I was not at all certain whether I had any advocates, I could not find out anything definite about it, every face was unfriendly, most people who came toward me and whom I kept meeting in the corridors looked like fat old women; they had huge blue-and-white striped aprons covering their entire bodies, kept stroking their stomachs and swaying awkwardly to and fro. I had been told that at least three advocates would be assigned to represent me, but if so, where were they? And could the case proceed without them?

I wondered if I had somehow come to the wrong building. Perhaps this was not the law courts, but some other branch of some other institution of some other regime in some other country on some other continent. After all, there was a blank period of several hours, between my waking up on my pallet of straw in the barn annexe and my arrival here, several hours of which I could remember nothing save for the plaintive cry of a curlew, and a smashed saucer on the linoleum.

Dizzy in the head, I sat down on a bench and lit my pipe. People continued to mince and waddle along the corridor, seemingly with purpose. None of them spared me a glance. None of them announced themselves as my advocate. Perhaps I was in the right building but on the wrong floor? I had noticed, as I entered from the street, that the building was impossibly tall. The top of it was invisible, engulfed by clouds.

Puffing on my pipe ought to have calmed my nerves, but, like poor Neddie in Brand Upon The Brain! (Guy Maddin, 2006), I was a bundle of tics. The case – if it were ever heard and judged upon – could spell my ruin. I had been accused of plagiarism by the publishers of the weekly children’s comic The Hammer Of Christ. Among the most popular strips in that penny woeful was that recounting the adventures of Buster and Radbod. I was deemed to have stolen these characters when I began to issue my own weekly children’s comic, Buster And Radbod. It was true that, in all particulars, my Buster was identical to the original Buster, my Radbod to the original Radbod, and that some – well, all – of the adventures I related in my comic differed not a jot from adventures pursued by Buster and Radbod in The Hammer Of Christ. But apart from those wildly improbable coincidences – and is it not a feature of coincidences that they are wild and improbable? – there really was no comparison. The paper-size and pagination of the comics was different, my drawings were somewhat cack-handed, and the sale price of my publication was four times the price of the dreadful rag I was accused of copying.

In spite of this, and of my protestations of innocence, I had been summoned to the court to face the full wrath of the law. But how could I marshal a defence without my promised advocates? Slumped on the bench, it dawned on me that my predicament was not dissimilar to a situation faced by Buster and Radbod in one of their adventures, which had appeared in The Hammer Of Christ Vol. XLIV No. 8 and, coincidentally, in Buster And Radbod Vol. I No. 1.

What happened was that the frolicsome duo were summoned to the law court, an impossibly tall building, the top of which vanished in the clouds. They had to answer a charge brought against them, the essence of which was that they were false replicas, or doppelgangers, of the purported real Buster and real Radbod. It is a stupendously exciting and suspenseful story, as the pair roam the corridors on the many many floors of the building, knowing that at any moment they may come face to face with … themselves! Particularly enthralling – and psychologically complex for a children’s comic strip – is Buster and Radbod’s growing realisation that they may not be real, may be simply fictional two-dimensional simulacra. Complexity piles on paradox because, of course, neither Buster nor Radbod is real – they are comic strip characters. But so are the so-called real Buster and Radbod they will encounter, at some point in the story in the building in a corridor on a floor.

Somehow these reflections made my own situation less fraught. I tapped out my pipe, rose from the bench, and went in search of my advocates. It seemed to me now that I would be able to spot them easily among the teeming throng. They would look identical to me! All three of them! I hunted them along all the corridors on the floor, and then I tried the other corridors on the other floors, one by one. But before I found my advocates, I noticed a curious thing about the many steep and crowded staircases in this building. As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

I ordered my horse to be brought from the stables. His name is Alan. He is an elegant horse, but tubercular. His shanks are admirable, and he has as fine a mane as any horse in Christendom.

The stable-boy, a pockmarked little squirt who bore a distinct resemblance to the young Stalin, came limping out. His face was drained of all colour.

“Alan is gone, gone, vanished, as if in a puff of smoke!” he cried, and began to weep.

I cannot bear the sight of a weeping stable-boy.

“I cannot bear the sight of a weeping stable-boy!” I cried, “Stop snivelling!”

And I jabbed a finger sharply into one of his pocks. I found this immensely satisfying, so I jabbed my other seven fingers, one by one, into seven of his other pocks.

“Now,” I said, “You will go and find Alan. The mobile library is parked outside the birdseed shop on Lower Goat Lane. In the library, you will find a horse-atlas. Borrow it, using your library ticket. The horse-atlas contains many maps showing those parts where horses of different complexions and beauty are located. It is likely Alan has galloped to one such part of our land. Work out which, using the horse-knowledge you have acquired as a stable-boy, get thee hence, and fetch him back, using a lasso if need be.”

I was pleased with this little speech, almost as pleased as I was jabbing my fingers into his pocks, so I took myself off to the tavern for well-deserved refreshment. When I arrived at the tavern, on Upper Goat Lane, I discovered that it was under new management and had been turned into a trendy milk bar, within which dozens of beatniks were playing bongos and reciting terrible poetry.

As I sipped my tumbler of milk, I jotted down the words of one of the poems I heard.

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

Because their horses had gone missing from the stables

But they were in luck because they could send pockmarked stable-boys who looked like the young Stalin

Off in search of their horses armed with a horse-atlas from the mobile library.

For some reason, I found that this poem spoke to me in a way the other beatnik twaddle did not. Perhaps it was because I was one of the best minds of my generation. I had a trophy to prove it, a cup I had been given in my infant school. The full wording etched on the cup was another poem:

Best mind your cup, oh child so tiny

If you break it you will be whiney

And if you whine on Saint Spivack’s Day

The Grunty Man will take you away!

I had actually been taken away by the fearsome and awful Grunty Man at the age of six, but he grew so exasperated by my constant whining that he brought me back again later the same day. As I sat in the groovy milk bar, I could only hope that the stable-boy would bring Alan the horse back just as quickly.

He duly turned up several hours later, by which time I had drunk so much milk, and listened to so much terrible poetry accompanied by bongos, that I was burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night, who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz.

The stable-boy had brought me a horse, but it was not Alan. It was neither elegant nor tubercular, its shanks were despicable, and its mane was nothing to write home about.

“That horse is not Alan!” I cried, “It is neither elegant nor tubercular, its shanks are despicable, and its mane is nothing to write home about!”

“Sorry,” said the stable-boy, “I visited many many many of the places on the maps in the horse-atlas, and this is the best I could do.”

I was minded to jab my fingers in his pocks again, but I restrained myself.

“Take the new horse to the stables and saddle it up,” I said, “I will be along shortly, for I have miles to go before I vomit up all this milk and go to sleep.”

The stable-boy plodded off with the horse in tow, and I drank another tumbler of milk and listened to another godawful poem accompanied by bongos.

When I made to leave, I found my way barred by a huge bouncer-beatnik.

“What gives, daddy-o?” he said, “You don’t want to leave this groovy milk bar. Anyway, we won’t let you. You’re the kind of cat we’d love to have hitting those bongos morning noon and night. You really fry my wig. Yes, you’ll stay here forever, drinking milk and thumping bongos. Where would you go, anyway?”

I whined.

“Out of here – that’s my goal.”

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was lying on his back, and as he lifted his head slightly, he could see several tiny, stick-thin legs wriggling helplessly. He realised that, at some point during the night, he had become some kind of beetle. His brain could not cope with this horror, and promptly shut down, propelling him back into merciful unconsciousness.

When, eventually, he woke from his stupor, he was shocked to discover that he had undergone a second transformation. He was no longer a beetle. He was a Beatle! Somehow, he had now become Ringo Starr, or, more precisely, a perfect replica of Ringo Starr circa 1964. Cautiously, he ran his hands over his hair, now become a moptop. He called out, quietly, for his Mama, and heard a lugubrious Liverpudlian accent. But Mama did not come, and in his despair he picked up a pair of drumsticks which had appeared on his bedside table, and bashed himself on the head, repeatedly and rhythmically, with a characteristic “fill”, until, once again, he lost consciousness.

There were more uneasy dreams, and when he awoke again he discovered he had undergone a third transformation. Now he had become an entirely new being. Outwardly – indeed, inwardly – he was exactly the same as he had been the previous day, no longer a beetle or a Beatle. Yet it was clear to him, as he leapt out of bed and plunged his head into a bucket of icy water and shuffled into the kitchen for a breakfast of jugged eels and reconstituted marmalade and turned on the radiogram to listen to an early morning concert of argumentative German improvised racket, that something had changed, something decisive and irreversible. But what?

Neither Mama nor Papa, nor his young sister Sophonisba, gave any indication that he was in any way different. But then they barely noticed his presence at all, as they sat at the kitchen table stuffing their gobs with cornflakes and hardboiled eggs in jelly. So concentrated were they on their munching and chewing they did not even hear the frankly godawful din from the radiogram.

He decided that the simplest way to work out what had happened to him would be to go about his usual routine, but to monitor himself. So he spent a profitable three or four hours faffing about with the inner workings of his wristwatch. When he was done, it would not only tell the time, but it would keep a continuous check on the state of his soul and his vitals. If all his tweakings were correct, then at nightfall, when the day was done, his watch would spit out a printed report, with handy bullet points. The next day, he could pass this to a consultant for analysis.

The difficulty would be to find a competent analyst. He did not require the services of a brain-quack, but of someone learned in such fields as ornithology, geology, origami, athletics, trellis work, and rustic wisdom. If necessary, he would have to consult separate experts and then correlate their findings. It was going to be an uphill struggle.

Fortunately, Gregor Samsa was no stranger to uphill struggles, for the chalet where he lived with his Mama and Papa and sister Sophonisba was at the foot of an important mountain. Every day he had to clamber across scree and up treacherous snow-covered slopes to get to the newsagent’s. That was the first part of his routine. He purchased a copy of The Daily Voodoo Dolly and a pint of warm untreated goaty milk sloppings, and then he climbed ever further up the mountainside, panting, until he reached his other chalet. He had always thought it best to have two chalets, one in which to sleep and ablute and eat breakfast, and another as a bolt-hole away from his family, in which he could while away the day staring out of the window at snow and sky and the various types of birds which flit and swoop in that sky.

But on this day he was only part of the way across the scree when his head became filled with uncertainty and doubt. His legs were like jelly. On impulse, he turned back, back to the family chalet, and he unlatched the door and slammed it shut behind him and collapsed on the carpet, across which he could see a beetle scurry. An insect, that is, not Ringo.

He lay on the floor wondering if the newsagent would be alarmed by his unaccustomed absence, and by the unsold copy of The Daily Voodoo Dolly. Would the newsagent call the helicopter police? Would they come in search of him, swooping across the sky, just like the birds? Unlike the birds, would they come scrambling down on rope ladders and kick in the chalet windows and Taser him and hoist him up into their chopper and ferry him across the important mountains to a sinister compound? Would he be dragged to a cellar and tied to a chair and interrogated under Klieg lights? Would they mistake him for Ringo Starr? Would he be forced to sing Octopus’s Garden, or would they demand that he tell them tales of Thomas The Tank Engine? All these, and other panicky questions throbbed in his brainpans until he remembered that he was not Ringo, he was neither a Beatle nor a beetle. But what in the name of Saint Spivack had he become? He got up from the carpet and went to his cupboard and took out a hammer and nails and planks and barricaded himself into the chalet. Mama and Papa and Sophonisba were out, attending an all-day archery tournament in a nearby village.

His barricading had blotted out the daylight, so he deployed an array of blubber candles here and there, on sideboards and mantelpieces and tabletops and counters. He gazed at the flames, one by one, and pondered how curious it was that this light was produced by what was once the innards of that mighty sea beast, the whale. He asked himself if his own innards might, in some future dispensation, shed light upon the world. Was that to be his destiny, as a new kind of being, in his transformed state?

Hours passed, with no hint of police helicopters, and one by one the blubber candles sputtered and guttered out, and he was left in darkness. Rather than shedding light, then, was his fate to become some kind of nocturnal being, like an owl or a bat?

He rummaged through the nooks of memory to try to recall what he had learned of the bat and the owl through years upon years of study. He remembered little, save for sounds of squeak and hoot and that both bat and owl have the gift of flight. Could he now, in his transformation, fly? He flapped his arms, testing the air, and discovered that, yes!, he could indeed fly. He rose so fast that he crashed right through the skylight in the chalet ceiling. Now he was up in the cold moonlit air, wheeling and swooping, a human starling.

Now it so happened that down below, on the path from the village, his parents and his sister were returning from the archery tournament. Looking up at the moon, they were startled to see so strange an airborne being.

“Let us fell that highly unusual flying creature,” said Mama, “We can sell the corpse to a museum and make a tidy sum. We will be able to pay for Gregor to be put in a Mercy Home for the Feckless & Bewildered.”

And the three of them each took their bows and arrows and shot him out of the sky. He plummeted to earth at their feet, thrice pierced and stone dead, and they saw that it was Gregor.

“Crikey!” said Mama, “We’ve bollocksed things up good and proper. As soon as the helicopter police find out what we’ve done we’ll be in hot water and no mistake. There’s only one thing for it. We’ll have to flee, all three of us. If we turn around now and go back to the village, we should be just in time to catch the night train to that dilapidated seaside resort a hundred miles away. There is an unseemly hotel there, where we can hole up until this kerfuffle blows over, or for the rest of our lives, depending on the pertinacity of the coppers. Let’s go!”

They made it to the railway station with seconds to spare, first dumping their bows and arrows in a skip next to the signal box. As the night train chugged out towards the seaside, they sat in their carriage, stuffing their gobs with a supper of lemon meringue pie ‘n’ boiled liver. And it was like a confirmation of their new dreams and excellent intentions that at the end of their journey their daughter sprang to her feet first and stretched her young body.

Much, but not all, of this piece is recycled, with tweaks, from On My Transformation, which appeared here in March 2012. The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

We are five friends, one day we came out of a house one after the other, first one came and placed himself beside the gate, then the second came, or rather he glided through the gate like a little ball of quicksilver, and placed himself near the first one, then came the third, then the fourth, then the fifth. We were like a five-sided die. Most dice have six sides, or faces, I think, but we were like one of those five-sided dice you used to be able to buy at Mr Fatso’s Unseemly Joke Shop. There is an old canard that a five-sided die is a geometric impossibility. Well, try telling that to Mr Fatso. He will spit on your shoes and push one of his novelty spiders up your nose.

We did not come out of the house voluntarily. We were turfed out, one by one, by its paterfamilias. Several hours earlier, shortly after the risen sun brought a blush of golden loveliness to the burgeoning day (Dinsey), we had barged into the house purporting to proselytise. We claimed to be Adepts of the Order of Sibodnedwab, an esoteric order devoted to esoterica, spiritual perfection, and robbery. On the pretext of converting the occupants to our cause, we hoped to snaffle items such as kettles, cushions, and coathangers.

They were a – very wholesome – family of four, Pa and Ma and Little Gus and Little Gertrude. We kept them entranced by chalking an esoteric design upon the carpet, babbling incoherent yet strangely compelling gibberish, and summoning, from a plume of smoke, the jewel-encrusted toad god Alf. Everything was going swimmingly until one of us – I won’t say who – got carried away and pushed one of Mr Fatso’s novelty spiders up Little Gus’s nose. His Pa became enraged. He was wholesome but also a champion wrestler, as big and broad as a big broad bear – see Colour Plate XIV in Snit’s Picture Book Of Bears. That will give you an idea of who we were dealing with.

Or not dealing with. One by one, Pa picked us up by the scruff of the neck and hoicked us out of the house. We came away with nothing. Now we are gathered at the gate, the five of us, like a five-sided die, wondering what to do next.

“Let us repair to an ice cream parlour!” cries Ringo. I ought to explain that we are each named after a Beatle. That means four of us have fixed names, while the fifth is known variously as Stu or Brian or George (the other one) or Mal or Yoko, depending upon which lengthy and pointless bit of conjecture gleaned from a half-century’s-worth of so-called rock journalism is uppermost in our minds at any one time.

Usually we like to engage in lengthy and pointless arguments, particularly when it is Ringo calling the shots, but this morning we all agree that ice cream sounds like a capital idea. After all, was it not Perkins who wrote “a choc ice is always a consolation”?

So off we toddle, the five of us, towards the nearest ice cream parlour, as the hands of the clock creep inexorably towards that position where they are both pointing in an identical, decisive vertical. There is a name for that precise alignment. You can look it up in Hodgepang’s The Positions Of Clock-Hands And Their Implications.

As we pass a splurge of binsey poplars, one of us – I won’t say who – looks back and sees, springing along the lane in pursuit, the jewel-encrusted toad god Alf. He is such a nuisance! Years ago, we hired him from Mr Fatso’s Unseemly Joke Shop, thinking he would add a dash of panache to our Order of Sibodnedwab capers. And he did, but he never leaves us alone, when for example we want to go and eat choc ices. We stopped paying Mr Fatso his rental fee long ago, but the toad god still follows us about. Is he a toad god or a toad demon? No matter how he pouts his lips we push him away with our elbows, but however much we push him away, back he comes.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

We were camping in the oasis. We were in one of those so-called “new tents” championed by the “new campers”. The new camping movement took its inspiration partly from the Kibbo Kift and partly from an obscure B-side of a 45rpm single by The Captain And Tennille, in which the winsome duo sang of the joys of “new camping in our new tent with our new camping-gaz stove”. Though we had a new tent, unfortunately we did not have a new camping-gaz stove, and had to make do with an old one to cook our sausages.

My two companions were soilheads, but I am not a trendy person, and I still own – and use – a comb.

One day, peering out through the new flap of our new tent, we saw, passing by in the near distance, an Arab, leading a jackal on a leash.

“Hey there!” called out one of my companions, let us call him Soilhead One, “Come over here with your leashed jackal and share our cocoa and sausages!”

As he approached, we saw that the Arab was an old man, much bewrinkled, and creaking.

“You are very kind,” he said, “Though I am old, my jackal here is one of those so-called ‘new jackals’ we’ve been hearing so much about lately.”

We confessed that we had heard not a jot about new jackals.

“Well,” he said, “The mobile library will be stopping by this oasis on Thursday morning. They should have in stock the latest issue of Stuff Occurring In The Desert magazine. In it, you will find a feature article about new jackals. A short while ago one of its reporters interviewed me, and the Muhammadan mezzotintist Dot Al-Tint executed a mezzotint of my jackal. I was given to understand the picture will appear on the magazine’s cover.”

We promised to consult a copy on the coming Thursday, and reasoned that any questions we might have about old and new jackals could wait until then. There was a lull in the conversation. We chewed our sausages and slurped our cocoa.

This would be an opportune time to tell you something about Soilhead Two. When we set out on our desert crossing, he was a complete stranger to both me and Soilhead One. We had encountered him at a souk. He used to wear fedoras, but now he sported a fez. There were kabbalistic innuendos in everything he said. A soilhead in a fez was quite a novelty, even at that time. Soilhead One, who knew more than most about the Kabbalah, was able to untangle the innuendoes to some extent.

Soilhead Two told us very little about himself. Growing exasperated by our questions, he conceded eventually that there was an entry for him in the Dictionary of National Biography. That, he said, would tell us all we needed to know about him, and more. It was Soilhead One, sharp as a tack, who countered that one needs to be dead before one can be included in the DNB. In reply, Soilhead Two looked up at the sky, pointed, and said “Oh look, a [common name of a type of bird I am afraid I have forgotten]!” As ever, ornithology served to distract us, and the subject of Soilhead Two’s life – and possible death – was never raised again.

Now, in the lull outside our “new tent” at the oasis, we noticed that Soilhead Two was staring fixedly at the jackal, and the jackal was staring fixedly at Soilhead Two. Were they just gazing at each other, or were they communicating by some telepathic means akin to that employed by Mr Spock in the television series Star Trek?

Whatever was going on between them came to an abrupt end when the Arab, tugging on the jackal’s leash, explained that he had important sand-based things to do elsewhere in the desert, and must be on his way. He thanked us for the cocoa and sausages, reminded us to read up on “new jackals” in Stuff Occurring In The Desert magazine, and trudged creakily away, jackal in tow.

A few days passed without incident. Soilhead Two seemed strangely quiet, but we noticed he was growing increasingly irritated with our old camping-gaz stove. Then, on Wednesday, the day before the mobile library was due, he announced that he knew of a large desert department store where we would be able to buy one of the “new” stoves. Soilhead One and I had no reason to suspect him of ill intent, so we happily packed up our things and set off across the sand, letting Soilhead Two lead the way.

We marched across the boiling sands for the best part of a day, until, towards nightfall, we arrived at an airstrip. There were no aeroplanes, no control tower, and nor was there a department store. Soilhead Two walked determinedly along the strip, and came to a halt at a gaping pit. Baffled, we watched him carefully as he began to wave his arms in strange slow significant passing movements over the pit, while babbling guttural incantatory mumbo jumbo.

Suddenly, a plume of black smoke belched forth from the pit, and we were amazed to see, stepping out of it, the old Arab. He no longer had a jackal on a leash. Unnervingly, his own head was that of a jackal.

“All hail Anubis!” cried Soilhead Two.

“Greetings, Mr Crowley,” barked Anubis.

“Please, call me Aleister,” said the man we had thought our “new camping” companion.

“Very well, Aleister. I see, standing behind you, a couple of nitwits.”

“Yes, O great Anubis, I thought it would be fun to make of them a sacrifice to the powers of Darkness, Death, Doom, Despair, and Destruction.”

“That’s a great idea, Aleister, But wait!”

And the jackal-headed god made strange slow significant passing movements of his own, and out of the pit came leaping and bounding dozens upon dozens of savage yapping jackals.

“Let us push your little pals into the pit until we have prepared ourselves for the full awfulness of the sacrifice,” said the god.

And so Soilhead One and I were pushed into the pit. That was six days ago. We can hear Aleister Crowley and Anubis assembling their horrible equipment. We have no chance of escape. Above us, in a ring around the pit, are the jackals. They are barking and yapping and slavering and gazing down on us. And how they hate us!

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

“Am I not the helmsman here?” I called out.

Most of you, I hope, will recognise this as the opening line of my Great Speech. It will certainly be familiar to younger readers, who must learn the Great Speech by rote in their kindergartens. Only when they have it by heart are they permitted to move on to other essential topics, such as pig husbandry, Latin, and knitting. For the older generation, we have made possession of the printed transcript compulsory. There are several editions available, including one with cardboard covers and a lovely frontispiece featuring a mezzotint by Dot Tint. Unfortunately, not all of these editions are reliable, some containing misprints and even wilful interpolations serving to twist my words. There have been several executions at the gibbets atop Polkadot Hill.

As is well known, I delivered the Great Speech while standing at the helm of a barge on an important stretch of canal, the better to illustrate my point for the thickos in the audience. They probably comprised about ninety per cent of those gathered on the towpath, if not more. It is quite astonishing to recall that, in those antebellum days, the bulk of the population completed their six months of kindergarten completely unable to husband a pig, speak Latin, or knit.

But things have changed, and credit must be given to my Great Speech. It was stirring, it was majestic, it was very loud, and it took four hours to deliver. It was punctuated, as all my speeches are, with copious spitting. Before I began speaking, I had the Earwax Squad move among the crowd with their little wooden ear-prodders, to ensure every last thicko peasant would hear me properly. They might not understand half of what I said, or any of it, but at least the words would enter their ears unmuffled by wax.

I was pleased with the rhetorical flourish at the beginning of my speech, partly because I was daring anyone in the crowd to contradict me. Doing so was made the more difficult by my standing at the helm of the barge, wearing a bargee’s cap. But you can never be sure with the peasantry. As it was, nobody did try to deny that I was the helmsman, so I was able to proceed without pause.

I explained that the old days were over and, quoting Blair, declared “a New Dawn has broken, has it not?”, again inviting contradiction. No voice was raised against me, so I pressed on. From now on, there would be more and better pig husbandry. Latin would be the lingua franca. Idle hands would be forced to knit in special new knitting camps, fenced with barbed wire.

I outlined other exciting features of the New Dawn, covering everything from albatross slaughter to zoo regulations, with twenty-four other alphabetically-ordered areas of urban and rustic life in between. I am not sure, frankly, why I bothered to include urban matters, because the peasants gathered by the canalside to hear me were the sort of peasants who, faced with something urban, like a pavement or a street light or a civic art installation, would faint or swoon or just topple over, in uncomprehending mental chaos.

Indeed, quite a large proportion of the crowd listening to my Great Speech seemed similarly brain-bedizened. They stood there, gawping, open-mouthed, dribbling and drooling, a slouching bunch of dimwits. These are the riffraff my regime of the New Dawn will mould into terrifically energetic and Stakhanovite pig husbanders, Latin speakers, and knitters.

That, at least, was the plan. But – and it is a huge but. Do they ever think, or do they only shuffle pointlessly over the earth?

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

A vulture was hacking at my feet. I punched it in the throat and it flew away, up to a corner of the cage, where it perched, furious. I was furious too. I let myself out of the cage, clanging the door behind me, and went straight to the bandagerie. It was shut, which made me more furious. I took a plum from my pocket, ate it quickly, and threw the stone at a whinchat. I missed, but the act of throwing calmed me down.

Leaving a trail of blood from the wounds in my feet, I crossed the site to my cabin. I was about to go in when the hooter hooted, deafeningly. We are trained to stand absolutely still, chin up, hyper-alert, all wax removed from our ears, to await whatever announcement – or command, or diktat, or ukase – will follow. When at last the sound of the hooter died, I heard the grating voice of Grandma Pipstraw ordering me – me! – to report immediately to her at the központ. It was the first time I had ever heard my name spoken aloud by Grandma Pipstraw, and I felt a curious admixture of pride and terror.

I sprinted to the központ as fast as my vulture-hacked feet would allow. The security git scanned the identity number tattooed on the side of my neck, and shoved me along a passageway to the inmost hub. Grandma Pipstraw was sitting on her musnud, knitting. She looked up at me, and I saw reproach in her half-blind eyes.

“We have CCTV footage of you punching Geraldine the vulture in the throat,” she said, “What have you got to say for yourself? Actually, don’t answer that. You will only whine, and I can’t stand whining. So a vulture hacks at your feet? What do you expect? Birds are savage, wild creatures. A woodpecker will peck you, if you are made of wood. A swan can break your arm, according to Tim Henman. A vulture will hack at your feet. Deal with it. But you do not punch Geraldine in the throat. You’re fired. The security git will escort you, roughly, off the premises. Now, begone from my half-blind sight!”

And that is how I lost my job as an Aviary Assistant at Grandma Pipstraw’s Lovely Zoo.

Unemployed, penniless, and hopeless, I wandered from seaside resort to seaside resort, jostling with seagulls as we scavenged for scraps. Then one night, when the seagulls were asleep, I was rummaging in a municipal seaside dustbin and I found a discarded copy of Dobson’s pamphlet Things To Do When You Have Been Dismissed From Your Job At A Zoo (out of print). I wondered what qualified the twentieth century’s greatest pamphleteer to expound on the subject. As far as I was aware, Dobson had never been employed by a zoo in any capacity. So I approached his text with a measure of caution.

I was bowled over. The prose was hysterical and jarring, but Dobson really seemed to know what he was talking about. Over forty closely-typed pages, he suggested two “things to do” for somebody in my predicament. I can’t remember the first one, possibly because I did not understand it, but the second suggestion was absolutely brilliant. I will not quote the pamphleteer directly, on legal advice, but the gist of it was “run away and join a circus”.

I tossed the pamphlet back into the dustbin and I ran away, oh how I ran!

Some weeks later, I eventually arrived, panting, at a Big Top pitched in a mud-stricken field on the outskirts of Pointy Town. While running, I had had plenty of time to devise a circus act which, I was sure, would see me welcomed with open arms. Before going into the tent, I brushed my hair and removed all the wax from my ears. Then I pranced through the tent-flap and presented myself before the circus ringmaster, who went by the name Baruch Spinoza.

“Hello!” I chirped, “I would like to join your circus!”

“I see,” he said, “Who are you and what is your circus act?”

“I am Little Minnie Pipstraw, The Amazing Vulture-Puncher,” I said, “I punch vultures in the throat”.

“That sounds highly entertaining,” said the ringmaster, “You’re hired”.

I would like to say that I was an instant success at Baruch Spinoza’s Big Top, but in truth it took several years to perfect my act. Initially, I had a great deal of difficulty finding an available vulture, and had to make do with a toy one made of marzipan. My punching technique, with my dainty little fist, won the crowds over, and when I upgraded to a papier-mâché vulture, the applause was thunderous.

It so happened that one muggy summer’s day, we pitched our circus tent in a mud-stricken field slap bang next to Grandma Pipstraw’s Lovely Zoo. I could not resist paying a visit. Though years had passed, the same security git stood on guard at the gate. He did not recognise me. When I tried to enter, he stopped me.

“The zoo is shut,” he said, “Grandma Pipstraw passed beyond this mortal realm last week. She became hopelessly entangled in the ravels of wool she was knitting, with fatal results. We shall not see her like again. To pay her funeral costs, we are selling off the zoo animals and aviary birds at bargain bin prices. Can I interest you in anything?”

Of course, I jumped at the chance to buy a real live vulture for 35p. I took it back to the Big Top, happier I think than I had ever been. Goodbye marzipan and papier-mâché! From this day on Little Minnie Pipstraw, The Amazing Vulture-Puncher really would be amazing!

But in my glee and excitement, there was one thing I had not accounted for. It is a signal fact, at least in this work, that vultures have a sort of hereditary memory, passed down from parents to hatchlings. Thus, a hurt inflicted on a vulture will be “remembered” by that vulture’s offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring, yea unto every generation. And Dennis, my bargain bin 35p vulture, was a direct descendant of Geraldine.

That night, in the Big Top, I pranced into the ring with Dennis by my side. As the crowd gawped, I punched him in the throat with my dainty fist. He flew away, up into a corner of the tent, where he perched on a tall circus pole. And there came swimming into his vulture-brain the inherited memory of his great-great-grandmother, Geraldine, also punched in the throat, years ago, by Little Minnie Pipstraw, whose feet she was hacking, as any vulture would hack. Dennis was furious. He fixed his vulture-gaze on me, standing in the ring below accepting the wild applause of the circus crowd, and he swooped. He descended upon me at dazzling speed, and plunged his beak down my throat, a vulture avenged. Falling back, I was relieved to feel him drowning irretrievably in my blood, which was filling every depth, flooding every shore.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

It was summer, a hot day. I was eating breakfast when I was disturbed by a knocking at the manor gate. Pushing my lemon meringue pie to one side, I picked up my portable aerophone, or parp, and snapped it open. I held it at arm’s length, above my head, until it locked on to my factotum, Chumpot. A chiaroscuro image of his head, floating in a haze of static, appeared on the screen. I pressed the parp’s summoning knob and waited.

While I waited, I thought about Chumpot. Days can pass without encountering him, and I wanted to be sure it was indeed he who answered the summons. He has been our family factotum since long before I was born. If it is possible to be both suave and decrepit, both urbane and toothless, that was Chumpot. Heaven knows how aged he was, or from what wood his crutches had been fashioned.

Eventually he appeared, creaking, in the doorway. I told him I had heard a knocking at the manor gate and would have him investigate. He muttered something unintelligible and went away. I finished off the lemon meringue pie and started in on a dish of bloaters. I had eaten all but one of them when Chumpot returned, bringing with him a stranger. This fellow was nondescript, so I shall non descript him.

“Good morning on this hot summer’s day,” he said, “I am Detective Captain Cargpan, and I have come to place you under arrest.”

I was momentarily disconcerted, but quickly realised the copper’s error.

“You are confusing me with Chumpot,” I said, gesturing at the factotum, “He is a member of the lower orders, the servant class, and thus given to acts of malfeasance. By all means take him away.”

“Your factotum is as innocent as a newborn kitten,” said Cargpan, “It is you I have come for,”

And he spat in my eye.

“But I have done nothing wrong!” I cried.

“Are you sure of that?” said the policeman, spitting in my other eye, “The crimes of humankind are numberless, numberless. For example, in Thailand it is against the law for an individual to own more than one-hundred-and-twenty playing cards.”

“But we are not in Thailand and I do not own that many playing cards,” I shot back.

“Well,” said Cargpan, looking thoughtful, “Those are both matters we can look into down at the station, in the basement interrogation chamber. We might also find out whether you have ever taken hold of a salmon in a suspicious manner, whistled excessively, allowed a chicken to cross a major thoroughfare, or given a pig the name Napoleon. Who knows what you might have done in addition to the heinous enormity for which I am arresting you?”

I was about to ask what that was, but Cargpan whacked me on the windpipe with his truncheon. I saw my factotum smirking. As I gasped for breath, I was astonished to hear the copper say “Excellent work, Chumpot”. Then the pair of them bundled me none too gently out of the room and down the stairs and along the hallway and out of the manor door and into the back of Cargpan’s gleaming black police van.

As we drove along bosky country lanes towards the village police station, I experienced a shocking epiphany. Despite his suavity and urbanity, Chumpot was a most untidy man. His clothing was ragged and filthy, his shoes were always caked with mud, and I suspect he was a stranger to shampoo. Yet he wore pinned to his chest a brooch, polished to a gleam every day, a gleam so bright that, when it caught the sun, on hot summer days such as this, it flashed gash gold-vermilion, and almost blinded the observer with its brilliance. It was an oddity, compared with the factotum’s general unseemliness, and once, long ago, I had asked him about it.

“This brooch belonged to my dear departed mother,” he told me, “She was a sainted woman, a paragon of virtue, a model of kindness. She spent untold years resuscitating newborn kittens whose owners had drowned them in the toilet. I was devoted to her. As she took her last dying breath, in the drainage ditch where her poor withered body passed beyond this cruel world, she pressed her brooch into my hand and made me promise to wear it every day, and to polish it to a gleam every day, in her memory. And I have kept that promise. I could do no other.”

I found this little speech emotionally shattering, and I wept. And now, in the back of the police van, I was again emotionally shattered, and again I wept. For I suddenly saw what I had been blind to for so many years. Chumpot had lied to me. His “brooch” was a police badge!

Well, how was I to know? This was in the days before we all became familiar with coppers and their ways through endless television crime dramas and police procedurals. In any case, Chumpot was, as I had told Cargpan, a member of the servant class. As any phrenologist will tell you, though such specimens are habitually dishonest, they lack the intelligence necessary to embroider so credible and heart-wrenching a tale as Chumpot’s account of his dying mother.

I was still in a state of mental chaos when they tied me to a chair in the basement interrogation chamber and shone a Kleig light into my eyes. From behind it, I heard the suave and urbane voice of Chumpot, as if for the first time.

“Well, well, well,” he said, “I suppose I ought to introduce myself, or reintroduce myself. I am Detective Cadet Chumpot, though you might prefer to think of me as the Recording Angel. I’ve been keeping tabs on you for years and years, since before you were born. And in that time, I’ve gathered enough evidence of your unimaginably numerous and multifarious crimes to have you banged up in chokey for a very long time indeed. My boss, Detective Captain Cargpan, says he’s never seen such a lengthy rap sheet. I suppose we’d better make a start on it. So, in your own words, tell me about the time you cooked and ate a mute swan that was, as you well knew, the property of the Queen, as all mute swans are.”

And so began my interrogation. I confessed to everything on that long, long list. I sang like a canary. And all the while, in my throbbing brain, I kept asking myself – what would become of that last, uneaten bloater in my breakfast dish? That is the great question, or rather it would be if I still had any prospect of release.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

Today the chief engineers have been down to our part of the mine. They descended in the rickety lift of the Sylvia Townsend Warner Memorial Shaft, and stood in a huddle, puffing on their pipes and blowing smoke at the canaries. Whether this was vindictive or in the interests of scientific research was not clear. There were seven of them, like Snow White’s seven mining dwarves, and they were similarly mononymous. The chief engineers were known as Wretched, Spiteful, Incontinent, Peevish, Lippy, Rancorous, and Preening.

One might assume these names to reflect their personalities, but that was not the case. If we consult their academic reports from the Valentine Ackland Memorial College of Mining, Boring, & Pitcraft, we learn that Wretched was judged to be preening and rancorous, Spiteful to be lippy and peevish, Incontinent to be spiteful and wretched, Peevish to be rancorous and incontinent, Lippy to be preening and spiteful, Rancorous to be peevish and lippy, and Preening to be illegible. Not one of them was a dwarf, or even a gnome.

They stood puffing in silence for a while, until one of them spoke.

“It strikes me that this mine is rather Kafkaesque,” said Lippy.

“Oh? In what sense?” the other six said, or rather sang, in harmony, to the tune of Land Of Ladies by the Brothers Johnson.

“Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the management of the mine is Kafkaesque,” said Lippy, “In that it is a labyrinthine, senseless, and oppressive bureaucracy. Consider that there are seven of us chief engineers, yet only three miners.”

He was referring to me and my two colleagues, who had taken a break from toil in order to meet with the chief engineers. Lippy called us miners, but we prefer to think of ourselves as troglodytes. None of us had been up to the surface since the dying days of the Nixon administration.

We had been transfixed by the Watergate hearings. Shortly before going down the mine we compiled a Who’s Who of the scandal, in which the three of us drew sharp, pointed pen-portraits of the significant players, including Nixon himself and Ronald Ziegler and Ken Clawson and H R Haldeman and Donald Segretti and Dwight Lee Chapin and John Dean and John & Martha Mitchell and Bruce Kehrli and Gordon C Strachan and Herbert Warren Kalmbach and Chuck Colson and Gerry & The Pacemakers and Robert C Mardian and Jeb Magruder and Maurice Stans and G Gordon Liddy (not Lippy) and Hugh Sloan and James McCord and John Erlichman and David Young and Egil Krogh and E Howard Hunt and Richard Kleindienst and Richard Helms and Patrick Gray and Vernon Walters. We thought it judicious to omit our own names, and, to be on the safe side, volunteered for duty in the salt mine until the whole sorry business had blown over.

Now, faced with seven chief engineers, we would have to dissemble.

“Well, O weird hunched albino men of the pit,” said Lippy, addressing us directly for the first time, “We have come down into the Stygian gloom to find out how much salt you’ve mined. I must say the production figures are disappointing.”

“I can assure you we have been tireless in our search for salt down here,” I lied, “And in fact we think we spotted a tad just before you and your fellow chief engineers arrived.”

“Excellent,” said Lippy, “Then perhaps we should leave you free to mine it.”

“There is nothing we would enjoy more,” I lied again, “But before we do so, would it not be wise for the seven of you to check that what we found actually is salt, and not some other mineral with properties closely resembling but not identical to salt?”

Lippy went back into a huddle with Wretched and Spiteful and Incontinent and Peevish and Rancorous and Preening to discuss this.

I was lying because we had not actually been looking for salt at all, nor had we found any, not even a tad. Instead, we had been opening up a cavern, and creating a huge underground aviary in which we were breeding an entirely new type of hyperintelligent subterranean canary. This represented a great advance on what we had been up to in the Watergate building on that night in June 1972. But we could not – yet – reveal our doings to Lippy and his fellows.

They finished talking, and Lippy turned to me.

“Very well,” he said, “Where are we to find this tad of what may be salt?”

I pointed at the entrance to an excessively long, dark, winding, horrible tunnel.

“Go down there,” I said, “And mind your step. It is long and dark and winding and horrible.”

And so, ten minutes ago, the naive, if not outright idiotic, chief engineers went pootling off down a tunnel so long and dark and winding and horrible that it is likely to drive them insane. They will find no salt, and they may be attacked by a few stray hyperintelligent subterranean canaries, but we don’t care. Besides, our shift will soon come to an end; we shall not be here to see them coming back.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

The evidence shows that this is how the murder was committed.

The victim was a fanatic named Vanityvanity Orliss Vanity, known as Vov for short. He made his living as a thumper. He thumped both tubs and Bibles, and sometimes, when he was strung out on dandelion-and-burdock, he thumped police officers, puppies, and other things beginning with P, such as pin-cushions.

On the day of the murder, Vov woke at dawn and rose from his bed and shoved his head into a pail of icy water and thumped a tub and ate some cream crackers and stood on his balcony and engaged in blood-curdling invective with his downstairs neighbour and thumped a Bible and tallied up the visible toads and combed his hair with a Bedraggler and fossicked in a cupboard and took a swipe at a bat and prayed the Lord his soul to save and wrapped a cravat around his neck, his neck, his neck, and paid no heed to the weather forecast and left his gloves on the bus and eked from its shell a tiny wriggling unidentified creature and admired the view from Sawdust Bridge and boxed clever and dipped an orphan in a pond and failed to understand foreign signage and almost toppled into a ditch but righted himself at the critical moment and had a go at a game of Regurgitate The Cream Crackers and scratched an irritant and looked at the town hall clock and thumped a few things beginning with P and pursed his lips, his lips, his lips, and tossed a hard-boiled egg so high it vanished in the aether and lost all sense of cardboard and did a few other things on his way to the post office.

At the post office, Vov joined a queue. The back of the head of the person in front of him was a phrenologist’s nightmare. This reminded Vov that he had in his blazer pocket a copy of Dobson’s pamphlet A Compendium Of Phrenologists’ Nightmares (out of print). It occurred to him that this would be a suitable gift for his brother, whose birthday it was today. Unfortunately, Vov knew not where his brother was. The last he had heard of him, he was being carted off in chains to a prison hulk after committing a series of enormities. Vov had no idea of the location of the hulk, nor if his brother was still there, in chains, raving, while the sea sloshed against the sides and birds swooped overhead in glorious aerial displays of avian grace and beauty.

What we know now is that Vov’s brother had escaped and was, at that very moment, bearing down on the post office, rattling his chains and raving and strung out on dandelion-and-burdock-diluted-with-seawater and mad as a kitten on the moon and armed with a club manufactured for the slaughter of baby seals and dribbling and drooling and forgotten by God and tormented by imaginary bells.

Accompanying him, because they were chained together, was a second escaped convict, a man named Schmar. Schmar had been sent to the prison hulk due to the shape of his head. According to the judiciary’s phrenologist, the bumps and dents in Schmar’s skull were indicative of the kind of criminal who would steal toffee apples from crippled children, or forge his bus ticket, or hang out his laundry with the wrong sort of clothes-pegs. No malfeasance, great or small, was beyond him, or would be beyond him, in theory.

Meanwhile, in the post office, Vov was perplexed. Every time the queue shuffled forward, the counter seemed to recede further into the distance. Vov wondered if he could correct this anomaly by shuffling backwards instead of forwards. In so doing, he stepped on the toe of the person behind him. There was an altercation. Vov noticed that his antagonist was wearing a soutane and carrying a prayer book and a set of rosary beads, thus he was a priest, thus he was something beginning with P, thus he thumped him. The priest was an advocate of muscular Christianity, and thumped Vov in turn. The thumping might have continued interminably, were it not for the sudden arrival, in the post office doorway, of Vov’s brother and Schmar.

And so we come to the murder.

What has not been mentioned thus far is that Vov, from certain angles, in a certain light, during certain phases of the moon, in certain post office queues, bore an astonishing resemblance to a baby seal. Brute instinct, therefore, led his brother to charge screaming at him and bash him, relentlessly and mercilessly, with his baby seal-culling club. He bashed and bashed until Vov lay dead on the post office floor. Then, pausing only to snatch from his brother’s blazer pocket the copy of Dobson’s pamphlet A Compendium Of Phrenologists’ Nightmares (out of print), the escaped convict slipped his shackles, thrust the bloodied club into Schmar’s weedy hands, and scarpered, making a beeline first for the bus stop and then, boarding a number 666, riding all the way to the end of the route, an eerily deserted terminus at the edge of the cold wet unpitying marshes, where he hid among reeds and catkins, feeding on insects and marsh-water, and occasionally waylaying tiny marshland children, terrifying the poor little mites, still forgotten by God, but forgotten by the coppers too, and left free to live out his days, sploshing around in the marsh and reading the Dobson pamphlet, running his fingers delicately over his own skull, feeling the bumps and dents, and slowly, very slowly, turning into a marsh-warbler, and flying, soaring through the blue sky, migrating to other marshes, in other lands, far far away.

When Detective Captain Cargpan arrived at the post office, it was all too obvious what had happened. There was Vov, bludgeoned and dead on the floor. There was Schmar, holding the club, looking as if he was about to be sick, and in possession of a head the shape of which any phrenologist worth their salt would attest screamed “criminal!”.

Schmar, fighting down with difficulty the last of his nausea, pressed his mouth against the shoulder of the policeman who, stepping lightly, led him away.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

It looks as if much had been neglected in our country’s system of defence. Yes, Fort Hoity is famously impregnable, and Fort Toity likewise. But the fence linking them, running along the frontier, had been constructed from balsa wood and lollipop sticks. And when the swarm of specially-trained border wasps was wiped out by Hulbert-Courtneidge Disease, otherwise known as Border Wasp Wipeout Syndrome, the flimsiness of the fence had become all too apparent.

Our neighbours are ferocious and barbaric. Night after night, on the other side of the fence, they light bonfires and dance in circles round them, screaming impious guttural cries and waving pitchforks. They are unfathomably stupid. To date, they have been kept at bay by the papier-mâché wasps gummed to lollipop sticks at regular intervals along the frontier. The effectiveness of this defensive measure is unlikely to last. The puppet wasps cannot withstand torrential rainfall, of which there is much, in torrents, and our factories cannot churn out sufficient replacements, because of the shortages.

From Fort Hoity, as also from Fort Toity, we take snipes at our barbarian foe by launching snipe at them. For those of you who know little or nothing about flying things with wings and beaks and feathers, the snipe is a type of bird. It has a long, sharp, pointy bill or beak (see previous sentence). Our snipe are specially trained to swoop relentlessly towards barbarians, and to pierce them with their pointy beaks, ideally puncturing one of the major arteries. Note that, as with sheep and teal, the plural of snipe is snipe. I do not know why that is the case. Ask an ornitholinguist.

One drawback of our sniping is that, for all their savagery, our neighbours seem to have a way with birds. The original idea was that, having stabbed and slain a barbarian, the snipe would turn around and fly back to Fort Hoity (or Fort Toity), ready to be relaunched for another attack. But the barbarians cosset the snipe, and feed them millet and tiny terrified mammals, and make pets of them, and – maddeningly – the snipe thrive in their care. We are fortunate that thus far the savages have not yet worked out how to get the snipe to attack us.

One of our brightest engineers has devised a plan to dig a ha-ha along the length of the fence between Fort Hoity and Fort Toity. Thus, if the barbarians did manage to breach the balsa wood and lollipop sticks and papier-mâché wasps, they would immediately topple in to the ha-ha. They would be trapped like sitting ducks, and our forces could then make short work of them by dropping in a mass of violets and other flowers, smothering them as Heliogabalus did his enemies. Before we can put this plan into action, we need to convert much of our farmland into plantations for violets and other flowers, so we have enough for the smothering.

Meanwhile, our Black Ops team conducts various black ops on both sides of the border. By their nature, black ops are carried out under the radar. As we do not have a radar, we fashioned a convincing counterfeit by attaching a couple of wire coat-hangers to the top of a lamppost near Fort Hoity, and another one near Fort Toity. So pig-ignorant and backward are the barbarians, they are completely taken in. Baffled by our superior technology, they think a coat-hanger is the work of the devil – and that is when it is used for its original purpose. As a faux radar, they think it is the work of two devils.

Threatened as we are by brutes on the border, there is perhaps a greater peril lurking in our midst. I speak of the enemy within, the peaceniks. They are growing in number, in spite of our efficient secret police and the Friday night head-boilings at both Fort Hoity and Fort Toity. These “useful idiots” deny that our neighbours are barbaric savages who wish us harm, insisting rather that they are lovely people who just grunt rather more than we do. Look how they care for their snipe!, these nitwits cry, ignoring the fact that they are our snipe, primed to kill, and treacherously bought off by the barbarians with millet and tiny terrified mammals.

Of equal concern to the authorities is the fashionable theory, currently being bruited about the cement water-troughs of our fauborgs, that there is no land at all on the other side of the fence, no barbarians, just the sea, the vast wet illimitable sea that stretches forever, to the ends of the earth. Proponents of this codswallop maintain that the bonfires we see are strange inexplicable atmospheric phenomena, that the barbarians dancing in circles round them, screaming impious guttural cries and waving pitchforks are mere sea-sprites, phantoms of wind and water and the play of the light. This is a misunderstanding of some kind; and it will be the ruin of us.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.

Deeply lost in the night. An overwhelming pong of hamster and hair oil. The air swarming with nocturnal gnats. In the distance, under the elevated section of the motorway, scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae and rock music. A night of dread, but is it natty? Nashe wrote of the terrors of the night, and there was nothing natty about them. Or gnatty. Oh, sweep them away, the swarms, or disperse them with a blast from a bicycle pump.

Imagine if Lee Harvey Oswald had been armed with a bicycle pump rather than with a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle. He was unable to drive, so it is plausible he could have had a bicycle, and thus a pump. Imagining such a thing, such twaddle, distracts from the dread and the terror on this night of nights.

This night of no owls. Where have they gone? The yew tree’s branches are owl-empty for the first time in living memory. Remember studying them through night-vision trinoculars, the mystic third lens for the mystic third eye? Invaluable goggles.

Night came crashing down so suddenly. Up there, fat stars glistened, unimaginably distant burning rocks. Down here, hopelessly lost. Magnets ceasing to function, compasses pointing in unknown directions never previously seen on earth.

In tenebrous gloom, trying to decipher the scritti. Muck underfoot. Approaching the ducal potting shed, behind eerie shrubs. Someone must be there.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Tania and James Stern. Everything in between was not.

Coal all spent; the bucket empty; the shovel useless; the stove breathing out cold; the room freezing; the trees outside the window rigid, covered with rime; the sky a silver shield against anyone who looks for help from it. As I did, foolishly. I shoved open the door of the chalet, and steeped out, and stared at the sky.

“Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!”, I shouted. There was no answer. I went back inside and slammed the door shut. Before I froze to death, I put on two coats, made from the fur of critically endangered medium-size mammals, which I had stolen from Yoko Ono. Physically, I am a good deal bigger than diminutive Yoko, hence the two coats. Ideally, I would have pilfered three, but the Beatle Lennon was mooching about the place, and I had to act fast. That was a long time ago. In those days I did not shout at the sky in French.

That skill, or art, I learned more recently, from Blötzmann. “Those seeking succour from the sky,” he writes (Book XIX, Lavender Series), “Are well advised to note that the sky speaks French, with a smattering of Finnish (verbs only).”

I know there are those who damn Blötzmann as a crank and an idiot, but to date I have found him an infallible guide, in spite of the often senseless tosh he peddles. I say “to date” because now even I am beginning to have doubts. It was, after all, because of Blötzmann (Book IX, Lilac Series) that I ended up here, in a chalet high, high in the ice mountains, with an empty coal-bucket and icicles forming on my moustache.

Should I have treated the invitation with a measure of caution? Probably. But, immersed as I was in the tenets expounded in Book IX, I did not even question it. Instead, I shoved a few essentials into a pippy bag and ran – sprinted! – to the railway station. I was in such a hurry that I did not even lock the door behind me. Within hours I was at the foot of the ice mountains, queuing for a ticket for the funicular railway which would take me to this confounded ice-girt freezing coalless chalet.

The invitation came from the Pointy Town Nisbet Spotting Society, an organisation previously unknown to me.

Dear Shambeko!, it read, Please join us for a very special week of nisbet spotting high, high in the ice mountains. Be our guest in a lovely chalet heated by a coal-stove. Brr! It’s chilly out there, so wrap up warm!

As I say, it might have been wise to make a few enquiries before rushing off and leaving behind everything I held dear. Not only had I never heard of the Pointy Town Nisbet Spotting Society, I had no idea what a nisbet was. How, then, could I spot one? And if I did spot one, or dozens, or hundreds, I would not realise I had done so, not knowing what one was. Dashing off to the chalet was the utmost foolishness on my part. The best I can say in my defence is that I assumed a representative of the Society would be there to enlighten me.

But when I arrived, the chalet was empty. There was a small amount of coal in the bucket, so I got the stove burning, heated up a pan of milk slops, and sat gazing at the rime-encrusted window. And I waited. I waited for three days, until the coal was almost spent. Then, with a sudden crash, the door burst open, and a woman festooned with the pelts of various hairy mammals came waltzing in.

I was astonished to see Pointy Town’s most notorious flapper, Flossie Von Straubenzee. She raised one bemittened fist and cried “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people!” Flossie had once been a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, and still liked to shout their slogan in greeting.

“Thank St Spivack you are here!” I babbled, “The bucket of coal is almost spent, there are very few milk slops left, and according to the Daily Ice Mountains News Digest & Weather Forecast, dropped by parachute to the chalet each morning, it’s going to be twice as cold tomorrow, thrice as cold the day after, and so on, exponentially.”

Flossie seemed unperturbed, and asked me how the nisbet spotting was going. Somewhat shamefacedly, I explained that I did not know what a nisbet was.

“Well, nor do we, exactly,” she said, “That’s one reason for this very special week. We’re hoping that you might accomplish the very first authenticated spotting of a nisbet. That would really give the Society a boost. I came to tell you that we’ve just had word there could be a nisbet higher up the ice mountains. Apparently they don’t thrive except right near the summit, where the air is thin and the cold is bitter, or bitterer. Good luck! Cheerio!”

And Flossie waltzed out of the chalet as suddenly as she had come.

That was three days ago. Now, all the coal is spent. The bucket is empty. The shovel is useless. The stove is breathing out cold. Et cetera et cetera. The sky offered no succour. But I have devised a plan. The bucket is large enough for me to squat inside it, just about. I drag it outside, and, using knots both sturdy and ingenious, attach it to the cords of one of the morning parachutes lying in the snow. Then I climb into the bucket. Soon, as I expected, a flock of wingèd things, with beaks and feathers – probably birds – grasp the parachute in their talons, and lift it. The knots hold. I am lifted too, in my bucket.

“Let us go and spot a nisbet!” I cry.

And with that I ascend into the regions of the ice mountains and am lost forever.

The first sentence, and the last, were translated from the German by Willa and Edwin Muir. Everything in between was not.