The left lung of the tyrant collapsed on the morning of the fourth. At midday, a satrap in gorgeous uniform sparkling with embedded gems appeared on the balcony to make an announcement. It was imperative, he said, reading from a hastily drafted statement, that tyrannical human pneumatics become the proper study of every citizen. By the evening, fat textbooks had been printed and bound and consignments ferried to every city and town and village and hamlet in the land.

So rapid was the response of the satraps that the textbooks were not proofread. A number of errors, many trivial but some calamitous, were thus allowed to stand. But the book bore the tyrant’s imprimatur and could not be questioned. As a result, every citizen gained a flawed understanding of tyrannical human pneumatics.

The tyrant, meanwhile, had been placed inside a nylon tent. A wheezing pump imitated the action of a working tyrannical human lung. The pump was operated by hand, in case of a loss of electrical power caused by the evil machinations of revolutionary scum. Pumpers were drawn from lists maintained by one of the satraps. They worked one hour shifts, and during their rest periods were penned in an anteroom.

By the morning of the fifth, embroidered lapel accoutrements bearing a three-coloured image of the collapsed tyrannical lung had been issued to all citizens, to be displayed on their outer tunics. In certain hotbeds, several persons were shot for failure to wear them. After execution, the left lungs were torn out of the corpses and hung on gibbets in the town squares. This had a salutary effect on the populace, even in the hotbeds.

The first public examination on tyrannical human pneumatics took place at midday on the fifth in the remote town of Sand. It was conducted orally, and tape recorded. Those gaining top marks were taken by sealed train to the capital. A gang of revolutionaries attempted a derailment of the train on the outskirts of Gorse. Brave conduct by the train conductor, and foolish felled log deployment by the scum, brought their nefarious schemes to nought. They were hanged in a barn and their left lungs torn from their corpses and burned on a bonfire by the loyal peasants of Gorse.

The tyrant was told of the narrowly averted derailment. He was as yet unable to speak, but he blinked significantly. The blinks were interpreted and converted into text by a satrap. Plans to have the text declaimed from the balcony were put on hold. It was considered best to wait until after the next day, the sixth, which was Flag Day.

On arrival in the capital, the top scoring tyrannical human pneumatics examinees were taken from the sealed train in sealed trams to the National Archives. Here they stood behind glass to watch as the tape recordings of the examinations were placed on the register and locked in a special bomb-proof cabinet. They were then given a snack in the canteen.

Late in the afternoon of the fifth, Grimes “the Wolfman”, leader of the revolutionaries, was arrested in a jungle clearing. He was spirited to the capital by way of the subterranean pulley-car system. Intelligence reports hinted that he had unparalleled expertise in human pneumatics, a field closely related to tyrannical human pneumatics. Bound in chains, he was taken to a sealed room in the palace, to where the examinees from Sand were also brought once they had digested their snacks in the National Archives canteen.

The sixth was Flag Day. The weather was such that artificial winds were needed to make the flags and standards and pennants billow. Further pumpers had to be recruited from the satrap’s list to ensure sufficient numbers for both the tyrant’s lung pump and the artificial wind contraptions. For a while it was touch and go, until a keen-eyed under-satrap found a supplementary list which had been misfiled in a filing cabinet. He was given a medal, a gorgeous disc of brass embedded with gems that sparkled in the sunshine.

Grimes “the Wolfman” was undergoing a tormented moral struggle between his revolutionary principles and his professional pride as an expert in human pneumatics. The examinees from Sand stood gazing at him with the imploring moon-eyes of calves. Some let tears roll slowly down their cheeks, but did not overdo the sobbing lest Grimes thought they were making use of freshly chopped onions behind his back. Behind a panel, certain satraps discussed the pros and cons of an amnesty for Grimes. It was a heated discussion.

On the morning of the seventh a puncture in the left lung of the tyrant was repaired and the lung was reinflated. He was fed from a bowl of slops. Several satraps were executed and their left lungs torn out and kicked through the broad boulevards of the capital by cheering citizens. Grimes shaved off his beard and was given a satrapage and a gorgeous uniform sparkling with embedded gems. A fleet of aeroplanes sprayed the jungle with defoliant. The area was then covered with cement as far as the eye could see. The examinees from Sand were appointed as tyrannical human pneumatics emergency pumping supervisors and given vouchers and bungalows. A second edition of the fat textbook was issued, with corrections. The tyrant appeared on the balcony, propped up by a concealed prop, and waved to the teeming masses.

On the morning of the eighth, the right lung of the tyrant collapsed.

I was pleased to note, in this week’s newsletter from World Wide Words, that Michael Quinion turns his attention to hoity-toity. He tells us that the original meaning was “frolicsome, romping, giddy, flighty”:

Hoity-toity derives from the long-obsolete verb hoit, meaning to “indulge in riotous and noisy mirth” (have you hoited recently? it’s supposed to be very good for you) or to “romp inelegantly” (again from the OED; is it even possible to romp elegantly?). Where hoit comes from is uncertain, although an early form suggests a link with hoyden, which is now an unfashionable way to describe a noisy or energetic girl but which at the time could also mean an ignorant or clownish man. This is probably from the Middle Dutch heiden, a heath, hence a yokel; if so, hoyden is a close relative of heathen.

Curiously, the estimable Mr Quinion has nothing to say about Fort Hoity and Fort Toity, the favourite forts of Hooting Yard readers. In fact, other than a few military history buffs and Uncle Tobys, you lot may be the only persons who actually have favourite forts. I conducted a sort of straw poll on this matter by buttonholing a random selection of pedestrians between here and Nameless Pond.

“Excuse me,” I said, standing in front of them so they could not pass, “May I ask you which is your favourite fort?” I did not get a single coherent or sensible answer. Perhaps had I armed myself with a clipboard and a biro and a high visibility jacket the results would have been different. But on the evidence of my admittedly unscientific survey, I am forced to conclude that one hundred percent of riffraff infesting the streets of my bailiwick early on a Saturday morning care not a jot for forts of any kind. Some of them seemed not to know what in heaven’s name I was talking about. That is the modern education system for you.

As fanatically devoted Hooting Yard readers, you already knew, or at least suspected, that you were members of a select band. Now you have further confirmation, in that you can most definitely claim to be among that minuscule portion of the populace who have a favourite fort. My research, such as it is, tells me that you are pretty evenly divided between Fort Hoity fans and aficionados of Fort Toity. I have not analysed the stats in great detail, partly because there aren’t really any reliable stats on this matter, and partly because, even if there were, I doubt that I am capable of the drudgery necessary to analyse them. I have better things to do with my time, such as smoking and staring out of the window at crows while listening to Essay On Pigs by Hans Werner Henze. It’s a godawful racket, but it drowns out the sound of the neighbouring tinies, whose screeching would otherwise unhinge me.

Over the years, several readers have asked me to give a clear and highly amusing account of the differences between Fort Hoity and Fort Toity. I suspect that such requests are based not on any genuine keenness to be able to tell the forts apart as much as a desire to have some justification for plumping for one fort over the other. It is, after all, a mark of the truly ‘with-it’ Hooting Yardist that they care enough to choose Fort Hoity over Fort Toity, or, of course, Fort Toity over Fort Hoity. Nobody wants to admit to not giving a hoot one way or the other, as if they were the riffraff in the vicinity of Nameless Pond.

But while it is easy enough to cry “Fort Hoity!” or “Fort Toity!” when asked which is your favourite fort, far more difficult is the supplementary question, “Why?” Personally, I never ask that myself. I never wish to entangle my readers in potentially brain-numbing mental gorse bushes. As far as I am concerned, it is enough that each of you has a favourite fort. But great heavens to Betsy, some of the tales I have heard from Hooting Yard picnics and charabanc outings and mass singalongs, indeed from any occasion where two or more Hooting Yard readers gather together! Here is one such tale, related in a letter received from one T. Thurn:

Oh wondrous and resplendent Mr Key!

I wish to tell you about an incident that occurred at a recent Hooting Yard outing. A quartet of us had gone on an otter rescue mission, but the circumstances in themselves are not important. When we were still some distance from the riverbank, one of my companions asked me which was my favourite fort, Fort Hoity or Fort Toity? “Fort Toity”, I replied. Then she dropped a bombshell. “Why?” she asked. I realised I was quite unable to answer the question, as I have no idea of the difference between the two forts, other than a vague inkling that Fort Toity is a bit smaller then Fort Hoity. I was forced to dissemble. I pointed at the sky and yelled “Look!”, hoping there would be a flock of some kind of birds visible. Alas, it was one of those birdless days, so I had to pretend I had spotted unusual patterns of light and shadow presaging the collapse and ruination of the empyrean realms. I got away with it this time, but I would be grateful if you could provide a clear and highly amusing account of the differences between Fort Hoity and Fort Toity so that, next time I am asked, I will be able to justify my plumping.

Yours frolicsome, romping, giddy, and flighty,

T. Thurn xxxx

Must I do all the work? If T. Thurn had any strength of character he would refrain from bothering me with his tiresome whinges. I have gaspers to smoke and crows to watch and combative Teutonic din to listen to! It would be a simple enough matter for any true devotee to read through the collected Fort Hoity and Fort Toity references and to compile their own list of plumping reasons. That should keep you lot occupied until the morrow.

Startlingly hirsute Italian artist Accurso Git unveiled his latest work at the Pointy Town Biennale this week. Egregore is an anatomically accurate facsimile of the brain, rendered in Git’s favourite medium, marshmallow. Intriguingly, the startlingly untidy artist has chosen to express the concept of the egregore – an occult concept representing a “thoughtform” or “collective group mind”, an autonomous psychic entity – with a marshmallow model not of the human brain, but that of the lobster.

The students of lobsterdom among you will know that the brain of a lobster is about the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. They do not possess the keenest intellects in the animal kingdom. Asked why his brain was so tiny, Accurso Git initially misconstrued the question and set about his interviewer with his fists, those startlingly hairy fists, with the result that the interview had to be postponed for a month while the interviewer received hospital treatment. During this time, the startlingly ill-tempered artist was given several written assurances that the tiny brain being referred to was that of the lobster, not the one encased in his own startlingly enormous head. When he was eventually placated, and the interview resumed, in a clinic annexe where the interviewer was learning to walk and talk again, Git gave this reply:

“Have you seen the cost of marshmallows? Add together the prices of sugar and corn syrup and water and gelatin that has been softened in hot water and dextrose and vanilla flavourings, take into account the optional use of colouring agents and/or eggs, tack on the labour involved in whipping the mixture to a spongy consistency, and it will be clear even to a simpleton that a startlingly impoverished artist like me, the critically acclaimed Accurso Git, could not afford more than a tiny, tiny amount of marshmallow. What little money I have must be kept aside for gourmet meals and wine and international jetset travel and floozies and pipe tobacco and a place at the table in the tiptop casinos! Yet as I struggled to bring to birth my vision, I realised that a tiny lobster-brain-sized marshmallow facsimile brain was the perfect realisation of the egregore. Were it the size of a human brain, it would be too big. Were it smaller than a lobster brain, it would be as near as dammit invisible. By settling upon the size I did I have proved yet again that I am the greatest artist of this or any other age.”

This kind of talk is par for the course with the startlingly egotistical artist, and is difficult to argue with unless one wishes to end up in hospital alongside others who have crossed him. And in truth, he has a point. When one spends many hours in contemplation of Egregore, as I have done, the sheer artistic force of the piece becomes clear. To a layman it might look like nothing more than a singularly tiny marshmallow placed upon a plinth with a glass case surrounding it, the sole object in the startlingly vast galeria of the Pointy Town Civic Hall, Scout Hut, & Temporary Allotment Rental Office. Yet, as so often, the layman does not see what the piercing acuity of the goatee’d, cravat-wearing art critic sees. Admittedly, I too was at first deluded into thinking it was a mere miniature marshmallow brain. In fact I stomped off to the galeria canteen and unleashed my laptop and, over a startlingly ungenerous helping of sausages ‘n’ pickle, I tapped out an article in which I suggested that Accurso Git had lost his mojo.

Where, I asked, were the signs of the majestic genius whose rendering in marshmallow of the Tet Offensive had been at once so offensive and so thick with sugar and corn syrup and water and gelatin that had been softened in hot water and dextrose and vanilla flavourings and colouring agents and eggs? And where oh where was the startlingly combative artist whose marshmallow Noli me tangere somehow cast two millennia of Christian art into the dustbin of history?

The answer was that he was standing right behind me in the canteen, breathing down my neck and with his fists, those startlingly bony fists, raised ready to strike. I did what any goatee’d cravat-wearing art critic would have done in the circumstances, and offered him a spoonful of pickle. While he was engaged in munching it, with his startlingly awful table manners, I had time to reassess Egregore. I continued to reassess it until Accurso Git dropped his fists, sat down, and called to the waiter for a bottle of wine and an ashtray and a floozie. Until, that is, he appeared to be relaxing, and no longer startlingly combative. I then gave him what was left of my sausage, for in all honesty I had lost my appetite.

What I have not lost my appetite for is Egregore. To that end, I obtained a special permit to set up a camp bed in the galeria, and I now spend all day, every day, gazing, with my customary piercing acuity, at a tiny model of a lobster brain fashioned from sugar and corn syrup and water and gelatin that has been softened in hot water and dextrose and vanilla flavourings and colouring agents and eggs, then whipped to a spongy consistency by marshmallow technicians, more than ever convinced that what I am gazing at is beyond any doubt the very finest tiny model of a lobster brain fashioned from sugar and corn syrup and water and gelatin that has been softened in hot water and dextrose and vanilla flavourings and colouring agents and eggs, then whipped to a spongy consistency by marshmallow technicians in the entire history of Western, or indeed any other, art. And that is my considered opinion as a goatee’d, cravat wearing art critic sans pareil.

A letter arrives:

Dear, beloved Mr Key

We are lost, hopelessly hopelessly hopelessly lost. We write “hopelessly” thrice to indicate that each of us is hopeless. We would not have you think one is hopeless while two retain hope, nor that two are hopeless and one still hopeful. We are all hopeless and we are all lost.

How we have come to this pass may take some explaining. We got off the bus, as you told us. We were on a lane. There was a hedge. There may have been birds nesting in the hedge. There was certainly sign of nest, if not of bird. Had a bird returned to the nest while we stood there in the lane as the bus chugged away into the distance, there is every chance we might have killed the bird for food. We were famished. Lucky bird, then, that it was off and out, somewhere in the sky, in flight.

We peered over the hedge. There was a field. It was an extensive field containing several cows. We pondered killing one of the cows for food but could not come up with a method. Had there been a bird in the nest in the hedge, we could have borne down upon it, the three of us, menacingly, and made short work of it. Two could hold it still while the third throttled it. We looked at a cow and tried to picture applying that same method. It was not a convincing picture.

We cast our six eyes around in case there might be a pile of rocks in the field or beside the lane. With a rock of sufficient size we thought one of us might bash the cow about the head until it dropped dead. But look as we might there seemed to be nothing bigger than a stone or a pebble, neither of which we thought would prove fatal to a cow no matter how hard we hit it. We had to bear in mind the presence of several cows and assume that the ones we did not attack would come rushing to the aid of the one we did. A few quick sharp blows with a big rock would kill a cow before the other cows came a-charging. But we would have no such window of opportunity armed with mere pebbles. We dismissed the cows as a possible source of food and turned our attentions back to the lane.

We were famished, but at this stage we were not yet hopeless, nor indeed lost. After all, we had only just alighted from the bus and had not yet had time to get our bearings. In our hearts there was a flicker of optimism that within a few hundred yards we might come upon the orchard with its squirrels, or the hotel, or both. We decided to walk along the lane in the same direction in which the bus had travelled. The bus itself had disappeared over the horizon. Ahead of us we could see various clumps and slopes and distant buildings. Hence our hope.

Shortly afterwards, we came upon a puddle of recent rainwater. We fell upon our knees and drank our fill. It was a big puddle, so we did not drain it. We spotted in it a small pale, almost translucent, writhing wriggling wormy maggoty kind of being. Food! We could have compared notes on whose famishment was most debilitating, or drawn lots, but instead, and in spite of its tininess, having plucked it from the puddle we chopped it into three equal portions. Squatting beside the puddle, we then sucked on our helping rather than bolting it down, to eke from it all the nourishment we could and to make it last as long as possible. Yum!

Thus fortified, if only minimally, we toiled on along the lane. Certain clumps and slopes and distant buildings grew closer. None was yet close enough to ascertain whether an orchard or hotel was among them. Pangs of thirst now beset us, as the wormy maggoty thing had proved surprisingly salty. We encountered no further puddles, but then the hedge beside the lane came to a sudden stop and in its place was a ditch. In the ditch was a great deal of water, an admixture of recent rain and some kind of filthy muck-riddled brownish liquid oozing up from below. We judged that were we to drink it, we would be at risk of stomach cramps and digestive horrors and many another gastric malady. “Gastric” may not be the appropriate word, but let it stand. So we trudged on, the watery ditch alongside us like a cruel taunt of the devil’s. It may have been about this time we began to lose hope. But we were still not lost, because we could see the clumps and slopes and distant buildings ahead. We had something to aim towards, be it but a chimera.

But then a mist descended. It was a thick mist. We could not even see our hands in front of our faces, let alone the clumps and slopes and distant buildings. There was some relief in the fact that moisture was present in the mist, so if we gulped mouthfuls of it and swallowed, our thirst raged a little less, oh a little less, but enough, enough. If you can put yourself in the place of a famished and thirst-ravaged orphan recently discharged from an orphanage and sent into the rustic wastelands on a fact checking mission by a writer of unparalleled genius, accompanied by two similarly discharged and famished and thirst-ravaged orphans from the same orphanage on the same fact checking mission, you will appreciate how greedily we gulped that mist-moisture.

In fact, we were so revitalised that we said “Pshaw!” to the mist, the three of us in unison, and we blundered onwards, even though we could not see where we were going. This was our undoing. For when the mist cleared, as suddenly as it had descended, there was no sign of the clumps and the slopes and the distant buildings. There was merely a bleak expanse of nothingness. We were lost. And we were hopelessly hopelessly hopelessly lost.

We slumped against a blob of the nothingness that might have been a vestige of hedge or of the side of a ditch. We sobbed quietly for a while. Then we wrote this report. It is an interim report. Hopeless we may be, thrice hopeless, but we shall press on with our mission, as if it were a metaphor for man’s life upon this mortal coil. If you receive this letter, you will know that at least we stumbled upon a postbox. What the postbox is a metaphor for, we leave for you to judge.

Yours lost and hopeless, your devoted fact checking team.

Bim, Bam and Little Nitty

Before we can begin to address today’s topic, there is a matter of potential brain-numbing confusion which I think it best to clear up. If I neglect to do so, there is a risk that at least some of you lot will become bewildered, and that is in nobody’s interest. As I hope you realise, I strive to make things as clear as I can. In spite of my weakness for passages of purple prose, or for using dozens of words where a handful would do, or indeed for making up words entirely, I am always mindful of the need for clarity. So, yes, my prose could be plainer, but I want you to appreciate that I am never deliberately obfuscatory. Well, rarely. And it could be argued that from time to time you lot need to have your brains jangled about, and who better to jangle them than Mr Key? Answer me that, if you dare.

But today is not a jangly type of day. It is a day for crystal clarity, the sort one might see through a recently wiped window, especially if one remembered to put one’s specs on. I always remember my specs, I jam them on when waking and remove them when I retire. Without them I would be stumbling about in a haze. But we are not here to discuss my opia. Sorry, I mean my myopia. Our subject today is the bestselling autobiography I, Alfred Pigtosser.

Straight away, you see, the source of potential confusion whacks us in the face. At least, it does for those of you who read Hooting Yard diligently and daily. Yesterday, you will recall, we made mention of one I. Alfred Pigtosser, the possibly pseudonymous writer of letters to Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest. That Pigtosser, whomsoever he may be, is no relation to the Alfred Pigtosser who wrote I, Alfred Pigtosser. You can spot the difference because the autobiographer’s first name is Alfred, whereas the mad letter-writer’s first name is something beginning with I. What it might be we do not know. Isambard or Ignatz, perhaps. But let us not dwell upon it, for we would soon be embroiled in a Rumpelstiltskinny situation, never a happy prospect.

I think I have now made it plain, as plain as the peas on my fork, that I. Alfred Pigtosser and Alfred Pigtosser are two different persons. That is the task I set out to accomplish in my opening paragraph, and I think we can all agree that I have succeeded brilliantly. If there remains, among you lot, anybody who is still confused, I would suggest the fault lies with you rather than with me. You might want to go and get your head examined by some sort of specialist in dimwits.

Let me take the rest of you by the arm and guide you into the world of Alfred Pigtosser, or at least the world as revealed to us in his autobiography. It has been a rather surprising bestseller, particularly when one considers the photograph of the author staring out at us from the front cover. Seldom have I seen a less charming countenance. Ears askew, eyes of differing sizes, boxer’s nose, hairstyle frankly unspeakable. Stupid pointy cap. It is a small mercy that the photograph is a black and white one, for I dare not guess at the complexion of his skin. I suspect if you met Alfred Pigtosser in a dark alley at night you would run screaming.

Appearances can of course be deceptive, and it is no doubt remiss of me to judge him on superficialities. But then we open the book, and begin to read, and what do we find?

Chapter One

I am Alfred Pigtosser and this is my autobiography. My ears are askew, my eyes are of differing sizes, I have a boxer’s nose, and my hairstyle is frankly unspeakable. I like to sport a stupid pointy cap. My complexion is that of contaminated curd.

It’s not promising, is it? Yet the book has sold by the million. And this in spite of the fact that as far as I am aware nobody had ever heard of Alfred Pigtosser before. I’ve done my research, as always. That is why you come to Hooting Yard, because you know you can trust me to have done all that background reading and poring over reference materials and almanacs that you don’t have time for. In any case, you need not take my word for it. Here is how the autobiography continues:

Nobody has ever heard of me. That includes even my immediate family, for shortly after my birth I was abandoned in an orchard, where I was raised by squirrels. I lived in the orchard with the squirrels, wholly isolated from humankind, until my fortieth birthday. That day, I wended my way along a lane and across an extensive car parking area towards a hotel, where I registered under the name Flossie Partridge and took a room with a sea view. I do not think the receptionist believed I was really a Flossie, but I gazed at her in the way the squirrels taught me and she was duly hypnotised and reduced to an automaton.

In the hotel room, in between staring out of the window at the sea, I pounded the keys of a typewriter, bashing into shape this, my autobiography. I cannot claim it is packed with incident. One orchard- or squirrel-related anecdote drifts into another, samey samey. But when I have finished writing it, I know that all I need do is captivate people with the squirrel-gaze, and they will purchase as many copies as I command them to. I will have a bestseller on my hands, and untold millions in the bank, and then I will summon the squirrels from the orchard. How we then deal with the human population of the earth I have not yet decided, but I plan to write about it in a second volume of autobiography, tentatively entitled I, Alfred Pigtosser, And My Terrifying Army Of Squirrels.

Though his mighty brain confounded mere mortals, Sherlock Holmes was, of course, a dimwit in comparison with his brother Mycroft. Something similar may be said about Blossom Partridge and her sister Flossie.

Blossom is best-known as editrix of Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest, quite possibly the finest weekly digest on this or any other planet. It remains, defiantly, a printed paper publication, though one feels sure that if Blossom ever countenanced the idea of going online, she would wipe the floor with the ghastly Arianna Huffington or with Tina Brown of the Daily Beast. Not the least of the charms of the Weekly Digest is that it is hand-written in Blossom’s immaculate copperplate and the copies duplicated on an ancient and creaking Gestetner machine. Blossom also refuses to acknowledge the horrors of decimalisation and the cover price has been held at 4d. By any measure she is a marvel of marvels among women.

Yet she would be first to bow to the even greater marvellousness of her sister. Flossie Partridge is a balloonist, aviatrix, explorer, inventor, secret agent, government spy, and the Lord knows what else besides. She could serve as a role model for any aspiring International Woman of Mystery, did she not remain almost entirely hidden from the public gaze. What little we know about her is thanks to hints dropped by Blossom in her magazine.

For example, Blossom has written movingly about the rare times the sisters spend together, when “we never walk like other people: we skip and gambol to show how girlish we are, as if we were Goosie and Piggy Antrobus”. She alludes to some of Flossie’s more hair-raising adventures in her regular “Glimpses of Flossie’s Hair-Raising Adventures” column, without ever going into the sort of detail that might compromise her sister’s obsessive, indeed maniacal, desire for secrecy. Thus, we might be afforded a “glimpse” of Flossie inventing a new serum, or in hand-to-hand combat with a giant anaconda, but we will not be told the purpose or recipe of the serum, nor the rationale or location of the death-struggle. Nor, incidentally, does Blossom divulge how one might engage in hand-to-hand combat with a beast that has no hands, though by omitting an explanation she guarantees a bulging postbag of readers’ letters.

Regular readers of the Weekly Digest will be aware that in virtually every issue, the “Dear Miss Partridge” letters page includes a lengthy, demented, and hysterical screed from a certain I. Alfred Pigtosser. Occasionally, Mr Pigtosser might address a topic raised in an earlier issue; more often, however, his letter will be a bitter and venomous harangue, barely coherent, shading at times into outright madness. Blossom has stated that it is her policy never to cut or otherwise edit her readers’ letters, and so there are times when a Pigtosser letter takes up six- or seven-eighths of the entire magazine. Readers complain, but Blossom remains unruffled.

It has not escaped the notice of her more astute readers that “I. Alfred Pigtosser” is an anagram of “Flossie Partridge”. Could it be, they ask, incredulously, that this poisonous invective is the work of the editrix’s marvellous sister? To which Blossom has responded by publishing grainy black-and-white photographs purporting to show Mr Pigtosser as an infant, on a tricycle, in a sailor’s suit, next to a large swan. She does not say how she came by these snaps, nor provide evidence of the (blurred) infant’s identity. On the other hand, Blossom is such a marvellous woman that she would surely not try to pull the wool over her readers’ eyes. It is a conundrum to be sure.

Speaking of wool, another of the regular features in the Weekly Digest is “Miss Blossom Partridge’s Woolly Blather”. Here one might find adventurous knitting projects, crochet extravaganzas, and disquisitions upon good wool and bad wool. Every now and then, the “Woolly Blather” and “Glimpses of Flossie’s Hair-Raising Adventures” columns are combined into one, as a surprising number of Flossie’s hair-raising adventures have involved wool in some form or other. One thinks of the incident when Flossie was engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a giant anaconda which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be an extensive draught-excluding sausage knitted entirely from the wool of a merino sheep. Blossom, with her typical editorial dash, appended a pattern so readers could knit their own. As if to provide fuel for the conspiracy theorists, the article prompted a letter from I. Alfred Pigtosser so lengthy, and mad, that it completely filled the next three issues of the magazine.

As far as is known, Flossie Partridge has never published a single word under her own name. Presumably she is too busy ballooning, flying aeroplanes, exploring, inventing, engaged on secret missions, spying for the government, and the Lord knows what else besides ever to find time to put pen to paper. Blossom has said, however, that once, when she and her sister were skipping and gambolling girlishly o’er the green to dance around a maypole, Flossie let slip that she kept a daily diary. It is said to run to thousands upon thousands of pages, scribbled in Flossie’s mad demented scrawl – so unlike her sister’s elegant copperplate! – and kept in an airtight and lead-lined storage facility in a subterranean cavern somewhere below the Swiss Alps. Who knows what secrets it contains? Marvellous secrets!

Blossom, or Flossie, or someone else entirely, as a child.

For today’s sermon I take as my text some pairs of words from the Grauniad cryptic crossword, No. 25,733, set by Chifonie. There we will find, when we have solved the puzzle, NORMAL BUTCHERS (15 across and 18 across), OMINOUS STORAGE (16 down and 1 down), and DERANGED PENANCE (12 across and 7 down).

We may imagine, at the outset, a NORMAL BUTCHER. He is normal insofar as he wears standard butchers’ apparel, makes use of conventional butchers’ knives and cleavers and slicers and mincers, and sells only those cuts of meat one is likely to find in any butchers’ shop throughout this land. He even has a normal butchery name, something like Mister Brinks or Mister Greaves. If you were to pass his shop, on a normal street in a line of shops including a greengrocers’, a haberdashery, a newsagent and a bakery, you would not feel a shudder of Lovecraftian terror. If, instead of passing by, you popped in, to make purchase of sausages, say, the transaction would be conducted absolutely normally, and you would take the sausages home and cook them and chew them and swallow them and you would lean back in your chair and pat your sated tum and there would be no catastrophic consequences whatsoever. All is normal, you would think, in the world of that butcher.

But there is normal and there is outwardly normal, and they are very different things. Mister Grimes the butcher may look and act as normally as one expects a butcher to look and act, but what his customers perceive may be a mere carapace, concealing a monstrous and abnormal inner maelstrom of seething chaos. It may indeed be a studied normality, honed and perfected over many years, the better to hide the awful reality.

Let us ask, does Mister Jarvis ever allow anybody into the back room of his butchers’ shop? Why is it always locked, and locked doubly or trebly, with padlocks and chains? Does he have the radio in his shop tuned to Butchers’ Playtime airing Xavier Cugat number after Xavier Cugat number at a loud volume simply to muffle the eerie and spine-tingling noises otherwise to be heard from that locked back room? What on earth does he keep in there, and is it alive?

We may be unable to provide answers to those questions, but we can say that the back room is used for OMINOUS STORAGE. There is something stored in there, and it is ominous. And if we study Mister Smethwick’s countenance carefully, we might notice that, as he serves us our sausages, wrapping them in greaseproof butchers’ paper and tying the package with butchers’ string, his eyes dart occasionally towards that locked door, and for all his normality there is in those eyes an expression of mad intensity. Whether it be fear or murderousness is harder to ascertain. We are likely to dismiss it as a trait or a tic, that darting, insufficient in itself to convince us that the butcher is in any way abnormal. In any case, as we wait to be handed our sausages, we are clicking our fingers to the catchy beat of Xavier Cugat. It serves not only to drown out the gruesome noises from the back room, but to distract us from wondering too deeply about the butcher’s darting eyes.

There is, to be sure, ominous potential in any storage facility, be it a butcher’s back room or an extensive warehouse surrounded by an electrified fence in the desert. Unless we personally go a-rummaging through all the boxes and crates and cartons and vats and canisters and what have you, neatly arranged in rows upon shelving units or piled up higgledy-piggledy or in any number of other dispositions, we can never be certain what is contained therein. That sense of doubt is not always ominous, but it can be. Just as we would jump out of our skin if we spotted a slithering vegetable tendril tapering to a palpitating sucker emerging from a crate in a storage shed, so we would shudder if, undistracted by the butcher’s skilful sausage-wrapping and the Xavier Cugat music, we noted that the locked door of the back room was shaking on its hinges, as if something within were trying to break its way out and crash through into the normal world.

And this explains why, at nightfall, when the butcher’s shop is closed and the shutters are down, we will find Mister Perkins sprawled on the bare stone floor of his cellar, abasing himself in an act of DERANGED PENANCE. He is gibbering words seldom encountered outside the pages of an H. P. Lovecraft story. Words? Perhaps it would be better to say hideous strangulated cries. These cries, these gibberings, are addressed to a mud idol standing on a slab. There are nails driven into the idol, and two glistening gemstones embedded in its head, to serve as eyes. And though it is mere mud and metal and jewel, all inanimate, the butcher knows in the deepest core of his being that those eyes can see him. They glare and sparkle and bore into him, and he grovels ever more abjectly on the floor, doing his deranged penance to his god.

If we were to understand his hellish gibbering, we would learn that Mister Wilkins is pleading with the mud idol to forgive him for what he has done. And what has he done? What was it he did, those many years ago, that forced him to avert suspicion by seeming so normal, that forced him to lock and lock again and lock yet again the door to his back room? What thing has he kept trapped in there? Only the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred could tell us that.

And as the night soil man roves the streets of the town under fierce moonlight, he makes his way down the alley behind the butcher’s shop, and hears, from within, oozing and chthonic, the repeated sound “Glubb… Glubb… Glubb…”

Something that has always puzzled me about the famous story in which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is its lack of detail. Ever since it first appeared in The Michigan School Moderator in 1885, it has been a popular and well-known story, and I would guess that most people know its basic outline. There is a fox which is quick and brown, and it jumps over a dog which is lazy. Even the most harebrained dimwit can understand that, and it is made all the more vivid by being told in the present tense. That gives it a sense of immediacy, such that we could almost be present, witnessing the fox jumping over the dog.

Yet I cannot be alone in thinking that the tale leaves too many unanswered questions. Of course, as sophisticated readers we do not necessarily want everything handed to us on a plate. We expect to do some work, and part of the pleasure of a tale well told is that we may well have to exercise our imaginations to fill gaps, to flesh out details, to complete a picture which is only hinted at. But in the story of the fox and the dog there is so much missing from the narrative that we are ultimately dissatisfied.

Even the few details we are given beg further questions. How quick is the fox, exactly? Quickness is surely relative. Is the fox quicker or slower than, say, a tortoise or a steam train? Does it move with the swiftness of a javelin through the air, or of a cheetah? Without having any moving object to compare it with, we have no idea of its speed.

The only other thing we know about the fox is that it is brown. Well, that tells us little, given that there are innumerable shades of brown, from umber to dun and from dun to umber, and all sorts of others I cannot be bothered to list. If we were to grab hold of the fox and hold it up against a paint chart, a grid of squares of various shades of brown, where would we stop and cry “Aha! Look how closely the colour of this fox struggling in our grasp and attempting to bite our wrist matches the colour of that square, such that if we painted the room with it from floor to ceiling we would render the fox invisible!”? We do not know the answer to that question.

Things are even less satisfactory in the case of the dog. At least with the fox we are given two snippets of information, vague as both those snippets may be. But all we are told of the dog is that it is lazy. It is true that, being a personality trait, the imputation of laziness tells us more – much more – about the character of the dog than we ever learn about the character of the fox. Insightful as this may be, however, it is meagre pickings.

Thus we have several questions directly related to what little we do know. How many more are thrown up when we consider what we are not told! What manner of dog is it? Is it asleep or awake? Has it been recently fed? Is it sound of limb? Does it wear a collar to which is affixed a small round metal tag with its name engraved upon it? Is it a homeless stray? Where the hell is the damned dog anyway? On a lawn? Outside a kennel? Inside a kennel? As the questions multiply, we begin to lose patience with the dog. If it were real rather than fictional, we would be tempted to kick it, or at least to throw a stick for it to go and fetch, were it to overcome its idleness. As a dog in a story it leaves much to be desired. One thinks, briefly and fugitively, of the hound of the Baskervilles, or the lapdog belonging to the lady in the Chekhov story. No doubt you can add your own fictional dogs. By any measure, the lazy dog in the present story is a pretty sorry specimen.

We may posit a similar, and endless, list of questions about the fox, if we are so minded. Frankly the prospect is wearying. The sad fact is we know in advance that repeated readings of the story will help us answer none of them.

If we put aside both the fox and the dog, and consider in isolation the action of the story, we realise how feeble it is. We have as much idea of the motivation of the fox, in jumping over the dog, as Tippi Hedren had about that scene in The Birds where her character Melanie Daniels inexplicably enters a room full of savage frenzied birds. At least Tippi had the wit to ask Alfred Hitchcock why on earth Melanie would be so stupid. We do not know if the fox is being equally stupid, or wise, or perhaps merely playful. It might be larking about for no apparent reason. But as readers, we want to know.

I must confess that I became so exasperated with the writer that I determined to send one of my notorious Letters of Remonstrance. Recipients, among them Jeanette Winterson, Will Self, and the late Iris Murdoch, are known to quake in their boots and make abject promises to mend their ways. Then I recalled that the story of the fox and the dog was originally published in 1885 and thus, barring a freak of nature, the author was almost certainly dead and gone to that place from where none return except zombies. I pummelled a cushion in my frustration.

My next step will be to go to the Wolverine State and to trawl through the archives of The Michigan School Moderator, hoping to lay my hands on working notes, early drafts, and possibly alternative versions of the tale. Then I intend to publish a long overdue critical edition, annotated with scholarly notes, of at least eight hundred pages, including colour plates with mezzotints of a fox (quick and brown) and a dog (lazy). I think I shall ask eighty-two-year-old Tippi Hedren to write the foreword.

France in the immediate aftermath of the revolution was not the only place in which a commissioner, seeking to climb a bell tower, would be deterred by the presence of an axe-wielding madman. It is a dilemma which has faced many commissioners, of differing stripes, in many lands at many times. What all the known and recorded instances have in common is the difficulty of ascertaining whether the woodcutter in the belfry is truly a madman, or is feigning madness as a ruse. No commissioner, it appears, has ever been able to say definitively, upon entering a bell tower with an axe-wielding woodcutter in situ, “Ah, a genuine madman!” or, conversely, “Oh ho, a perfectly sensible woodcutter pretending to be mad!”

A recent scholarly analysis of the phenomenon sheds light on the methods commissioners and their minions have used to decide the question. It is not an incandescent light, nor even a bright one, for the past is suffused with a great darkness, as Pang Gong Loon demonstrated in his important paper on the subject, the title of which escapes me, understandably, as it was published long ago, in the past, and was thus suffused with a great darkness, which rather goes to prove Pang Gong Loon’s point, if proof were needed. Me, I’ll take him at his word.

Even when the darkness is pitch black, we may still cast glimmers of light if we deploy what Pang Gong Loon called the “pointy torch of inquiry” into it. The author of the recent scholarly analysis clearly has such a pointy torch, for in the study we find such accounts as this:

Hail to thee! I am a commissioner. My most recent commission was to go to the bell tower of St Bibblybibdib’s church in the vicinity of Blister Lane and to count the bells. When I had counted them, I was to report back to the County Bell Counting Register Panel. There my duties ended. A straightforward task, but one nevertheless calling for a large breakfast, which I proceeded to enjoy in the salubrious setting of Alphonso’s Dining Room hard by the banks of the Toss. I had sausages and kippers and kedgeree and thrush-brains and wolves’ livers and custard triangles and milk slops and jugged hare and toasted grease and Doctor Baxter’s Fine Pudding and a pig’s head and wren innards and smokers’ poptarts, all washed down with a pot of boiling hot tea.

I then summoned my minions and we headed for St Bibblybibdib’s. One minion carried my propelling pencil and the other my bell-count ledger. The lych-gate was off its sneck but that was no business of mine. I paused to weep at the grave of a floozie of past acquaintance, but then it was down to business. Or should I say up, for we must climb the bell tower to count the bells.

No sooner had we entered the church, however, than a cry came from above. To my ears it sounded like the inarticulate gibbering of a madman. I sent Minion Lars to the foot of the bell tower to peer upwards and to tell me what he saw. He reported that, as so often happens, the belfry was occupied by an axe-wielding madman who would surely chop us to bits if we dared venture further.

I took from my pocket my two-way radio contraption and gave the details to HQ. They said a mad-doctor would be sent immediately, and that I should do nothing until he got there. I ushered the minions into the St Bibblybibdib’s annexe, where there was a snack bar. We tucked in to toffee and boiled seal and Carlsbad plums while we waited.

The mad-doctor duly arrived on his motorbike at 0955 hours. Brain-probe in one hand and pack of flash-cards in the other, he sprinted up the spiral staircase like a man half his age, which I estimated to be in the region of forty. What went on up there I have no idea, though I assume he probed the axeman’s brain and tested him with the flash-cards, each of which bore a mysterious occult symbol.

At approximately 1005 hours the bloodied corpse of the mad-doctor toppled from the belfry. It was missing the head. I radioed through the details to HQ, who advised that the axeman in the belfry was almost certainly a genuine madman, and not one of those pretenders who feign madness as a ruse to prevent bell-counting by commissioners. As I am the bravest commissioner in the entire commission, I offered to climb up to the belfry and give the madman a sound thrashing with my seagull-beating stick before he had a chance to chop my head off with his axe. But I was forbidden to do so by HQ, who suggested I return to the snack bar to await the arrival of the priest and the verger and the sexton, all of whom were on an unofficial St Bibblybibdib’s charabanc outing.

Unfortunately by this time the snack bar was shut, so I blew off steam by giving Minion Lars and Minion Tim a sound thrashing with my seagull-beating stick. Then I sat on the floozie’s grave to write this report in my bell-count ledger with my propelling pencil.

This is but one of no fewer than three contemporaneous accounts of commissioners confronting axe-wielding madmen in bell towers cobbled together in this fascinating piece of scholarly analysis. Frankly, I am not convinced that the analysis following the accounts is up to snuff, but then I am no scholar. I am merely a fanatical devotee of the teachings of Pang Gong Loon. If you have any sense in your heads, you ought to be too.