author?”

At which point I might try to claim a case of unconscious plagiarism, or coincidence, or haunting by the spirit of an (albeit still-living) author. None of which would be remotely convincing, would they?

Panjandrum, The Great. The term applied to a country worthy who fills every public office available in a village. It was a word invented by Samuel Foote in a string of rigmarole as a test for the memory of Macklin, the actor. Macklin had boasted that he could remember anything he had read once. Foote wrote this:

“So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie, and at the same time a great she-bear came running up the street and popped its head into the shop. ‘What! No soup?’ So he died, and she – very imprudently – married the barber. And there were present the Picninnies, the Joblilies, the Guryulies, and the Great Panjandrum himself, with the little Red Button a’top and they all fell to playing the game of catch-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of their boots.”

Macklin, in a fury, refused to repeat a word of it.

– from Encyclopaedia Of Phrases And Origins by Edwin Radford, Editor, “Live Letters” of the Daily Mirror , Eighth & Cheap Impression, 1950.

Frankly, it is difficult to see what Macklin, the actor, was getting in a tizzy about. Perhaps he was just having a thespian moment. He was, after all, a tempestuous character who killed a fellow actor, Thomas Hallam, by thrusting a cane through his eye during an argument about a wig. The cane went straight though Hallam’s eye into his brain. Accused of murder, Macklin defended himself at his trial and was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, for which he ought to have had his hand branded with the letter ‘M’, though it is unclear if the penalty was carried out. When he died at the age of 98 in 1797, his memorial tablet in St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, included a relief of a dagger piercing the eye of a theatrical mask. Next time you are in London, you might want to dress up as the Great Panjandrum, with the little Red Button a’top, and go and take a look at it. I have not paid such a visit myself, partly because I do not think ill-tempered roister-doister Irish thespians ought to be encouraged. Lord knows there are enough of them, from Macklin in the eighteenth century to such as Richard Harris in the twentieth.

Had I been presented with Foote’s rigmarole, I would not have fallen into a fury, nor been tempted to pierce his brain with a cane through the eye. Instead, I would have questioned him closely about the sources of his story. You see, having done a certain amount of research into this kind of rigmarole, I think Foote was actually reporting a real historical episode.

The difficulty lies in pinning down the identities of the unnamed “she”, the fleeting, fugitive “he” who dies, and of course the Picninnies, the Joblilies, and the Guryulies. The Great Panjandrum, we can assume, is Celtic hothead Macklin. As for the barber, I have cobbled together a theory that this was one Punchkin Lampwick, a murderous barber, well-known to members of the eighteenth century theatrical profession, whose locks he chopped, and who was the real life model for that Victorian bogeyman barber Sweeney Todd.

Unfortunately for us, Lampwick appears to have been bigamous as well as murderous. He had several wives and more than several paramours, thus making identification of the “she” who – very imprudently – married him a matter of conjecture. Could we trace all those three hundred-year-old women, and say with certainty which one used a cabbage leaf in their apple pie recipe, we would be on firmer ground. It may be, of course, that a cabbage leaf was an essential ingredient in one particular type of eighteenth century apple pie, in which case that firm ground would crumble beneath us, leaving us dangling over a precipice. Such are the risks of historical research.

Further and more intractable problems occur when we try to work out who in heaven’s name Foote was talking about when he refers to the Picninnies, the Joblilies, and the Guryulies. Picninny – more commonly given as Picaninny – is a word one deploys at one’s peril these days, as Boris Johnson found to his cost. Although a plain reading of his original text makes clear that the object of his amused scorn was Tony Blair, nobody actually bothers with plain readings of original texts when certain hand-grenade words are used. There will probably be some righteous airheads who would prefer that I rendered it as P********, or as ‘the P-word’. In whatever form we put it, we are unclear to whom precisely Foote was referring.

At least that word, with its added ‘a’, has survived, along with Panjandrum. The same cannot be said for either Joblilies or Guryulies, neither of which I have come across before. They would seem to have been born and died with Samuel Foote and his rigmarole, no doubt leading to the misunderstanding that he was writing nonsense. Of course, the idea of writing deliberate nonsense simply to irritate an Irish thespian is an appealing one. Clearly it has inspired those charged with writing scripts to be performed by Liam Neeson, for example.

So I am afraid my theory regarding the factual basis of Foote’s rigmarole is but a fledgling. There is as yet so much I don’t know. I don’t know who these characters are. I don’t know what they want. If they are looking for fictional immortality, I can tell them I don’t have that gift. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for characters like them. If they let me cease this prattling now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not go on about them, I will not pursue my theory. But if they don’t, I will look for them, I will find them, and I will kill them.

NOTE : The photograph of Macklin’s memorial is by Kieran Smith, via findagrave.

I have been watching, with something akin to hysterical overexcitement, reruns of the long-running television game show Guns Before Butter. It really is the most fantastic example of Bismarckian light entertainment ever devised. As is often the case with these things, the basic format is very, very simple, one might almost say simple-minded. A contestant, plucked from the studio audience, is faced with two small tables. On one table is a stack of guns, on the other a packet of butter. All they have to do is choose. If they choose correctly, they win a souvenir propelling pencil and a spiked helmet. If they choose incorrectly, the studio audience hisses and boos, and the shamed contestant is bundled backstage to face who knows what godawful fate. The simplicity of the game lies in the fact that, of course, the guns are always the correct choice. That much is evident from the show’s title.

One might think that the format drains any possible dramatic tension from the show. Nothing could be further from the truth. As each new contestant is hustled on to the stage to be embraced in a bear hug by the smarmy host, one never knows if they will have sufficient wit to chose guns before butter. I have been unable to gain clearance to show a clip here, so I have done the next best thing and made a partial transcript of a typical episode.

Smarmy Host : And let’s have a big and deafening round of applause for our next contestant!

[Big, deafening, round of applause. Hooters, klaxons, screaming.]

Smarmy Host : And your name is?

Contestant : Horst.

Smarmy Host : And where are you from, Horst?

Contestant : Obergrumpelschwittenzollern, Trevor.

Smarmy Host : Fantastic! And what do you do for a living in Obergrumpelschwittenzollern, Horst?

Contestant : I have a small business manufacturing cowbells.

Smarmy Host : Fantastic! And I believe your lovely wife and lovely children are with you here tonight, is that right?

Contestant : That’s right, Brian

[Camera shot of lovely wife and lovely children in audience.]

Smarmy Host : Well let’s hope you do them proud, Horst. Are you ready to play . . .

[Dramatic drumroll.]

Smarmy Host : . . . Guns Before Butter!?

Contestant : [Swallowing nervously] Yes I am, Alan.

[Smarmy Host ushers Contestant towards a curtain, which sweeps back to reveal two small tables. On one is a stack of guns, on the other a packet of butter.]

Smarmy Host : Okay, Horst. I’m sure you know the rules, but let’s just run through them again for the viewers at home. There are two tables. On one is a stack of guns, and on the other is a packet of butter. All you have to do is to choose, either the guns or the butter. You’ve got that?

Contestant : Yes, I think so.

Smarmy Host : Remember, guns or butter. You can only choose one.

Contestant : Yes.

Smarmy Host : Okay. Let’s play . . . Guns Before Butter! Horst, you have one minute, starting . . . now!

[Big clock starts to tock noisily. Contestant looks solemn, gazing from one table to another.]

Smarmy Host : It’s your choice, Horst. Take your time. You still have fifty seconds.

[Contestant dithers.]

Smarmy Host : It looks so easy when you’re watching at home, doesn’t it?

Contestant : Phew! Yes, Ted, that’s right.

Smarmy Host : Forty seconds, Horst.

[Contestant looks as if he is about to choose, then dithers a bit more.]

Contestant : There’s part of me that wants to go for the guns, but . . .

Smarmy Host : Thirty seconds, Horst. Half way to the bell. It’s louder and more resonant than one of your cowbells, I expect.

Contestant : [Chuckling] I expect so, Dax.

Smarmy Host : What do you think the good folk of Obergrumpelschwittenzollern are yelling at their television screens right now, Horst?

Contestant : I wish I knew, Graham!

Smarmy Host : Fifteen seconds.

Contestant : Okay, okay. I think I’m going to go for . . .[Dithers again]

Smarmy Host : Ten seconds.

Contestant : Um . . .

Smarmy Host : Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .

Contestant : Okay! I’m going to choose butter, Bob.

Smarmy Host : You choose butter? Is that your final decision?

Contestant : Yes . . . butter!

[Loud, resonant bell clangs. Audience silent as the grave.]

Smarmy Host : That’s your time up, Horst. You chose butter. Well I can tell you now . . . butter was the . . . [extends pause to wring as much tension from the situation as conceivably possible, then pauses a bit more] . . . wrong answer, Horst!

[Audience groans, then starts to hiss and boo.]

Smarmy Host : I’m sorry, Horst. The correct choice was guns, as it always is on Guns Before Butter. But you weren’t to know that. Well, actually, you were, so you must just be incredibly, incredibly stupid.

Contestant : I suppose so, Rolf.

Smarmy Host : You’ve been a great contestant, Horst. Let’s have a bloodcurdling din of hisses and boos for Horst!

[Brutes appear onstage and bustle Horst away, to face who knows what godawful fate.]

I have written to dozens of television light entertainment commissioning editors pleading with them to revive the show, thus far without success.

STOP PRESS : One of my letters might have paid off! It was apparently retrieved from a waste paper bin by Stephen Fry on one of his regular night-time prowls around commissioning editors’ offices. He is reportedly planning a dumbed-down version of Guns Before Butter for BBC Radio Four. Marcus Brigstocke, David Mitchell, and Alan Titchmarsh have already been lined up as contestants.

Before reading the following, gaze at the picture above for a goodly amount of time. You may wish to enlarge it to poster size, print it out, and pin it to your noticeboard or wall.

The photograph shows a boffin and a mouse. Also shown is certain arcane laboratory equipment, and a stencilled panel marked SPEC. NO. 40642. It is not clear whether this designation refers to the equipment, the mouse, or the boffin. Let us not bother our little heads about it.

At first glance, it appears that the boffin is studying the mouse, and making notes in a ringbound notepad, presumably appertaining to the mouse. The mouse is encased within some kind of lidded laboratory bowl, for which I do not doubt there is a specific proprietary name, of which I am tragically ignorant. The bowl is attached by a tube to the arcane laboratory equipment and also, by wire, to something else, unseen, out of camera shot. We might spend all day lost in conjecture about precisely what that might be.

We might, but we won’t, because we have other matters to attend to. Though it is a racing certainty that the above summary is correct, and that the boffin is indeed studying the mouse, there is an alternative possibility, albeit an unlikely one. Consider again that the boffin is quite clearly making notes. It could be that she is not a boffin but an amanuensis, and is actually taking dictation from the mouse. Though the general run of mice are not gifted with human speech, this mouse might be an exception. Or it may be that the boffin-amanuensis is gifted with an understanding of mouse squeaks, and is able to transcribe them for the benefit of other humans not so gifted. As I say, this is unlikely, even outlandish, but it is not beyond the bounds of possibility.

I would dearly love to see what is written in that notebook.

On purely pictorial evidence, we would have to swat aside my foolish mouse-dictating-to-amanuensis scenario, if only because of the power relations implicit in the photograph. The mouse is trapped in the bowl, whereas the boffin can presumably wander off and skitter away to do something else, in the laboratory or outside it. Lord knows what high jinks she might get up to when not making notes about a mouse in a bowl!

There is also the indubitable fact that the boffin is much, much bigger than the mouse. Humans almost always have the upper hand in any interaction with mice, simply on account of the size difference. When they are so tiny and we so huge, the matter of intellect doesn’t come into it. Even if mice were hyperintelligent, and humans dumb as oxen, we could still overpower them physically. At least, let us hope so!

Of course, both the scenarios I have outlined, the almost certainly correct one and the harebrained one, may be equally flawed. What if – it is always worth asking what if? – the object of study is the boffin herself, or her interaction with the mouse? It may be that the wire we see trailing out of the picture leads, not to some other piece of arcane laboratory equipment, but back, under the work bench, out of our sight, and is connected to the boffin. It may be, too, that the lidded bowl in which the mouse is trapped is but a miniature mousy model of a much bigger lidded bowl, in which both boffin and mouse are trapped. We may imagine similar tubes, similar wires, protruding or feeding in to this uberbowl, calibrated and monitored by higher boffins, one of whom is making notes in a ringbound notepad. Those notes might pertain to the boffin only, or to the boffin and the mouse.

There is a further possibility which scarcely bears thinking about, for it is all too terrifying. What if – again, what if? – the higher boffins are not humans but mice? Hyperintelligent mice, either gigantic ones from some far distant space age planet of hyperintelligent giant mice set on conquest of the Earth, or a teeming throng of thousands upon thousands of mouse-sized mice, whose very numbers serve to give them an advantage over puny humankind? The object of their study might be to ascertain how well, or ill, the boffin treats the mouse in its little lidded bowl. Her treatment of the mouse will determine how the invading giant space mice thereafter treat the human inhabitants of the conquered planet. Boy o boy, this is world-shuddering stuff! The fate of millions, billions, may depend on just what the boffin does next. If, having finished her notes, she removes the lid from the bowl and places in it a little excelsior for the mouse to snuggle in for a rummage and snooze, humanity may survive until the morrow. But if she cackles and pipes into the sealed bowl, through the tube, poison gas to fell the mouse, then we are doomed, doomed.

There is a personal story here, too. Did the boffin realise, when she woke up that morning, that she held the fate of humankind in her hands? No doubt such a thought was the furthest thing from her mind as she tucked into her breakfast of boffins’ vitamin-enriched poptarts. Later, as she took her white lab coat out of its locker and pulled it on, was she daydreaming of her boyfriend Dan and their imminent Alpine hiking holiday? And then . . . and then she stepped into what she thought was a common or garden laboratory but was in fact a giant lidded bowl, watched over and studied by hyperintelligent intergalactic space mice, armed with ringbound notepads!

There may be further interpretations of the picture, convincing or otherwise, which readers may wish to add in the comments. Meanwhile, I think it is up to every one of us to decode precisely what is meant by that mysterious stencil, SPEC. NO. 40642.

See, see? Whether it be burning coals or sugar lumps, his manipulation of the tongs is peerless. He is a dab hand. The dab, too, a demersal fish, he has plucked from the tank with the tongs, with great care, to watch it wriggle, before allowing it to plop back in, where it sinks gratefully to the sandy bottom. Coal, sugar, dab: these are but three of his tong manipulations.

He was born to it. His papa thrust the tongs into his tiny infant fist. Papa was the Shatteridge Tongsman, as his papa had been before him, and his before his, all those papas stretching back generations since first the tongs were forged on the first Shatteridge Tongsman’s legendary anvil.

The first words he could speak were the words of the Song of Tongs. At six he was sent out from Shatteridge across the desolate tarpoota, practice tongs in his satchel. He confronted bears and monkeys and wolves, and human wolves in the form of the roaming tarpoota banditti. He learned the manipulation of the tongs.

Epp, dubbed Glabb, taught him further tricks. Sweeping movements, significant passes, sleight of hand, delicacy, deftness. The wonder was that Epp, Glabb, was blind. He prowled the castle ramparts with, it was whispered, long invisible tongs. Many a flunkey felt their pinch from an inconceivable distance. Even papa was in awe of Epp, or Glabb.

It was important to watch the wrigglings of the dab with great reserves of concentration, to memorise them. They told the weather, the crop failures, the outcome of battles. Not so the manipulation of the tongs with burning coal and with sugar lumps. Those were mere humdrum manipulations, to avert blazes or to sweeten infusions. It happened that a piece of burning coal might pop from the hearth on to the carpet, if the fire had not been properly set. Far better to pluck the coal from the carpet with the tongs than to let it burn and have need of flunkies with pails and buckets to extinguish it. It happened that an infusion might be bitter or sour and barely potable without the addition of a sugar lump. Better that it be sweetened than poured unwanted down the drain.

But the dab, the dab! Epp, dubbed Glabb, was the repository of the dab’s wrigglings lore. Incapable of seeing the wrigglings, he had them reported to him. Not by the Shatteridge Tongsman, whose job was to concentrate on the manipulation of the tongs. To have to watch the dab with piercing acuity the meanwhile would be asking too much, far too much. Thus by his side was the Dabwriggleman. It was another hereditary post, passed from papa to son. As for the dab, there was a pool for them, in the castle grounds. They settled there on the sandy bottom, being dabby, until such time as the tank dab died and had to replaced. Then the Dabnetman came lumbering towards the pond with his net. He cast it about with great skill, to ensure just one dab was caught in its mesh. And then he hurried, hurried, through the grounds and in the gate and through the hall and up the stairs and along the corridor to the chamber wherein the tank rested on its stilts, and he plopped the new dab into the water, and it sank to the sandy bottom, awaiting, though of course it did not know it, the twice-daily entrance of the Shatteridge Tongsman with his tongs.

Neither the Dabwriggleman nor the Dabnetman had any doings with burning coals nor sugar lumps, save to be warmed by the fire or refreshed by the sweetened infusions. Demarcation lines were stringent in that castle.

Stringent, too, at least by name, the Stringent Tongs. This was the pop group who played in the castle ballroom and who performed the Song of Tongs, at daybreak, at lunchtime, at dusk. A basic guitar, bass, drums trio, augmented on spectacular days by glockenspiel and Ponsonby hooter. They were old hands, drawn from the village. Subject, upon entering the castle, to a stringent code of conduct. The code drawn up by Epp, dubbed Glabb, or more correctly by his papa’s papa’s papa’s papa’s papa. It may even be that further papas be added to that litany. Generations who have patrolled the ramparts with, it was whispered, long invisible tongs.

When the Stringent Tongs return to the village, on so seldom days, they carry with them moths and spiders and beetles from the castle. They release them on the desolate tarpoota, and off they flutter and scurry and creep.

*

I have no idea what that was all about, really. Best to think of it as an outpouring from an almost empty head. When one has determined to bash out a thousandish words a day, and meets a day when there is little or nothing going on within the cranium, and when one feels reluctant to resurrect pieces from the past too often, then one writes merely what one can. Fingertips tippy-tap the keyboard keys, in a flurry, then a pause, then a flurry, then a pause, then haltingly, until there is nothing left to tap. Actually, I had to correct that, I tapped out “nothing left to yap”. Perhaps that is the more appropriate word – prose like the yapping of a dog, meaningless, and deeply, deeply annoying.

What kind of madness is it that would prompt a person to make up a duck? This was a question I asked myself after consulting a list of fictional ducks and discovering, with something akin to terror, that it contained over one hundred and fifty non-existent ducks.

Let us allow those words to penetrate. Over one hundred and fifty non-existent ducks. That is no small number. Line them all up in a row and it would take a while to walk from one end to the other. And imagine the din if they all quacked at the same time! You would have to stuff your ears with cotton wool. But of course, they cannot be lined up and they cannot quack, because they do not exist and never have existed. They are wholly imaginary semi-aquatic beings, born in the minds of flawed humanity.

It is not that the world lacks real, flesh-and-feather-and-blood ducks. Go to any duckpond or lake and the chances are you will see more than a few ducks. You might even toss them scraps of stale bread from a brown paper bag if you are that way inclined. You might peer at distant ducks through a pair of binoculars. But it is a far cry from such innocent pursuits to unleash from within the throbbing jelly of your brain a made up duck. Yet clearly that is what has happened in the past, with a number of people, though fewer than a hundred and fifty. Tragically, some among these poor duck-haunted souls have invented more than one fictional duck..

You would think that, having made up a non-existent duck, the duck-maker would mop their brow and retire from the fray, perhaps clear their head by going on a long hiking holiday in an area of few ponds and fewer lakes. The last thing you would expect is that they would immediately set about inventing another duck. But some have done just that. Now you see why I used the word “madness”.

Our difficulty lies in trying to grasp the lineaments of a mentality that can spark the thought: “There are millions of ducks in the world, but (and? so?) I am going to make up another one!” And not only to have the thought but to act upon it. Perhaps that is the crucial distinction between mere eccentricity and full-blown madness. Casting back upon my own mental history, I wonder if it has ever occurred to me to make up a duck. I wonder, too, if that is a rather common thought, one shared by thousands if not millions of persons past and present. Yet how few of us have taken the fateful next step . . . the actual creation of a non-existent duck!

There is something of the Frankenstein about it, is there not? Derangement, delusion, and mania all focussed, horribly, on an idée fixe. But the duck-makers have no need of lightning-blasted laboratories high in castles, nor of hunchbacked assistants named Mungo, nor of the various paraphernalia ascribed to Victor Frankenstein in this or that recounting of his blasphemous doings. To make up a duck, one may need merely a pencil, or a typewriter, or some cloth accompanied by basic skills in needlework. That being so, we must not lose sight of the fact that the same mad impulse is at work, in both the crazed scientist and the creator of fictional ducks. It is an impulse to tame or control nature, to play God.

This is nowhere more evident than in the unnerving fact that the majority of fictional ducks are blessed (damned?) with the gift of human speech. And just as I am quite clear in my use of the word “madness”, so too with “unnerving”. I suspect if you were ever to come upon a real duck that, instead of quacking, spoke to you in a familiar tongue, you would be unnerved. I dreamed of such a duck once, and I woke up screaming. It was a hideous nightmare rather than a dream, but the important thing to state here is that the talking duck was the sole source of my terror. Nothing else that occurred in the night-phantasm was frightening, or gruesome, or unholy.

The scene was unremarkable, even humdrum. I was in my childhood home, the house I grew up in. My parents were there, peripherally, in that there was a sense of their presence. I entered the living room, and sat in an armchair, and looked across, and there, perched on the seat of the matching armchair, was a duck. It engaged me in conversation. At first, I felt no sense of alarm. Dream-logic was at work, and all seemed well. But as the duck continued to speak, its voice grew more grating and menacing, and it spoke of things I shudder to recall. Slowly it dawned on me that it was an evil duck, a Lucifer or Beelzebub duck, fathomless and awful in its pure unalloyed malevolence. That is when I woke up screaming. It is a nightmare I have never been able to forget.

That duck remains for me the epitome of all fictional ducks, and it is why I cannot shake the feeling that every other non-existent duck aspires to its state of sheer evil. Would that the makers of made up ducks take heed!

I have not mentioned, in the foregoing, a second category of fictional ducks, ones far more numerous than the one hundred and fifty or so given in the list. These are decoy ducks, usually carved from wood. Pinocchio-ducks, if you will. They are even more terrifying than the non-existent ducks we have already considered, but my nerves are shattered now, and I cannot bring myself to write about them until I have eased my overheated brain. But give me time, and I shall summon up the mental and moral resources to address the subject, and to explain why, whenever you encounter a decoy duck, you should be very, very afraid.

I have heard it said that by repeating the word “Om”, over and over again, for hours upon end, one can achieve a state of spiritual transcendence. The person from whom I heard this was an ancient mystic with a straggly beard who was sitting cross-legged three-quarters of the way up a mountain slope, where the air was rarefied. I was panting and out of breath and relying on my Alpenstock to keep me upright. Then all of a sudden, half hidden in the cloudy mist, I saw this fellow, his wrinkled countenance a picture of beatific bliss. Glad of the company after so many hours toiling up the mountain by myself, I slumped down next to him and we fell into conversation.

“Good day,” I said. I never say “Hello”, which is an improper form of greeting in my view, an illegitimate coinage by Thomas Edison devised from the huntsman’s cry “Tally-ho!” Look it up.

“Good day to you, sir,” replied the wrinkled ancient, “You have pierced the cloudy mist by which I am normally occluded from the eyes of ordinary mortals.”

It had never occurred to me that I might be an extraordinary mortal, and the thought was a pleasing one, so I smiled. This is not, generally speaking, a good idea, for it is my unfortunate lot that whenever I smile my face assumes the rictus cast of a maniac or a death’s head, and those who see it tend to run screaming. The ancient, however, stayed put. My smile held no terrors for him. I began to wonder if anything did.

“If what you say is true,” I ventured, “Could it be that you are one of those gnomes Rudolf Steiner writes about, invisible to the common riffraff, perceived only by those of a more elevated insight?”

“Do I look like a gnome to you?” he asked. It was not a snappish response, rather a gentle enquiry.

“I suppose not,” I said, “But as you are squatting cross-legged upon the mountain slope I cannot rightly adjudge your full height when in a standing position.”

“Rest assured I am no gnome,” he said, “I am one of the Hidden Masters of whom Madame Blavatsky wrote so eloquently.”

“Well knock me down with a feather,” I said, “But I thought you had your abode in the mountains of Tibet, whereas this is, unless I am mistaken, an Alpine peak.”

The ancient now moved for the first time since I had encountered him. He slipped one hand inside his white robe, and produced a feather, I think one plucked from a kingfisher or a heron. He waved it in front of me, and I was propelled flat on my back as if the stuffing had been knocked out of me. Gasping for breath, I sat back up and goggled at him.

“I did as you asked,” he said, “And now in return you must do as I ask.”

“What do you want me to do?” I said, between gulps for rarefied air.

“Continue up to the top of the mountain,” he said, “When you reach the summit, you will see that it is strewn with small pebbles. One among these pebbles, just one! mark you, is a mystic pebble, possession of which grants visions of realms beyond human sense to the possessor. You must find that pebble among all the other pebbles and bring it down from the mountaintop to me.”

“How will I know which is the right pebble?” I asked.

It was at this point in the conversation that he vouchsafed to me the business about repeating “Om” over and over again, for hours upon end, until I reached a state of spiritual transcendence.

“When that state is achieved,” he said, “You will be able to perceive the mystic glow of the mystic pebble. Then you must pick it up, pop it for safekeeping into your mouth, as if you were a Beckettian tramp, and suck upon it while you clamber back down the mountain.”

“Yes, oh Master!” I said, and up I went.

The air was more rarefied still at the summit, and I was gasping for breath as I collapsed on the peak next to a patch of strewn pebbles. I poked at them with my Alpenstock, wondering if I might already be spiritually advanced enough to perceive the mystic glow. After all, I had it on the highest authority that I was an extraordinary mortal who had pierced the cloudy mists which normally occluded the Hidden Master. But no particular pebble stood out from among the others, so I made myself as comfortable as possible and started to say “Om”.

“Om,” I said, “Om Om Om.”

I felt like a fool. I felt like even more of a fool when night crashed down upon the mountaintop and I was still sitting there saying “Om”. And I felt like the most foolish fool of all fools when dawn broke, and I was still sitting there, still saying “Om”, over and over again.

It has been six weeks now. I seem to be clawing my way towards a new plane of existence. I experience neither hunger nor thirst. My beard is straggly, and the sun has bleached my Alpine mountaineering garb so I appear to be wearing a white robe. My Alpenstock has been dragged away and gnawed by a venturesome mountain goat. I say “Om” and I gaze upon the pebbles, and I await spiritual transcendence.