Archive for the 'Prose' Category

[My thanks to R.]

The lambing-hall boogie may refer to two distinct, yet allied, phenomena. First we need to be clear what we mean by the lambing-hall. Almost invariably, this is the farm building wherein newborn lambs are brought fumbling and puling into the world. In the specific context of the lambing-hall boogie, however, it refers to the site associated with the other extremity of the lamb’s life. Certain evil farmers mischievously give the name “lambing hall” to the barn – often cavernous, windowless, and grisly – in to which lambs are led to the slaughter. Those of you who have bathed in the blood of the lamb, the better to become Christ-like, will be familiar with this latter designation, as will those of you who have read Thomas Harris’s potboiler The Silence Of The Lambs, or have seen the film adaptation starring Jodie Foster as rookie FBI agent Clarice Stalin.

Incidentally, if I may digress for a moment, the agent’s name is often given, erroneously, as Clarice Starling. Even the potboilerist himself refers to her as such throughout his text. Yet the parallels between the fictional law enforcement officer and the non-fictional pock-marked moustachioed Georgian petty thief who rose to become the paranoid and demented tyrant of the Soviet Union are surely too obvious to need repetition here. For my part, I have gone carefully through each page of my paperback copy of The Silence Of The Lambs, Tippexing out the extraneous letters “r” and “g” in each mention of Stalin, and then, using a black biro, slightly thickened the “a” and the “l” to close the gap created between them. Laborious though the process is, it makes for a much more satisfying read, for one is no longer distracted by what seem to be frequent and irrelevant references to a starling, the passerine bird known to congregate in vast flocks often numbering in the thousands, or even millions. I was once reading the potboiler, as yet unmodified with Tippex, when I paused to look out of my window and saw a flock of starlings in the sky, blocking out the sun, but that is an anecdote for a later occasion.

The primary definition of the lambing-hall boogie, then, is that it is the name given to a riotous dance which may be organised by the evil farmer after he has cut the throats of all the lambs he has corralled into the cavernous grisly barn. The sawdust on the floor is awash with the blood of lambs, and into this gruesomeness the evil farmer will inveigle his farmhands and their extended families. First they roll about in the sawdust until they are smeared and splattered with lambs’ blood, and then they dance. Perhaps the closest non-rustic equivalent of the dance is the pogo once practised enthusiastically by punkists in the latter part of the nineteen-seventies. But the music to which the farmpersons leap and hurl themselves about the blood-soaked barn could not be more different from punk music as we know it. Evil farmers are wont to employ for the evening a so-called chamber farm orchestra, which performs a combination of baroque minuets and oompah marches, overlaid, or possibly underlaid, I don’t really understand the technicalities, with funereal dirges on cello.

Intriguingly, there is some evidence that Josef Stalin may have taken part in several lambing-hall boogies during his youthful years in Georgia. Clarice Stalin, however, did not, insofar as we can glean from Harris’s text. Further research on this matter is probably pointless, at least in the case of the rookie FBI agent, for the simple reason that she is fictional.

The secondary definition of the lambing-hall boogie is, as I indicated, allied to the first. If you have spent any appreciable time in a rustic milieu, you will know that you can barely pass ten minutes without being buttonholed by a toothless ancient or drooling village idiot eager to regale you with barely comprehensible countryside lore and legend. Much of this can be airily dismissed with a wave of your elegant hand, swathed in an Italianate silken glove, but occasionally it pays to sit with the crone or idiot and to listen carefully. That is how I learned of the undoubtedly real terrors of the other lambing-hall boogie, where “boogie” refers not to a dance but to a boogie-man or sprite or hobgoblin or wraith or phantom or possibly even to the devil himself.

This figure, with the head of a blood-soaked lamb and the body of either a goat or a hedgehog or a starling, is said to appear from within an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, when the pogoing farmpersons are sprawled, exhausted and nauseous, on the bloody sawdust in the barn. It wreaks its terrible vengeance by casting a hypnotic spell over all those gathered, condemning them to a calendar year of rustic drudgery, flooded drainage ditches, pricking by thorns, torrential rainfall, maddened cows, and other such miseries of countryside existence.

There is some conjecture that the lambing-hall boogie may have somehow entered the body of, and commandeered the brain and soul of young Josef Stalin. There is further conjecture that there exists a suppressed text by Thomas Harris in which Clarice Stalin goes in pursuit of the lambing-hall boogie in an attempt to bring him to justice. I have spoken to someone who claims to have seen the manuscript, who reports that the potboilerist mires the whole business in unnecessary confusion. In his version, the lambing-hall boogie, as it emerges from an engulfing mist of foul and noisome vapours on the stroke of midnight, is erroneously given both the head and the body of a starling, making it effectively identical to the bird itself. My informant tells me that the bulk of the text then has Clarice Stalin chasing a starling across the continental United States, armed with a butterfly net.

It was my intention today to use this space to compile a list of nitwits. The idea was to save you, gentle readers, from having to work out for yourselves who was, and who was not, a nitwit. You could simply memorise my list and then, whenever you saw or heard a nitwit, you could cry “Nitwit!”, and pay the nitwit in question no further regard, thus freeing up your time for more salubrious pursuits than being exposed to nitwittery. If your cranial integuments were unequal to the task of memorising the list, you could print it out and carry it with you at all times, in pocket or reticule, hoisting it out to check it when in the presence of a possible or probable nitwit.

I am not suggesting that you do not know a nitwit when you see one, but I thought it would be helpful for you to have a ready made list. Ah, but already your eyes are scanning the splurge of text below this line, and you see no sign of a list. Did my plan gang agley, and if so, why, for heaven’s sake?

Well, jumping out of bed before dawn and plunging my head into a pail of ice-cold water, as ever, I began compiling the list within that same head, wet and freezing. There would be time enough to write down the names of this first flurry of nitwits when I repaired to my escritoire after breakfast, breakfast today being eggy, accompanied by a single smokers’ poptart, washed down with liquefied vitamin-enriched pap. The difference between common or garden pap and liquefied pap is that the latter is runnier, and can be poured into a beaker for the swigging therefrom. Common or garden pap, while still runny, when compared say to a potato or a block of suet, is usually served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. I know these things.

But I am leaping ahead of myself. Let us return to where I was doubled over with my head plunged into a pail of icy water. The names of seven or eight nitwits sprang to mind before I lifted my head, took a gulp of air, and replunged. During the second immersion I thought of several more nitwits. One more deep breath, and the third and final plunge, and before I was even wrapping a towel around my freezing head I had a mental list of at least a score of nitwits.

I just need to clear something up here before we proceed. I may have given the impression that I am only capable of thinking of the names of nitwits at such times as my head is immersed in ice cold water. Not so! I can as well summon the names of a legion of nitwits with my head wrapped in a towel, or indeed not wrapped in a towel or any other swaddling, just plonked atop my neck breathing in the air, fresh or foetid as may be. Don’t get the wrong idea.

So, as I prepared my breakfast eggs ‘n’ smokers’ poptart ‘n’ pap, with my habitual ritualistic precision, I congratulated myself on having made a splendid start to my nitwit list. And here I must confess that self-congratulation is my fatal weakness. I have been known to give myself a thunderous round of applause simply for completing a mundane task, for instance making my breakfast, or tying my bootlaces. In my defence, I would point out that I only do this because it was recommended to me by the author of the only self-help book I have ever read. In Clap Yourself Stupid! – Ten Steps To A Dementedly High Level Of Self-Esteem, Dr Bruce Terrific – pictured on the back cover wearing splendid moustachios and a cravat – suggests not only applauding oneself but also patting oneself on the back using a patented arm-extension device, striking one’s own medals from milk-bottle caps, and playing tape recordings of the cheering of hysterically overexcited crowds, cleverly modified so they sound as if they are bawling one’s own name through tears of happiness and joy. I have found these methods work wonders, and it is now at least three weeks since I have compared myself to a worm wriggling in the muck.

More names of nitwits popped into my head, now dry and slightly warmer, as I ate my breakfast. I was impatient to get to the escritoire and to start writing them down. At this point, I began to wonder whether I ought to simply scribble the names down, one after another, on sheets of notepaper, or if it would be better to make use of a stack of index cards. If I gave each nitwit their own individual card, I would have space for annotations. These could prove invaluable. Already, in my mental list of nitwits, I had two nitwits with very similar names, differing in fact by only a single letter. Granted, they were both nitwits, through and through, but the nature of their nitwittery varied – one was a saintly nitwit, the other a knave and jackass – and it would not do to mix them up. It also occurred to me that, as my list lengthened, there may be a similar similarity in the name of a nitwit and the name of one who was not a nitwit by any stretch of the imagination. I did not want the users of my list to call its reliability into question by making the assumption that I had included a non-nitwit on a list of nitwits or, worse, that I had declared one who was quite clearly not a nitwit to be a nitwit. Were that to happen, I would run the risk of being called a nitwit myself. Perish the thought!

If only the thought had perished. But it began to gnaw at me, before I had even finished my breakfast, before I had even got as far as my escritoire, and my notepad, and my stack of index cards, and my pot of propelling pencils. Should I be on the nitwit list?, I asked myself, over and over again. Sometimes I answered no, sometimes yes, sometimes I left the question hanging, and it hung over me like the sword of Damocles, to the point where I got all wibblywobbly and frightened and jellylegged and fretful. Hoping for some kind of succour, I reached for my self-help book and stared at the photograph of Dr Bruce Terrific. His black and white eyes gazed back at me, curiously unreadable, fathomless, cold. It was like looking into the unreadable fathomless cold eyes of a swan.

I received no succour, no answer. Mopping up the last bit of egg with the last corner of smokers’ poptart, I decided I could not take the risk of being dubbed a nitwit. If I were called a nitwit, I might become a nitwit, my name at the top of my own list of the names of nitwits. It was a prospect too horrible to contemplate. I banged my fork on my plate and stood up, and I walked right past my escritoire, out through the door, into the freezing cold, and I gulped the icy air, as dawn came crashing across the sky.

Dennis Beerpint’s latest poetry collection, a slim volume of twee verse entitled Groaning Minions, is an experiment in what the weedy ex-beatnik calls “fictional autobiography”. “Fictional”, note, not “fictionalised”. In a preface he makes his intentions clear:

By any measure, my life has been one of unremitting tedium. Nothing remotely interesting ever happens to me, nor do I cause anything of remark to occur. My motto can be encoupleted as “Neither a mover nor a shaker be / Just write verse relentlessly twee”. In my advancing years, however, rightly celebrated as probably the greatest poet ever to tread the earth, I am constantly beset by eager young whippersnappers beating a path to my door, clutching their notebooks and propelling pencils and tape recorders, desperate to hear me tell tales of my life so they might be the one to write the Life. It always amuses me to watch them doze off as I explain that, no, I never swapped beekeeping tips with Sylvia Plath, I was never declared insane like Ezra Pound, I never saw my work turned into a hit West End musical like T S Eliot, and I never even shared a Lemsip with Andrew Motion. Having scurried breathlessly up the path, the wannabe biographers trudge away a couple of hours later, their notebooks empty, their cassette tapes blank.

It has occurred to me that if anyone does ever succeed in writing my Life, the book will be so damned boring that nobody will ever want to read it. Thus I have taken it upon myself to invent a life of thrills and spills and adventures and extraordinary excitement, all of it chronicled in the form of twee and vapid verse. Let future biographers pick over the contents of the present volume, and rewrite it as prose. That will keep them occupied, and I will no longer have to heave myself out of my armchair and answer the doorbell to another panting whippersnapper, and parry a legion of pointless queries about the part I played in the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent and many another world-shuddering kerfuffle.

Beerpint appears to be teasing us here, because there is not a single mention of any of those world-shuddering kerfuffles in the forty-nine poems in the collection. Instead, we get a sort of Ruritanian fantasy, with the fictional poet born and brought up in an eerie and phantasmal castle, surrounded by the groaning minions of the title. Indeed, he gets rather carried away by these minions, whose incessant groaning he is at pains to account for. One, it seems, has a burst appendix. Another groans because he is overtired. A third is a minion of melancholic disposition whose groaning is

Both religious, like a tortured Christian martyr

And existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not going to quote directly from the book, what with Dennis Beerpint’s fondness for unleashing savage packs of wolves at any hint of copyright violation, but perhaps I can be forgiven just the one couplet.

The poet’s growing obsession with the groaning minions is apparent when one considers that, though they make only fleeting appearances in the first half of the book, from poem number twenty-six onwards they are increasingly dominant. In fact, the concluding set of six villanelles seem to consist of nothing but groaning, as if Beerpint’s very psyche has been invaded and overtaken by these minions of his childhood. This is both perplexing and worrying when we lift our eyes from the page briefly to remind ourselves that they are entirely fictional and never actually existed. The unrelenting focus on the groaning minions also means that, in terms of chronology, Beerpint never gets beyond the years of his youth. He thus undermines his own stated purpose of fobbing off the doorbell-ringing wannabe biographers, who are still left in the dark about the poet’s involvement, or otherwise, in such world-shuddering kerfuffles as the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent.

It may be that he has a second volume of “fictional autobiography” in the works, but quite frankly, let us hope not.

It is often remarked that, in an age of mass transportation, what we have lost is the thrill and glamour and sheer romance of travel. It is true that were a modern day Richard Hakluyt to publish a modern day version of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, the navigations, voiages and traffiques would already be familiar to millions, and the discoueries few, if indeed there were any at all. Journeys that were unimaginable even to our fairly recent ancestors we now undertake at the drop of a hat. But was the thrill and glamour and romance inherent in the travel, or does it depend above all on the attitude of the traveller? If the latter, we can still experience the sensations of Hakluyt’s voyagers, of explorers treading into the unknown, of wide-eyed wonderment and awe.

If our attitude is all, then we need not hark back to the past in our choice of transport. However appealing the steam train and the hot air balloon and the vintage car, what they offer is nostalgia. Yet it is possible to find thrills and glamour and romance in bang up to date transport systems if we screw our heads on properly, that is to say, if we adopt a true traveller’s attitude. Consider, for example, that often overlooked wonder of the age, the replacement bus service.

You arrive at the railway station for a routine journey. Perhaps you are simply commuting from home to work, or paying your regular visit to Great Aunt Flo in her seaside retirement home, or taking your monthly trip to a distant city with a castle and an exciting zoo. You already have your train ticket, and as you prance into the station you take it from your inside pocket, ready to present it to a uniformed factotum. It is then you espy, emblazoned with a magic marker pen across a board, a notice telling you that all train services have been cancelled and there is a replacement bus service in operation.

You become aware of fellow passengers standing around the railway station looking lost, tutting and muttering and in some cases seething. They are annoyed and irritated and frustrated. One of them is already shouting his head off at a uniformed factotum, who is blinking frantically and parroting the “line” he has been given by his superiors. You, by contrast, have not a care in the world. You are a true traveller. Bright of eye and determined of gait, you turn on your heel and stride out of the station, seeking the bus stop. And there it is!

There is a bus waiting there for you, its engine already grumbling. A rapid glance confirms that it is indeed the replacement bus service bus that will ferry you to your destination. There is another factotum, wearing a peaked cap, standing on the kerb by the open door. You show him your train ticket, he acknowledges it with a manly nod, and you board the bus and select a seat. At this point, while you wait in a state of high expectation for the bus to rev and slowly ease away from the bus stop, at the outset of your journey, you might take from your bag a piece of fruit, an apple or a pear or a Carlsbad plum, a snack to calm your nerves.

Eventually, your waiting is over. A few more passengers have clambered aboard, some still tutting and muttering and seething, but you block them out of your consciousness. In regrettable modern parlance, they are, or appear to be, bus wankers. But you are of a higher calling. You are a replacement bus service voyager, with the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum now tucked away in your bag. And the door hisses shut and the engine revs and away you go.

“Make it new!” was Ezra Pound’s battle-cry, and that is exactly what happens to your oh so familiar train journey. You stop at all the same familiar stations, yet, crucially, following a parallel yet different trajectory, from an unfamiliar angle, and you stop, not at a platform within the station but at a bus stop outside it. And all along that trajectory, everything you see you see from an unfamiliar angle, including the railway tracks themselves, sometimes visible from the window of the bus, sometimes occluded, as when the bus needs must follow the line of the road where it veers away from the railway line due to the terrain, the physical geography, or historical imperatives. Trees, shrubs, huts, outbuildings, factories, orchards, canals, aerodromes, coppices, lakes, duckponds, churchyards, volleyball courts, swimming pools, chimneys, follies, otter sanctuaries, car pounds, statues, industrial estates, science parks, gin palaces, clock towers, unoccupied plinths, standing stones, plague pits, recently-landed alien spacecraft… each and all, seen from a different angle, are made anew, made unfamiliar. And here and there, scattered along the line, groups of railway employees, with no trains to run, are gathered, smoking pipes or playing improvised games of boules using pebbles or staring at the sky and at the birds in the sky, the engine drivers and ticket collectors and inspectors and buffet stewards gathered together with porters and maintenance men and signalmen, ripp’d from their familiar context, they too are made anew.

You disembark from the bus at the bus stop outside the railway station for which you set out, whether to go to work or to see Great Aunt Flo or to visit the castle and the exciting zoo. You know where the waste bins are inside the station, but here, outside, from this angle, at the replacement bus service bus stop, you must cast your eyes about until you spot one. Only then can you take from your bag and discard the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum. And, that done, you can wend your way, now on familiar pedestrian territory once more, but having travelled as a true traveller, with thrills and glamour and romance.

Are bongos inherently groovy? It’s a good question. There are countless examples of the addition of bongos to a lineup by those desperate to impart grooviness to their combos. Sometimes it succeeds incontrovertibly, as in the transformation wreaked overnight when Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra became Groovy Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos. It is important to note here, however, that though the pulsating rhythm orchestra itself became indubitably groovy, Claude Grimes himself did not. He was a straightlaced and somewhat starchy figure upon whom the mantle of grooviness never sat comfortably, and it would have been better for all concerned had he dubbed the new lineup either Claude Grimes And His Groovy Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos or Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Groovy Bongos. Either of those would have been accurate, for they were grooviness incarnate with added bongos. Yet for all their grooviness, few could hear it when they were distracted by the patent absurdity of stiff, unfashionably-dressed Claude Grimes trying to pass himself off as groovy. That is why, shortly after the bongos were added, the combo retired from live performances and kept to the recording studio, where they could give vent to their newfound grooviness uninterrupted by hepcats hooting ridicule at Claude Grimes.

No one listening to those scratchy old 78s today could dispute just how groovy they are, and how that grooviness reaches its apogee in the bongos. But ’twas not ever thus. At around the same time as Claude Grimes was haunting the lobbies of talent agencies on the lookout for a bongo player, another bandleader, Pook Tuncks, had the same idea. One might think that with a name like Pook Tuncks, he had quite enough grooviness to be going on with, because it is by any measure a groovy name. It was of course a pseudonym, taken from an 1864 entry in the Journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the Victorian Jesuit poet wrote “Tuncks is a good name. Gerard Manley Tuncks. Pook Tuncks”. But Pook Tuncks the bandleader was on a mission to become ever groovier. Almost one hundred years after Hopkins, in 1954, he wrote in his own Journal:

I have it in me to become the grooviest person ever to bestride the earth. By my own reckoning, I am currently at a high level of grooviness. I need to screw my courage to the sticking place and take certain steps to become even groovier. My spies tell me that Claude Grimes is planning to add bongos to the lineup of his combo. Even though he is laughably ungroovy there is no doubt that he will impart grooviness to his pulsating rhythm orchestra by doing so. He will be hot on my heels. If I am to propel myself further into the stratosphere of grooviness and leave Claude Grimes a barely visible speck in the far distance, I too must have bongos in my lineup! Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness must become Groovy Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness With Bongos, or perhaps Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Groovy Fantasticness With Bongos.

So Pook Tuncks too haunted the very same lobbies of the very same talent agencies, in the shadow of Claude Grimes, and within days of the latter snapping up a groovy bongoist, so too did Pook Tuncks. At least, he thought his bongoist was groovy. Most bongoists are. But, fatally, Pook Tuncks plucked the wrong bongoist from the pile. Classically trained, with many a certificate and diploma hanging in frames on the walls of his bongoing room, the new recruit was simply unable to get the hang of the happening sounds of fantasticness so dizzyingly played by the combo. A terse entry in Pook Tuncks’s Journal is smudged by tears:

His bongoing is leaden.

Ironically, then, the decidedly ungroovy Claude Grimes was celebrated for the grooviness of his combo, at least after they retired to the studio, whereas the once impeccably groovy Pook Tuncks lost every atom of grooviness he ever had. And the impetus behind these divergent trajectories was bongos.

What we can learn from this is that, contrary to received wisdom, bongos are not inherently groovy. Other factors have to be taken into account. For one thing, the demeanour, attitude, and aptitude of the bongoist are critical. No one becomes groovy just by thumping a pair of bongos, even though the bongos may be groovy in themselves. Much less does the bandleader automatically bask in reflected grooviness simply by dint of adding bongos to the lineup. A certain alchemy has to occur, whether the bongos are added to pulsating rhythms or to happening sounds of fantasticness.

A grooveologist recently posited the intriguing question of what might have happened had Claude Grimes recruited Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, and Pook Tuncks Claude Grimes’s. A rival grooveologist made the compelling point that the pivotal factor may be the bongos, not the bongoist. Had Claude Grimes’s bongoist swapped his bongos with Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, could that have made a vital difference? This takes us into the treacherous territory of whether the grooviness or otherwise of bongos depends upon the bongoist, which in turn forces us to ask if the grooviness or otherwise of any individual bongoist is reliant upon their bongos.

In an ideal world, of course, one could match up groovy bongoists with groovy bongos, while they are still loitering full of hopes and dreams in the lobby of a talent agency. But even then, can the grooviest of bongoists, armed with the grooviest of bongos, necessarily impart grooviness to the combo to which they are recruited? The tragic decline of Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness, insert the Groovy where one will, would suggest not. He was last seen in 1962, in the gutter outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool, sloshed and stricken and holding out a begging bowl to trendy with-it young persons, who passed him by, neither knowing nor caring who he was.

Every now and then, civilisations collapse. Usually this happens after a gradual decline due to an immensely complicated set of factors which future historians seek to understand and explain. Sometimes, the collapse is sudden, as when barbarian hordes come sweeping o’er the plains on horseback, bringing ruin and desolation in their wake. Barbarians have their part to play in gradual collapses too, just not so dramatically.

In understanding why civilisations collapse, then, it would be a great boon to historians were they able to sit down on a sofa with a barbarian and have a chinwag. What were you thinking, as you swept across the plains on horseback, accompanied by your horde?, the historian might ask. Was it your settled intention to cause the collapse of any civilisation you happened upon, or was its destruction an unforeseen consequence of your penchant for havoc and mayhem? Were you pernickety in your choice of civilisations to sweep towards, or was it a more haphazard process? Give me some insight into pillage. And so on.

The benefits of such direct evidence from the mouths of barbarians have not been forthcoming, partly because the barbarians involved are long dead, each and every man jack of them, and partly because, being barbarians, they are, or were, incapable of coherent speech. Barbarians, remember, merely grunt.

Two recent developments, in different fields, promise to pull the rug from under this dispiriting state of affairs. Actually, I am not sure “to pull the rug” is the appropriate metaphor, but ipsum dipsum, let it stand. First, separate investigations into the reanimation of the dead, mediumistic communication with the ethereal realm, shamanism, and séance etiquette have coalesced to the point where it may well be feasible to plop a long dead barbarian on to a sofa and actually engage him in conversation. However exciting this prospect is – and make no mistake, it is! – it is made somewhat less so by the fact that any such conversation is likely to be one-sided, consisting on the one hand of searching, piercing questions delivered in a series of well-turned phrases in a plummy baritone, and on the other hand, of barbaric grunting.

That is why the second recent development may prove so decisive. Boffins in Switzerland (where else?) are putting the finishing touches to some kind of contraption that, fitted to the head of a grunting person – whether he be a barbarian or not – and with wires and nozzles poking, variously, into the mouth and the brain and certain glands, is able to “translate” the grunts into any of a dozen or so modern languages. I placed inverted commas around the word “translate” because it is not yet clear if the resulting print-outs, created with biro-nib on a gelatine wafer attached to a docking hub – are, strictly speaking, what we would understand as translations of grunts in the commonly accepted sense. But billions of Swiss currency units are being poured into this research, so I expect it will come good in the end.

The implications dizzy the mind. We will have, at first hand, the accounts of individual barbarians as they describe the process of congregating in a horde, supplying themselves with arms and victuals, mounting their horses, and sweeping o’er the plains to loot and pillage and lay waste to sundry isolated villages on their implacable way towards a more advanced civilisation, the collapse of which they will then bring about, either deliberately or inadvertently. For the first time we will be able to apprehend a grunting enhorsed barbarian raining death and terror where’er he roams as a person, a person like you or me, subject to the same whims and pangs, jumping through the same hoops, balancing upon the same ledge over the awful existential abyss. The only difference between us is that we are quick and alive, breathing in the air of the twenty-first century, and he is barbaric and dead and can but grunt. But such fripperies ought not divide us. Already, even before the reanimation of the dead, and improved mediumistic communication with the ethereal realm, shamanism, and séance etiquette, and the final tweakings to the contraption with poking wires and nozzles and biro-nib and gelatine wafer and docking hub, human rights lawyers and Guardian columnists and Occupy protesters are suggesting that it is due time barbarians were allowed to play a full part in society, given the vote, and a living wage, and, most importantly, legally protected from being offended by the so-called civilised.

Far too many people dismiss a dead grunting barbarian on a sofa as a “zombie”, or similar pejorative description. However, those who show such disrespect may temper their views when techniques for the reanimation of the dead are perfected. For then, just one barbarian, reanimated for the purpose of an historical chinwag, might seize control of the machinery and bring back to life his entire horde. Then, in their inimitable barbaric fashion, they will exact their own revenge.

I failed to mention, in yesterday’s essay about his love song, that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer. So let me put that right without further ado. Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer, a noted mountaineer. Elsewhere, I wrote of him that “Physically, [he] was not really cut out for mountaineering. He was described by a contemporary as ‘a figure of untold puniness’, and he was indeed tiny and weak, short-sighted, lanky and prone to swooning fits. He was terrified of gnats, horseflies and fruitbats. He had an oversensitive digestive system and had to subsist mostly on thin soup or broth. It was difficult to find a mountaineering team willing to recruit so wretched a specimen, so Ah-Fang did most of his clambering up sheer rock faces solo, a man alone testing himself against the elements”.

This description was called into question by Brian Phantasm, who took me to task in the pages of Puny Mountaineers Monthly, accusing me of getting my Ah-Fangs mixed up. As if! There were not exactly dozens of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who were accomplished mountaineers, in love with Mrs Gubbins, and perished in the Hindenburg disaster. Granted, there may have been a couple of others, but – tellingly – Mr Phantasm – sorry, Doctor Phantasm – though what he is a doctor of God alone knows – the doctoring of signatures on counterfeit documents, probably – um – I think I have lost my thread. Let me begin that sentence again. Granted, there may have been a couple of other Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who met the necessary criteria, but – tellingly – Doctor Phantasm does not identify the one he accuses me of getting mixed up with the Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp I was writing about. I hope that is clear. I am becoming somewhat befuddled in defending myself against these outrageous charges, and outrageous they are, as is Doctor Phantasm’s dress sense, but it is best to cast a veil over that, and a very thick veil, made of many blankets, as if he were a prisoner being ushered between police car and police station, covered to outwit the press photographers. It is my fond hope that one day Phantasm himself will be placed under arrest, and then he might stop attacking me in the pages of little-read magazines.

Our initial falling out, some years ago, was occasioned by a piece he wrote in News Of The Screes, a small circulation mountaineering journal devoted, as its title suggests, to scree, the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders. It was an ill-written and intemperate rant, the gist of which, when one got past the swearwords, was that the word “scree” should be dropped and replaced by “talus”, which means the same thing and has become the scientifically-approved term. “Scree” is of Old Norse origin, whereas “talus” derives from French. Now, I am neither Norse nor French, and Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was Sino-Dutch, so my championing of “scree” is not based on any infantile sense of chauvinism. But champion “scree” I do, without apology, in all weathers. It is clearly the more apposite word for the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders which serves as its definition. Go to a scree and have a go at clambering across it if you don’t believe me. Better, be there when tumbling rock fragments from the upper slopes come crashing down to add to the scree, and raise the earflaps of your mountaineering hat to listen carefully. I am sure you will agree that “scree” beats “talus” hands down, whatever our French amis and scientists might say on the matter.

I wrote a letter to the editor of News Of The Screes, arguing my point and suggesting that Doctor Phantasm was an oaf and a dunderpate and probably a forger of doctored signatures on important documents. Thus our war of words began, and it continues to this day. So when he writes to accuse me of mixing up my Ah-Fangs, I swat his article aside as I might swat one of the gnats Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was so affrighted by. That is my Ah-Fang, of course, not one of Brian Phantasm’s putative unidentified Ah-Fangs.

My Ah-Fang spent much of his mountaineering time clambering across scree. His puniness was such that he often grew exhausted, panting, panting, panting, while barely across the scree, whatever the steepness or otherwise of its gradient. For remember that some scree is steeper than other scree, depending on its geographical location and indeed the circumstances of its geological formation, whether created by dint of mechanical weathering by ice, chemical weathering by mineral hydration and salt deposition, thermal stresses, topographic stresses, or biotic processes. [Note to self: make a study of the word “dint”.] Sometimes Ah-Fang was so puffed out from clambering over a mere few yards of scree that he collapsed upon it, gazing hopelessly upwards to where the summit he aimed to ascend vanished in the clouds. Could there be a more pitiable image of a mountaineer?

But we must bear in mind that some scree can prove to be devilishly difficult terrain. All those rock fragments, often loose, can be perilous, even when one is not puny. So let us not mock Ah-Fang, or rather his memory, as the despicable and quite probably criminal Brian Phantasm has done in his latest piece of grievous folderol. No fewer than ten pages of last week’s issue of Screeds On Scree were given over to a disgraceful rewriting of history, in which Phantasm claims that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp used stilts and some kind of anti-panting elixir to cross the scree at the foot of Big Oddly-Shaped Mountain Number Seven in 1929, one of his most famous ascents, and the one for which he was awarded a medal – the very medal I snapped up at an auction of Ah-Fang memorabilia which was then stolen from me by a footpad who bore a striking resemblance to Brian Phantasm. I have no proof, and I have never knowingly met this hellhound, but my assailant had a bouffant and cummerbund and winklepickers identical to those sported by Phantasm in the one grainy black and white photograph of him that I have seen, a copy of which I keep pasted in my Enemies Book (page 149, lavender series).

And so once again I must take up my butcher’s pencil to rebut, or refute, I can’t remember which, the calumnies rained down upon Ah-Fang. But I will continue to defend his memory until the cows come home. And no, they are not coming home now, o’er the rain-soaked loam.

A recent survey suggests that the truculence of peasants comes top in a list of baronial dissatisfactions. A huge percentage of barons expressed the view that a truculent peasantry caused them greater mental anguish than the crumbling of castle crenellations, outbreaks of disease in cows, and torrential rainfall.

Elspeth Grimpenmire, of pollsters YouBaron, said “This is an important finding. It shows that subjugation of the peasantry is high on the list of policy initiatives most barons would support. For the king to faff about with pie in the sky ideas about improving the lot of belligerent rustics shows just how out of touch he is.”

The king has not issued an official statement in response, although a palace spokeschamberlain insisted that plans were well under way for increased smiting, burning of villages, destruction of crops and associated mayhem.

No one from the peasantry was available for comment. That doesn’t really matter, as they are all illiterate and would be incapable of reading any snag-toothed babble reported here in any case.

Questions were raised about the reliability of the survey, however, when it came to light that only three barons were polled, each of whom was an empanelled official of the Association of Brutish Barons. From its grim headquarters in a castle keep on the edge of a marsh known locally for the poisonous vapours which hover in a mist o’er it, the Association regularly sends out marauding gangs of ruffians to bash up and lop the limbs off selected peasants. These gangs will usually haul back to the castle carts piled high with whatever agricultural produce they can gather from the peasantry’s pitiful patches of tillage, together with a few hostages.

An Association spokesbrute explained “If we don’t terrorise the peasantry, who will?”

Doctor Dust, an alchemist and necromancer retained by the Association as a consultant, recently passed his hands in oddly significant sweeping movements over a bowl containing a decoction of boiled amphibians, herbs, blood, semen, twigs and black bile and, after gazing into it for an hour, announced something which, unfortunately, came out as gibberish. But it is thought his eldritch manoeuvres, accompanied by various portents seen in the sky, suggest an uprising of the peasants at a future time.

“What Doctor Dust can see in his mysterious bowl is all the more reason to suppress the rabble in the here and now,” said a brutish baron, sharpening the blade of his bloodstained axe upon a whetstone, “We should certainly pay no heed to those so-called enlightened barons.”

The reference is to a newly formed groupuscule, the Association of Enlightened Barons, whose castle headquarters, far from being engulfed by poisonous marsh vapours, is decorated with pretty pink flags billowing in a balmy breeze.

“We like to think of the peasantry as stakeholders,” said one enlightened baron, “And though it may be hard to do blue sky thinking under this leaden pall, with threats of a downpour, we are convinced that they need not be truculent and belligerent, if treated with a little loving kindness and offered the prospect of a future world with many enticing leisure and retail facilities.”

Interestingly, even the peasants themselves ridicule this fatuity. We cannot quote them for obvious reasons, and as it happens most of the peasants we approached for an interview were to be found drunk out of their heads on some gruesome brew, fighting among each other, or lying unconscious in ditches.

Such scenes are welcome to the brutish barons, who will take the opportunity to charge out of their castles on horseback and trample the distracted and insensible peasantry under the clattering hooves of their mighty steeds.

“I often find it gives my horse quite a fillip if I let him crush the skulls of a few peasants while out on an afternoon gallop,” said one baron, “Though of course that is not the only method we use to crush their skulls and other bones. That is why we have dark dank dungeons in our castles, where the more truculent peasantry can be subjected to episodes of barbaric cruelty that would make the devil himself blanch. Even the most belligerent rustic tends to be a little more tractable after he’s had most of his bones crushed.”

In spite of the galloping horses and the dungeons, there has to date been no diminution in the truculence of the peasantry. Some commentators put this down to social factors such as the baronial tendency to have great feasts, with hunks of venison and pig’s heads and puddings made from wrens and quail and coot and partridge and widgeon, and foaming tankards of mead, while the peasants subsist on gruel. Others claim this is the natural order of things, and to tamper with it would turn the world upside down and bring chaos and, ultimately, undermine our entire understanding of the cosmos.

One enlightened baron pops his head over the parapet to offer a different view.

“It can seem one must be on the side either of the brutish barons or of the truculent peasantry,” he opines, “But luckily there is a so-called Blairite third way. It will come to pass.”

We shall see.