These are the voyages of the Starship Corrugated Cardboard, its five year mission to seek out, somewhere in the illimitable vastness of space, the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits. This is needle in a haystack stuff. Unless you have boldly gone across the universe yourself, aboard one of the other starships, you really can have no idea just what a palaver it is. So, some sympathy please.

When I was called in to Starship Command, four and a half years ago, all I knew was that I was going to be made captain of a mission. What I did not know was the nature of that mission. I was excited, for this was to be my first captaincy. I had plenty of experience as a bo’sun and a crow’s nester on both ships and starships. I had done the so-called “milk round”, delivering bottles of milk to far-flung space colonies such as New Jaywick and Far Distant New Isle of Muck. I had served my time plying between the dismal little planetoids of Galaxy 14, eradicating the bindweed and setting up diversity outreach initiatives. I had even been to the furthest and most distant planet of all, the one with the weird voodoo-rastafarian belief system and giant Cyclopean turtles and sweet-smelling marsh gas. But none of these voyages had prepared me for the mission to find, somewhere in the illimitable vastness of space, the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits.

The story goes that several hundred years ago, on a mere whim, a gang of Jesuits grew tired of earthly ways and set out in a secondhand spaceship to find a deserted planet. There they would establish a Jesuitical paradise, if one can imagine such a thing. They, quite clearly, did. But what they cannot have foreseen was their gradual crumpling, which began shortly after they landed on their distant world, and proceeded apace, with ghastly consequences. Now every single Jesuit on the planet was a picture of almost unimaginable crumplement. Paradise it might have been, but a paradise tinged with crumples.

This much we knew from radio reports picked up by a space scooter. The news caused something of a hubbub when it reached Earth. Certain members of the Interplanetary Council were livid, others more sanguine. But the livid ones won the day, and it was they who insisted on sending a mission to find the planet. Because of the space scooter’s on-board radio scrambling system, it was an unfathomable mystery from where the stark and crumpled messages had been sent. I did ask Starship Command what I was meant to do after I found the planet, and was given an envelope marked “Further Instructions To Be Opened Only After The Planet Of The Crumpled Jesuits Has Been Located And That Location Confirmed”. I kept the envelope tucked into a pocket of my Starship Captain’s Smock. It’s a fine smock, modelled on the ones worn by nineteenth century peasants in rustic English backwaters.

“Rustic backwaters” is as good a description as any of the many and various worlds we have visited during the last four and a half years. We have seen incredible things, most of them involving potatoes, hay and space-straw, but to date we have not encountered a crumpled Jesuit. Uncrumpled ones, yes, on certain other planets, a list of which I maintain in my log book. Most planets, after all, or at least most of the ones that support life, have a Jesuit, as they have an alderman and a town crier and a haberdasher and a man whose job it is to club seals. My crew and I have gained deep and penetrating insights into the basic patterns of the known universe.

And we have taken tea with the voodoo-rastafarians of that most distant of all planets. It was our first port of call. Knowing that some members of my crew would suffer from terrible homesickness, I decided to ease their sufferings by the simple expedient of so arranging things that for the bulk of our voyage we would be heading Earthwards. In a roundabout way, of course, but generally with the starship’s nose cone pointing towards home. As a result of my captainy wisdom, morale has been high. Where the average starship voyage is a purgatory of lassitude, grumpiness, longing, and weeping, the Corrugated Cardboard is a jocund ship, with piccolo recitals and flower-arranging contests and jousting tournaments and games of quoits and monkey divertissements and all sorts of other recreations. On Sundays I prance and skip about with a fairy wand. The only tears are tears of happiness.

Yet for all that, there is mounting tension. With only six months before our scheduled landing at Starship Command HQ at Clacton-on-Sea, we are all too aware that we are in danger of failure. There has been so sign of anything even resembling the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits. Our daily prayers are not helping, even though we say them in Latin, and wear vestments. The envelope in my pocket remains unopened. I know I cannot ask for more time. For one thing, the fuel will run out. Also, the emergency boosters packed up after we had to make a quick getaway from a planet in sector 9 which turned out to be inhabited entirely by starving, befanged and ferocious giant space-donkeys. The chief engineer, a dour Scot like all good starship chief engineers, has been faffing about with the boosters day in day out, but they still make a horrible creaking noise and sputter out. Or perhaps it is the chief engineer who makes the creaking noise? He may be more elderly than I had been led to believe. Or the space-time continuum might be playing tricks on us. I have heard rumours of such things.

But we must keep our peckers up. Today is the feast day of St Ignatius Loyola. We shall continue on our voyage aboard the starship Corrugated Cardboard with hope in our hearts. So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the gravitational field of the Planet of the Crumpled Jesuits.

Today we don a stout pair of boots and lace them up with due care, having first threaded through the holes strengthened bootlaces of tough material, sisal perhaps. We have not stinted. The aglets, one at each end of each bootlace, are made of iron, forged in a white hot furnace and beaten into shape with a mighty hammer by our favourite blacksmith at his anvil. Remember that hammer.

Boots donned, we step out of the chalet door. The air is cold and clean and bracing. This is Alpine air, of the kind recommended to those who would lie shattered upon balconies. Today, we are anything but shattered. We have had no need to move our mattress on to our chalet balcony. We pull our hat of leather and wool, with its attendant earflaps, more snugly about our head. We light our pipe and puff the acrid Montenegrin tobacco. We gaze up at the summit of a nearby Alp, then scan our eyes a little further down, to where, perched somehow on the slope of the mountain, stands a Schloss.

Later, we shall climb up to the Schloss, and enter its majestic carved wooden portal, the height of twenty men. But first we must descend to the village below, Ack-on-the-Vug, or Vug-on-the-Ack, I can never remember which. It is the kind of village where, at dusk, packs of peasants brandishing pitchforks and tarry burning torches roam the streets, a vigilante force ready to confront werewolves, Golems, mad kings, and similar horrors. Imaginary the horrors may be, but these are violent and ignorant peasants. In glorious morning daylight, they are more tractable, and thus we may prance into the village without fear of harm.

We stop to purchase a pastry from a pie-and-pastry man plying his wares from a cart. There is icing on the pastry and, within, a mash of pulped unidentifiable fruit. We sit on a cold stone slab in the village square and munch the pastry, gathering crumbs on the greaseproof paper bag in which it was sold to us, the bag spread flat on our lap to serve as a napkin. When our munching is done, we scatter the crumbs in an elegant sweeping motion, as food for birds, and then we crumple the bag and toss it into a waste bin. Today there are no birds. Peasants will fall upon the crumbs when our back is turned.

Turned it is, towards a kiosk. The kiosk has a hatch at head height through which, in the interior gloom, can be seen the gaunt and loathsome figure of the couponeer. He is either wall-eyed or pop-eyed. At this late date we can no longer recall which, just as we can no longer recall the name of the village nor of the river, nor of the Alp on which the Schloss was built. The day of which we speak was so long ago, in the last century. The couponeer must be dead by now, and if ever we return to the village we will dance a hoocha upon his grave. He was not a pleasant fellow.

Not pleasant, to be sure, but sadly necessary. We need our coupon, for without it the purpose of our venturing out of our chalet will be lost. Without it, we may as well have remained indoors, or at a pinch upon the balcony. Once out, we must confront the couponeer. He wears a copper cone upon his head, an affectation. We make purchase of our coupon with as few words as possible. The couponeer himself says nothing. Is he mute?

A donkey has been tied to a post some yards away from the kiosk. It wears a ragamuffin air, as donkeys sometimes do. We pat it on its flanks. Its owner, or rider, or master, or torturer, is nowhere to be seen. We are tempted to unloose it from its post and send it off, along the path beside the Vug, or the Ack, until perhaps it comes to a bridge to cross, and in crossing meets a new master, a kindly one, out this morning looking for a stray donkey to pamper. But we suppress the temptation and prance past. It was merely a dream of liberty, a fatuous illusion.

The coupon tucked for safety into one of innumerable pockets of our reindeer-hide anorak so apt for the Alpine climate, we begin to climb the lower slopes of the Alp. We no longer prance, on such a gradient, we trudge. Our sisal bootlaces hold firm. There will be no inelegant pratfalls. As the path becomes steeper, we pant, but still we puff our pipe, indomitable. The sun, still rising, is blinding, and we put on a pair of Guglielmo Boffo sunglasses. They were a gift from Maisie, poor, poor Maisie.

Shortly after midday, we arrive at the Schloss, flash our coupon at the sentry, and enter through the majestic carved wooden portal, the height of twenty men. The carvings are of werewolves, Golems, mad kings, and similar horrors. Long long ago, these were the last things a peasant saw as he was dragged in chains through the portal before being pitched into the Schloss’s oubliette. The oubliette is cemented over now, the cement covered by rugs. The Schloss is now, has been for fifty years, a museum.

We head directly for a gallery on the third floor. It is cold and vast and bare but for a glass case in the middle of the room and a sentry sat on a stool against one wall. The sentry is a cousin of the couponeer, a fellow with a goitre, as affable as his cousin is unpleasant. He murmurs a few polite words of greeting and welcome and hands us an information leaflet. Without looking at it, for we know why we are here, we step over to the glass case. And there it is, returned after theft, the Babinsky hammer. Babinsky was the huge lumbering walrus-moustached psychopath who committed numberless savage enormities. The hammer is the one he used to prosecute dozens upon dozens of those enormities.

We told you to remember the hammer. The man who stole it from and then returned it to the museum was our favourite blacksmith. He used it to hammer our aglets into shape on his anvil.

Over in his Inexplicable World yesterday, Outa_Spaceman conducted “an experiment in writing something using the first word I read after waking this morning”. Sacré bleu!, I thought, now that is a simple and efficacious way to solve the problem, which often besets me, of having to summon up from within the deep interior cranial nooks and crannies a topic each day to which I can devote a thousandish words.

Two questions may occur to you about my thinking process: (1) Does Mr Key habitually think in French oaths? (2) Why is his thinking so prolix?

I would like to address both those queries, though I fear that my response to (2) would in itself be prolix. I therefore intend to put it to one side, as a topic for a future essay on prolix thinking. Had I an in-tray, I would scribble the question on a sheet of paper and pop it into the tray, which I visualise as being constructed of wire. In the absence of such a tray, I shall merely shove the idea into one of those deep interior cranial nooks and crannies and pluck it out, as one would thine eye if it offended thee (Matthew 18:9) at an appropriate time.

As for (1), it is not the case that I habitually think in French oaths. I am to all intents and purposes a monoglot, regrettably, though like most people I have a little store of foreign words and phrases I am able to deploy when the fancy takes me. When my thought processes call for a foreign oath, it is probably more likely to be the Russian Боже мой. This is pronounced “bozhe moy”, and translates as “My God!”, for as you will know if you have been reading Hooting Yard assiduously, God in Russian is Bog, the root form of “bozhe”. And if you have not been reading Hooting Yard assiduously, then I am afraid all I can say is God – or Bog – help you.

Outa_Spaceman claims that the first word he encountered after he woke up yesterday was “opinionated”. Plenty of room for manoeuvre there, and had it been by some inexplicable Koestlerian coincidence the first word I had read today, I think I could quite easily have strung out a thousandish words, particularly if I considered truncations such as pinion and pin. Pinion would have allowed me to “go off on one” about birds, a topic upon which I can expatiate for umpteen thousands of words, as assiduous Hooting Yard readers will know (see above).

Unfortunately, however, the first word I read after waking this morning held less promise. While slurping coffee, I picked up the book I am currently reading – Saturnine by Rayner Heppenstall – opened it at the page where I had slipped my cardboard bookmark – bearing a photograph of St Alberto Hurtado SJ, Jesuit, Priest, Companion of God, Saint, Born 22 January 1901, Died 18 August 1952, Canonised 23 October 2005, given to me by Chris Weaver of Resonance104.4FM, who believes that I have a “thing” about Jesuits – and scanned my eyes down the right-hand page (p. 9) where I had left off reading yesterday. As is apparent, I have only just started reading this book, but I am enjoying it immensely. The Acknowledgements and Disclaimer alone (p. 5) made me laugh (though not out loud). Assiduous Hooting Yard readers (see above, see above) will I hope have shared that laughter as I fatally interrupted my reading to transcribe p. 5 yesterday evening. I say “fatally” as I barely returned to Saturnine, managing only pp. 7-9 (or most of 9) before I began to feel sleepy.

I think there are far too many parenthetical and subsidiary clauses in this essay. But I am not going to rewrite it. You will just have to cope as best you can.

So there I was, slurping coffee, shortly after 6.00 a.m., taking Outa_Spaceman as my guide, and I read “The”. Or rather “THE”, for the typesetting of the book (1943) renders the first line of each new section entirely in upper case. “THE”. And what was my project? To write “something using the first word I read after waking this morning”. A thousandish words on “THE”, then. Any prospect of finding, however tangentially, an ornithological angle and thus being able to spout effortlessly until the cows come home was cruelly blocked.

Now I am sure that if I put my mind to it, I probably could bash out a thousandish words on the definite article, and the fact that in Saturnine it was printed in capital letters would be of enormous help, in that I could prattle on about upper and lower case. Well, another time perhaps. For now I decided that On “THE” was a topic for my imaginary wire in-tray. Instead, I would resort to cheating. I read on:

THE GREAT FROST OF 1938 BEGAN ON DECEMBER 20TH, the date of my first visit to the Middlesex Hospital.

Much, much more promising than a mere “THE”. I could take as my topic either the Great Frost Of 1938 or, failing that, The Great Frost. The latter would allow me to write either about the Great Frost of 1683, or of 1709, or indeed of Great Frosts generally, with their attendant frost fairs. (If I wrote about frost fairs and frozen rivers I would no doubt be able to shoehorn in a paragraph or two about birds, river birds such as moorhens and kingfishers.) Alternatively, I could write about Robert Frost or David Frost, or both, tackling the thorny question of which more justly deserved the title of “The Great Frost”, were such a title to be bestowed, and were it to be limited to the poet or the television person, to the exclusion of any other Frosts you might care to name. In fact, such a vista of possibilities opened up before me that there was an ominous rumbling noise in the deep interior cranial nooks and crannies. I know from bitter experience that this betokens an overheated brain, so instead of writing a single word, I slammed Saturnine shut and wrapped a cold wet towel around my head and stared out of the window, at crows and starlings and sparrows and linnets and pipits and swifts and nuthatches and so an ad infinitum.

In yesterday’s piece on foopball I gave due credit for the (correct) spelling of that word to Geoffrey Willans, chronicler of St Custards. I was led, naturally, to think of his co-creator Ronald Searle, and to realise how educational Searle’s cartoons were in my formative years. I still have the copy of The Penguin Ronald Searle which was on my parents’ bookshelves when I was growing up, and which I pored over with delight over and over again – and still do. It was from Searle that I learned of the existence of certain great books (Gibbon’s Decline And Fall Of The Roman Empire, Roget’s Thesaurus), grammatical terms (the gerund), and historical events (the Relief of Mafeking). He did not of course tell me anything about them, but it was clear to me that they were part of an inherited cultural knowledge, things I ought to know about, that I would learn about at school as I grew older. Alas, it was the 1960s, so by the time I might have expected my teachers to enlighten me, the rot had set in. With the exception of the Thesaurus, I do not recall hearing about any of them at my 1970s grammar school. What knowledge I did pick up came from the same source as the cartoons themselves – the bookshelves at home.

If things were beginning to fall apart by the 1970s, how much have they crumbled to collapse today? I doubt the words “the Relief of Mafeking” have been spoken in a state school for decades past. It was, after all, a magnificent example of British Pluck, a concept wholly alien in our brave new world. Now British Pluck may be laughable – and it is, it is – but at the very least the tinies ought to be told about it. For younger readers wondering what in heaven’s name I am talking about, here is a quotation which encapsulates something of the spirit:

We certainly have the habit of stepping off the kerb without looking round, but this is not so much from blank foolishness as from the feeling that the road belongs to foot sloggers as much as to any motorist; and if, as a consequence, we get it in the back we merely die asserting our right. That’s British.

To which one feels compelled to respond, on the contrary, it is blank foolishness. But it is also magnificent in its way. It should come as no surprise to learn that those words were written by Robert Baden-Powell, a man who appropriately shared his initials with British Pluck. And Baden-Powell was propelled to fame, before he created the Scout movement, by his role at Mafeking.

Why did an insignificant railway siding on the line between Bulawayo and Kimberley assume such talismanic importance? News of the Relief of Mafeking gave rise to such unbridled rejoicing back in Britain that a new word – mafficking – was coined to describe it. And as we have seen, decades later Ronald Searle could make it the basis of a cartoon knowing that his audience implicitly understood the reference. Briefly, what happened was that, under the command of Baden-Powell, British troops hunkered down at Mafeking to resist an expected Boer invasion of the Natal Colony and to draw Boer troops inland, away from the coast, thus making it safe to land further British troops. It was, in that sense, a pre-planned siege.

No one really expected it to succeed, given the comparative strength of the forces on either side. But the Boers reckoned without the sort of man who would breeze into the path of speeding motor vehicles just because he considered it the inviolable right of an Englishman to do so. Baden-Powell seemed to consider the whole thing as a boyish prank, and employed “joyous little dodges” to outwit the enemy,

transmitting mock orders through a megaphone, sowing sham minefields, climbing through imaginary barbed wire, casting grenades by fishing rod.

There were other, more substantial defensive methods, of course, but what may really have tipped the balance was his ability to keep morale and spirits high. In those far off days, there was an agreed ceasefire every Sunday, and the future Chief Scout used the opportunity to provide well-organised opportunities for entertainment and recreation:

There were Beleaguered Bachelors’ Balls and beautiful baby competitions, cricket matches and horticultural shows, bicycle races and tea parties, gymkhanas and fetes . . .On Guy Fawkes’ Day he mounted a firework display, first having warned the Boers not to be alarmed. At Christmas he presided over a dinner . . . He arranged polo fixtures on week-days – when occasional shells added to the game’s excitement.

No doubt Baden-Powell was inspired, in both his tactical and entertainment activities, by the memory of his early days in the 13th Hussars:

their favourite mess amusement . . . was to pile all the furniture into a heap and turn somersaults on top of it while proclaiming ‘I am a bounding Brother of the Bosphorus’. The height of comic sophistication reached by the Hussars was to twirl the chandeliers at mess balls and spray the dancers with hot candle wax . . . [Baden-Powell’s] favourite music hall ‘artistes’ were the trick cyclist, the ‘fellow with a spring necktie’, and the ‘champion smasher of plates’ .

As with his road sense, one is tempted to dismiss Baden-Powell as a blithering idiot. It is a sobering thought, however, that it is precisely such blithering idiots, of the same mould, who explored the world and built an empire. They had British Pluck, and it is something that may never be revived, but is certainly worth remembering.

Incidentally, well to remember too that among the troops who arrived to relieve Mafeking was Baden-Powell’s brother, who had the splendid name Baden Baden-Powell.

NB : The quotations above are all taken from Piers Brendon’s Eminent Edwardians (1979).

Dear Uncle Istvan,

Thank you for sending me a box of flies, Musca domestica. I am sad to report that most of them perished in transit. The few that survived are recuperating, and I have put them on a vitamin-enriched diet. I hope they will soon be hale and hearty enough to serve as proper objects of study as I cram for my forthcoming entomology examinations. The Institute needs new blood.

The dacha is very comfortable, and the surrounding woods are beautiful. The silver birches are silvery and birchy and the spruces have been spruced up by Old Oleg. You remember Old Oleg, the groundsman? Even though he now gets about on one leg and a stick, he still has a spring in his step. I do not know exactly what he did to the spruces to spruce them up, and of course if I asked him I would not understand his reply, for he still talks in that loveable barbaric clickety-clackety language with lots of spitting. I do not think he has washed his hair since the last time you were here, in the twilight years of the Tsar before last.

Thanks again for the flies. I will put the box they came in to good use.

Your loving nephew, Zoltan.

*

Dear Uncle Istvan,

It was extremely thoughtful of you to send me another box of flies, Musca domestica, but really not necessary. The survivors from the first batch are now almost fully recovered, their vitamin-enriched diet further enriched with anabolic steroids on the advice of Old Ma Kropotkin. You remember Old Ma Kropotkin, the housekeeper? She is now almost totally blind, but still as sharp as a button. It was she who suggested I punch a couple of holes in the box from the first batch of flies and loop a bootlace through them and wear it as a hat. I call it my dacha hat. I will have to ask her what to do with this new box!

Sadly, once again very few of the flies survived the rigours of their journey. I am going to write a stiff letter to the postal authorities. I have now been given the date of my examination, so I hope to be able to study the living flies, from both boxes, before then. Otherwise I shall have to rely on the rather blurred illustrations in the encyclopaedia, if I can find it. Are you sure it is at the dacha? The only book I have spotted is a guide to pursuing and shooting wolves from a helicopter.

The poplars and larches in the woods are looking as spruce as the spruces, thanks to Old Oleg. He is now getting about on two sticks, after a mishap the other day with a bear-trap.

Thanks again for the extra flies.

Your loving nephew, Zoltan.

*

Dear Uncle Istvan,

Thank you so much for the box of flies you sent. I think that is now three boxes! Unfortunately, this time every single fly was dead on arrival. Clearly my letter to the postal authorities failed to prompt the root and branch reform of Musca domestica package handling I hoped for. Not to worry, however, because the surviving flies from the first two boxes are thriving, to say the least. Old Ma Kropotkin added Strontium 90 to their vitamin- and anabolic steroid-enriched diet, and they have now grown to an unseemly size. And where before they were sunk in lassitude, their energy levels are terrifying.

Almost as terrifying as the energy levels of Old Oleg, who has been sprucing up the yews and sycamores in spite of the fact that he has lost the use of one of his arms. Last week he had a mishap with a chainsaw. Old Ma Kropotkin has been rubbing one of her mysterious unguents into his stump. Oh, by the way, she came up with a splendid use for the second box. It has been cut in half, and the two halves glued to my dacha hat, one on each side, to act as earflaps. I expect she will think of something to do with the third box!

Thanks again for the flies, Musca domestica, although you really need not go out of your way to send any more.

Your loving nephew, Zoltan.

*

Dear Uncle Istvan

Many thanks for sending me a fourth box of flies, Musca domestica. Thank God they were all dead! I implore you not to send any more. Luckily, just before Old Oleg’s latest mishap he still had the ability to wield hammer and nails and planks, and he kindly barricaded me into the pantry of the dacha. As he drove the last nail home I heard his loveable barbaric clickety-clackety language become a deranged and hideous screaming as he was beset by the flies. They are now enormous and frenzied and radioactive, pumped up by the vitamins and anabolic steroids and Strontium 90 Old Ma Kropotkin has been feeding them. The once beautiful dacha is now splattered with their noxious regurgitations. Old Ma Kropotkin herself has been feeding on the same diet and is half-housekeeper, half-fly, the blind queen of the swarm. Please send help as soon as you receive this letter. I do not know how sturdy the barricades are. I think the flies are massing for an attack. Oh God! They are breaking through! Under the flaps of my dacha hat my ears are assailed by their infernal buzzing! God hel

*

Darling Istvan

I found the enclosed scribble in the dacha pantry and thought it might be of interest. You will be pleased to note that everything went according to plan.

Passionately yours, Old Ma Kropotkin.

At an advanced stage, the gunk is scraped off with a tallow-knife, collected in a pot, reduced by steaming and fed to seahorses. After several days the seahorses begin to display intricate and abnormal behaviour patterns. These patterns can be traced on graph paper with propelling-pencils and a ruler. Comparison with earlier graphs, done under a double blind test, have proved immensely illuminating. So lustrous, indeed, that copied out onto onion-skin paper and crumpled up, they can be inserted into glass bulbs and light a long corridor in a large building for upwards of four days. By the fourth day, they are dimming, there is a dying of the light, and sensitive persons mourn, as mourn they might.

Having disposed of the gunk as described, the main bulk is best fed through a sieve. The most effective sieve to use is one with so-called “Swedenborgian angel” holes. These are not generally available in the shops, but can be ordered direct by post from the manufacturers, thus keeping costs surprisingly low. You might want to purchase two or three at one time. The fragile nature of the sieve means that it will not, alas, survive much use. It is easily distressed, especially when you try to force stuff through the holes, as certain boisterous and reckless persons tend to do. If you have such a person on your team, it is a good idea to keep them away from the sieves by telling them to go and keep an eye on the seahorses.

Other pesky or exasperating team members can be usefully employed – and kept out of your hair – by laying the plumb line. This should consist of tent-pegs and butcher’s string and stretch as far as the eye can see. The line should ideally be at the height of an average hollyhock, the calculation being made by consulting the tables at the back of the Annual Hollyhock Height Register. A copy of this ought to be in your local reference library, but will usually not be available for borrowing, so a literate and numerate member of the team, with a valid library ticket, should be delegated to copy out the required details. They can use the back of the graph paper on which the behaviour patterns of the seahorses have earlier been inscribed in majestic sweeping lines and arcs of unsurpassed beauty.

Meanwhile, having fed the main bulk through the sieve into a bucket, the bucket can now be ferried to the platform. This should stand on sturdy props, the sturdier the better. Do not on any account use balsa wood. You are probably familiar with the case of Tarleton, and what transpired with his balsa wood props. If necessary, test the sturdiness using the standard tests of sturdiness which appear as Appendix VII in your pamphlet. Otherwise, proceed directly to the siphon and funnel palaver.

Siphon the stuff out of the bucket, working slowly and methodically and seamlessly. As it passes through the funnel, take snapshots at one-minute intervals from the designated angles. These need not be full colour snapshots, unless they have been explicitly specified in the contract. That is certainly an unusual clause nowadays, and if it does appear, it is worth checking. The contract might, after all, have been drawn up by a halfwit. Try to ensure that no seahorses are visible in the background of the snapshots.

The whole lot, save for the scraped-off gunk, should now have been transferred into beakers, without spillage. Align the beakers along the plumb-line. Once they are in place, and only when they are in place, attach the snap-on, snap-off lids. Using a thick bold black indelible marker pen, draw identifying symbols on the lids. For examples of apt symbols, see Appendix IX. Make sure each one is different. There is often a temptation to repeat the seahorse symbol because it is so fetching. Fight against this temptation with all your might, like Christ in the wilderness.

In case of rainfall, it will be necessary to cover both beakers and plumb-line with tarpaulin(s). The approved colour is an almost transparent light blue. Any other colour is likely to result in fewer points being awarded, without the right of appeal. Again, the case of Tarleton should give you pause if you are thinking of using black or yellow tarpaulin or, God forbid, a particularly opaque one. It was not amusing when Tarleton had to account for himself before the panel.

The seahorses’ tiny brains will by now be utterly ravaged. Scoop them from the tank with a standard angler’s net and deposit them on the slab. One by one, using a very sharp kitchen knife, remove the brain from each seahorse. If you feel pangs of pity in your soul you are pursuing the wrong hobby and would be better off taking up ping pong. Place the brains in a brown paper bag. Twist the top of the bag to seal it and then swing it around your head several times while ululating an incantation. It is important to note that this step is essentially meaningless, so you need not put a great deal of effort into it. But it is always a good idea to show willing. You do not know who is watching.

Holding the bag in your right hand, walk the length of the plumb line, pausing at each beaker. At each pause, gaze mournfully into the middle distance, your lips trembling. Some of the feathers in your headdress may fall to the ground. You should disregard them, while at the same time being very careful not to tread on them as you resume your walk towards the next beaker along the line. That is unless they are sparrow feathers, in which case you should pick them up and put them in your pocket. But that of course should go without saying, as it is blindingly obvious, if you have got this far.

[Extract from The Book Of Significant Tomfoolery by “The Master”.]

Ned Mossop sat in his office nursing the last dregs of a bottle of hooch and smoking his umpteenth cigarette of the day. He stared out of the window into the gloaming, at the mean fields, like mean streets but without paving and with fewer, if any, buildings, and what buildings there were were ramshackle and dilapidated. This was a godforsaken rustic backwater, and Ned Mossop adored it.

Nothing much ever happened here, which suited Ned, but not his bank manager. He hadn’t had a case for weeks. Every day he sat in the office glugging hooch and smoking and occasionally picking a bit of straw or hay out of his hair. Sometimes, through the window, he would watch muck being spread or bonfires lit. But nobody seemed to need him. He liked it that way.

Then suddenly the buzzer on his desk buzzed. It was Velma, from the outer office.

“Ned? There’s a woman here to see you.”

“OK, pumpkin, show her in.”

Ned took his feet off his desk, knocked back the last of the hooch and shoved the empty tumbler in his drawer. And then she came in, and his eyes popped out. She was dressed in black, wearing a bippety boppety hat with a veil drawn over her face, and her figure was the kind of figure that Raymond Chandler would have enjoyed describing with a startling simile.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr Mossop,” she breathed, in a husky voice that almost made Mossop faint with desire. He managed a peasant-like grunt.

“I had better tell you straight out why I’ve come,” she said, “It’s about my husband.”

Mossop raised an eyebrow. He had tagged her as a widow, what with the black dress and the veil.

“Or rather. . .”, she added, her voice trembling, “It’s about my husband’s cows.”

“Quit stalling, honeybunch, just lay it on the line,” snarled Mossop, curling his lip. She had not actually been stalling, but Mossop said that to all the girls.

“Please, Mr Mossop, be patient with me!” she pleaded, “You see. . . yesterday morning my husband’s herdsman discovered seventy-nine of his cows locked in a churchyard. They had somehow got in, but then the gate must have slammed shut, trapping them there. My husband thinks the cause was that gale that blew in the night. Anyway, when the herdsman released them two cows were already dead and during the day a further nine cows perished. Why? Why? Why?”

She collapsed in quivering helplessness. Mossop took a fresh bottle of hooch from his drawer, filled a pair of tumblers, and handed her one.

“Looks like you could do with a stiff drink, sister,” he growled, “And I suppose you want me to find out what happened?”

The woman drank the hooch in one gulp and said, “Well, yes, Mr Mossop. On your office door it says ‘Ned Mossop, Cow Detective’. Was it silly of me to think you could help?”

Mossop grinned a wolfish grin.

“Not at all, cherrypie. Twenty groats a day plus expenses, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She delved into her reticule and took out a handful of bent and dented and filthy coinage. Mossop took it and counted it out.

“Velma!” he called, “Get the lady a peasant with a cart to trundle her home.”

*

Later that night, Mossop walked the mean fields, all the way to the churchyard. The gate was swinging loose. He gave it a kick, and made his way among the gravestones. The grasses unloaded their griefs on his feet as if he were God, prickling his ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabited this place. The moon was no door. It was a face in its own right, white as a knuckle and terribly upset. It dragged the sea after it like a dark crime; it was quiet with the O-gape of complete despair. The yew tree pointed up, it had a Gothic shape. His eyes lifted after it and found the moon. The moon was his mother. She was not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloosed small bats and owls. Inside the church, the saints were all blue, floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon saw nothing of this. She was bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree was blackness – blackness and silence. Satisfied, Ned Mossop lit a cigarette and walked out of the churchyard, across the mean fields, as a gale began to blow. He did not shut the gate behind him.

*

“Oh, Mr Mossop! You startled me, trudging uninvited into the cowshed while I am faffing about with mops and pails!”

She was wearing the same black dress and bippety boppety hat and veil.

“Save the dramatics for your husband, sugarplum. I knew all along it was yew.”

“Me? Why, that’s ridiculous!”

“Not you, yew. Yew trees. Your husband’s cows died from yew poisoning. The cows got into the churchyard because the gate was left open. And who left it open? Joel Cairo! But you knew that, didn’t you, pineapple chunk, because you paid him. Only not with this filthy coinage you gave me, which I am throwing into the muck at your feet in a gesture of contempt. No, you paid him in contaminated milk from your husband’s herd. You’re taking the fall.”

And as he spoke, a police car screeched to a halt outside the cowshed.

*

From The Last Englishman : The Life Of J. L. Carr by Byron Rogers (2003):

On 27 October [1967] the Archdeacon wrote again, this time enclosing a letter from Maxwell Elliott, a local farmer. “We have 80 dairy cows grazing regularly in the fields adjoining the church, and we have a continued problem of keeping the churchyard gates closed. On Monday night, Oct 16, one of the gates had been opened some time after 6 pm, and every cow except one spent the night in the graveyard. Our herdsman found them at 6 am with the gate closed on them, presumably by the gale which blew in the night. Two cows were already dead, and altogether 9 died in the course of the day, all proved to be by yew poisoning. There are 3 yew trees in the churchyard.”

Suspicion is a beast with a thousand eyes, but most of them are blind, or colour-blind, or askew, or rolling, or yellow. There is too little respect paid to the good resolutions which are so popular a feature of the New Year. It is a pleasure to see a modern clergyman expressing his horror of the dancing of the moment as Canon Newbolt did in St Paul’s. It is not easy to decide what is the dullest feature in the Tango Teas upon which Londoners are now wasting their afternoons and their silver.

Almost everyone who has committed a murder knows that the business has its tragic side. It is significant of the change that has come over the religious imagination that a number of representative clergymen have issued a manifesto of disbelief in Hell and no heresy-hunt has begun. There has been an increasing demand lately for cheerful books.

There has been a delightful correspondence going on in the Times about Mdlle Gaby Deslys. Surely honest men may thank God they belong to ‘the Stupid Party’! When Mr Churchill referred in Manchester to the piling up of armaments as so much misdirected human energy, he said something with which men of all parties will agree, except those few romantic souls who believe that it is a bracing thing to shed the blood of a foreigner every now and then. There is a cant of Christmas, and there is a cant of anti-Christmas.

It is still the custom in civilised countries for the politicians to call each other names. An amazing story of coincidences appears in the Westminster Gazette. There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than indignation. Mr Galsworthy has been writing to the Times on “the heartlessness of Parliament.” In spite of the progress of civilisation, there are still women to whom the returning Spring is mainly a festival of dresses.

It is easy to imagine the enthusiasm of the audience at Manchester when a black cat walked on to the platform at a meeting of Sir Edward Carson’s. Being shocked is evidently still one of the favourite pastimes of the British people. Father Hugh Benson has been praised for his courage in confessing that he could not read Sir Walter Scott. There is a good deal to be said for Mr Lloyd George’s complaint against the world for its treatment of politicians. It is a remarkable thing that human beings have never yet got reconciled to disaster.

Mr Justice Darling, before passing a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude on Julia Decies for wounding her lover with intent to kill him, made a remark which must interest all students of the morals of murder. It was only the other day that Mr G. A. Birmingham gave us a play about a hoax at the expense of an Irish village, in course of which a statue was erected to an imaginary Irish-American General, the aide-de-camp of the Lord-Lieutenant coming down from Dublin to perform the unveiling ceremony. There does not at first glance seem to be any great similarity between Mr Thomas Hardy and M. Anatole France, the latter of whom has come to London to see how enthusiastically Englishmen can dine when they wish to express their feelings about literature.

It is only now and then, when some great disaster like the sinking of the Empress of Ireland occurs, that man recovers his ancient dread of the sea. The appearance of the first number of Blast ought to put an end to the Futurist movement in England. Mr E. F. Benson has been attacking the critics, and reviving against them the old accusation that they are merely men who have failed in the arts. One of the most unexpected pages in Sir Edward Cook’s Life of Florence Nightingale, is that in which he describes Miss Nightingale, in a phrase Lord Goschen once used about himself, as a “passionate statistician.”

You see? This and that, as promised by my title. There’s never a dull moment at Hooting Yard, is there? Well, I grant that not every one of the above sentences is scintillating, but you never quite knew what was coming next, and if you were yawning your head off at one thing, you likely snapped back to attention soon enough. And think how educative it has been, the this and that. You will have learned several things I bet you did not know before. Next time you are invited to a sophisticated cocktail party and there is a discomfiting lull in the blather, you can pipe up with a titbit about Canon Newbolt’s views on modern dance or the tragic side of murder or black cats or Florence Nightingale the passionate statistician.

This is where I fear I have been going astray in my daily thousandish-word essays. There has been far too much airy persiflage (to borrow a phrase from Mister Nizz) and witterings of questionable or indeed no consequence. Instead I ought to have been writing on superstition, on good resolutions, on the sin of dancing, on thoughts at a tango tea, on the humours of murder, on stupidity and waste and demagogues and coincidences and disasters and the sea and all the other subjects addressed in The Book Of This And That by Robert Lynd, published by Mills & Boon in 1915. What I have given you is the opening sentence from each of the twenty-eight essays in the book, all of which first appeared in the New Statesman. Hard to imagine that clapped-out husk of a magazine being even half-way readable, but that was the past.

We are nearly two thirds of the way through the year and I have managed to keep up my daily quota, but I think as we approach the final few months I need to get my noggin screwed on tight. The time has come for more this and further that, and much, much less of whatever isn’t this and that. Hold on to your hats!

In a piece the other day entitled On Snitby, I mentioned in passing the computer game Demented Virtual Needlework. Several readers have contacted me to ask for further particulars. “Further particulars” indeed. Well, I mean to say! The absolute bloody nerve of some people! Some even demanded that I “furnish further and better particulars” (my italics).

The sheer impertinence of some of my readers is astonishing to behold. I get the impression that they think I sit here, day in day out, tippy-tapping these teeming thousands of words because I have nothing better to do, as if it’s all the same to me whether I prattle on about demented virtual needlework or Snitby or snags or jam tomorrow or a thing of beauty or God or an impromptu dinner party recipe or fubbed pannicles or Tinie Tempah or tin squirrels or an atoll or whatever else springs to mind, so they need merely snap their fingers and say “demented virtual needlework” and I’ll jump to attention and salute and say “Righty ho!” and immediately buckle down to bashing out a thousand words just to keep them happy. Well, it doesn’t quite work like that, buster. There’s a method, and I stick to it, and I shall not be swayed, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my father used to say, though he was not a pipe smoker himself. As I recall he favoured Player’s No, 6, a particularly acrid cigarette to the best of my knowledge.

By which I do not mean to suggest that all my readers are importunate rascals. Far from it. Many of you, I know, would never dream of writing to demand that I provide further and better particulars of anything under the sun. Even if you wished it so, you would not have the gall to ask. You would rather sit sprawled in your hovels patiently waiting to learn what is writ upon the tablets borne down from the Hooting Yard mountain, pathetically grateful, like kicked dogs whimpering for crumbs from the master’s table.

I need hardly add that there is not actually a Hooting Yard mountain. I use the term figuratively. But if there were such a mountain, as in an ideal world there would be, then it would be a mighty Alpine peak, snow-dazzled, its summit invisible, lost in the clouds. And most importantly, I would be the only one ever to set foot on that summit. You lot would be huddled in your flimsy tents somewhere on the slopes, cooking sausages over a stove, melting handfuls of snow into tin cups, tossing bones to the huskies. It may be that I have muddled polar exploration with mountaineering in that happy image, but that is my prerogative and you know better than to carp or cavil. At least I hope you do. And I do not want to be asked to give further and better particulars of that Antarctic or Alpine scene, or my wrath will be as terrible as an army with banners. I would be like Benaiah in Samuel II, chapter 23, verse 20: “And Benaiah the son of Jehoidah, the son of a valiant man, of Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab; he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow”. Don’t think I wouldn’t.

Having said all that, I am aware that there are among my readers a few poor souls who think it perfectly acceptable to spend their leisure time playing so-called “computer games”. Personally, I think they would be better off familiarising themselves with the Old Testament or, if that is too much to ask, then they could at the very least devote themselves to rereading the Hooting Yard Archives, over and over and over again, until they can recite my complete works by heart, word perfect, with every last nuance given its proper weight. That is a practical use of anybody’s time.

But I am, as you know, nothing if not a realist, so I accept that some of you will want to muck about with your bleeping and buzzing hand-held digital brain-sapping gewgaws, your iFads and whatnot. If you are determined to shrivel your brain in such a fashion, then you might as well do so with the absolutely tiptop game Demented Virtual Needlework. The basic idea is that you can do frenzied embroidery without any risk whatsoever of pricking yourself with small pointy metal things like needles and pins. How great is that?

When you start the game, by pressing some sort of knob on your device, or tapping the screen, or whatever the latest thing is, you are presented with a virtual “piece of cloth”, blank and featureless and whatever colour you like, though the default setting is beige. Down one side of the screen are various virtual metal pointy things, and on the other side various virtual skeins of thread. You can mix and match these in numberless combinations, and then the fun begins. You can make the most fantastic and insane needlework designs and you will never need a thimble to protect your dainty fingertips!

We got one of our unpaid and half-starved interns to test it out, and within a few minutes the little orphan had “stitched” a design that looked as if a dog had been sick in a wind tunnel. We snatched the device away from the intern, took a screen-shot, and were then able to use this as a pattern from which real needleworkers, unpaid and half-starved and orphaned like the tester, were forced to create some real embroidery, down in the dimly-lit and fetid cellar. Naturally this was the occasion for much pin-pricking and droplets of blood and weeping, but the end results were superb, and we were able to sell them at extortionate prices at an unregulated bazaar. I think that is what they call, in the lamentable parlance of the day, a “win-win situation”.

It is very close to inevitable, when you are problem-solving, that at some point you will hit a snag. Indeed, if you do not hit a snag, that calls into question whether what you are doing is actually solving a problem, rather than merely going about something you ought to be able to do blindfolded and with your hands tied behind your back. I do not mean that literally. I am trying to suggest an activity that is so familiar and comes so easily that to call it a problem is to do violence to the language. Going out to the newsagent to buy a copy of the Daily Hoo-Hah and a pint of milk, for example, ought not be a problem for most of us. So if that is your idea of problem-solving I think I would laugh in your face, or shove you aside, out of my sight.

Having said that, I suppose it is true that even so simple and unproblematic an activity could be booby-trapped with a snag. You might trip over a clump of tough intractable weeds on your way to the newsagent, for example, and sprain your ankle, forcing you to hobble. Or you might arrive at the newsagent only to discover a hole in your pocket through which your coinage has fallen, and you have no money to pay for the newspaper and the milk. Or who knows what else? But these are properly accidents rather than snags, the kind of snags we bump up against when solving problems.

The snag is, as it were, inherent in the problem. If there were no snag to negotiate, the matter might not be a problem at all, and we could just get on with it, and now I am repeating myself so I had better shut up about non-problems and concentrate on problems.

To illustrate what I am talking about, or trying to talk about, let us take two different problems and consider what sort of snags might crop up.

First, we could say that the most basic type of problem is a simple sum, 1 + 1, for example. This is the kind of problem with which we might be faced when attending infant school. We have to add 1 to 1 and come up with the correct answer. Simple as it is, this little sum might be dubbed the fons et origo of every other sum we might ever attempt, up to and including stupendously complicated calculations in the higher mathematics. It is, in a sense, the ur-sum. Not too many snags there, you might think. But hold on! What if, as an infant, sitting on the infant school bench with your slate and your pointy scraping tool, it is somehow vouchsafed to you that 1 + 1 is indeed the very basis of every other sum you might ever try to solve for as long as you live? That is a dizzying mental prospect! It is enough to befuddle the head of the more sensitive and imaginative infant. Hence the snag. The profound implications of 1 + 1, of all that it might later lead to, could provoke a sort of seizing up of the cranial integuments, a gibbering havoc of the brain. In other words, a snag.

For our second example of a problem let us take something more concrete. Let us say you have embarked upon a project of building a tiny hydroelectric power station using balsa wood and glue and nanotechnology. Everything is going swimmingly, until you realise there is a mismatch between the diagrams on your blueprint and the amount of balsa wood in your box. You are at a loss to see how you might complete the construction until this anomaly is resolved. This, then, is the snag.

It is clear, I hope, from these examples that neither problem is going to be solved successfully until the snags have been addressed. By addressed, I suppose I mean solved. So we can consider each snag like a little problem in itself. It is part of a bigger, overall problem, but the solution to that uber-problem depends entirely on the solution to the mini-problem. How, then, should one go about tackling the mini-problem, or snag? Here are some handy tips.

1. Do not panic. (Actually, there are certain snags where panic is, if not the most sensible response, then certainly an understandable one. Imagine you have hit a snag in disarming a lethal explosive device, and the timer is ticking down to the last few precious seconds. In these circumstances, you might be better off panicking and running away as fast as your little legs will carry you.)

2. Take several deep breaths.

3. Scratch your head and furrow your brow. (Some people also like to let their tongue loll out.)

4. Try to relax your overheated brain. (There are several ways of doing this. President Nixon mashed potatoes. Baruch Spinoza set a pair of spiders to fight each other in mortal combat.)

5. Consider whether you really care enough to solve the problem at all. (This might sound defeatist, and it is, but you would be surprised at how often people get all hot and bothered about things that, in the long term, do not matter one jot.)

6. Smack your forehead with your open palm and press on regardless. (This is the reckless option. Sometimes it works out for the best, sometimes it brings in its wake unparalleled disaster.)

7. Consult an expert. (Somewhere in the world there is an expert in everything. The expert is the kind of person who will take one look at your snag, give a wry chuckle, and solve it, possibly while blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their back. Tracking down the right expert can of course become a problem, or snag, in itself, so what you should do as you make your progress through the world is to buttonhole every person you meet and interrogate them regarding their field(s) of expertise. Keep a note in your jotter, including their contact details. Later, at home, transfer the details from your jotter to a magnificent alphabetical and cross-referenced card index system.)

Next week, we will take a look at pitfalls.

Snitby blubbing on the causeway. A death in the family. The priest is on his way, astride his elegant horse, along the clifftop path. Candles lit in the cottage, and blood on the pillow. The dog is being sick in the gutter. Snitby’s dog, with its corkscrew tail like a pig’s. Call My Bluff on the wireless. Nobody wants to turn it off. Robert Robinson says: cagmag. Nobody is listening. Birds are shrieking in the sky, an impossible blue, not a hint of cloud. Snitby’s tears extinguish his gasper. It is too wet to be relit so he tosses it into the sea. A gull swoops to examine it. The sound of hooves, but it is not the priest, not yet. It will not be the priest at all, today, for the telegram was mistranscribed and he has set off in entirely the wrong direction. He will arrive at Taddy at nightfall and have to be put up at an inn. Here comes the crone with the winding sheet. She has a goitre and clogs. The winding sheet is filthy. Snitby stares at the sea. The gull has flown away into the far distance. It is now a speck. In the cottage, Robert Robinson says: pannicles. There is nobody to hear him, for they have all come out to greet the crone, to kick the dog, to rub its snout in its vomit. It whimpers and scampers to the causeway. Snitby pats its head. A tiny white cloud appears in the sky. A police car screeches to a halt outside the cottage. Snitby scarpers.

Snitby listening to Plastic Ono Band on his iPod.

Snitby sobbing on the jetty. Undone by art. A seaside exhibition of oils by Tarleton. Oil paintings of oily subjects, rigs and slicks and sumps. A terrible beauty. His dog tied to a post outside the galeria. Really an underused seaside civic hall. Snitby overcome with emotion. Here in Taddy where the priest is still holed up in the inn, one or more limbs paralysed. He fell from his elegant horse as it cantered to a halt. A hopeful crone came clutching a winding sheet but he let out a groan and she was sent away. Salt stains on the jetty. Salt in Snitby’s tears. He holds his gasper at arm’s length. Sea sloshes against the wooden posts. Onions on Snitby’s breath. Tarleton dead these many years but still remembered and beloved in Taddy. He was a local boy. Blond and breathless. One leg shorter than the other. Collector of cakestands. Auctioned off. Snitby wanted one but had no cash to speak of. In exile here now and for the future, where the police have no remit. Ancient laws, woolly and medieval, like Snitby himself, after a fashion. In his attic room, the priest’s shutters are shut.

Snitby reading Ruskin’s numbered paragraphs on his Kobo.

Snitby bawling on the pier. The handcuffs chafe. The sergeant has a florid face and a massive moustache. His socks are unwashed and give off a whiff. Klaxons blaring. A pier ventriloquist stuffing his gob with steak and kidney pie while his dummy prates. It is reciting a list of over six hundred birds. Snitby’s face in the sawdust. A couple of teeth loose. Police brutality, but then the sergeant does not suffer fools gladly. Kicks Snitby as an afterthought. Fills out a form with the stub of a pencil. Ten miles along the coast from Taddy, twenty from the causeway. Geographical precision. Pins on a map. The priest an invaluable source of intelligence. One arm now working perfectly, or as near as dammit. Grace abounding. Gruel for his breakfast during Lent. Fish abounding in this resort, but he pushes his plate away with his good hand. The diocese is paying his bill at the inn. Totted up in the innkeeper’s head and nowhere else. Snitby turning to prayer. Mouth full of blood and sawdust. O Lord O Lord why hast Thou forsaken me?

Snitby playing Demented Virtual Needlework on his iPad.

Snitby weeping on the quayside. Tears blurring his vision. He cannot make out the horizon, simply a blank grey blue expanse. Fussing with rosary beads in his pocket. Given up the gaspers for now. Cries of gulls and clanks of tugboats. Foghorns on a clear day. A marching Salvation Army band. Catholicism versus muscular Christianity. It’s an endless battle with no winners. Snitby asked for a nun. He was sure this seaside resort had a convent, right on the harbour. He had his resorts all mixed up. Fifty miles from the causeway on the other side from Taddy. At high speed in a Japanese car with blinking lights and a siren. And motorbike outriders. And two helicopters. Promised a nun on arrival. Not in writing. Snitby’s dog still tied to its post in Taddy. Fawned over by passing widow-women. One will untie it and take it home to a cottage in the woods. It will run away and perish on a railway line beneath a thundering locomotive. The nun will hear about the accident on a nun’s grapevine but decide not to tell Snitby, Snitby in extremis.

Snitby scraping his serial number on his iSlate.

Transportation to shores afar
But the gates of heaven are left ajar
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

O’er the sea to a distant shore
To see your homeland nevermore
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

Snitby jumping overboard.

There will be jam tomorrow. The announcement was made on the front page of The Tinderbox. I was absolutely sure, in my own head, that we had been promised jam today, but I can only conclude that I was wrong. Perhaps this is the first flickering sign of a descent into madness.

The announcement, signed by the Regional Captain of the New Peasant Army, is unequivocal. There will be jam tomorrow, he says, and he goes on to give the locations of kiosks where we can form orderly queues to exchange our coupons for jam. Several different flavours are promised, including raspberry and strawberry and quince. Marmalade will have to wait for another day. Isn’t that always the way?

I decided to reconnoitre the site of my nearest kiosk, on the corner of the square. Shortly after dawn, the square was empty save for birds pecking orts and scantlings. There was no sign of a kiosk of any description. I checked all four corners, even though the announcement in The Tinderbox was clear that it was the north-west corner, where stands the big stone statue of Charles Hawtrey, miraculously undefiled by the roving goon squads of the New Peasant Army. The sculptor omitted the eyes, choosing to have two blank stone discs for the lenses of Hawtrey’s specs. It grants him a weird, blind authority, and I think it may be this that deters the thugs. After all, they lost no time in smashing to smithereens the statue of Eric Sykes in another square in another part of town.

That there was no kiosk did not of course mean there would not be one, on that very spot, tomorrow. It takes no time at all to put up a kiosk, and to pack it with jars of jam. It is likely that the erection of the kiosk will take place in the small hours of the night, when all good citizens are tucked in their beds and their windows shuttered and their radios silenced. Then, at dawn, when the hooters blare, or shortly thereafter, we can make our way to the square and form an orderly queue, those of us who have the necessary coupons.

I am fortunate to have coupons for jam and coupons for marmalade. For safety, I keep them in a concealed cubby locked with several different padlocks, the keys of which I keep on a string tied around my left leg just above the knee. I have a tale at the ready in case I am patted down by one of the patrols. It is not that my coupons are forgeries, and I have every right to them, but in the present climate they are like gold dust, especially the marmalade coupons.

I was there when they smashed up the Eric Sykes statue. I just happened to be passing, and thought it prudent to stop and clap. The wreckers were a gaggle of new recruits, the newest of the New Peasants in the New Peasant Army. I have turned the phrase over and over in my mind, this idea of the “New Peasant”. How does he differ from an Old Peasant, except in his fanaticism? Not that one sees many, or any, old peasants nowadays. Where have they all gone?

When they had finished smashing the statue, I watched them depart, on their way to a rally. They passed close by me, so close I could have touched them, and I was sure I saw, on their moustaches, smears of jam. But how could that be? There was no jam that day, nor the next, nor indeed will there be any jam until tomorrow. So I must have been suffering from a hallucination, another sign of incipient madness.

I have learned to cope with jamless picnics. At first it was hard, so hard, to pack the hamper and to realise that, yes, one had done packing, that was it, there was no jar of jam to cram in at the last minute. Out, then, heaving the hamper along the lane towards the grassy splendour of Hattie Jacques Memorial Field, still there were jam pangs, for the first few picnics at least. Plopping the hamper on the grass I would find myself somehow expecting a jar of jam to appear, miraculously, when I lifted the lid. It took several picnics for this hope to die in me. But die it did.

And now it has been revived. As I said, I thought there was going to be jam today. I am sure that was what was announced in yesterday’s Tinderbox. In my mind’s eye I can still see it, big bold black block capitals, accompanied by a cut-out-‘n’-keep mezzotint of the Regional Captain, his face grim yet puckish, his specs glinting, his moustache fabulous. Was that merely another hallucination? I would be tempted to go to the clinic, had the clinic not been burned to the ground by a gang of Old Peasants.

The gang was still at large, and we were warned to be on our guard. In a further depredation, they had stolen a consignment of jam destined for our kiosks. At a rally, I bawled my undying hatred of them along with everyone else. But truthfully, there was no real hatred in my heart. They were welcome to the jam, as far as I was concerned. By then I had grown so used to my jamless picnics that I could barely imagine a picnic with jam.

But then came the announcements in The Tinderbox. Not every day, but often enough to raise my hopes, to have me salivating. Once more it became a trial to pack the hamper. Once more my mind played tricks as I headed along the lane towards the field. The stone statue of Hattie Jacques gazed kindly upon me as I chewed my dry husks of bread and slurped my brackish water, as if she too were saying, “Buck up! Buck up! For there will be jam tomorrow!”