Maud Glubb, the aviatrix and author of The Book Of Gnats, is just one among a number of Glubbs of note. This ought not surprise us. After all, as H P Lovecraft wrote in The Thing On The Doorstep, It began with a telephone call just before midnight. I was the only one up, and sleepily took down the receiver in the library. No one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up and go to bed when my ear caught a very faint suspicion of sound at the other end. Was someone trying under great difficulties to talk? As I listened I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise – “glub… glub… glub” – which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible word and syllable divisions. I called “Who is it?” But the only answer was “glub… glub… glub-glub.” (The one-B Glub is a common American variant of the more standard two-B Glubb.) It can be argued that Lovecraft’s “glub” is a repetition of a single Glubb, much as we accept that Edgar Allan Poe was referring to only one person when he shouted the name “Reynolds!” repeatedly as he lay dying in the Washington College Hospital in Baltimore. Yet Lovecraft clearly indicates “unintelligible word and syllable divisions”, which sensible people who have their wits about them will take as hard evidence of multiple Glubbs.

One such other Glubb, if we use that term to distinguish our subjects from the aviatrix, was Old Mother Glubb. This fine upstanding dowager was not the mother of Maud Glubb, by the way. In fact as far as we can ascertain, Old Mother Glubb had no children. She was dubbed “Old Mother” because she was very aged, at the time we learn of her existence, and because she bred moths. It is easy to see how people assumed that “Mother”, to rhyme with “Hiawatha”, should be pronounced to rhyme instead with “brother”. From such tiny presumptions can titanic historical errors occur. Several bright and promising genealogists saw their careers ruined, their health destroyed, and their lives wasted as they tried and failed to track down Old Mother Glubb’s non-existent progeny. Had they known about her revolutionary moth-breeding programme, and the attention it gained from moth experts on two or three continents, things may have been very different indeed. Or perhaps not. Perhaps each of these genealogists had a fatal flaw which sent them chasing phantoms, and had they not driven themselves mad with Old Mother Glubb, they would have alighted upon some other hopeless pursuit. There are many, in the groves of academe.

There is, for example, the case of another Glubb, Binnie Glubb, the man who became Professor of Futile Studies at a large important university. Sometimes called the senile grandparent of postmodernism, Binnie Glubb spent years and years writing incomprehensible twaddle, in unreadable prose, about… well, about god knows what. If we knew what he was writing about it would suggest that occasionally he was both comprehensible and readable, and he was neither, ever. And yet his screeds were typeset and bound and published and sold and stuck upon shelves in libraries across the land, and he had his photograph taken, smoking a pipe, shoulder to shoulder with a French intellectual or a Maoist psychopath, and airheads wrote fawning profiles of him for the Sunday supplements.

No such plaudits for the next Glubb in our set, the one-legged bobsleigh competitor Digby Glubb. He was a sports-mad youth who was nonetheless completely useless at everything he tried. Failing at pétanque, he took up pingpong. Failing at pingpong, he tried vinkensport. Savaged by finches, he turned to curling, and failed again, failed better, as Beckett might say. All this time he had two legs. On his thirtieth birthday, still utterly useless in all sporting events, he toppled into a ditch full of fierce biting ants, which ate most of one of his legs before he was rescued by an ant-killing patrol. Recovering in a superbly sterile clinic, Digby Glubb researched sports he could take part in while sitting down, and decided to devote his life to bobsleigh, in spite of the fact that he did not quite understand the point of it. For two decades he continually crashed any bobsleigh he sat in, whether solo or as part of a team. What drove him on, from one calamity to another? Was it perhaps revenge against the fierce biting ants which had hobbled him? There are those who can be spurred on by often harmful derangements, be they vengeance or jealousy or preening vanity.

Consider the cravattiste Shelvington Glubb. Convinced that, when he wore one of his cravats, he might be mistaken for a young Apollo, this Glubb pranced about the boulevards of Pointy Town watching Pointy Towners gasp and swoon at his beauty. Some of them were blinded, he was so like the sun.

There, you have some Glubbs to be going on with.

I paid a visit to my friend Becke Beiderbix in her fortress in the mountains. We had known each other since childhood, growing up on a postwar housing estate, a workaday world of compactness and convention. But Becke was always a singleminded girl who followed her own strange star, and while the rest of us went off to polytechnics and office jobs and became fodder for a peculiarly dull-witted type of English fiction, Becke decamped to the mountains and built herself a fortress with her bare hands. I had no idea where she had picked up the skills to do this, and in truth, when I visited I was astonished to find how solid and immense and impregnable her fortress appeared, a massive edifice perched upon a bluff, as forbidding in its aspect as the Schloss Adler in Where Eagles Dare, but without the Nazi connotations, for Becke was the most apolitical person I have ever known.

When she greeted me at the gate, she was holding a cornet in her hand.

“Hello, Dennis,” she said, planting a peck on my cheek, “As you can see I have taken up the cornet, like my near-namesake Bix Beiderbecke, the original young man with a horn, and perhaps the greatest jazzman of the nineteen-twenties.”

“From fortress-building to cornet-playing, you never cease to amaze me, Becke,” I replied, dumping my weekend luggage in a corner of the grim brickish vestibule.

“As you are well aware, I follow my own strange star,” she said, steering me into the canteen of the fortress where she ladled soup out of a tureen into a pair of bowls.

“This is my own home-made soup,” she announced, “For in addition to building the fortress and learning the cornet I have taken a correspondence course in devising original soup recipes. In your bowl you have what I dubbed Becke Beiderbix’s Boiled Black Broth, in which every single ingredient begins with the letter B. As you can see, it is a black soup, of a black so black that if you stare at it, instead of spooning it into your mouth, you will become entranced, pretty much like a voodoo zombie-person, and be entirely within my power.”

“Then I shall shut my eyes while I drain the bowl, Becke,” I said.

“Yes, I was about to recommend you do just that, Dennis,” she replied.

The soup proved to be bland and without even a hint of taste, but it warmed my innards and stopped the gurgling in my belly.

“Now that your belly has stopped gurgling, Dennis, I shall take you to see my workshop,” said Becke, and I followed her into the bowels of the fortress, to a room with a thousand padlocks and reinforced walls and sputtering candles. I half-expected to see a gibbering hunchback named Mungo, but it seemed Becke worked without assistance.

“Well now,” I said, “You have many towering piles of metal tapping machine directories from all around the world, much thumbed through and dog-eared, as if you have been poring over them with terrific diligence, Becke”.

“That I have, Dennis,” she replied, “It is drudgery to be sure, but necessary to the success of my project.”

Of course, I asked her what the project was, and her reply shocked me to the marrow. For all that her star was a strange one, it had never occurred to me that Becke was capable of the abduction and incarceration, in dungeons beneath her fortress, of eight completely innocent souls. She had gone through those directories searching for names, and when she alit upon an apt name she tracked the person down, wheresoever they might be, and she crept up on them and shoved a rag soaked in chloroform over their breathing channels, and shoved them into the back of her van, and drove like the devil himself at tiptop speed until back in her mountain fastness, and then she dragged the abductee down into one of her dungeons and slammed the heavy iron door shut upon them, and every day thereafter she took them a bowl of her black, black soup, and made them stare into its blackness until it was lukewarm, so they were pretty much like voodoo zombie-persons, entirely within her power, and then she commanded them to drink the soup, until the gurgling in their bellies ceased.

“But why, Becke, why?” I shrieked, as if taking part in a melodrama, wondering how the sensible, resourceful woman I had known had become quite loopy.

“Oh, this is only part one of the plan, Dennis,” she said, “It will all make perfect sense now that I have an abductee in each of my eight dungeons. You would not believe how long it has taken me to work my way through those confounded directories to find the names I need. And then of course to travel hither and yon to wherever they are and do the bit with the chloroform, which has its own risks. You gape at me goggle-eyed, Dennis, as if I have taken leave of my senses, and I would agree with you were it not that all this is merely a preparation for a grander scheme.”

I did not discover, over that weekend, what the grander scheme was. Becke showed me a few other things in her workshop, including some mysterious small trunks, then insisted that we head on up to her rooftop pingpong area and play pingpong for hours and hours. Every so often she took a break to visit the dungeons, and left me to lie on my back, exhausted, staring at the bitter sky, trying not to think about what in heaven’s name was going on far below in the subterranean depths of the fortress.

I made my farewell on the Sunday evening, after being given a bowl of a different home-made soup which I could sup without shutting my eyes. It was as bland as the black zombie soup, but extremely welcome after all that pingpong. Becke waved at me as I trudged down the mountainside towards the bus stop. I looked back, and there she stood, at her fortress gate, and above her in the now darkening sky shone a single star. I couldn’t help but smile. She may have become bonkers, but she would always be my pal.

A year or so passed. I was too busy with my halibut research to give much thought to Becke and her eight abductees. I sent her the occasional metal tapping machine message, to which she always replied, although she never said much about what she was up to, confining herself to remarks about general fortress maintenance. And then one day, passing through Pointy Town, some kind of woolly-hatted student in need of pin money handed me a leaflet. I shoved it into my pocket and forgot about it, and only later, as I was rummaging through my jacket for scrunched-up halibut research notes, did I come upon it and read it.

Pointy Town Hepcat Jazz Club, it said, is pleased to announce a concert by a thrilling new combo. For the past year, Becke Beiderbix has been teaching the cornet to an octet of eight amateurs, and she is now ready to lead them in what promises to be a fantastic debut. The Becke Beiderbix Bix Beiderbecke Tribute Cornet Octet, featuring newcomers Bixder Beibecke, Beike Bixderbec, Kebec Bixderbei, Bixbec Beiderke, Beibix Becderke, Derke Bixbecbei, Kebeider Bixbec, and Bixke Derbeibec will perform a show of Bix Beiderbecke classics. Soup will be served, in the form of Becke Beiderbix’s Boiled Black Broth. Admission free.

I attended the show, of course, but shut my eyes for the soup.

Chumpot’s Patent Rarefied Pigfat ‘n’ Sourdough Paste comes in handy tubes. Spread thickly on a digestive biscuit, or between two slices of sliced-up solidified milk sludge, it makes for a perfect picnic snack.

You will well know, if ever you have been held responsible for the packing of a picnic hamper, the difficulty of picking the appropriate picnic snacks. How common it is, to be sat in a meadow, pipe clenched in your teeth, moustache bristling, to be lambasted by your fellow picnickers as the picnic hamper is unpacked and harsh words are said about, say, the sausages or the unsliced, unsolidified milk sludge. Many an idyllic picnic has been destroyed before it has even properly begun because of hamper-contents fury. Many meadows have resounded with unseemly imprecations. Many moustache-ends have been tweaked with spiteful tugs by the fingers of furious picnickers reaching across the picnic rug to assault the hamper packer. It is a sorry state of affairs, but one which Chumpot’s aims to make a thing of the past. Our pastes are beyond reproach.

We have been manufacturing pastes, in tubs and tubes, for over a century, from our pasteworks in Pointy Town. Old Pa Chumpot, who founded the firm, and whose moustache was as magnificent an example of the walrus variety as has ever been grown in this town, made it his business to end picnic unpleasantness good and proper. It is easy to chuckle at those early promotional leaflets, with their clunky slogans such as “There will be no more unwarranted tweaking of moustaches at picnics when you pack Chumpot’s pastes in your picnic hamper”, but they bespeak a great moral purpose. It was a time when meadows were loud with the din of moustachioed men wearing boaters, pipes clenched between their teeth, venting their fury at the choice of snacks packed into their picnic hampers. Bebonneted ladies blushed and held their dainty hands over their ears and, in some cases, swooned. Into this maelstrom stepped Old Pa Chumpot, with pastes specifically designed to bring due decorum to our meadows. For more than a hundred years now, the firm that still bears his name has continued to manufacture exciting and toothsome pastes, usually quite edible, for use at picnics. We are proud to do so.

Ever since I posted here the letter I received from a wooden child, he has been badgering me to publish more of his writing. I have been inundated with screeds, all of which I have heartlessly chucked down the clanking refuse chute at the side of my escritoire. Today, though, I have decided to indulge him, because his latest missive is quite interesting. Here it is:

Dear Mr Key : It may surprise you to know that, despite being a wooden child abandoned to a Mercy Home nestled deep in the gloomy woods, I am a voracious reader and a keen user of my local library. Well, it is not exactly local, given that it is located far away beyond the sinister purple hills that loom at the edge of the woods, but I regularly scamper over there when allowed out of the Mercy Home by the beadle. On my most recent visit, I was delighted to find a copy of a scholarly work by Dot Tint, entitled On The Vampiric Sea Shanties Of Ancient Pointy Town. You may be familiar with this book, which takes a forensic approach to the surprisingly blood-sucking subject matter of many of the sea shanties sung by the mariners who sailed from Pointy Town harbour in days of yore. It took a bluestocking of Dot Tint’s perspicuity to winnow from these almost-forgotten songs insights into matters which have great resonance for us today, such as poop deck vampires, the dilution of blood with bilgewater, and the credit crunch. I know you worry about other, neglected crunches, but stick with me here, if only because I have my wooden finger on the pulse. Not on my own pulse, obviously, because I do not have one, being wooden. I refer to the pulse and throb of our contemporary urban hurly burly, which I keep tabs on despite living in rustic squalor far from any town or city. The tabs I use, incidentally, are made of tin or plastic, but they are coated with a wood veneer so that they do not look out of place in my otherwise totally woody environment. The beadle does not take kindly to non-wood materials, arguing – quite justifiably – that we wooden tinies might go crackers if exposed for any length of time to concrete or rubber.

Anyway, about the Dot Tint book. I got it date-stamped at the library desk and put it in my pippy bag and trotted out into the bewildering sunshine. The library is in a little village called Blunkett-By-The-Blears, where, on the day I am telling you about, a saturnalia was taking place. I fancied a go at the potato shy, which was like a fairground coconut shy except with potatoes instead of coconuts. I slipped some wooden coinage into the paw of the stallholder and in return he gave me three chunks of wood to throw at the potatoes. This was going to be fun!

I put down my pippy bag and threw a chunk of wood to dislodge a potato from its stick, successfully, and threw another chunk of wood to dislodge another potato from its stick, again successfully, and then I threw another chunk of wood at another potato to dislodge it from its stick, and again I did so successfully, and that was the end of my go. The potato shy stallholder congratulated me and drew aside a tatty curtain to unveil a pile of prizes from which I was invited to take my pick. After rummaging about for a bit, I chose a canister containing a brand new print of the first reel of Anthony Newley’s 1969 film Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness?, a seminal influence on the young David Bowie. I resolved at once to coat the canister in wood veneer before letting the beadle clap his eyes on it, and stooped to stash it in my pippy bag. But my pippy bag was gone!

What kind of monster would steal a pippy bag from an inattentive wooden child? The worst of it was, of course, that the library copy of Dot Tint’s On The Vampiric Sea Shanties Of Ancient Pointy Town was in the bag and so had vanished with it. I had always been very conscientious about returning my borrowings on time and unsullied, free of marmalade smears or dog-ears or any of the other besmirchments to which library books fall prey when in the wrong hands. I had even been promised a “good borrower” badge by the librarian, a signal honour for an inmate of the Mercy Home For Abandoned Wooden Children. I had been so looking forward to coating my badge with wood veneer and buffing it to a shine with a rag. Now, unless I was able to retrieve my pippy bag, and with it the book, I would be in bad odour with the library and end up with the stigma of a “bad borrower” badge instead.

I shoved the film canister under my arm and looked wildly about. The saturnalia was getting up steam, and the normally quiet village square of Blunkett-By-The-Blears was a scene of mayhem and disorder, crowded with mountebanks and revellers, masked maniacs, prestidigitators, capering dizzyheads and unsupervised farmyard animals including hens and cows. I cursed that I had never thought to personalise my pippy bag by sewing on to it some brightly-coloured beads and buttons, not that needlework of any standard is among my accomplishments. But I could at least have splashed some paint on it, or beribboned it with ribbons. Alas, it was but a featureless dun pippy bag like ten thousand others, and I was at a loss as to how I might track it down in the midst of a saturnalia.

I slumped down in the boarded-up doorway of what had once been the village’s Respect Party headquarters and held my wooden head in my wooden hands. It is at times like this that I taste the bitter gall of unassuageable despair. For me it has a woody taste, which I could liken to a creosoted fencepost in the rain, just to give you an idea. I was deaf and blind to the saturnalian antics around me, smothered in self-pity and misery. Even my potato shy prize held no allure for me, and I tipped the film canister upright, gave it a shove, and let it roll away along the gutter. I watched as it clattered to a halt at the feet of a crone. She bent to pick it up, and brought it back to me in my doorway, and she spoke.

“What ails thee, youthful person of wood?” she asked. If I had had my eyes shut I would have thought I was being spoken to by the young Joan Greenwood as Sibella Holland in Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949). Or, more accurately, Joan Greenwood with a mouthful of brazil nuts. No doubt such distortion was on account of the great age of the crone, who looked to be at least ten score years and ten if she was a day. I am very skilled at adjudging age, in people and trees and milk and birds and the smaller mammals. Once or twice I have been called on by the police to assist them in the dating of evidence, notably in a strangling case which gave me the shivers. So I am fantastically confident that the crone was indeed as ancient as she looked, unlikely as that may seem. With age comes wisdom, and I felt immediately that this überwrinkled, kindly old biddy would somehow be able to help me, so I told her of my travails, but not in so much detail that she would grow fractious and thump me into silence. That kind of thing has happened to me in the past, I’m afraid to say, for I can get carried away with my woes when I taste the bitter gall of unassuageable despair. I have learned through experience that travails are best narrated as a kind of sprightly anecdotage, so that is the approach I took, and it paid off. The crone tilted her ancient head in an attentive manner, and when I was done she bent down and took my little wooden hand and lifted me – with uncanny strength – to my feet.

“You shall come with me!” she announced, “And don’t forget your film canister!”

Some people would describe what happened next as being “taken out of their comfort zone”. That is not the sort of zone I have. Back at the Mercy Home, I have a cornflake zone, where I eat hearty breakfasts, and a compost zone, where I wallow in rotting celery stalks and potato peelings to pass the time, and I have quite a few other zones which I will tell you about in a separate letter. The zone I was taken to by the crone was, I suppose, best described as a cavernous secret underground headquarters zone, which was quite a novelty for a sheltered wooden child like me. It was alive with the buzz and clank and hiss of activity, but so dark that I couldn’t see a thing. I was pleased that the crone was still holding my hand. I asked her where we were, and what was going on.

“This,“ she said, “Is the nerve centre, or hub, of my crimebusting organisation. I bust more than crime, but the popular press calls me the Crimebusting Crone, and it is a title I have learned to live with, even though I also bust wickedness and shirking and pelf, and want of decorum, and lack of gravitas, punctilio and rectitude, among many other despicable blots on civic loveliness. Here in the subterranean gloom my factotae are busy busting such blots, and I shall find one who is idle and set them to work to recover your pippy bag and your library book and bring the malefactor to justice. Wait here.”

She let go of my hand and disappeared into the gloom, though she creaked loudly as she moved so I was able to tell more or less where she was headed. I did not know quite how to conduct myself so I went all floppy and clattered to the ground, which was covered in linoleum. It seemed to be a very well-appointed cavernous secret underground headquarters zone, despite the lack of light. I wondered about the Crimebusting Crone’s factotae, if they were some sort of blind, stunted troglodyte horde. It was certainly within the bounds of reason. After all, that earlier crimebuster Sherlock Holmes had his Baker Street Irregulars, and they were not exactly polished in their manners. I am polished, by the way, very much so.

Eventually the crone returned, accompanied by a factotum. I got to my feet and studied, as best as I could, the person charged with retrieving my pippy bag, but he, or she, or it, was but a blur in the darkness.

“This is Factotum Milliband,” said the crone, “I have every confidence in him, and I have no doubt that he will solve the case. Just now, for example, excitabat fluctus in simpulo, as Cicero put it. He was stirring up billows in a ladle. There will be more billows before the day is out! Now, tiny person of wood, hop up onto his back.”

I did as I was bid, being a biddable sort, and once I was secure, Milliband lumbered off, taking huge strides, further and further into the cavernous secret underground headquarters zone, until all around me was pitch black, and strangely, compellingly muffled. I had complete trust in this mysterious blurry factotum, so I sort of snuggled up against him, wedging the film canister between my head and his back as a pillow, and fell asleep. The beadle would have been livid if he knew I was using a tin pillow, fearing ineradicable contamination, so before dozing off I begged for forgiveness from my weird wooden gods and clutched the little gauze bag on a lanyard around my neck for luck. I am not particularly superstitious, but I must admit it gave me some comfort. Inside the bag were the teeth of an otter, a sprig of parsley, and a passport photograph of Bjorn from Abba, or it might have been Benny, I could never remember which was which. Whichever one it was, the snap had been taken in the late 1970s, at the height of the group’s success, and Bjorn or Benny was wearing a polo neck sweater. I had not chosen the contents of my lucky gauze bag on a lanyard myself. For years, I didn’t even know what was in it. But one day, while I was mooching about over by the collapsed birdseed silo near Sawdust Bridge Football Stadium, I peeked inside, out of curiosity. It was a turning point in my life. Some of the other abandoned wooden children at the Mercy Home also wear such bags on lanyards around their necks, and the only thing that ever keeps me awake at night is wondering if their bags, too, contain otters’ teeth and parsley and passport photographs of Scandinavian pop legends in polo neck sweaters. I have never dared to ask, or to look, and always, after such sleepless nights, I remind myself that I can do without any more melodramatic turning points.

From darkness to light. My hand was still wrapped around my lucky gauze bag on a lanyard when I woke up beneath the breathtaking sky, an expanse of billowing clouds. The Crimebusting Crone had promised me billows, so this was a good sign. But when I lifted my wooden head from its tin pillow, I was disconcerted to find myself back in the boarded-up doorway of the Respect Party headquarters. There was no sign of Milliband. Gone, too, were the rogues and madcaps of the saturnalia. The village square was deserted, and I was alone and chill under the billows, without my pippy bag and my Dot Tint library book. Then, just as the creosoted fencepost taste of the bitter gall of unassuageable despair rose in my throat, a post office starling flew past and dropped an envelope into my lap. I am unreasonably fascinated by stamps, so I paused to examine the one affixed to the letter that was clearly addressed to me. How thrilled I was to see that it was the maroon sixpaney stamp from the series of Rex Tint mezzotint reproductions, depicting in gorgeous detail the mezzotintist himself, at work in his studio, and visible through the Prussian windows a bosky hillside dappled with laughing cows, similar to the cheese triangle laughing cows but done in a Soviet realist style. It was certainly one to collect, so if I was careful when soaking it off the envelope later I would have almost half a dozen stamps in my album!

Shuffling backwards to make myself more comfortable in the doorway, I took out the letter with my trademark fastidiousness, unfolded it, and read:

Dear Wooden Child : Be not faint of heart, and do not weep when I tell you that Factotum Milliband has been unable to recover your pippy bag and library book. In spite of being a mute, blind, stunted troglodyte, he is surprisingly resourceful in the open air, above ground, and I am sure he would have succeeded had not circumstances been against him. Neither he nor I could have predicted that those circumstances would have been loopy, indeed dotty. I shall not go into detail, except to say that we live in a loopy, dotty world, and the sooner you reconcile yourself to the fact the better. Daily contemplation of pigs in a pig sty can be extremely beneficial in this regard. But all is not lost. As I write, Factotum Milliband is smashing his way into the library via a concealed side entrance, and once inside he will create a scene of havoc and destroy any record that you have ever borrowed a copy of On The Vampiric Sea Shanties Of Ancient Pointy Town by Dot Tint, so you need never fret that you will have to pay a fine or be in bad odour with the librarian. Meanwhile, Factotum Milliband’s brother, also known as Factotum Milliband, is hard at work in the needlework section of my crimebusting hub, stitching together a brand new pippy bag for you, which will be sent by post office starling to the Mercy Home. Please allow twenty-eight days for delivery. Factotum Milliband is a painstaking needleworker, still learning his craft, but I have seen one of his earlier pippy bag efforts and I can assure you it is a thing of beauty, if a bit loopy and dotty. I have given him instructions to sew the Mercy Home For Abandoned Wooden Children monogram in the correct place on the bag, so unless the beadle looks at it with a microscope it should easily pass for the genuine article. Do let me know if I can be of any further assistance. Yours ‘til the cows come home, the Crimebusting Crone.

So there you have it, Mr Key. I had been hoping to write a review of Dot Tint’s book for you, but it will have to wait for another time. Incidentally, I have taken the crone’s advice and now spend at least four hours a day contemplating pigs in a pig sty, with the beadle’s blessing. I will happily write an account of my ruminations for you, should you wish, as I am sure that all Hooting Yard readers would enjoy a regular dose of my witterings.

Blissfully yours, An Anonymous Wooden Child

I see that Channel Four, or the BBC, is showing, or has already shown, a so-called Liverpool Nativity, presumably a wretched attempt at making the story of the birth of The Christ “relevant” to today’s feckless Britons, or at least to their northern segment. At Hooting Yard we have no truck with such twaddle. But while you are not watching the Liverpool Nativity you might be diverted by a brief account of the Pointy Town Nativity, an annual jamboree which has nothing to do with The Christ as such. The birth that is celebrated is that of a pig, the firstborn pig on Scroonhoonpooge farmyard after the feast of Saint Loopy, and known throughout the succeeding year as the New Pig.

Much to the consternation of the Pointy Towners, adherents of various religions have taken offence at their beano. Those big but, let’s face it, witless books, the Bible, the Torah and the Koran, each get into a bit of a flap about pigs, deriding them as unclean abominable cloven-hooved beasts. On the contrary, pigs are charming, intelligent, loveable, and delightful animals, and it is well-known that leaning over the fence of a pig sty and watching pigs for an hour a day is one of the most relaxing activities known to humankind. You would be astonished at the kerfuffle caused a year or so ago when the New Pig was given the name Mohammed, which was viewed in Pointy Town as a compliment. Any name attached to a pig is thereby raised above the level of everyday Dennises and Ednas and Demi-Leighs and Kyles. A similar, but less violent, reaction occurred when the New Pig was named Jesus, but that is unlikely to be repeated due to the Gibsonian practice of dropping the J-word and referring simply to The Christ.

Pig nomenclature has become something of a minefield, then, but that does not deter the good people of Pointy Town, who have a healthy and positive attitude to their pigs, the celebration of the birth of the New Pig being the proof of the pudding. (I am not entirely sure that last phrase means anything, or at least that it means what I intend it to mean, but I would ask readers to cut me some slack.)

On Saint Loopy’s Day itself, the pregnant pigs of Scroonhoonpooge farmyard are gathered in a special piggery unit, part of an enormous barn decorated for the occasion with flags and bunting and embroidered portraits of Saint Loopy. Roaring Sawtooth jets from Pointy Town aerodrome screech across the sky in a series of fly-pasts and dozens of dirigibles loom over the barn. Meanwhile, the current, soon to be displaced New Pig is given a crate of crab apples and conference pears to feast upon. There is much wassail and jocundity, especially near the caves, where the Pointy Town cave-dwelling troglodytes’ curiosity is sparked, and they creep into the light for the only time in a twelvemonth. Outside the post office, a person upon a podium reads passages from the Pointy Town Pig Chronicle, recalling past New Pigs and their names, from the controversial Mohammed and Jesus to less troublesome ones such as Popsy, Hudibras, Quetzalcoatl, Poopy, Christopher Plummer, Gervase and Winifred. A hopelessly overqualified veterinary surgeon keeps a beady eye on the pregnant pigs, ready to relay news of the first whelping via a pneumatic communications tube to the Pointy Town Pig Nativity Announcer. There is dance band music, much trumpetry, the eating of milk slops, conjuring tricks, chanting, caterwauling, hysteria and shamanistic fire-dancing. Over by the Pointy Town potato patch, raw potatoes are carved into piggy shapes by trained potato-carving experts. And when, eventually, the New Pig is born, a hush descends upon the town, from Scroonhoonpooge farmyard to the horrible caves, while the Pointy Towners wait to hear the chosen name.

The Naming of the New Pig is a solemn contrast to the rowdy celebrations which precede it. So solemn, indeed, that the silence is broken now and then by the sounds of sobbing and weeping and the rending of garments. Eventually, a designated orphan child will pluck a name out of thin air, and paint it, with a dangerous lead-based paint, on the outside of the barn. And thus the Pointy Town Nativity comes to a close, as the New Pig is given gifts of bran-tub scrapings, and the old New Pig is led away to an ordinary sty, and the townspeople trudge back to their daily drudgery, and the planet continues to spin upon its axis for no apparent purpose.