There are circumstances in which you may find yourself standing in a field alongside a Scandinavian peasant, staring at the sky. The peasant may turn to you and say:

Morgenrode gir dage blode,
Kveldsrode gir dage sode.

What is an appropriate response? You could, of course, remain silent, while moulding your countenance into an expression of sagacity. A slight furrowing of the brow, a pursing of the lips, an intense look in the eyes, perhaps an almost imperceptible nod of the head. You could even rub your chin thoughtfully, as Mr Carter does in the Jennings & Darbyshire books by Anthony Buckeridge. The Scandinavian peasant will almost certainly take this as due acknowledgement. This is the safest course of action if you have no idea what he is babbling on about.

But it may be that you have a smattering of some Scandinavian languages, or are wearing a hidden earpiece which provides you with a simultaneous translation. Both are possibilities if you are, for example, a diplomat, or a special rapporteur of the United Nations. There may be other reasons why one or both is the case, such as family background or the habit of international jet-setting for either business or leisure purposes. Your knowledge, or earpiece, will thus apprise you of the meaning of the peasant’s utterance, which can be given as:

Morning red gives wet days,
Evening red gives sweet days.

Armed, then, with the knowledge that the peasant is spouting rustic wisdom, or weather lore, you may wish to consider a verbal response. You can still do the whole business with the brow and the lips and the eyes and the head and the chin, but this time as a preliminary gambit. Then you might counter with a countryside adage of your own, for example:

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,
Red sky in morning, fisherman’s warning.

or, if the field in which you are standing alongside the Scandinavian peasant is within the vicinity of the sea, or of a fjord, you might say:

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

The problem with this approach is that the Scandinavian peasant may be prompted to bat back a further piece of his own rustic wisdom, to which you will feel compelled to supply a rejoinder. You will swiftly find yourself embroiled in an escalating exchange of countryside proverbs which you cannot win. He is a peasant, and you are not. He will always be able to top your saw with something more abstruse, born of generations of experience tilling the Scandinavian fields. You should therefore deploy a different tactic. Instead of following the brow and the lips and the eyes and the head and the chin business with a couplet of weather lore, you should allow a significant pause, and then say:

And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

This is a Biblical quotation, from the Gospel of Matthew, 16:3. Assuming for one moment that the Scandinavian peasant does not take it personally, it is likely that he will be stunned into silence, like a dumb ox. You then have the advantage. But bear in mind the possibility that he does take it personally, and thinks you are accusing him, wildly, of hypocrisy. He may be a violent peasant, and lift up his spade to bash you about the head. If you are wearing a hidden earpiece, a bash will dislodge it, and you will no longer have the simultaneous translation to let you know what he is saying. To prevent this happening, you should have in your pocket some kind of treat with which to placate him. A piece of smoked and dried herring will usually suffice. You should keep it wrapped in greaseproof paper to avoid sullying the lining of your pocket.

There is, however, the possibility that he may be a Bible-thumping Scandinavian peasant, as familiar with the Old and New Testaments as he is with weather lore. If this is the case, he may respond to your Matthew 16:3 with, say, his Isaiah 36:16-17:

Drick var och en vatten i sin brunn, tills jag kommer och tar dig bort.

This will put you in something of a pickle. Unless you have the measure of his Bible-learning, and how could you?, you have no guarantee that you will be able to match him quote for quote. Remember he may well be a Lutheran. You will need to be pretty damn confident of your own store of memorised Biblical verses to embark upon a tit-for-tat. Weighing things in the balance, your best option is to reply:

Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away.

By merely echoing back at him the Authorised Version version of his own sally, you may well succeed in bringing the exchange to a close. Neither of you has outwitted the other, neither of you has lost face. He can take up his spade and go off to till his fields in a peasanty way, and you can wander off in the opposite direction, to your holiday chalet, or special rapporteur’s concrete pillbox, or wherever it is you are staying. When both of you have walked about twenty paces, you might turn and wave to each other, in amicable farewell. The next morning, or evening, when you encounter each other again in the field, you will both be better prepared, and companionable silence will almost certainly be appropriate.

Next week, in our series on conversational gambits with Scandinavian peasants, we will look at the best approach should you find yourself talking of the varying merits of agricultural implements. For your homework, make a list of farm implements mentioned in the Bible, using as your sources both the Authorised Version and a Scandinavian-language Lutheran edition.

When John Foxe published Actes And Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, in 1563, he unaccountably neglected to mention St Spivack. This is a great pity, as St Spivack was one of the holiest and most pious of men, whose life we would do well to study. I have studied it in excessive detail, and as a result I am holier and more pious than I was before, though nowhere near as holy and pious as St Spivack himself of course. Nor have I been martyred by being poked at with burning pincers and plunged into a barrel of boiling tar. I fervently hope that will not be my fate, but if things turn out that way, I shall have the example of St Spivack to cling to, and I will do my best to sing rousing hymns in a strong, resounding falsetto, as St Spivack did, winning the grudging admiration of his unholy and impious tormentors.

He was born in rustic squalor in a barn in some sordid backwater during the Dark Ages. His parents were simple peasants. Actually, the word “simple” does not suffice. Let us rephrase that sentence. His parents were profoundly ignorant peasants. No, that is still not enough. Again. His parents were profoundly ignorant, staggeringly stupid peasants. I think to drive the point home we need to have one more go. His parents were profoundly ignorant, staggeringly stupid, breathtakingly dimwitted peasants. That will do. They were so ignorant and stupid and dimwitted that one Dark Ages day, when he was but a year old, they mislaid their infant in the woods, and completely forgot about his existence. Poor little St Spivack!

He was raised by squirrels. Ever after, those he met were struck, not just by his holiness and his piety, but by a certain squirrely something in his demeanour. He had an extremely high metabolic rate and ate a lot of nuts.

At the age of ten, he was discovered in the woods by a sycamore-climbing monk from the nearby monastery of St Dippy’s. This monk took the holy and pious child with him, and at the monastery he astounded the abbot by reciting from memory the entire book of Ecclesiastes, first in the original Hebrew, then in Greek, then in Latin, then in the language of squirrels. He took holy orders on his eleventh birthday.

When he was twelve St Spivack left the monastery and set off on a pilgrimage. Wherever he stopped, he preached, and his sermons converted many an ignorant and stupid and dimwitted peasant to the faith. Most of his sermons consisted of glosses on passages from Ecclesiastes, though on occasion he would describe visions.

It was in the village of Vig, hard by the banks of the Vug, that St Spivack was describing a vision one day when he was arrested by the henchmen of a baron. This baron was an unholy and impious wretch, and he tossed St Spivack into an oubliette in his castle. There were many ants and beetles in the dungeon, and St Spivack befriended them. He passed the horrible days and weeks by making little sets of rosary beads for the ants and beetles from grains of unspeakable matter found upon the oubliette floor.

On Easter Sunday one year in the Dark Ages, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St Spivack in the gloom of the oubliette. She handed him a pair of spectral gleaming holy tweezers with which he was able to effect his escape. It was at this time that light began to pour out from St Spivack. This was the light that blinded the evil baron and his henchmen as they tried to recapture their holy and pious prisoner.

St Spivack continued on his pilgrimage through the benighted lands of the Dark Ages. In his train there followed squirrels and ants and beetles. One day he performed the miracle that guaranteed his sainthood, though in all honesty it should never have been in doubt. (It is said that when the Congregation for the Causes of Saints met to decide on his canonisation, the priest taking the part of the Devil’s Advocate, to argue against, suffered an attack of the withers just as he was about to speak. This was rightly taken as another sign of St Spivack’s saintliness.) The miracle took place in the village of Vug, hard by the banks of the Vig. St Spivack produced out of thin air a bouquet of lupins and rhododendrons, and by waving it in significant passing movements over a crone, cured the crone of a foul and sickening malady, a debilitating palsy or ague to which Dark Ages crones were forever falling prey.

On St Bibblybibdib’s Day one year, later in the Dark Ages, St Spivack arrived in Pointy Town at the end of his pilgrimage. He was enthroned as bishop in the pointiest church in Pointy Town. He continued to pour forth an unearthly blinding light. Squirrels and ants and beetles had the run of the episcopal palace, pointier than the pointiest church in Pointy Town. St Spivack by now could recite from memory several other books of the Bible, in several languages, and often did so in everyday conversation. A Dark Ages scribe copied down many of his after-dinner monologues to create what we now know as the Codex of St Spivack.

One year in the Dark Ages, on St Dippy’s Day, into Pointy Town came galloping the blind baron and his blind henchmen, astride their seeing horses. They laid siege to the bishop’s palace and slaughtered all the squirrels and ants and beetles and they dragged St Spivack from his dinner table, where he was eating nuts. Then they had at him with burning pincers and they plunged him into a barrel of boiling tar. St Spivack sang rousing hymns in a strong, resounding falsetto, and then he died. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared and carried him up to heaven.

His tarry bones were buried in a tar pit, which is today the site of the Blister Lane Bypass.

That is the life of the holy and pious martyr St Spivack.

There is a land, remote and lovely, where the first three things likely to strike the visitor are butter and clatter and taxis. You will ask, why those three things, rather than, say, soap and watercress and canals, or toffee and rainfall and pig iron? All I can say in return is that travellers to that land, upon their return, eyes bright, buttonhole the stay-at-home and babble excitedly about butter and clatter and taxis.

Being unreasonably obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, I have just begun reading Stephen King’s new Pebblehead-like big fat bestseller 11.22.63. (I do wish it had been renamed 22.11.63 on our shores.) The conceit of the book is that the narrator travels back in time to before that date, and attempts to prevent the killing of the Potus. I mention this because one must travel through time in order to visit the land of butter and clatter and taxis. What is not clear to me is the direction of travel. Is this land plunged in the past, or is it a future state? And how will I ever know, short of going there myself?

In 11.22.63. as in many another time-travel narrative, the past is reached via a portal, in this case the pantry of a diner. When I have questioned travellers returning from the remote and lovely land of butter and clatter and taxis, they invariably refuse to divulge the location of the portal, or indeed whether one needs to pass through a portal to get there. There are, after all, other means, like the eponymous contraption in H G Wells’s The Time Machine. But nobody is willing to tell me how I might get from here to there, wherever “there” is. For the time being, I remain stuck in the here and now. That is not such a bad thing, of course. It’s what I am used to.

Yet I cannot help hankering. “Oh, the butter!”, the returned visitors cry, “It is golden! Oh, the clatter! It is curiously mellifluous! Oh, the taxis! How they careen along the wide important boulevards of that remote and lovely land!” It is all a far cry from the margarine and din and traffic congestion of my own time.

It is decidedly odd that the visitors are so keen to extol the virtues of that past or future land, yet remain so reticent about how they came and went. Odd, too, now I come to think of it, that the only virtues they extol are the butter and clatter and taxis. I have asked them about other features, about soap and watercress and canals and toffee and rainfall and pig iron, among other things, but they purse their lips and look at me quizzically as if they have no idea what I am talking about. “Oh, forget about those things,” they say, “Let me tell you about the butter and clatter and taxis!” And they are off again, breathless with enthusiasm.

I have poked and prodded about the city in search of a likely portal, without quite knowing what I am looking for. Qua King, I haunt pantries, particularly but not exclusively those in diners and cafes and restaurants. Cooks and chefs and maitre d’s are none too pleased with me, and I am often escorted off the premises in a ruffianly manner. Pantry does not equal portal, of course, and I try other points of access, such as mysterious doorways and archways and gates and wickets. More of these have a mysterious character than you might imagine. It has also occurred to me that perhaps I need to catch some sort of magic bus, or coach, or a strangely unscheduled train, and I have spent more hours than I care to count lolling about at bus stops and railway stations, trying to spot telltale signs, ever in vain.

One day, my frustration at boiling point, I went out and bought a packet of butter, and I hailed a taxi, and directed the driver to take me to somewhere I might hear a lot of clatter. He took me – grindingly slowly through the congested streets! – to a lane alongside a railway shunting yard. The sound was more akin to din than to mellifluous clatter, but he had done his best, and I gave him a generous tip. There was a low wall on the lane, bordering a flowerbed violent with lupins, and I sat upon it, clutching the butter, content to pass the time. I suppose there was a nagging hope that a portal would open up before me, or an emissary from that remote and lovely land suddenly materialise before me, or spring out from behind the lupins, and take my hand and guide me. But nothing whatsoever happened, save that along the lane came passing an off-duty maitre d’, one who had expelled me from his pantry a few days before, and he recognised me, and cursed me as he passed, and threatened to call the police, though I was doing nothing wrong. I made a gift to him of the packet of butter, as a peace offering, and he relented, and sat down on the wall next to me, and we fell into amicable conversation.

“Have you heard tell,” I asked, “Of a remote and lovely land, in another time, whether past or future I do not know, where the butter is golden and the clatter is mellifluous and the taxis careen along the wide important boulevards?”

“Why yes!” he cried, “Only the other evening in the restaurant there was a group at one of the tables who spoke of such things.”

“Did you ask them how they got there, via a portal perhaps, or by magic bus etcetera?”

“I did not. As maitre d’, I spoke to them only of food and drink and service standards. In any case, I did not need to ask, for I already know the answer. It is a land I have visited many times myself. In fact I am on my way there now.”

My eyes popped out of my head.

“Gosh!” I said, “I knew I would be on to something by buying a packet of butter and taking a taxi to a place of clatter! Can I come with you?”

“Of course you cannot,” he replied, and he stood up and turned about, twice, thrice, and vanished behind the lupins. I sprang after him, and tripped over, and lay sprawled in the flowerbed with my mouth full of mud. And then a wind came in from the west, a roaring wind so loud that it drowned out the clatter from the shunting yard. I had given my butter away, and the taxi was gone. I got up and dusted myself down and trudged home. The evening newspaper was on the doormat. A huge headline shrieked the news that, far away in Dallas, Texas, President Oswald had been shot.

Many years ago, Peter Blegvad posed some questions about hats. To the best of my knowledge, nearly four decades on he has not answered a single one of them. I do not doubt that he has many other calls on his attention, but quite frankly my patience is at an end. I have therefore resolved to seek answers to the questions off my own bat. Whether my answers be right or wrong, I will at least have addressed them, and thus put to bed certain niggling vexations which have been bothering me ever since I first heard those questions, sung by Dagmar Krause, in 1975. Those of you who have no idea what I am talking about should listen to the questions before proceeding:

♪♪♪ Some Questions About Hats ♪♪♪

The first question is “Can one wear uncanny hats?” For a long time I sat at my escritoire pondering this, smoking the odd gasper and glugging a cup of tea. I had a pencil and a blank sheet of paper, just in case. Eventually it dawned on me – as I am sure it has already dawned on you, dear reader – that I was unlikely to come up with an answer to the question while sitting indoors. No, I would have to go out and about, prancing the boulevards, on the lookout for hat-wearing persons. What a bother! I went to take a nap instead.

When I woke up, I returned to my escritoire, my cigarettes, and a fresh cup of piping hot tea, and considered if I might address one of the other questions, one which would allow me to stay put. I dismissed the idea, because I tend to take a very methodical approach to hat question matters, and it seemed important to answer them in the precise order in which they had been posed. Dobson has a pamphlet about this kind of thing, the title of which escapes me, but I have read it several times, and taken its lessons to heart. There was nothing for it, then, but to put on my stylish Italian Hoity Toity Boots, and sally forth into the streets. Before doing so, I thought it prudent to look up the dictionary definition of “uncanny”. I told you I was methodical. The OED gives a number of definitions, some Obs., but the one I felt sure Peter Blegvad had in mind all those years ago was 4.b., that is “Partaking of a supernatural character; mysterious, weird, uncomfortably strange or unfamiliar”. I did not look up the definition of “hat”, because I am not an idiot. I know a hat when I see one, thank you very much.

As I strode out, under an overcast sky threatening rain, I chewed over that definition in my mind. For a hat to be truly uncanny, I reasoned, it would have to meet all the terms given in the OED. It would not be sufficient for a hat to be merely “uncomfortably strange”, for example. As I knew all too well, there were parts of town where strange and uncomfortable hats were ten a penny. Those parts of town I tended to avoid, in the main. A further requirement was that the hat had to be atop somebody’s head, being worn, in order to provide an answer to the question. Otherwise I could save a lot of time and energy by prancing straight to the nearest milliner’s and casting my eye over the window display. I had my work cut out. I headed for an important boulevard, one with plenty of benches upon which pedestrians could rest their weary limbs, chose one to sit upon, and sat, and watched the passing throng.

The first thing that struck me was the extraordinary number of people who wore no hat at all. This in itself seemed uncanny. I myself was sporting a little Tyrolean number, with a feather in it. It is old and battered and has certain unseemly stains under the brim, but it is a good hat, in my opinion. But it is neither mysterious nor weird nor uncomfortably strange, and it is most certainly not unfamiliar, to me at least. It may possibly partake of a supernatural character, given that I acquired it from an unnervingly elvish Tyrolean hatter, with a little pointy beard, dressed all in green, like a character from a frightening fairy story. He was uncanny, sure enough, but his hats were not.

I sat on the bench on the boulevard for half an hour before spotting my first hat. It was worn by a cadaverous lolloping fellow who seemed to have stepped out of an earlier century. He was hefting a carrier bag crammed with angular somethings, who knows what?, and his boots, or possibly his bones, creaked as he lolloped. His hat, however, was disappointingly unremarkable, a Trilby I think, in better condition than my own hat. I felt a sudden urge to attack him, to knock the hat flying off his head, into the gutter, there to stamp on it, in a rage, but I stopped myself. I shut my eyes and counted to two hundred and fifty, which I find is the number required to quell my seething. When I opened my eyes the fellow was out of sight and it had begun to rain.

Now I am not a man for umbrellas. I do not own one and never have. I have my Tyrolean hat to protect the top of my head, and I am insouciant in drizzle. This, however, was a cloudburst, a downpour, and if I stayed where I was my clothing would be sopping wet, however dry the top of my head might remain. I rushed to find shelter in the doorway of a butcher’s. From my new vantage point I hoped to spot more hat-wearers, persons perhaps who eschewed their hats in rainless weather, but now plopped them atop their heads. Where they might be carrying their hats in the meantime was not a matter I wished to think about. As it was, the rain brought no noticeable increase in the hat-wearing population out and about on the boulevard. Instead there appeared a flurry of those cursed umbrellas.

I was beginning to feel cold and miserable and brain-jangled, and I could smell sausages. I turned and went into the butcher’s and bought a half dozen bangers. Did you know there are as many as four hundred and seventy different varieties of sausage available in this country? I can’t remember what kind I bought from this boulevard butcher, whose hat, by the way, was a fairly typical butcher’s hat, and thus not in the least bit uncanny.

Peckish, I returned home in the downpour. On the way I passed several people wearing hats, more than I could have expected, and though one or two were weird – the hats, that is, not the persons wearing them, at least as far as I was aware, not knowing them from Adam – and some hats looked uncomfortably strange, and they were all, to me, unfamiliar, none were mysterious, and none looked, in the time I had to study them, as if they partook of a supernatural character. In short, I did not see a single uncanny hat, and I must have been out of doors for at least an hour all told.

Later, slurping tea and munching my sausages, I reflected that I would have to go out again the next day, to keep my eyes peeled for persons wearing hats, perhaps in a different location. And I began to understand why, almost forty years since he had posed some questions about hats, Peter Blegvad had failed to answer them. I was trying to answer just one, and it was proving no easy matter. How many more days was I going to have to spend sprawled on benches or huddled in the doorways of butcher’s shops, prey to the temptation of sausages? Answering all the questions would be a Sisyphean task. It was clearly time for me to take another nap. And so, sausages digested, to bed.

It was a rainy morning in the late 1970s when I was called for an interview with the school’s careers adviser. He was an unkempt man and he smoked a pipe.

“Come in and sit down, sonny,” he said, “I am the careers adviser. I am here to help you decide what you want to do with the rest of your life. Generally speaking, I find most boys fit snugly into one of two careers. Welding, for monoglots, and the diplomatic service, for polyglots. How many languages do you speak?”

I was a single-minded, even obsessive, teenperson, so I ignored his question and jabbered back. “Ever since I was tiny, sir, it has been my dream to follow in the footsteps of my hero, Johs. Schmidt, 1877 to 1933. Are you familiar with his work?”

He seemed taken aback by my pure ringing confident tone, and choked on his pipe. “I can’t say I am, sonny. Now, about welding . . .”

But I interrupted him, and babbled on.

“Johs. Schmidt was the author of a book I have treasured since first I discovered it tucked away in the aquatic life forms section of my parents’ bookshelves. I have read it, from cover to cover, hundreds of times. It is entitled Danish Eel Investigations During 25 Years 1905-1930. Though both welding and the diplomatic service undoubtedly have their attractions, I have already determined, young as I am, to spend the next twenty-five years investigating Danish eels. After that, well, who knows what I might turn my hand to?”

I had presented the careers adviser with a fait accompli, so he tapped his pipe on the side of his desk and sent me on my way.

The very next morning I set sail for Denmark, bent on eels . . . Dear God in heaven! How I wish that were true! But life was not as simple as I assumed, and things gang agley, as it were. Instead of spending the next quarter of a century investigating Danish eels, I found myself welding. Weld, weld, weld, that was me, for more than twenty-five years, day in day out. It was never clear to me precisely how this came about, and it would be melodramatic to describe it as a living death, but my eel dreams were shattered. It has to be said that there were certain aspects of welding that I enjoyed, particularly arc welding and the welding of rivets, but at the end of each welding day I would return home and pore over Johs. Schmidt’s book – well, pamphlet – and reread those stirring words, and gaze for untold hours at his Danish eel map. I made a promise to myself that one day, I would write my own pamphlet, with exactly the same title and with only the dates changed, that one day, I would write “I set sail for Denmark, bent on eels . . .” And do you know what? A week ago, I kept that promise.

With no more welding to be done in my town, I was freed from my duty to the regime. They gave me a medal, and I had my photograph taken for the Worker’s Sop (Welding Edition), but these honours meant nothing to me. For years I had been secretly in contact with a Dane called Lars. Lars knew little or nothing about eels, but he had a tiptop grasp of Danish geography, particularly its watery places, and I had long been convinced he would be an ideal companion for my investigations. I sent him a message arranging to meet on the harbourside of an important Danish seaport, packed a bag, locked up my cabin, and went straight to the tram stop. I did not have the necessary papers, but after waiting for over a quarter of a century, I was determined that nothing would stop me. On my way to the tram stop, I popped in to the cemetery, and found the grave of my careers adviser from long ago, and I thumbed my nose at him, or at his headstone. An act of childish petulance, perhaps, but boy oh boy did it feel good. Then I caught the tram to the canal, and went down the canal by barge to the railway station, where I boarded a train to the coast. All the while I had to keep my eye out for Lavender Cadets. At the docks, I bribed a sailor with my welding medal, and he helped me to stow away on the SS The Joy Of Bumper Harvest Overflows Amidst The Song Of Mechanisation. If I was not mistaken, I had welded many of the rivets on this very ship! And so, at long last, I was heading for Denmark. Hiding away among huge bales of fusewire in the cargo hold, I reread Danish Eel Investigations During 25 Years 1905-1930 yet again. In my excitement, I was struck anew by Johs. Schmidt’s marvellous prose, which now seemed even more magical. I could barely wait to begin writing my own version. Would my eel-prose come up to snuff?

At the important Danish seaport, Lars was there to meet me, bearing gifts. He gave me a cap and a Thermos flask and a lemon meringue pie. I had nothing to give him in exchange except my unbridled gratitude.

“So, tomorrow we shall begin investigating Danish eels, yes?” he said.

“I have been waiting over a quarter of a century for this moment!” I shouted, “Let us begin our investigations right now!”

Lars gave me a funny look, but acquiesced. It will of course be twenty-five years before I am able to publish my pamphlet, but I see no harm in allowing you a glimpse of the first entry.

Danish Eel Investigations During 25 Years, Day One. I arrived in Denmark. At the important Danish seaport, Lars was there to meet me, bearing gifts. He gave me a cap and a Thermos flask and a lemon meringue pie. I had nothing to give him in exchange except my unbridled gratitude. We immediately set to work investigating Danish eels. I managed to spot one there at the harbourside! To my consternation, it looked exactly – and I mean exactly – like an eel from my homeland. This cannot be right. Luckily I have plenty of time to investigate other Danish eels. Sausages for supper, and so to bed.

I don’t know if any television network commissioning wankers editors read Hooting Yard, but I certainly hope so, because I have had a fantastic idea for a show. It is a panel game called My Favourite Owl. The idea is that every week, four panellists would each be given an hour to sing the praises of their favourite owl. I do not mean they would actually sing, as there are already plenty of television programmes where people wail and caterwaul to no good purpose. No, I mean simply that the panellists would make the case for their favourite owl being the best owl of the four extolled on that week’s show. The chairman, who would ideally be me, or if not me then a neglected genius, would then decide which of the four owls was the winner.

Those are the bare bones of the show, and I think any commissioning wanker editor worth his or her salt would give it the green light straight away, on that basis alone. However, I am given to understand that these people like to preen themselves and pretend to an expertise and intelligence they signally lack, and thus the creative genius pitching an idea must abase themselves by providing unnecessary detail. So here are some further particulars.

If I do not get to be the chairman, then ideally I would like that role to go to the neglected genius Freddie “Parrotface” Davies. Older readers may recall him from various excruciating light entertainment television shows of the nineteen-seventies. For me, however, Davies’ immortality is guaranteed by his appearance in a film, Peter Chelsom’s masterpiece Funny Bones (1995). As the clapped-out old vaudevillian Bruno Parker, Davies is magnificently lugubrious, and one wonders why he was never cast in a Samuel Beckett play. It is Davies I see in my mind’s eye as the derelict and dilapidated protagonists of Beckett’s great trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Now in his mid-seventies, Freddie “Parrotface” Davies could have a late-flowering career resurgence as the host and chairman of My Favourite Owl.

I said that each of the four weekly panellists would be given an hour to extol their favourite owl. Clearly this means that each episode would be at least four-and-a-half hours long, if we take into account the padding and faffing. Objections will be raised that this is far too long for a prime-time panel game, but I disagree. In a world of ever-decreasing attention spans, my show would be striking a blow for something we miss profoundly. In the nineteenth century it was quite common for large audiences to be attracted by lengthy talks and lectures. In Amusing Ourselves To Death (1985), Neil Postman gives the example of a hall full of people held spellbound by a seven-hour address by Abraham Lincoln – and this was before he was president, indeed before he considered running for president. And this was not an unusual event. Clearly the human brain is capable of sustained concentration, and it is our current Age o’ Pap that is destroying it. Well, I, and Freddie “Parrotface” Davies, and our owl-loving panellists, will restore it to sparkling good health.

As for those panellists, who would they be, precisely? It is common knowledge, I think, that there is, in Television Centre, a cupboard where the dozen or so panel show regulars are kept, to be trundled in their chairs into place just before transmission of whatever programme they are appearing on that day. Well, we are going to lock that cupboard! Instead of the usual suspects, our panels will be composed of owl-loving people we drag in off the streets, or rather off the pathways of owl sanctuaries – true enthusiasts, who may not be familiar to the audience, but whose eyes gleam with fanatical glee when invited to prattle on about owls, uninterrupted, for sixty minutes.

We will add a further layer of excitement to the show by leaving deliberately vague the definition of “owl”. So, for example, the favourite owl might be one particular living owl, one kept as a pet. Or it might be a dead owl, stuffed by a taxidermist. It might be not one owl, alive or stuffed, but a type of owl, saw-whet or eared or horned or pygmy or stilt or maned or crested or screech or elf or scops or hawk or fearful or giant or striped or white-faced or spectacled or laughing or earless or little or tawny or barn. Or it might not be a real owl at all, but a toy one or a trinket, a glove-puppet, perhaps, or a thing of rags and string and glue, or a hideous gewgaw made from seashells, as one might find in a seaside resort gift shop, the kind of seaside resort where Freddie “Parrotface” Davies, or Bruno Parker, would haunt the pier, majestically lugubrious. The fact that there are numberless things called “owls” that might be a panellist’s favourite suggests that the show could continue, week in week out, for years and years.

I expect eventually it would prove so popular that, slowly but surely, all other television shows, including Channel 4 News, would lose their audiences. The time will come, I believe, when the only use for a television set will be to watch people talking at length about their favourite owl. That day cannot come soon enough. In a better world, it would already have come to pass. I just hope the commissioning wankers editors are paying attention.

I am grateful to Wonders And Marvels for drawing to my attention  the important topic of the naming of dogs in Ancient Greece. This is a topic I have always taken very seriously, in spite of the fact that I have never owned a dog myself. Indeed, ever since the age of four, when I was struck dumb and immobile with terror by Mrs Flack’s huge black spittle-flecked growling hound, I have been cautious around dogs.

Mrs Flack was a friend of my mother’s. It is indicative of changing customs, and of a lapse in formalities, that I have no idea of her first name. The friends of my parents were invariably known to me, and I was expected to address them, as Mr or Mrs. As with so much else from my childhood, it seems like a lost world. Much, too, is lost due to my pitiable memory. But I certainly remember Mrs Flack’s dog. We had gone to visit this friend one day, before I was of school age, and while my mother and Mrs Flack chitchatted away in the kitchen, I was deposited in an armchair in the living room, perhaps with a glass of milk and a biscuit and a comic to pass the time. (Another hint of a lost past is that I was not deposited in front of a television set.) At some point, into the room padded a huge black spittle-flecked hound, which planted itself in front of me, growling, quite obviously preparing to pounce and sink its fangs into my little infant throat. I wanted to cry out for help, but was so frightened I could neither move nor make a sound. I was eventually rescued by Mrs Flack popping into the room, seeing my stricken state, and leading the ungodly beast – which had not, after all, attacked me – away, assuring me it was a loveable harmless pooch. In subsequent years I have noticed that dog owners always make such assurances, which I treat with deserved contempt. I remain convinced that the vast majority of dogs mean me harm, and would tear out my vitals given half a chance.

Nevertheless, dog nomenclature has always been a subject of interest to me, as has the nomenclature of other domestic pets. I would not claim is it an intense interest, like, say, the Munich Air Disaster or the Kennedy assassination or the glory of bird life in all its avian forms, but it is something I find diverting. Understand, I don’t spend all my time thinking up names for putative dogs I might own in some parallel universe where I am a keen, even avid, dog lover, and was never traumatised, in my infancy, by Mrs Flack’s huge black spittle-flecked growling hound. To do so would be foolish. But still, every now and then I find myself considering the names of dogs, and so the title of the Wonders and Marvels postage was bound to attract my attention. Names Of Dogs In Ancient Greece, it announced, and I immediately stopped whatever else I was doing so I could bone up on the subject, one which, I admit, I had never given any thought to whatsoever. The Ancient Greece bit, that is.

So what did I learn? Among other things,

An ancient Greek vase painting of 560 BC shows Atalanta and other heroes and their hounds killing the great Calydonian Boar. Seven dogs’ names are inscribed on the vase: . . . Hormenos (Impulse), Methepon (Pursuer), Egertes (Vigilant), Korax (Raven), Marpsas, Labros (Fierce), and Eubolous (Shooter).

I have to say I am a little peeved that we are not told the meaning of Marpsas. Perhaps it doesn’t mean anything, is just a word or sound that sprang into the head of an Ancient Greek person when confronted with a new as yet nameless puppy. But it would be helpful to be told, otherwise I might lie awake all night wondering about it.

The Roman poet Ovid gives the Greek names of the 36 dogs that belonged to Actaeon, the unlucky hunter of Greek myth who was torn apart by his pack: among them were Tigris, Laelaps (Storm), Aello (Whirlwind), and Arcas (Bear). Pollux lists 15 dog names; another list is found in Columella. The longest list of suitable names for ancient Greek dogs – 46 in all – was compiled by the dog whisperer Xenophon. Popular names for dogs in antiquity, translated from Greek, include Lurcher, Whitey, Blackie, Tawny, Blue, Blossom, Keeper, Fencer, Butcher, Spoiler, Hasty, Hurry, Stubborn, Yelp, Tracker, Dash, Happy, Jolly, Trooper, Rockdove, Growler, Fury, Riot, Lance, Pell-Mell, Plucky, Killer, Crafty, Swift, and Dagger.

Again, it might have been helpful to give full rather than partial lists. Telling us the numbers but then giving only a few samples is the kind of thing that can get me steamed up, if I am already in a bad mood. Luckily, I was not in a bad mood today, quite the opposite, for I am always pleased by rainfall, especially in summer. In yesterday’s Grauniad there was a quotation from Kenneth Williams’ diaries, in which he wrote “This was one of those dark, rainy mornings that I love”. I would echo that.

Still, even though I would have preferred to be given fuller and further information, I was pleased to discover what I did about the dog names of Ancient Greece, and you will be too, if you go and read the full article. Meanwhile, it occurred to me that, just as I never learned Mrs Flack’s first name, nor did I ever find out the name of the great slavering brute that terrorised me. Perhaps if I could give it a name, even now, so many years later, I might be able to overcome my fear of pooches. I note that Growler is given in one of the lists above, which is perfectly appropriate, but I think I am going to retrospectively dub Mrs Flack’s dog Rockdove. That sounds a bit weedy, for a hound. Even a terrified four-year-old could cope with a dog called Rockdove, even if it was huge and black and spittle-flecked and growling.

I have written previously, on a number of occasions, about bogs, but as far as I recall I have not addressed the important topic of bog standards. It is helpful, as ever, to define our terms at the outset, so let me cobble together a very basic definition of the bog standard.

Bog standard : A standard, or flag, assigned to a bog, and usually flown from a flagpole anent the bog.

Now if I know my readers, and I think I do, you will be sitting there open-mouthed, perhaps dribbling slightly, saying to yourselves something along the lines of “Well, I am utterly befuddled. Never in all my life have I ever seen a flag flying next to a bog, unless inadvertently. Certainly not where the flag is inextricably bound to the bog, is as it were the bog’s flag. No, that is wholly outwith my lived experience. And yet Mr Key is never wrong, as far as I am aware. His is a still small voice of certainty in a baffling world. Blimey. No wonder I am befuddled.”

You may mop up your dribble and unfuddle your head, for I shall explain all. What I did not mention, in my definition, was that the bog standard was confined to a particular time and place, and that time has passed and that place is no more. Those of you with a smattering of vexillological learning may have an inkling of what I am talking about. You might guess that this has something to do with that flag-mad king, Gobbo III, of the bog-riddled land of Tantarabim.

If you were paying due attention to Herr Von Straubenzee’s lessons, in the old wooden schoolroom long ago, you may recall Gobbo III, his tyrannical reign, his temper tantrums, his odd refulgent crown, his bustling and stamping, his surfeit of lampreys, his wax effigy, his cardboard queen, his lupin nosegays, his unrestrained power, his ceremonial pincers, his butt of Malmesbury, and of course his flags. You may recall these things because, if Gobbo III was mad for flags, then Herr Von Straubenzee was mad for Gobbo. He rarely taught us about anyone or anything else, long ago in the old wooden schoolroom, with frost on the windowpanes and icicles hanging from the ceiling.

It was while I was spending an hour or two slumped on a municipal park bench, watching swans and ducks in a municipal park pond, that my thoughts turned to reverie, and all unbidden my mind was filled with Herr Von Straubenzee. The memory of him in turn reminded me of Gobbo III, and of his flag-madness, and I remembered something we had been told of the time he, the King, decreed that every bog in the land should have its own flag. I could only remember vaguely, so on my way home I popped in to the Vexillology Club, and got a temporary ticket to use its library, and I pored over many many books about flags, and eventually I found what I was looking for. I seemed to remember Herr Von Straubenzee telling us that the proclamation, or promulgation, of Gobbo III’s decree had been recorded, and preserved, and indeed it had, for there it was tucked away in the endpapers of one of the books I consulted.

Bow down, bow down, ye serfs and peasants, and pin back your ears, for I am your King and I have a proclamation to proclaim! Let my words crash like thunder in your ears! In my majesty and magnificence I hereby decree that every bog in the land shall have its own flag. I have a vision, of a stout and mighty flagpole planted in the muck anent each bog, and from each flagpole shall fly that bog its flag. And let no one, not princeling nor peasant, not noble nor knave, cause any one of the flags o’ the bogs ever to be lowered, for any reason whatsoever, natural or supernatural, sensible or foolish. Let the vexillographers of the land begin work this very day on the designs of said flags, to be submitted for my personal approbation. This I decree, for I am mighty and majestic, and I hold in my hand the ceremonial pincers. I am Gobbo!

It is one of the great sadnesses of my life that I never heard these words spoken by Herr Von Straubenzee. While it is true that his voice was thin and reedy and he often had to break off from speaking to cough up blood into the pail he kept by his lectern, he would have done them justice, I think, in the old wooden schoolroom long ago, with frost on the windowpanes and icicles hanging from the ceiling, a freezing draught creeping in under the door and making the flimsy flames from the blubber candles flicker. The flames cast shadows on the walls, and I remember how Frau Von Straubenzee, after our lessons, would enchant us with her shadow puppetry, of cows and pigs and mythological beasts and noble kinsmen and hydroelectric power stations and swans and ducks.

Speaking of which, I hid the transcript of Gobbo III’s proclamation under my fantastically stylish Flinders Petrie cardigan, nipped out of the Vexillology Club library via the back staircase, and returned to the municipal park bench, by the municipal park pond. The swans and ducks were still splashing about. A pond is not a bog, far from it, but as I sat there in the dying light of an autumn afternoon, I thought how the scene would be improved by a flagpole and a flag, a special flag designed for that pond alone. Now, for the first time I realised that Gobbo III, for all his tyrannical reign and his temper tantrums and his odd refulgent crown and his bustling and stamping and his surfeit of lampreys and his wax effigy and his cardboard queen and his lupin nosegays and his unrestrained power and his ceremonial pincers and his butt of Malmesbury, was that rare thing, a wise king, perhaps even a philosopher king.

To each bog its flag. That simple phrase holds a deeper, more profound truth than the mere words can convey. I think Herr Von Straubenzee, in the old wooden schoolroom long ago, with frost on the windowpanes and icicles hanging from the ceiling, a freezing draught creeping in under the door and making the flimsy flames from the blubber candles flicker, knew that. And I salute his memory.

[I am afraid my head is entirely empty today, so I am reposting a piece which first appeared six years ago, on 22 July 2006.]

Intriguing news from the world of letters, where weedy poet Dennis Beerpint has turned his hand to a work of prose fiction. We have received a review copy of the novel, entitled The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo, presumably on the basis that we will give it a favourable notice and thus boost Mr Beerpint’s bank balance, albeit flimsily.

“An immense mass of clotted nonsense”. That was the verdict of the magazine Teachers’ World upon the first publication of Ulysses by James Joyce, and I am tempted to say the same about this Beerpint book, and leave it at that. Astonishingly, however, this thousand-page tome has already been made a set book for schools, colleges, and orphanages throughout the land, which means that your tots, if you have any, or you, if you are a tot, will have to become familiar with it. When examination time comes round, everyone’s knowledge of Dennis Beerpint’s fictional farrago will be tested to the full. And so, public-spirited as ever, I am going to try to save you from wasting your precious time actually reading the damn thing, by telling you what you need to know.

Plot : Tadzio Gobbo is a princeling in a fictional Renaissance city state, clearly meant to remind us of the setting of a Jacobean drama such as The Courier’s Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger. As the novel opens, Gobbo is pristine, even, and uncreased. “If he were a piece of cardboard,” writes Beerpint, “he would not be of the corrugated kind.” Chapter by chapter we watch as the princeling becomes ever more becrumpled in a variety of unspeakably squalid ways, until at the end there is a deus ex machina and he is unfolded and ironed out.

Characters : Tadzio Gobbo is a crude self-portrait of the author, sharing his weediness, neurasthenia, predilection for twee verse, and hypochondria. Many of his becrumplements are accompanied by the onset of an imagined disease, such as yaws, the bindings, ague, flux, black bile, bitter colic and the strangury. Beerpint attempts to play up a certain devil-may-care foppishness, but this is never convincing. In fact it is laughably inept.

There is a host of secondary characters, the most important being Lugubrio, the princeling’s mad, stiletto-wielding uncle. Beerpint is constantly harping on about his “frantic black eyebrows”, which soon becomes tiresome. Lugubrio’s sole motive for all his actions, from eating his breakfast to murdering a crippled beggar, is revenge, but what or whom he is avenging is never made clear to the reader.

Other characters in the novel are a mixture of fictional, legendary, and real historical figures. Among the latter are Anthony Burgess, Edward G Robinson, Emily Dickinson, L Ron Hubbard and Veronica Lake. Beerpint thinks he is being clever by setting some of the scenes in a so-called ‘Scientology tent’ on the banks of ‘Lake Veronica’, but the effect is simply witless, and the reader will struggle not to throw the book into the fireplace.

Imagery : As a poet, Beerpint has been praised for his imagery (although I cannot think why) and The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo is jam-packed with all his old favourites. Crows, cows, burnt toast, pencil-cases, weather systems, the blood-spotted handkerchief of a tuberculosis patient, chaffinches, hedgerows, the horn of plenty and the Garden of Gethsemane, mud, chutes, Mudchute, potato recipes and pastry fillings, starlings, pigs, more starlings, more pigs, a nightmarish albino hen and the Munich Air Disaster are all evoked at one time or another in imagistic ways, as the princeling become ever further becrumpled.

Does the book have heft? : Yes it does.

Structure : The book is divided into forty nine chapters, fairly uniform in length. Each chapter ends with a reminder, as if the reader needed one, that a further stage of unspeakably squalid becrumplement has taken place, except for the last chapter, to which I have already referred. Beerpint is clearly fond of the practice found in the picaresque novel of summarising the plot in his chapter headings. To take a random example, Chapter XXVI is titled: “In which the becrumpling of Tadzio Gobbo proceeds apace, as his mad uncle Lugubrio unleashes a swarm of killer bees into the sports arena during a wrestling contest, and a false eclipse of the sun leads to rioting and flux; together with some notes on the flocking of chaffinches and the nesting habits of starlings, an aside in which a missing punctuation mark spells doom for an apothecary, and the reappearance of Lugubrio’s lobster.”

Plagiarism or quotations : Certain passages in the book appear to have been copied verbatim from novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Elias Canetti, Dan Brown, and the sociopathic ex-jailbird Jeffrey Archer. Dennis Beerpint presumably considers this to be postmodernist irony, a dangerous medical condition best treated by having one’s brain sluiced out with a violent purgative.

Narrative sloppiness : Untold oodles of it. It is a sloppy, flabby and slapdash book from first to last. At its core is a burning jewel of flummery and poppycock.

Brow : Neither high, middle, nor low. Not even no-brow. This book’s brow is frantic and black (see above).

Bookcase location : Finding the right spot for this volume on your bookcase or bookshelf is likely to be fraught with difficulty. Dobson’s invaluable pamphlet on the shelving of books, which is sadly out of print, will not help you, even if you manage to track down a copy, for as the titanic pamphleteer readily admits, “There are certain books, especially those written by twee poets such as Dennis Beerpint, which resist proper shelving on even the most well-ordered of bookcases. Top left corner? No. Squeezed in among the drivel and tat on the bottom shelf? Hardly. Shoved behind the collected works of Edward Upward and quietly forgotten? Certainly not, because you will always remember that it is there, and its hidden presence will reproach you every time you go anywhere near the bookcase, and you will be as the lowest worm or beetle or that which creepeth on its belly in the foulest muck of the earth.” Maddeningly, Dobson goes no further, he leaves us in the lurch, he refuses to say what I think he means – set fire to the damn thing in your garden, just as Burgess biographer Roger Lewis was tempted to do with a rival Life of the absurd Mancunian polymath.

Marketing ploy : Each copy of The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo comes with a free gift, viz. a paper bag of badger food. For that reason alone, I recommend that you buy a copy at once.

Look! There’s Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn in a rowing boat! They are both dead and in their graves, of course, but here on Golden Pond they, or rather their shades, drift forever. There is a similar pond in Paris, where you will be able to spot Camille and Sophie and Olivier, from Céline et Julie vont en bateau, similarly drifting, in their rowing boat, forever and ever. Some ponds attract ghosts, in their boats. There is nothing intrinsically eerie about such ponds. If you were to go for a walk around one, on a summer’s day, chucking, from a scrunched up paper bag, shreds of stale bread to ducks, and you did not spot Henry Fonda or Katharine Hepburn or Camille or Sophie or Olivier, or should I say their shades, I keep forgetting, then you would not think the pond a haunted pond. Having fed the ducks, you would deposit the empty paper bag in a waste bin, and go home, all unaware. It might well be that just as you turn your back on the pond, to head for home, that is precisely the moment when the rowing boat will appear, from behind overhanging foliage perhaps, and in the boat, glassy-eyed and spectral, the shades.

Some ask why it is that the shades stay put in ponds. Freed from mortal moorings, why do they not take their rowing boats to a river, and row out to sea? Yes, a pond is still and serene whereas the sea can be a wild seething storm-tossed uproarious churning maelstrom, but that ought hold no terrors for the shades. Surely Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn and Camille and Sophie and Olivier are beyond all such care? They have faced the greatest of all terrors, and passed beyond, into the realm of ghosts. And as ghosts, in their rowing boats, they could row and row through even the most violent of seas until they came alongside a ghost ship. For we know there are many ghost ships out upon the ocean. They could still row in their boat, if they wanted to, but they would also have the larger canvas of a sailing ship on which to paint their gaudy pictures of the hereafter.

The reason the shades stay upon their familiar ponds is for safety. For were they to take their boats to a river and drift upstream towards the sea, then, close by the sea, they would meet with coastal tomb bats. Terror can still strike the shades, and it does so in the form of these bats. Now you understand why Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn and Camille and Sophie and Olivier, no, their shades, their shades!, stay far inland, upon ponds, on Golden Pond and a Parisian pond, remote from any sea. As their name implies, the coastal tomb bats can never stray far from the coast. They haunt the meetings of land and sea, and when they sense, with their exceptionally good eyesight, the approach, on the river, of drifting rowing boats freighted with shades, ah . . . then terror is wreaked. A flock of coastal tomb bats will descend upon the boat, horrifying bats with grizzled dorsal colouration and conical faces, and they will hoist the shades out of the boat, and drag them, dozens of bats carrying each shade, to a tomb, a tomb by the coast, on a promontory overlooking the sea, as at Whitby. And the shade will be dropped in a tomb and the tomb fall shut, forever, and then there will never again be any drifting upon placid Golden Pond, for Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, nor upon a Parisian pond for Camille and Sophie and Olivier. And if you go to feed the ducks from a scrunched up paper bag of shreds of stale bread, you will see no shades, but perhaps, if it drifts from behind overhanging foliage, an empty rowing boat.

In the hereafter, as in the here, nothing is ever as straightforward as it might be. It is not the case that a rowing boat shade, tired of its pond and hankering for the vastness of the open sea, is fated always to fall into the clutches of coastal tomb bats. The bats can be outwitted, and the shade, desperate perhaps to embark upon a ghost ship, can avoid a terrible entombment in a coastal grave. For there are other bats, Peters’ tent-making bats, which will fly to the shade’s assistance. Whether the tent-making bats do this knowingly or inadvertently is a moot point, but they do what they do, and the shade can find a measure of safety, even at the coast. For it is a curious thing that, even with their piercing eyesight, the coastal tomb bats cannot pierce the fabric of the tents made by the tent-making bats. The brave and fortunate shade, drifting downriver towards the sea, fearful of the predations of coastal tomb bats, will keep a sharp if glassy eye out for signs of an encampment of Peters’ tent-making bats’ tents. If the shade spots one, it can drift to shore and tie its rowing boat to a ghostpost, and shimmer quickly to a tent, and so hide. From within the tent the lapping of sea against shore can be heard, and the shade is comforted. For some shades, this is enough, and they settle in the tent by the shore. Somehow one imagines this might suit Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn, their shades, but not Camille and Sophie and Olivier. The domestic melodrama played out by the trio would be all the more harrowing within the confines of a bat tent. They are no doubt happier drifting on their Parisian pond.

Bur if a tent by the sea is not enough, and the desire to board a ghost ship overwhelming, how is the shade to make it safely from tent to sea? The coastal tomb bats are ever watchful. Alas, there is not a third type of bat which serves as an escort to ferry the shade in safety. Nature has not provided one. The shade must risk all in a desperate flight, at a time when the coastal tomb bats may be sleeping, a flight back to the tied-up rowing boat, and thence, rowing heave-ho, not drifting, must make as rapidly as possible for open sea, in hope of a welcoming ship. It is easy to see why some shades stay on their ponds.

Look! Henry Fonda and Katharine Hepburn are drifting, in their rowing boat, behind overhanging foliage on Golden Pond. Did you see them?

The Bisky Bat was first identified by Edward Lear in his poem The Quangle Wangle’s Hat (1877). It would be more accurate to say that it was only identified by Lear, as nobody before or since seems to have had a word to say of its existence. Believe me, I have done the research.

The initial problem I had to solve was whether “Bisky” was part of the formal nomenclature of this type of bat, or whether Lear was referring to a generic bat, and applying a descriptive adjective. The capitalisation of “Bisky” would suggest the former, though “Bat” is also capitalised in the text, so who knows? If “Bisky” is a general adjective, it is one that has been neglected by the OED and by all the other standard dictionaries. There is a slim possibility that it may have something to do with biscuits, but it is hard to understand what might be biscuit-like about a bat. You might bake a biscuit in the shape of a bat, but that would be a Batty Biscuit, not a Bisky Bat. I concluded, after much furrowing of the brow and smoking quite a few gaspers, that “Bisky” was indeed the formal name of a type of bat.

My knowledge of the world o’ bats is breathtaking. One of my party pieces, which never fails to enliven even the most straitlaced and sober of social gatherings, is to reel off in a dramatic tone of voice a list of bats. I rarely need prompting, and I do not need prompting now. Some bats then: the Asian False Vampire Bat, the Asian Painted Bat, the Big Brown Bat, the Big Free-tailed Bat, the Brandt Bat, the Brazilian Free-tailed Bat, the Brown Long-eared Bat, the California Leaf-nosed Bat, the Common Yellow-shouldered Bat, the Daubenton Bat, the Desert Red Bat, the Eastern Long-eared Bat, the Eastern Pipistrelle, the Egyptian Fruit Bat, the Evening Bat, the Florida Mastiff Bat, the Fringe-lipped Bat, Geoffroy’s Rayed Bat, the Giant Indian Fruit Bat, the Golden Horseshoe Bat, the Gray Bat, the Greater Bulldog Bat, the Greater Horseshoe Bat, the Greater Long-nosed Bat, the Greater Spear-nosed Bat, the Hoary Bat, the Honduran White Bat, the Indiana Bat, the Ipanema Bat, Keen’s Bat or the Northern Bat, the Lappet-browed Bat, Leisler’s Bat, the Lesser Horseshoe Bat, the Lesser Long-nosed Bat, Linnaeus’ False Vampire Bat, the Little Brown Bat, the Long-nosed Bat, the Mexican Big-eared Bat, the Mexican Fruit Bat, the Nathusius Pipistrelle, Natterer’s Bat, the Noctule Bat, the Northern Yellow Bat, the Pallid Bat, the Parti-coloured Bat, Peters’ Ghost-faced Bat, Peters’ Tent-making Bat, Peters’ Wooly False Vampire Bat, the Pipistrelle Bat, the Pocketed Free-tailed Bat, the Pygmy Pipistrelle, Rafinesque’s Big-eared Bat, the Red Bat, Rodrigues’ Fruit Bat, the Seminole Bat, the Serotine Bat, the Short-tailed Fruit Bat, the Silver-haired Bat, the Southeastern Bat, the Southern Yellow Bat, the Spotted Bat, the Straw-coloured Fruit Bat, the Surat Serotine Bat, Townsend’s Big-eared Bat, Underwood’s Long-tongued Bat, Underwood’s Mastiff Bat, the Vampire Bat, the Western Mastiff Bat, the Whiskered Bat, the Wrinkle-faced Bat, and the Yellow Bat. This is by no means an exhaustive list. I have not mentioned, for example, the Demonic Tube-nosed Fruit Bat, Veldkamp’s Dwarf Epauletted Fruit Bat, St. Aignan’s Trumpet-Eared Bat, the Strange Big-eared Brown Bat, Schlieffen’s Twilight Bat, the Tiny Yellow Bat, the Robust Yellow Bat, the Equatorial Dog-faced Bat, the Coastal Tomb Bat, the Buffy Flower Bat, the Hairy Little Fruit Bat, nor the various Smoky Bats. I could prattle on for hours, and perhaps include a diversion where I pointed out the amusing fact that an entire genus of fruit bats is known as the Dobsonia. But no matter how long my party piece lasts, the one bat you will not hear mentioned is the Bisky Bat.

Now this is very odd. Edward Lear was a formidable naturalist, and he would hardly have invented a bat. I can only assume that he spotted one, in 1877 or shortly beforehand, named it, wrote of it, and then went on his merry way, no doubt assuming other bat-mad persons would subject the bat to further study. And yet they did not.

Having reached a dead end in my researches, it occurred to me that I could make profitable use of my time by attempting to draw a Bisky Bat. Now it has to be said that I am a pretty cack-handed draughtsman, and not one of the hundreds of bat drawings I have made in the past bears much resemblance to a bat. I always have trouble with the wings and those little eyes and the complex radar-like navigation system bats rely on to get from A to B. But on this occasion it would not be “me” doing the drawing, for I resolved to enter into a trance and, with my arm suspended, from the elbow, in a sling, and a pencil glued to my fingers, I would commune with a spirit guide. This guide would control the movements of the pencil across the paper. Before sinking into the trance, by means of mystic Blavatskyan breathing exercises, gibberish, and a Brian Eno record, I went for a stroll and a smoke and I wondered if the spirit that communed with me would be Edward Lear himself, or perhaps another Victorian naturalist, one who had also spotted the Bisky Bat but had failed to recognise it properly, and was now taking the opportunity to make amends for his oversight. I would never know, of course, for when I emerge from these trances, my brain is as if wiped clean with a particularly effective disinfectant preparation.

The other thing that happens when I emerge from these trances is that I am confronted with a sheet of paper on which I, or the medium, has scribbled and scraped a formless mess of squiggly quangle wangle. I always forget that, too.

I have not quite abandoned my Bisky Bat research, however. I am now working on the theory that the editors of the OED, and of all other standard dictionaries, have somehow overlooked the word, and that it does indeed exist as a common adjective. All I need do now is to work out what it means.