I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony. I think I have the makings of an excellent singing teacher. I am to pedagogy as a duck to water. There is nothing that cannot be taught by ferocious spittle-flecked shouting accompanied by thumps on the head with a big stick. It is true that my field of expertise is ornithology, not singing, but I have taught even the most recalcitrant dimwit to identify four different types of bird, with as near as dammit a twenty-five percent success rate. The birds were a swan, an owl, a wren, and an ostrich.

I’d like to teach the world to sing, and the world is rather larger than the classroom in the cellar of Pang Hill Orphanage, where I currently teach. In fact I have never taught anywhere else, as far as I can recall. And I have rarely taught anything other than bird identification skills, apart from occasional sessions of boot-scrubbing, mucking about with saucepans, and guttural German. But pedagogy courses through my veins like blood. The more recalcitrant dimwits among the orphans often develop nosebleeds after my thumpings, so I know what blood looks like, even though it is not my field of expertise.

Another reason I am well suited to the task of teaching the world to sing is that I awake every morning with a song in my heart. Often it is a tuneless and monotonous dirge, which is the best I can muster when I wake in a foul temper, as I usually do. My attic bedroom at Pang Hill Orphanage is dark and dismal and icy cold, even at the height of summer. I have been told this is something to do with local atmospheric conditions, but such conditions are outwith my field of expertise, so I cannot judge the truth of the claim. Sometimes a frail and freezing robin will come and perch on my windowsill of a morning. I think it is a robin, though it is difficult to tell through the grease- and grime-smeared window. But at the sight, albeit blurred, of a feathered friend, the song in my heart is a cheerier and more up-tempo one, such as “Withered And Died” by Richard and Linda Thompson.

Before I teach the world to sing, then, I will make a start by teaching the orphans to sing. But before I teach the orphans to sing, I will hone my singing-teacher techniques – shouting, big stick – by teaching monkeys to sing. There is a Monkey House at Pang Hill Zoo, over on the other side of the hill beyond the viaduct. Through bribery and threats I obtained a key to the Monkey House. I think the janitor who passed me the key assumed I wanted to gain access to the monkeys for unseemly purposes. Well, let him think what he likes. I will betray him to the zoo authorities in any case, and he will languish in a prison cell while I teach the monkeys to sing.

UPDATE : I have discovered that most of the monkeys in the Monkey House at Pang Hill Zoo are howler monkeys. They can already howl their little heads off like nobody’s business. My work is done.

Upon Pang Hill, there is a plaque, battered and burnished and copper and commemorative, affixed to a stone marking the spot once occupied by the Pang Hill Plop Pit, the pit into which generations of tinies from Pang Hill Orphanage plopped things discarded and abandoned. Incessant rainfall in those parts meant that there was forever a puddle at the bottom of the pit, and the presence of the puddle meant that when a thing discarded or abandoned was tossed into it, the thing made a plop as, tossed and falling, it landed in the puddle. Oft times the depth of the puddle was such that the plopping thing was wholly submerged under the rainwater. Sometimes, when rainfall was light, was but a drizzle, much of the puddle water would leach into the muck, and the puddle become shallow, and then the thing discarded or lost would remain visible, to those who looked, until a storm came, and the puddle level rose, and the waters covered the tossed-away abandonee.

Once a week, on Thursday mornings, the Pang Hill Plop Pit became a bubbling fizzing fuming frothing gaseous pit. The Orphanage Janitor emptied into it numerous pailfuls of nigh-impossibly corrosive acid, which dissolved all the items tossed and plopped into the puddle during the previous seven days. By dusk on Thursdays the acid had done its work and further rainfall served to dilute the puddle and it ceased to bubble and fizz and fume and froth.

We have a record of all that was tossed away to plop into the Plop Pit, for the orphans were charged to maintain log books. Here are some telling extracts, from a recent compilation published by the Pang Hill Orphanage Documentary Archive. I have obliterated the dates, through a lack of pernicketiness.

Orphan Carstairs. Chucked into the plop pit several lobster pots of no further use since the imposition of the revised sea creature protocol.

Orphan Brandt. Up bright and early that day, feeling awful, and out to take a turn by the Pang Hill Plop Pit, and tossed into it cheesecloth trousers rent in many places following bramble bush and hornets mishap.

Orphan Cuddy. Into the pit plopped wrench, awl, adze, cutters and pincers.

Orphan Furbelow. Dun flap o’ tarp, eggs o’ larks, talc ‘n’ seed sprinkler, Jap keg lid, sconce ‘n’ punnet. All thrown into the Pit o’ Plops, all sank in the puddle, to be forgot.

Yet due to the log books, nothing is forgotten. Tossed away, plopped into the pit, discarded and abandoned and eaten by the janitor’s acid, every last item is granted immortality. The orphans themselves have perished, the long line of janitors too, the Orphanage crumbled to ruin, even the battered and burnished and copper and commemorative sign hangs from a single rusty nail and will one day fall and be buried in the muck. Pang Hill itself will be flattened by tectonic shifts or cataclysm. The sound of the plops, though, travels on, across unimaginable distances, in space and time, and with it the memory of all that was discarded, of all that was abandoned, of all things.

It is quite something to witness tongues of pentecostal fire lapping and flickering around the head of a monoglot, quite something indeed. And then to hear the monoglot babble in languages previously unknown to him, that is even more extraordinary. There has been but one disappointment, thus far, in the course of my experiments, and it is that not one of the languages inspired by the flames is identifiable as a genuine foreign tongue.

When I decided to embark upon this important religio-linguistic hoo-hah, a year ago, my first step was to have constructed for me, by decent honest tradesmen, a chamber, the ceiling of which was so designed that serried ranks of Bunsen burners could be installed in it, pointing downwards. It was not enough, you see, that the heads of my monoglots be lapped by flames. Being of pentecostal fire, the flames must descend from on high, upon the heads below. I next had to make adjustments to the burners themselves. Much as I would like to, I cannot divulge the exact nature of my tweakings and tinkerings. Suffice to say that my assistants at this stage were not the decent honest tradesmen but figures plucked from various ranks in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, plus a couple of fire scientists. Well I knew that ordinary flames could hardly be expected to prompt a monoglot to speak in a foreign language. My burners must blast forth true pentecostal fire.

Obtaining an old reel-to-reel tape recorder to keep a permanent record of the languages uttered by my test subjects was a simple enough matter. There is a boy with a barrow in the marketplace from whom such items can be bought. I purchased two, just to be on the safe side, and a mountain of reels of magnetic tape.

The beadle at Pang Hill Orphanage was of immense help to me in procuring volunteers. He gave me his personal guarantee that each one of them was a monoglot, and I never had reason to doubt his word, especially when I saw the grubby drooling halfwit urchins he regularly delivered to me on his cart, drawn by horses as inelegant as his cargo. Indeed, it was a wonder to me that some among these tatterdemalion hobbledehoys had ever mastered their mother tongue.

Ushered into the chamber, where the reel-to-reel tape recorders were already whirring away, each volunteer was strapped into a chair. Nothing if not rigorous, I had each of them utter a few words, to provide recorded evidence of their spoken language before the pentecostal fire was unleashed upon them. Some had to be prompted to speak by being poked at with sticks. I owe a debt of gratitude to my hunchbacked assistant Mungo for expediting this part of the process.

Mungo and I then left the chamber, locking and bolting the door behind us, and fastening it further with a length of heavy iron chain. I took my place in an armchair, while Mungo scrambled up on to the roof of the chamber in his spidery way and set the Bunsen burners roaring, spitting out pentecostal fire upon the heads of my monoglot volunteers.

On the following day, the beadle came rolling up in his cart to collect the newly-minted polyglots, taking some back to Pang Hill Orphanage, some to a clinic discreetly hidden in the mountains, and some to the graveyard. With Mungo at my side, I transcribed the recorded utterances from the tapes while snacking on loganberries and fried dab.

I have now filled thousands upon thousands of pages with polyglot speech inspired by pentecostal fire, and every single word of it is incomprehensible babble and raving. But if I have not my faith, I have nothing. I know, deep in my holy bones, that sooner or later one of my little orphan volunteers is going to pipe up in pure unalloyed Swedish, or Tagalog, or Vlaams. For through the pentecostal flames speaks the Spirit. If, thus far, it has not made clear its intentions for the people of the earth, prattling gibberish instead of sense, then I must wait, wait with inhuman patience, and continue to funnel monoglots into my chamber, and have Mungo set the burners in the ceiling belching fire down below.

Today is the one hundredth anniversary of the Great Emblotchment. There were countless other emblotchments throughout our history, but the one we commemorate today was of a blotchy magnitude well above those other emblotchments.

It all started in a commercial laundry on Pudding Boulevard. A man named Pim – who may or may not have been related to the late Francis Pym, Foreign Secretary from 1982 to 1983 – was bundling some towels into a basket when he noticed that one of the towels had been subjected to emblotchment. A man of piercing eyesight, a bit like Ray Milland in The Man With X-Ray Eyes (1963) but obviously not quite as piercing as that, Pim was able at a glance to divine the cause of the emblotchment, and it sent him into a panic. He scampered up the staircase from the laundry to street level, and ran the length of Pudding Boulevard waving the emblotched towel in the air. Thus microscopic blotchy bits were released into the atmosphere, invisible but none the less blotchy.

The authorities acted with admirable speed. Pim was carted off to a mysterious institute hidden behind trees in the countryside, the sort of place that would later become familiar to viewers of the 1960s television series The Avengers. He was placed in isolation and fitted with a metal helmet wired up to bleeping consoles. The emblotched towel was torn from his grasp and sent to another mysterious institute in the countryside to be analysed by trained emblotchment analysts. Meanwhile, Pudding Boulevard was cordoned off with what at the time was an entirely new cordoning technique. A controlled explosion destroyed the laundry and its neighbouring buildings, and the rubble was taken away by over fifty horse-drawn carts and tossed down a pit. It was not a bottomless pit, but the nearest thing to a bottomless pit that could be identified at short notice. When the last bit of rubble was thrown down it, the pit opening was covered with layers of cement over which a rich, loamy soil was scattered, and lupins and primroses were planted there. A similar operation was carried out on the site of the laundry, except that hollyhocks and hyacinths were planted instead of lupins and primroses. There were compelling reasons for this.

Before the day was out, big pumps were moved into position at either end of Pudding Boulevard, and the air was sucked into them, deblotched, and pumped back out. Thousands of starlings were lured to flock over the laundry site and kept there by a magnetic barrier. They were monitored by a team of top ornithologists in a lead-lined cabin just beyond the Boulevard, around which a flowerbed was dug and planted with geraniums and wisteria. At nightfall, volunteers from Pang Hill Orphanage were sent to scurry through the cordoned-off area and, as soon as they emerged, were tested for emblotchment in a hastily-rigged up lab the floors of which were strewn with lilies and petunias.

As we know, none of this hectic activity succeeded in stopping the emblotchment. Not only were the starlings and orphans and top ornithologists emblotched, so too were the gardeners who planted the lupins and primroses and hollyhocks and hyacinths and geraniums and wisteria. Soon everything was emblotched, and I mean absolutely everything. Even the stars in their heavens, the outer planets, the gas giants, all succumbed to what is rightly called the Great Emblotchment. And exactly one year later, on the fifteenth of May 1909, the actor James Mason was born in Huddersfield. Some see this as a coincidence, but those of us who have studied such things see deeper patterns, patterns not unlike the embroidered curlicues on the towel that Pim waved as he dashed frantically down Pudding Boulevard and let loose the Great Emblotchment, one hundred years ago today.

Traditionally, the tanager is the new year bird of Hooting Yard. A small to medium sized member of the bird family Thraupidae, the tanager picks insects off branches, often has a rather dull song, and lives in a cup nest on a tree branch. Sometimes the cup can be almost globular, but that’s a tanager for you. Because it is a tropical bird, flocks of tanagers are incredibly rare in the sky around Haemoglobin Towers, so the majority of Hooting Yard’s new year tanager birds are made of paper or cardboard. Well, all of them. The making of paper or cardboard birds, often very elaborate ones, but sometimes really quite shoddy and slapdash, has long been found to be a splendid way of keeping the tinies of Pang Hill Orphanage busy during the winter nights, when other, more fortunate children are fast asleep. Throughout the month of December, the orphanage attic, open to the freezing and black night sky, rings out with the jolly cries of infants competing with each other to craft the very best paper or cardboard tanager using shredded newspaper or crumpled cartons or torn-up Popsie The Pig annuals donated by a foundlings’ charity. These latter are eagerly grasped by the larger and more lumbering orphans, for the pretty coloured pictures of Popsie The Pig and her pals make for splendid plumage on the paper birds. On New Year’s Eve, each tiny collapses with exhaustion on the floor of the attic, and a trio of worthies roams among their fallen little bodies, destroying all but one of the paper or cardboard tanagers with hammers and slicers. The sole surviving paper bird is carried off for the Hooting Yard festivities that begin at dawn on New Year’s Day, by which time the orphans have been bundled downstairs and locked into the filthy and infested canteen for their breakfast of cauliflower water and radishes.

If you want to pursue a career as a robber baron, the very first step you need to take is to establish your baronetcy. You need to ensure that it has at least a patina of legitimacy, for you do not want nay-sayers and busybodies calling it into question. Youngsters who seek my advice are often surprised that wearing a burnished golden helmet while sitting astride a mighty steed is not, in itself, sufficient claim to be a baron. Of course, it is essential to have such a helmet and such a horse, no self-respecting robber baron could expect to go about his baronial robberies without them, but I’m afraid the drudgery of paperwork has to take precedence.

You can pluck the name of your baronetcy out of the air, much as you might invent the name of a monster in a bedtime story for tinies, but if possible it is best to take on the appellation of a genuine baronetcy, one that has fallen into desuetude where the last baron died hundreds of years ago without issue. Many barons fell in battle in far distant lands, so a good start would be to check up on the manifests of ruinous military expeditions. Obviously, whenever a baron fell on the open battlefield, he was almost certainly unhorsed, so that serves as a reminder to you to choose your steed well, when we come to the prickly topic of steed choosing.

Once you have picked an extinct baronetcy to revive, you will need a coat of arms. Don’t fuddle your head too much with all those heraldry words like azure and gules and rampant and argent and couchant, just make sure you have something that pleases you and that will look good emblazoned on the shields carried proudly by your masked outriders. You might be able simply to appropriate the actual coat of arms of the dead baron you have supplanted, but to do so risks alerting the busybodies and you might be faced with hard questions you will be in no position to answer. In any case, nothing could be easier than designing a coat of arms, it really is child’s play. You can even hire an orphan from Pang Hill to do the job for you.

With your baronetcy secure(ish) and a spindly orphan beavering away at your coat of arms, the time has come to obtain a mighty steed. I cannot emphasise enough just how important this is. Without a suitable horse, all else is as naught. At this point, up goes the cry “But where do I find a horse?” Well, in my bailiwick, horses are usually to be found standing in fields or, if the weather is inclement, in what are known as paddocks. What you need to do is to wait until nightfall, when their human guards will all be tucked up in bed, and creep stealthily to a field or paddock armed with a torch and a bag of buns. You will use the torch to examine, in the engulfing darkness, such features of your prospective horse as its mane, fetlocks, and withers. Look closely at its musculature. Remember that the horse you choose will be galloping across the land with you astride its back for many years to come. When you have picked a suitable steed, lay a trail of buns from the field or paddock to the gates of your castle. Nearly all horses find buns irresistible and, depending on how far the field or paddock is from your castle, your mighty steed should be safe in its new home by break of dawn. It is good practice at this point to pop down to the cellar to check up on the orphan.

You are now nearly ready to go marauding and to strike terror into the countryfolk for miles around. But remember that earlier I mentioned your masked outriders. You will need these accomplices, partly for emotional and psychological support, but mainly to help you carry back to your baronial castle the booty from your robberies. Opinions differ on how many masked outriders a robber baron needs, but as a rule of thumb two would be an absolute minimum, and four or five are preferable. The more masked outriders you have, the more saddlebags can be filled with clinking glistening baubles and coinage. When you have decided on the number, you can get the orphan to make the masks, once the coat of arms is finished. Very occasionally, masked outriders will work on a freelance basis, but it is far more common for them to “live in” at your castle, and they will expect a share of the booty. Just be on your guard that none among their number gets uppity and plots to usurp you from your baronetcy. Such things have happened, of course, so always be prepared to offer small bribes (leftover buns from the bag used to abduct your horse, for example) or, in an extremity, chop the would-be usurper to bits with a broadsword. You should have a collection of these lethal blades displayed upon the wall of the main hall of your baronial castle. Get the orphan to polish and buff them regularly.

With the bulk of your preparatory work done, all that remains is for you to set out on your first robbery. It is at this stage that many a neophyte has moral qualms. If, until now, you have been a law-abiding sort, conscientious when it comes to paying your bus fare and never dropping litter, you may get a bit jittery at the prospect of robbing people. That is why you should begin by robbing another baron. Later on, with some experience under your belt, you will be able to waylay little bands of peasants and take away all their potatoes as you cackle with evil glee, but to get you started there is nothing like another baron, preferably a robber baron like you are setting out to be. So how do you go about it?

First, gather your masked outriders around the table in your baronial hall. They do not need to be wearing their masks just yet, and you will be able to judge their readiness for the task ahead by studying their faces in the light of the flames roaring from the magnificent fireplace. Have the orphan posted there, regularly feeding more logs on to the blaze. Each outrider should have been provided with a goblet brimming with a frothy alcoholic potion, gigantic flagons of which are arrayed on a sideboard for whenever a refill is needed. Let them carouse and wassail for a little while to pep them up. Then spread out a big map on the table. This map should show nearby baronial halls with tracks and pathways leading to and from them. You will have made a careful study of the comings and goings of other barons, and thus be in a position to know when one of them will be cantering gently along a woodland path astride his own mighty steed, possibly on his way to an assignation with a comely damsel. Use a crayon to mark the likely spot for an ambuscade on the map, and ensure that each of your masked outriders knows how to get there. Clash your goblets together as a mark of camaraderie, stamp out of the hall with great determined strides, and make a final check that everyone has empty saddlebags ready to be filled with booty. Now is the time to set your horses a-galloping and to crash through the trees towards the unsuspecting baron.

Do bear in mind that your victim may have his own masked outriders, and indeed that the gentle cantering of his steed can be deceptive. If he is not just a plain baron but a robber baron, he may be setting out to rob someone himself. That is why you and your masked outriders are armed to the teeth with the various polished and buffed swords from your baronial hall. In order to fill your saddlebags with booty, you may have to slash and thrust at the baron and his masked outriders until they are reduced to a pile of corpses on the woodland path, their blood and gore gleaming in the dappled sunlight shining through the trees. If this is the case, it is worthwhile stripping them of their armour and adding that to your booty. You can take their horses, too, either by pulling them along on a length of string, or by laying a trail of buns back to your castle.

However, it is a perturbing fact that, this being your first baronial robbery, you and your masked outriders may well come off worse in any slashing and thrusting of lethal blades. If you are worried that it will be your blood and gore gleaming in the dappling sunlight, and your mighty steed which follows a trail of buns back to another robber baron’s castle, you may want to reconsider whether you are making the right career choice. You may decide you are better suited to being a postie, or a scrivener, or the Member of Parliament for Sheffield Brightside.

Can we decently admire a feat of engineering which led to the destruction of an owl sanctuary, the obliteration of a fairground, and the destitution of a grubby yet loveable hamlet of genetically intriguing peasants? For some, the answer is a straightforward “no”. They will point to the facts – and they are unassailable facts – that the Blister Lane Bypass was completely unnecessary, and that in the years since its construction a mere handful of carts have ever been seen toiling along its grey Stalinist empacture. Yes, I meant carts, not cars.

Conversely, one might argue that owls are hardly in need of sanctuary, that the fairground was a den of iniquity, and that the peasants would presumably rather be sunk in paupery than be sent to the salt mines. Let us not forget that owls are savage and pitiless birds of prey. Do you imagine that, if the tables were turned, such creatures would provide humans with a refuge? The fairground was a notorious sink of vice. If we are ever to revive in young hoodies the virtues of piety and probity, such places of so-called entertainment will have to be burned to the ground, roadworks or no roadworks. As for the hamlet, it is true that the peasants’ hopeless hovels were smashed and destroyed during construction of the Bypass, but they are free to gather at the roadside in the wind and the rain, hawking their baubles and moaning their dirges, free too to accept alms from any passing traffic. They were not, I repeat, sent to the salt mines, primarily because we have no salt mines in this fabulous land.

The original plans drawn up for the Blister Lane Bypass are among the loveliest drawings I have ever seen. They were done in a variety of coloured crayons on gigantic sheets of greaseproof paper, and have a childlike vivacity, annotated as they are with marginal pictograms of heraldic beasts, imaginary cloud formations, and cartoonish tombstones and mausolea. It has been suggested that the infantile quality of the drawings is due to the fact that the plans were nothing more than a wet Thursday afternoon project for the tinies of Pang Hill Orphanage, and that there was never any serious intent to build the Bypass at all. This is poppycock.

One advantage of the Bypass that is often overlooked, and never of course mentioned by the sort of fatheads who prattle on about poor fluffy owls, is that a cart laden with canisters full of volatile gas or toxic sludge now has an impeccably flat level surface to trundle along. Some of us remember when such cargoes had to negotiate twisting tracks riddled with potholes and crevasses, with the constant risk of toppling over. Such spillages explain why there are so many poisonous ponds and ditches, riddled with mutant toads, throughout our land. It is true that such a cart will only be seen on Blister Lane Bypass once in a blue moon, but all great advances begin with tiny steps, or, in this case, tiny trundles.

The Bypass has been celebrated in song, most notably perhaps in Trebizondo Culpeper’s opera bouffe “Ariadne auf Naxos und Blister Lane Bypass”. A tremendously exciting, and inadvertently blood-drenched, production was given at the Bodger’s Spinney Variety Theatre to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first hammer blow to the head of a grubby peasant protestor.

To end these brief notes, here is a little quiz. How many tunnels were built under the Bypass to allow safe crossing for badgers, stoats and weasels? Was it a) one, b) six hundred and sixty-six, or c) umpteen thousands? Answers next week.