First, to be comparatively small. Secondly, to be smooth. Thirdly, to have a variety in the direction of the parts; but fourthly, to have those parts not angular, but melted as it were into each other. Fifthly, to be of a delicate frame, without any remarkable appearance of strength. Sixthly, to have its colours clear and bright; but not very strong and glaring. Seventhly, or if it should have any glaring colour, to have it diversified with others.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

First, it was small. In fact it was tiny. And I made it seem even tinier than it actually was by placing it next to some pretty big things. If I had surrounded it with, say, lemons or pin-cushions, it would still have been tiny but it would hold its own, as it were, among such fruit ‘n’ cloth. So in order to emphasise, even to exaggerate, its tininess, I swept away all the scattered lemons and pin-cushions and in their place I put a couple of life-size papier maché models of cows and an industrial washing machine. I could of course have left the lemons and pin-cushions where they were, and simply removed the tiny thing and found a new home for it. That would have saved time. But I had time on my hands, since the fall of the regime. Also, I could now squeeze all the lemons and stick pins in all the pin-cushions, in other words, make use of them, instead of leaving them scattered about, pointlessly. Heaving the papier maché cows and the washing machine into place took the wind out of me, so I went to have a lie down. I turned the volume down on the radio, which was playing stirring and patriotic anthems, and I dozed.

Secondly, it was smooth. It was not smooth to begin with, but when I woke from my nap I fetched some sandpaper from my sandpaper-crammed desk drawer and rubbed away at the thing, smoothing all the rough edges. Offhand, I cannot recall what grade of sandpaper I used, but I made a note of it at the time, in my jotter, with my propelling-pencil, in case it ever cropped up as a matter of concern during an interrogation. But it never did, and eventually I cast the jotter into a furnace. I suspect I shall regret having done so, one of these days, but not yet, not yet, fingers crossed.

Thirdly, it had variety in the direction of the parts. Some parts of it pointed one way, some another, and some in still other directions. That makes it sound complicated, but it wasn’t. And to say the parts “pointed” might suggest they were pointy parts, but they weren’t, at least not after I had sanded them down with the grade [whatever] sandpaper. I say they “pointed” in a direction when I suppose what I ought more correctly say is that the different parts “faced” in different directions, or that, depending on where you were when you cast your eyes upon it, you would see different aspects of it. Much like any other solid object, really, in this solid world.

Fourthly, on that mistaken idea of pointiness, I should stress that not only was it not at all pointy but that its various parts looked as if they were melted into each other. This is hardly surprising. After my nap, and my bout of sandpapering, I fetched a blowtorch from the janitor’s cupboard and lit it and aimed it at the tiny thing. The heat was terrific, much as I believe in my heart of hearts the fires of hell to be, and it took less than a minute for parts of the thing to melt pleasingly into one another. Unfortunately, my blowtorch technique was somewhat slapdash, and I inadvertently set fire to one of the papier maché cows. The resulting blaze brought a goon squad galumphing through my door, but fortunately my papers were in order. I have to acknowledge their help in extinguishing the cow before it was too badly damaged.

Fifthly, it was very delicate, particularly after all that sanding and blasting with a blowtorch. In fact I became worried that it would fall to bits. That is why I put the industrial washing machine between it and the window where the draught gets in. Even a mild sudden gust might shatter it, it was so delicate! I resolved to obtain one of those draught excluder sausages when next I had the necessary coupons and pass. I suppose I could have run one up myself, possibly by stitching all the pin-cushions end to end to form a sausage, but quite frankly the prospect unnerved me. I am too timid to risk illegal needlework under the current regime.

Sixthly, its colours were clear and bright without being strong and glaring. Initially it was a sort of dull dun beige, but after my nap and the sanding and the blasting with a blowtorch and the visit from the goon squad and the extinguishing of the papier maché cow I gave it a lick of paint. A dab of yellow and a dab of red and a sort of wash of lilac or lavender. The colours had a very pleasing effect. Because it was such a tiny thing I used a very small paintbrush, and painted with care. After the hullabaloo with the blowtorch, I did not want to risk splattering paint all over the place, over the cows and the industrial washing machine. So I devoted several hours to that, until the pips on the radio indicated it was time for the night rally in the field behind the viaduct.

Seventhly, because the red and yellow dabs stood out in a vaguely glaring way from the overall lilac or lavender wash, I got a damp cloth from the janitor’s cupboard and smudged them a bit, so the colours sort of shaded one into another. But that had to wait until I got home from the night rally, dog tired and hoarse from shouting my undying hatred of the previous regime.

It was only after reading Edmund Burke I realised that there, between the papier maché cows and the industrial washing machine, I had a tiny [illegible] of unsurpassed beauty. I pray that it will not be confiscated by the peasant army.

In ages past, God was our help. He was also thought to be our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home. More recently, we were told that He was a concept by which we measure our pain. I’ll say that again. We were told that God was a concept by which we measure our pain. We were told this, however, by a drug-bedizened whiny-voiced Liverpudlian who told us many other things, such as that he was a walrus sitting on a cornflake. I think we can safely discard his witterings.

In Russian, God is known as Bog. It is well worth knowing this preparatory to reading any abstruse theological texts you may be tempted to tackle. For example, you might pluck from the shelf a fat tome the title of which promises to tell you all about God, when in fact it is a geographical survey of certain bogs. Conversely, if it so happens that you want to read up on bogs, you may become brain-dizzy trying to plough your way through the ineffable. Very few, if any, bogs are ineffable. They are, rather, a brute reality, an assertion you can easily test by donning a pair of wellington boots and trudging into one.

Can one, similarly, trudge into God? The answer to that, surprisingly, is “Yes!”, at least if we accept the argument of Digby Thew’s new paperback Trudging Into God. The esteemed geographer claims he did just that, a couple of years ago, while out on a hike. Though I have just noticed that the copy of the book sent to me for review is a translation from the Russian, and it may be one of those slapdash translations we hear so much about in the online journal Slapdash Translations & Confusion Regarding Theology And Geography. Incidentally, if you have never visited the site, I recommend it highly, though I know how difficult it can be to tear yourself away from Hooting Yard. I must say I wondered what Digby Thew was doing writing a book about God, when all his previously published works have been on the subject of bogs, ditches, puddles, marshes, mires, swamps, and other muddy wet places dotted about the earth.

God is to be found in such places, of course, for He is ubiquitous. Or almost ubiquitous. Let us not forget that there are quite a few so-called godforsaken places, certain dilapidated and ill-starred seaside resorts, from which God has fled. The poet Dennis Beerpint has been called the laureate of godforsaken seaside resorts, deservedly so, for penning lines such as:

I stood, at dawn, upon the collapsing pier
And I gave Lord God a flea in his ear
I shouted wild blasphemies at the sky
Upon the collapsing pier at Exe-on-Wye

Exe-on-Wye is a sort of generic dilapidated and godforsaken seaside resort invented by Beerpint, or possibly nicked from Vivian Darkbloom. It is based on the real resort of Innsmouth, which, oddly, is a town of no fewer than eleven churches. All of them are of course in various states of ruin, populated by bats and owls and crows rather than by the pious faithful.

Neither bats nor owls nor crows have need of God, save for their creation, but God Himself often assumes the corporeal form of a bat or an owl or a crow. One of my favourite Gods is the crow-God Cark! (always spelled with an exclamation mark), worshipped by the tinies at Pang Hill Orphanage. Some would hold that Cark! himself is a blasphemy, and in no way related to the real God Almighty, Lord of Hosts, but if ever you have witnessed the orphanage tinies trembling and bowing down in veneration of him you will almost certainly have trembled and bowed down in veneration on your own account, for truly he is fearsome and his fury is as the sort of stormy blast that God our help in ages past provides shelter from. I am tying myself in theological knots.

That is the thing with theology, it is so difficult to get a proper grasp of it. No doubt Digby Thew considered this when deciding whether to devote himself to the study of God or the study of bogs.

“What is it to be, young Digby?” asked his pedagogue when Digby Thew was young, “God or bogs?”

Luckily, young Digby did not know Russian, or he might have become hopelessly confused. As it was, he was uncertain which choice to make, and so he spent forty days and nights in the wilderness wrestling with his soul. It was the sort of outdoor activity encouraged by the institution where he received his education. Legend has it that God appeared to Digby Thew on his thirty-ninth night in the wilderness, though what passed between them is unknown. It is surely pertinent that the part of the wilderness where Digby Thew spent his time was a bog-riddled wilderness, though it was also rife with bats and owls and crows. It was also near the seaside.

As John Lydon among others has pointed out, God spelled backwards is dog. It is hard to think of a being less like God than a dog, especially one of those small yappy ones. Thereagain, we have it on good authority that God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, so who knows if that dismal little dog yapping at one’s heels as one trudges o’er the moors towards the marshes and the bogs is not God Himself? There might be a divine message in the yapping, if only one could decipher it. On the other hand, if one did devote time and energy and one’s very sanity to translating the yaps into coherent sentences, and the dog turned out to be just a dog, and no God at all, one would be a benighted fool.

Being a fool is of course no barrier to approaching God. Quite the opposite, if we are to believe some theologians. And of course the Holy Fool, the idiot peasant of mysterious sanctity, is a staple character of Mother Russia. Which brings us back to Bog, which, spelled backwards, is not dog but gob. Do you know what I am going to do now? I am going to shut my gob.

If I am to take my bulging postbag as a reliable guide, one of the issues which most taxes the contemporary Hooting Yardist is the impromptu dinner party. Here is a letter received from reader Tim Thurn, which is all too typical of the sort of thing I have to contend with:

All hail Mr Key! Like you, I am a Diogenesian recluse. I shun not merely the hoi polloi but pretty much everyone else as well. So you can imagine how taxing it is upon my poor curdled neurasthenic constitution when, more often than I can bear, there comes of an evening an urgent hammering at the door, which I open to reveal a gaggle of persons seeking succour.

“Hello Tim me old mucker!” one of them will cry, loud with bonhomie, “We thought we’d pop in for a chinwag and a bite to eat!”

This is what passes for good manners in our barbarous age. What is happening is that a vague acquaintance whom I may recall having bumped into once or twice takes it upon himself to barge in, accompanied by a raggle-taggle band of indigents, wastrels, and rascals. They disport themselves about my home, as if invited, and I am placed in the position of having to cobble together an impromptu dinner party.

Why, you might ask, do I not simply shove them out of the door with curses and imprecations and, if necessary, fisticuffs? Well, Mr Key, I was well-brought up, and taught always to be polite, and to avoid scenes. Thus I feel compelled to provide what hospitality I can. My question to you is, would you happen to know of a suitable recipe for such an occasion?

Yours until the cows come home, Tim Thurn.

It seems Mr Thurn is not the only Hooting Yardist who is plagued by sudden influxes of uninvited dinner party guests. As I say, this sort of inquiry is all too common. Quite frankly, I am sick to death of penning individual replies to these correspondents, so today, in the hope that I can staunch the flow of letters, I have decided to post a recipe. It is for a toothsome and filling meal, prepared from staple ingredients, which can be knocked together to feed just about anybody who comes crashing through your door.

You will need : a packet of Weetabix, a loaf of bread, and a bag of croutons.

First, remove all the outer packaging from the Weetabix. Then remove any inner packaging. You should have six, twelve, eighteen, or God knows how many pieces of Weetabix arrayed upon your countertop. Place the whole lot in a large bowl, and smash them to bits. You can use a hammer, or a crusher, or a similar implement. Just make sure that in smashing the Weetabix you do not also smash the bowl, or you are going to have an awful mess to clean up. By the time you are finished you should have a bowl full of tiny powdery Weetabix smithereens. Put this to one side.

Next, take the loaf of bread. It does not matter what kind of bread it is. Get another bowl out of the cupboard. Now, tear the loaf to pieces, letting the bits fall into the bowl. Keep tearing and ripping and rending until you have a bowl full of breadcrumbs. If you have some kind of electrically-powered mincing contraption, you might instead just want to feed the loaf into that. Either way, the end result should be a bowl full of breadcrumbs. Put this to one side.

Now take another bowl out of the cupboard, open the bag of croutons, and tip the entire contents into the bowl. Put this to one side. You will note that I recommend buying readymade croutons rather than making your own. I am trying to save your time, and in any case it is very doubtful that any of the indigents, wastrels, and rascals will notice the difference. In the event that there are any sniffy crouton wankers among your uninvited guests, chuck the telltale bag into the bin along with the Weetabix packaging. There is always the possibility – indeed, the likelihood – that some of the indigents, wastrels, and rascals will go rummaging through your bin, so it is a good idea to cover over the Weetabix and crouton packaging with cagmag. A favourite word of W H Auden’s, cagmag is defined in the OED as “unwholesome, decayed, or loathsome meat; offal ; hence anything worthless or rubbishy”. Clearly the more unwholesome, decayed, and loathsome your cagmag the better, as it should deter even the most indefatigable bin-rummager.

Wipe the cagmag off your hands and return your attention to those three bowls. Get another, bigger bowl out of the cupboard. Tip the crushed Weetabix, the breadcrumbs, and the croutons together into this bowl, and stir. Stir! Stir! Stir! Stir until the ingredients are thoroughly intermixed.

Can be served hot or cold. Add a sprig of parsley for colour.

When I have served this dish, I have usually neglected to provide my guests with any cutlery. They are thus forced to shovel it into their mouths using their fingers. It is also a good idea not to have any beverages in the house, and to cut off the water supply at the mains.

In the event of Weetabix shortages, a perfect substitute is Shredded Wheat.

It was a dark and stormy night. Off the Kentish Knock, on the wild and churning waters, the HMS Wither Art? was being tossed about like so much flotsam. The ship’s captain, Captain Plunkett, was all too aware that it was here off the Kentish Knock on a similarly dark and stormy night in 1875 that the SS Deutschland had been wrecked, and five Franciscan nuns, including a peculiarly tall one, had suffered death by drowning. Captain Plunkett had no Franciscan nuns aboard his ship, unless there were stowaways of whose presence he was ignorant, but well he knew the HMS Wither Art? was in equal danger of wreckage on so dark and stormy a night. It would take all his mastery of the nautical arts to bring the ship and its crew safely through to dawn, and port.

Clinging to the wheel, he cried out for the first mate, First Mate Hoon. Weedy and neurasthenic yet impossibly valiant, Hoon came staggering on to the bridge. He was sopping wet, drenched by both the teeming rain and by sloshing seawater.

“Hoon!” yelled the captain over the howling gale, “It has suddenly occurred to me that we may have stowaways aboard of whom I am ignorant, nuns, Franciscan nuns, hiding in the pannicles! Detail a detail of deckhands to search every last inch!”

“Aye aye, captain!” yelled Hoon, “But I’ve just had a report over the ructive hooter from the princox that the pannicles are fubbed!”

Captain Plunkett took one hand off the wheel, curled it into a sort of perch, turned it towards his head, and bent forward, resting his mouth and chin on his hand, striking an attitude almost identical to Rodin’s Thinker. He was thinking. He was thinking how it could have happened, on his watch, that the pannicles had been fubbed. He was thinking how it had come about that he had not heard the princox’s message over the ructive hooter. He was thinking that he had completely forgotten the name of the princox. And he was thinking that, if there were any stowaway Franciscan nuns hiding in the pannicles of the HMS Wither Art?, then they would surely have been carked by the fubbing. When he had finished thinking, he lifted his head, put his hand back to the wheel, and cried aloud again to Hoon.

“Hoon! Scrub that last command to detail a detail of deckhands!”

“Aye aye, captain! I have obliterated it from my brain so rapidly and thoroughly that already I have forgotten to what the word ‘it’ refers!”

The wind continued to howl and rage, the rain to teem, the sea to slosh, and the storm to toss the ship upon the waters.

“Hoon!” cried the captain, “What is the princox’s name?”

“I know him only as Alan,” shouted the first mate, “As in Ladd or Whicker or Freeman, known as Fluff.”

“The princox is called Fluff?” cried Captain Plunkett.

“Aye, captain, by those of the crew who are radio enthusiasts.”

“Detail Fluff to man the diaphanes, Hoon!”

“Aye aye, captain!”.

And Hoon left the bridge, staggering below decks in search of the princox. The storm did not abate. The captain struggled manfully with the wheel. His head was now empty of thought. He was engaged in an elemental battle, man versus sea, or man versus storm, or better, perhaps, man versus stormy sea.

Meanwhile, on one of the decks, poop or orlop, one of the girandoles had been torn loose from its cantilene and was clattering about perilously. First mate Hoon, making his slow unsteady way to the princox’s nest, saw what had happened and realised he had to make an instant decision. There was no time to think. He could not afford to curl one hand into a sort of perch, turn it towards his head, and bend forward, resting his mouth and chin on his hand, striking an attitude almost identical to Rodin’s Thinker. He staggered back to the bridge.

“Captain Plunkett!” he screamed, “One of the girandoles has been torn loose from its cantilene and is clattering about perilously on the poop or orlop deck!”

“Where is Fluff the princox?” cried the captain.

“Still in his nest I expect,” yelled Hoon, “For when I saw that one of the girandoles had been torn loose from its cantilene and was clattering about perilously on the poop or orlop deck, I made an instant decision to tell you about it as soon as I possibly could!”

“You should have used the ructive hooter!” cried Captain Plunkett.

“Believe me, captain, I would have done had you heard the ructive hooter message regarding the fubbed pannicles. But you did not, and I dared not risk that a second ructive hooter message would go unheard by you!”

“That shows good seamanship, Hoon,” cried the captain, “Let me pin a golden star to your cap.”

“Thank you, captain. I appreciate such recognition, it compensates for the lack of pay and the worm-riddled biscuits.”

And all of a sudden there was a lull in the storm, and the captain and the first mate looked up at the stars in the sky. For a few precious moments, the HMS Wither Art? was safe upon the sea. And down below in the pannicles, the sudden calm prompted five stowaway Franciscan nuns of whose presence Captain Plunkett was ignorant, one peculiarly tall, to pop their heads out from the rickety fiscs wherein they were hiding, and to sing a hymn of thanks to Almighty God, that He had delivered them from the fubbing.

Long ago, on New Year’s Day, I began this series of essays with a piece on perpilocution, that is, the art of expounding upon a subject of which one knows little or nothing. The original plan was to write, daily, about things of which I was wholly ignorant. I have veered away from this intention more often than not, but today I wish to return to it by devoting a thousand(ish) words to Tinie Tempah.

Let me begin by stating what I do know about Mr Tempah. (1) He is some kind of musical turn, (2) he is apparently due to perform in tonight’s Olympic Games Closing Ceremony, and (3) he cannot, or chooses not to, spell his name correctly.

In the latter case it is difficult to know if the misspelling is deliberate or not. I assume Mr Tempah is of an age where his teachers’ best efforts went into bolstering his self-esteem and awareness of diversity rather than in inculcating such minor matters as basic literacy.

My understanding of the Closing Ceremony is that it will feature “a celebration of British music”, which presumably explains Mr Tempah’s involvement. I would have thought Purcell, Elgar, Delius and the glorious Benjamin Britten would have provided the proper content for such a celebration, but what do I know? I am just a reactionary old fuddy-duddy. I fear our friend Tinie may be a “rapper”, and my spirits sink, for rap of course is not music, nor poetry, but barbarism. You can quote me on that, should you wish to.

And what of Tinie Tempah himself? Is he tiny? Does he have a temper? I have no idea of the correct answer to either of those questions. I find myself trying to gain an idea of him, and turn to The New Republic (1877) by W H Mallock, in which the art critic Walter Pater appears in the guise of Mr Rose:

a pale creature, with large moustache, looking out of the window at the sunset . . . he always speaks in an undertone, and his two topics are self-indulgence and art.

This, I suggest, might almost be the Anti-Tinie Tempah of my imagination. “Almost”, because the actual Tinie probably does babble on about self-indulgence.

Walter Pater : The Anti-Tinie Tempah

It is also possible that Tinie Tempah could look out of the window at the sunset, but his ability to do so rather depends on just how tiny he is. If he is a dwarf or a midget I suppose the aid of a stool or some cushions would suffice, but perhaps he is tinier than that. He may be as tiny as a homunculus, in which case he would have to be placed on the windowsill, or be furnished with a little ladder to enable him to clamber up to the windowsill of his own accord.

I have to say that the idea of an ill-tempered homunculus is a rather frightening one, something from a child’s nightmare. Have the organisers of the Closing Ceremony thought about that? I suppose the sting of terror might be drawn by having Tinie perch on the shoulder of an affable buffoon like Boris Johnson, who will no doubt also be on the bill. Mr Johnson might drown out the high-pitched bad-tempered shrieking of Mr Tempah by intoning some Latin at him, which would provide an amusing double act.

Without knowing for sure how tiny Tinie is, it is hard to envisage him as a child, in other words as tiny Tinie Tempah. He must have been a mere speck, almost invisible. Perhaps that is how his temper developed. He would be wailing and screeching for his porridge or his fluffy toy rabbit, and Mr Tempah senior and Mrs Tempah would be gazing around in search for him, wondering where on earth he was. That kind of thing happening day after day would curdle even the most equable tot’s temperament. I suspect eventually his parents resolved to keep him in one particular place, such as the windowsill, which is where he would have learned the habit of staring at the sunset. But they clearly left it too late to curb his temper.

The misspelling of his name leads to an alternative possibility. It may be that Tinie does not mean tiny at all, but tinny. Perhaps Mr Tempah is a fully-grown average-sized person who does not need to be hoisted on to a windowsill in order to stare at the sunset. He may give vent to his temper by bashing tins. If so, this might be quite a refreshing element of the Closing Ceremony. Much as I am of the view that a celebration of British music could happily be confined to Purcell and Elgar and Delius and Britten, I am not averse to a bit of improv percussive racket. If Tinie Tempah is indeed Tinny Temper, then I shall look forward to his tin-bashing, if he promises to keep his gob shut and refrain from the rappy stuff.

There is always the possibility that there could be a last minute change to the Ceremony. The music, whatever music – or barbarity – it is, could be ditched altogether. Instead Boris Johnson could stand on a dais, perhaps with a glistening wet otter draped around his shoulders, and read passages such as this, from G K Chesterton:

A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Men of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bulls’ blood, as did Julian the Apostate.

I suspect Tinie Tempah, too, bathes in hot bulls’ blood, though I have no evidence that this is so.

Mr Key’s brain is entirely empty today, so here is a piece which previously appeared in December 2007.

There is a toyshop I know of where they sell toy squirrels made of tin. I do not mean the sort of clockwork toy tin squirrels you probably had when you were a tot, the ones you wound up and set down and that then skittered haphazardly across the floor before crashing into the wainscot. No, the toys of which I speak are tin squirrels plain and simple, with no clockwork mechanisms nor moving parts. They do not skitter. They come in a variety of sizes, the smallest being about the size of a leaf-cutter ant and the most enormous roughly on a par with a squirrel-shaped variant of a double-decker bus.

There are countless ways of having fun with a tin squirrel. You can place it in a crate and cover it with shredded newspaper or excelsior and pretend that it is hibernating. When you want to bring the hibernation to an end, you can point the beam of an anglepoise lamp at the crate, to mimic that mighty orb worshipped by the islanders in The Wicker Man, and bring your tin squirrel blinking into the light. Being a toy of tin, your squirrel will not actually blink, but with the power of your mind you can imagine that it does. If your mind lacks the power to summon up this simple fancy, it is a good idea, before switching on the anglepoise lamp, to do a brain exercise specifically designed to increase the imaginative faculties. You will need to be familiar with the song Imagine, written and performed by John Lennon, the man memorably described by Kenneth Williams as “that Beatle who got married to an Asiatic woman”, although Williams initially confused him with Ringo Starr. Actually, you need only know the tune, to which you should sing the following words:

Imagine there’s a squirrel
A squirrel made of tin
It’s in a crate of newspaper
Hibernating
Imagine you unpack it
And place it in the light
Imagine it is blinking
If it wasn’t made of tin it might

In nature, hibernating creatures emerge due to an increase in temperature rather than to sunlight, but we are talking here about a tin squirrel in a crate in your living room, so some license is allowed, unless you are happy to turn your heating off for as long as the tin toy remains packed in newspaper.

Another thing you can do with your squirrel is to tap it with your fingernails to elicit a tinny sound. If you have bitten fingernails, this may not be such an easily-achieved pleasure, so you may wish to experiment by tapping the toy with different utensils, such as a spoon or a fork or a whisk.

Real squirrels, ones not made of tin, are noted for their devotion to nuts of all kinds, and you can entertain the family by creating a tableau. Place your tin toy on, say, a windowsill, and attach some twigs and leaves to the window with sticky putty. Then scatter some nuts around your squirrel. It doesn’t much matter whether they are hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, or macadamia nuts, or indeed whatever nuts you happen to have bags of in your cupboard. Just cast them upon the windowsill, and gasp as a scene from the savage world of nature comes to life before your eyes.

Speaking of savagery, it may amuse you to set a predator upon your tin squirrel. Owls are particularly fond of sinking their fearsome talons into real squirrels and ripping them to pieces, but no owl I am aware of is likely to take the slightest interest in a squirrel made of tin, for reasons I hope are too obvious to need pointing out, particularly if you have been doing that recommended brain exercise, which ought to have pepped up the buzz and spark inside your cranium. A tin squirrel would be the quarry of a tin owl, so you will need to go to a toyshop that sells such a thing. If you have difficulty finding one, you can always fashion a toy owl out of a used baked bean tin, by bashing it into shape with a hammer and giving it the appearance of an owl with modelling paints or decoupage. Clearly it will only make a believable tin predator if your toy squirrel is one of the smaller ones available. If you splashed out on the double-decker bus-sized tin squirrel you would be advised not to attempt to have it preyed upon by a tin owl, unless you have access to a scrap metal merchant and are skilled in the shaping of large amounts of tin into birdlike shapes.

For more ideas on having fun with your tin squirrel, rummage through your local secondhand bookshop and see if you can find a copy of Dobson’s pamphlet How I Conquered My Fear Of Googie Withers, Together With A Few Tips On The Limitless Possibilities For Entertainment Afforded By A Toy Squirrel Made Of Tin (out of print).

Marking the death of Robert Hughes yesterday, there were dozens of quotations I could have used, and I chose the one about the Inner Child and the Inner Adult more or less at random. It is a fine example of what Michael McNay in his Grauniad obituary calls Hughes’ talent for “[an] epigrammatic judgment that condenses deep truths”. It was a fortuitous choice, for it prompted Outa_Spaceman to bring to my attention another Inner Being of which I was previously unaware, the Inner Chimp.

The Inner Chimp seems to reside mainly within Outer Cyclists – or, as I tend to call them as they hurtle towards me on the London pavements, bike wankers. Outa_Spaceman supplied this intriguing extract from a 2009 Grauniad article:

In his absorbing and often riveting new book, [Mark] Cavendish trashes the contribution of some former leading members of British cycling – in particular, Simon Jones, acclaimed as the UK’s coach of the year after the 2004 Olympics. “He was a dickhead and all their scientific analysis of riders is complete bollocks when it comes to me. They kept telling me I wasn’t hitting the numbers but look what’s happened since. I couldn’t give a fuck about Simon Jones.”

With more warmth, he describes [Dave] Brailsford, the feted performance director of British cycling, as “a media darling”. He is also amused at the way in which Britain’s Olympic gold-medal winning track cyclists are so heavily reliant on the sports psychologist Steve Peters – who has done so much to ease the often tortured psyches of Wiggins and Victoria Pendleton, and even Chris Hoy. “I like Steve. But all that stuff about ‘taming your inner chimp [of negative thought]’ is hilarious.”

I looked up Dave Brailsford on the Wikipedia and learned that he is the son of an Alpine mountain guide. This is no doubt extremely pertinent to his discovery of the Inner Chimp, though in ways I have not yet been able to pinpoint. Chimps do not, after all, hang about in the snow white Alps. Yet I sense a tantalising connection there, between the tiny Brailsford plodding in his Papa’s footsteps o’er the the Alps and his adult conviction that cyclists are prey to their Inner Chimp. When I have worked out the cast iron link between the two, I will let you know.

Meanwhile, forgetting all about the Alps for the time being, it is worth considering the Inner Chimp in and of itself. I would like to know if it lurks within all of us, whether or not we are bike wankers. I myself am a militant pedestrian, though I share Rayner Heppenstall’s puzzlement at the need for a separate word to designate those of us who use the basic form of human locomotion. But I am now wondering if, whenever I walk from A to B, or from Haemoglobin Towers to Nameless Pond, I have an Inner Chimp struggling to assert itself. I would be interested to discover how it would make itself known.

There is a clue, perhaps, in the reference to the “often tortured psyches” of Bradley Wiggins and Victoria Pendleton. From my scant viewing of the Olympics hoo-hah, I would say that the latter does look rather highly strung, in a mad-woman-in-the-attic way, but Wiggins seems a far more relaxed character. But if Brailsford is to be believed, both of them have an Inner Chimp, which explains their tortured psyches. I am fairly sure my own psyche would be tortured if, as soon as I set out on foot somewhere, my Inner Chimp started jabbering for attention and threatened to become an Outer Chimp. I would run for the hills, if not the Alps. Though perhaps that is what the Inner Chimp would want me to do. This is devilishly complicated stuff.

It also leads me to wonder if chimpanzees themselves have an inner bike wanker. Next time I go the zoological gardens I am going to study the chimps very very carefully for telltale signs. What those signs might be I do not yet know, but I suspect I will find out if, for example, I flash a red light at the chimps and they are thereby compelled to rush towards it at inhuman speed, scattering adults and children and guide dogs and puppies and indeed any innocent life-form that gets in their way.

The other animal we have mentioned with an Olympic connection is the otter. What, I wonder, does Brailsford, or indeed Cavendish or Pendleton or Wiggins have to say on the subject of the Inner Otter? Cycling and beach volleyball are of course two different sports, and there is no reason to think that Inner Animals cross over from one to the other. But if the world of Inner Animals is as rich in variety and unfathomable weirdness as the world of actual, Outer Animals, it would not be surprising if there were instances of cyclists with Inner Otters, otters with Inner Chimps, chimps with Inner Cyclists, and Lord knows what other combinations.

Personally, I am looking forward to the day when everyone gives free rein to their Inner Pedestrian. Actually, strike that. Given that much of the population appears to be savage and barbaric, the ideal thing would be for most of them to unleash their Inner Stay-Indoors-And-Read-Morally-Uplifting-And-Improving-Literature-By-Candlelight Persons. Then I could happily walk from A to B and from Haemoglobin Towers to Nameless Pond without having my progress blighted by either bike wankers or shambling gits. Oh happy day!, in the unlikely event it ever dawns.

Over the weekend I watched a modicum of Olympickery on the box. One thing that struck me was that I counted no fewer than three separate competitors, in three separate disciplines, each of whom, the commentators informed me, was nicknamed “The Beast”. Clearly when you are an aspiring athlete determined to strike fear into your rivals, giving yourself an air of bestiality is a popular option. Yet none of these self-styled Beasts seemed to me as bestial as one particular Hungarian hammer-thrower, not nicknamed The Beast, who made great savage roaring noises. What was impressive was that he was perfectly silent while spinning around readying himself to launch the hammer on its flight, and only when he had let go and launched it did he stand and roar. And what a roar! I thought I was listening to the Grunty Man, that monster of legend who terrifies the tinies.

It made me wonder if there is not something a little pathetic about these far less bestial athletes calling themselves The Beast, as if they are trying desperately to compensate for the fact that, after all, they just run or jump or swim or whatever it is they were doing. I was reminded of Aleister Crowley, another man who liked to be known as The Beast, though the reality was somewhat less impressive. As Phil Baker tells us in his 2011 biography of Austin Osman Spare,

If the press notices [of Spare’s first West End gallery show] were calculated to put many visitors off, there was something about them that would prove positively attractive to a few. Among them was the so-called Wickedest Man in the World, the self-styled Beast 666; and so it was that Aleister Crowley came striding through the door of number 13 Bruton Street, grandly announcing himself to the shy and awkward artist as the “Vicegerent of God upon Earth” . . . Spare thought he looked more like “an Italian ponce out of work”, or so he told a friend years later. Perhaps with the benefit of four decades of hindsight, he said this was what he had told Crowley at the time.

In fairness, as far as I recall none of the Olympic Beasts looked like out-of-work Italian ponces, though I wasn’t paying complete attention. I was listening more than I was watching, my ears pricked up for the ever more baroque turns of phrase of the commentators. There are the ones seeking to explain to the dimwit the less familiar sports, and those trying to find new or different superlatives. What I found most intriguing were the experts seeking to tell us, before an event, what a particular athlete needed to do to win a gold medal. At no point did they ever say of a runner that “he needs to run faster than anyone else”, or of a thrower that “she needs to throw it further than anyone else”, which would have been my understanding. Apparently it is all much more complicated than that.

The commentators have certainly been excelling themselves, and I really ought to have had pen and paper at hand to jot down some of their more memorable utterances, though at one point all I could hear was the word “unbelievable” being bandied about by all and sundry. I do think it is a pity that the BBC did not think to engage Boris Johnson as a sort of roving commentator on all events. His line that the women beach volleyball players were “glistening like wet otters” is unlikely to be bettered by any of the experts.

Speaking of otters, I was interested to learn that otter-chasing was one of the planned events at the first modern Olympiad in 1896, and that the Grunty Man was going to be one of the competitors. The idea was that he would be lured out of his filthy dark dank lair with nuts and biscuits, and then turned loose in riverbank vegetation to scurry and splash in pursuit of several otters. It is not entirely clear who the Grunty Man would have been competing against, and this may be one reason why the event was dropped at the last minute. It is also likely that Baron de Coubertin, instigator of the modern Games, was worried about what would happen to the otters if the Grunty Man managed to catch up with them and grab them with his great hairy paws. The sight of otters ripped to pieces by the Grunty Man’s fierce razor-sharp claws was not, apparently, the sort of image the Baron wanted the Olympics to project. I must say that was a bit namby-pamby of him, especially as, back in 1896, any photographs would have been in black and white, and rather grainy, so it is not as if the newspapers would have been filled with full colour snapshots of bright red otters’ blood. In any case, there was no guarantee that the Grunty Man would actually catch them, as he may well have been diverted by some other claim on his attention, such as a nest of birds or a boy scout encampment or a hydroelectric power station.

I wrote to Sebastian Coe a few months ago to ask him if the Grunty Man chasing otters could be a feature of London 2012. If not an official event, I thought it could be part of – or even replace entirely – the Opening Ceremony. I got a reply from his fixer telling me Coe was too busy with his bouts of Graeco-Roman wrestling with William Hague in the gymnasium at the Houses of Parliament to attend to my query. I am surprised that Coe and Hague engaged in a naked wrestling match, perhaps by firelight, like Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (Ken Russell, 1969), has played no part in the Olympics. Perhaps it will be the centrepiece of the Closing Ceremony. With added otters. And there, in the shadows, grunting and bestial, the Grunty Man!

An Italian ponce out of work

I used to know a man who, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, could do the Police in different voices. It began as a party trick, for which he always received thunderous rounds of applause, upon which he eventually became dependent. There came a time when he no longer used his normal speaking voice at all. He couched every single utterance in one of his different Police voices, but the novelty wore off, and people no longer clapped, and he grew sour and disillusioned and rancorous, and ended his days drunk to high heaven sprawled on the floor of a hotel lobby at a seaside resort. It is a cautionary tale, then, his life.

But that ruinous end cannot dim the joy of his early forays into doing the Police in different voices. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I came across him. I was attending a sophisticated cocktail party in a sophisticated house in a sophisticated part of town, and, being myself deeply and ineradicably unsophisticated, was having a rather hard time mingling. I was leaning against a mantelpiece, trying my best to look insouciant, but the only people who deigned to speak to me were those who challenged my very presence, accusing me of being some kind of valet or factotum or, worse, an interloper. I grew increasingly cantankerous, losing any sheen of sophistication I might have hoped to assume. I spat at people and pointedly ground out my cigarette butts on the expensive carpet. Across the room I saw a couple of genuine factotae approaching, huge burly monobrowed fellows, like minatory bears, bent, I supposed, on chucking me out into the street. Before they reached me, however, the hubbub of sophisticated chitchat suddenly ceased, and one voice was ringing out solo.

“On the fifteenth inst at eight forty-six pee em I was proceeding along Letsby Avenue in a northerly direction when I spotted the accused taunting a kitten. I apprehended him in the course of this bestial enormity and – “ and then, without missing a beat, he quoted that twit-and-jug bit from The Waste Land, “ – Twit twit twit, Jug jug jug jug jug jug, So rudely forc’d, Tereu”. Then he continued, in so deep and grave and sonorous a voice we might have been listening to T S Eliot himself, “And I dragged him down to the nick for a mild roughing-up by some of Inspector Cargpan’s boys.” It was marvellous, and we all applauded, and my lack of sophistication was forgotten as all eyes turned to the owner of the voice.

Or, as I learned soon enough, voices. A couple of weeks later I went to another sophisticated cocktail party. This time I took the precaution of wearing spats and a dressing gown, to give myself airs. I was leaning against a mantelpiece when once again, there was a hush a single voice made itself heard:

“On the sixteenth inst at six fourteen pee em I was proceeding along Letsby Avenue in a westerly direction when I spotted the accused engaged in a hate crime against a sparrow. No! Oo-er, missus. Really! Nay, nay and thrice may! Titter ye not! Oo-er. I dragged him down to the nick and handed him over to Inspector Cargpan’s boys for a roughing-up in the basement.”

It was extraordinary. There was no hint of T S Eliot. This time it was is if Frankie Howerd had come back to life. Again there was a round of applause. I left my mantelpiece and made my way across the room to congratulate the speaker personally, but before I could reach him he had flitted away, possibly with some of the silverware tucked in his pocket.

Over the next few years, during my inveterate partygoing, I came upon the fellow, who I had dubbed “Sloppy” after his Dickensian inspiration, on numerous occasions. Every time I heard him he do the Police in different voices. Some of them were recognisable. As with his Eliot and Howerd, he could do pitch perfect impersonations of Enoch Powell and Bernard Levin, both Mike and Bernie Winters, and the Irish one-time hostage Brian Keenan. I even heard him do Yoko Ono. He had other voices which seemed to spring from his repertoire of invented characters, a chuckling Quaker, for example, and a breathless bike wanker. He never repeated himself.

The last time I saw, or rather heard, Sloppy, was at a sophisticated cocktail party at an art gallery private view. I was leaning against a mantelpiece staring vacantly at a splattery daub when a voice rose above the arty babbling. And this time it was not a speaking voice. Sloppy was singing! Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was caterwauling, in an ear-splitting high-pitched screech. I recognised that sound immediately, and did not need to wait for the words “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light” to know he was doing the Police in the voice of Gordon Sumner.

That, at least, was what I thought. But on my way home that night, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells, I picked up the Evening Rag, and reading it on the unsophisticated top deck of the unsophisticated bus which took me to my unsophisticated home, I read that the man I knew as Sloppy had been buried that day in a seaside resort graveyard, having died drunk to high heaven sprawled on the floor of a hotel lobby earlier in the week. I realised, with a shock, that the screeching caterwauler at the private view must have been Sumner himself, and I wept. I could connect Nothing with nothing. The broken finger-nails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning.

The other day I was leafing through a pile of back numbers of Modern Picnics magazine when I came upon an article that I thought would appeal to a Hooting Yard readership. I have therefore copied it out, painstakingly, for your edification and enlightenment. No author is given, though I suspect the hand of Modern Picnics editrix Poppy Nisbet, based on textual analysis and other arcane techniques best left under wraps. The article appeared in the November 1963 issue, and then again in July 1968.

It has lately become fashionable to have what is known as a “big picnic”, to which more people than you can shake a stick at are invited. The British picnic authorities have made an attempt to codify big picnics, and the appropriate number of picnickers has been set at five thousand. That does not include the organiser, or so-called “picnic host” or “big picnic host”, to whom the present article is addressed. We get letters all the time from persons who are keen to put on a big picnic but do not know quite how to go about it. Well, read on, and you will need have no fear of making a picnic fool of yourself!

The first thing you must do, before sending out your invitations, is to choose a good picnic location. Modern Picnics recommends a remote place, at which multitudes may gather, but do not forget that those multitudes must not number more than five thousand – nor, indeed, fewer than five thousand. Any other number and your picnic will not count as a proper “big picnic” and you will have some explaining to do to the authorities. The remote place may well be a desert place accessible only by boat. Do not worry that your five thousand guests will find it difficult to get there. The point about a big picnic is that the great multitude is so avid to attend that they will run thither on foot out of all the cities in order to attend. How this squares with your own boat travel is not something you need dwell on.

Clearly the most important preparation, as with all picnics, big or small, is the contents of the picnic hamper. This is where would-be big picnic hosts get themselves into a tizzy. It is not uncommon for ditsy-brained hosts to cover page after page of their picnic notebooks with sums, trying to calculate numbers of sausages, say, or cans of Squelcho!, necessary for five thousand people. Well, if that is what you have been doing, tear those pages to smithereens and cast them unto the winds. And throw your pencil away while you are at it. All you will need in your hamper is five loaves and two fishes.

Let us attend to the loaves first. Plain white sliced loaves with minimum nutritional value are the cheapest option, and may be the best bet if your multitude is drawn almost entirely from among the lower orders. On the other hand, you do not want any sniffy middle-class picnickers turning up their noses at your choice of loaf. Those kind of people will insist on brown bread packed with grains and seeds they have never actually heard of before. They may even prefer the loaves to be unsliced. With five thousand people to please, you should opt for a middle way, some sort of mid-price browny-whitey loaf. It doesn’t much matter whether it is ready sliced or not, as you are going to be crumbling the whole lot into crumb-sized crumbs in any case.

That is the next step in your preparations, and I trust you will not need to scribble any sums in your picnic notebook in order to make the calculations. Anyway, if you are following the instructions carefully you will have torn up the notebook and thrown your pencil away. You have five loaves and five thousand picnickers. You therefore need to disintegrate each loaf into a thousand crumbs. Try to make the crumbs of roughly equal size, or the sniffy middle-class people will start preaching about “fairness” and the lower orders will get into fist-fights. Such shenanigans can ruin the jolly atmosphere of your picnic.

Things are a little bit more complicated when it comes to the fishes. Remember you only have two. Though there is a myriad of different fishes in the sea you could choose, here at Modern Picnics we would recommend a dab and a blenny. If you do not know what they are, or what they look like, go to the library and consult an encyclopaedia, or just ask the most helpful of your local fishmongers. That fine fellow should also be able to advise you regarding purchase of an incredibly sharp fish-slicing knife. You will need one of these items, its blade gleaming in the sunlight, in order to cut up the dab and the blenny. As with the loaves, I am hoping you can use mental arithmetic to work out the numbers. You are going to have to chop each of the fishes into two-and-a-half thousand bits. That is why you need a very sharp slicer. Working methodically, starting at the fishhead end, make a series of lateral cuts, then, holding the resulting slices of dab or blenny together, follow with a series of lengthwise cuts. You should end up with a collection of more or less cuboid fish fragments. Count them. If they number under two-and-a-half thousand, use the incredibly sharp fishmonger-recommended knife to cleave each cube in twain. Continue this process until you have the required number, then, if that was the dab, repeat with the blenny, or, if the blenny, the dab.

I spoke earlier of the picnic hamper. Actually, you should have two hampers with you at the remote desert place accessible by boat. Into one hamper, toss the breadcrumbs, and into the other, the fish-fragments. There should be room enough in each hamper for you to add paper plates. When the multitudes arrive, panting and ravenous and overexcited, simply place on each paper plate a breadcrumb and a speck of chopped-up dab or blenny, and voila! the success of your big picnic is assured.

In the next issue of Modern Picnics we will look at several ways of turning water into wine, some of which are legal (-ish).