I was discussing the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen with the ghost of his first wife, Doris.

“Is it true” I asked, “That Stockhausen was covertly funded by the CIA in an attempt to demoralise German culture after the Second World War?”

Doris was one of those mute ghosts we’ve been hearing so much about lately but I hoped she would either nod or shake her head in reply. But her phantom head remained motionless atop her phantom neck, jutting at a disconcerting angle from between her phantom shoulders, draped in a shawl of surpassing loveliness which was all too real, as I knew because I had touched it, when gently pressing her down into her chair.

Well, not her chair, but a chair, the chair into which I press all my ghostly visitors. Unless you get them firmly nestled, they have a tendency to float and flit about the room, and even to splay themselves across the ceiling. Not all ghosts come when I summon them, but Doris did. A few seconds after my ear-splitting incantation, there was a faint tapping at my door. I opened it, and there, already, was the ghost of Doris Stockhausen. She handed over my fifty-pfennig fee, in cash that was pleasingly of this too too solid world – I checked – and allowed herself to be ushered in, and settled in the chair.

But I had not reckoned on her being a mute ghost. She sat across from me, fixing me with her baleful countenance, silent as the grave from which I had summoned her. With no prospect of the conversation I had so looked forward to, I went to rummage among my cassettes until I found the tape of her ex-husband’s Stimmung. I wondered if, hearing it again after all these years, Doris might be in some measure animated.

When I returned to the room, Doris had escaped her chair and was splayed across the ceiling. The surpassingly lovely shawl was hanging from her phantom shoulders, so I gave it a tug, hoping to dislodge her. And indeed, she lost contact with the ceiling, hovering in mid-air for a moment before darting this way and that, finally settling atop a toffee cable. Oops, I mean a coffee table. Using thumb-tacks, I secured the shawl to the table, holding Doris in place. The table was one of those fashionably distressed coffee tables, so the addition of a dozen tack-pricks would only add to its faux dilapidation.

There was every possibility that the ghost of Doris could slip or waft from beneath the shawl and go skittering about. I slotted the cassette into the cassette player, pressed “Play”, and cranked up the volume.

“Let us listen to Stimmung, Frau Stockhausen!” I cried, with perhaps an excess of jollity.

The tape hissed, and then the room was filled with the sound of a German man moaning melodiouslyish. Startled, I saw Doris suddenly clap her ghostly hands over her ghostly ears. Then she began to vibrate, horribly. I turned the music off, but it was too late. With a whoosh!, Doris shot up to the ceiling, taking the surpassingly lovely shawl and the coffee table with her.

Try as I might, I could not coax her down. Not only was I unable to use my coffee table to display my coffee table books, of which I owned oodles, but soon enough Doris outstayed her allotted time in the realm of the living afforded by the fifty-pfennig fee. Six weeks later she was still there, clinging to my ceiling, the shawl and table swinging gently beneath her in time with her ghostly panting. I had not realised how violently ghosts pant, particularly the mute ones.

At my wits’ end, I consulted a local spirit medium who specialised in the demoralisation of German culture in the aftermath of World War Two. He was a rather curious fellow. His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and his straight black lips. His voice was booming and monotonous, empty of human expression and lacking any variation in tone or cadence.

“Hand. Me. That. Cassette. Player.” he boomed, standing directly beneath the ghost of Doris and the shawl and the coffee table.

I did his bidding, and he took from his pocket a battered cassette tape. I shall never forget what happened next. He plopped the cassette into the machine, pressed “Play”, and cranked up the volume. There was the familiar hiss, and then the sound of a capella German voices warbling melodiously, with no ish about it, the first of the Choruses For Doris, by Doris’ ex-husband Karlheinz Stockhausen.

The spirit medium stepped – or rather, lumbered grotesquely – to one side, and the ghost of Doris let go of the ceiling and wafted elegantly down, shawl and coffee table and all, the table landing with a slight bump on the floor. As the chorus continued, the medium removed the thumb-tacks one by one. The ghost of Doris rose slghtly, hovering just above the coffee table, shimmered for a few seconds, and then seemed to dissolve before my eyes. Weirdly, that indubitably real unghostly shawl, of surpassing loveliness, dissolved with her. Then, even more weirdly, the spirit medium dissolved too, taking a handful of my thumb-tacks with him into ethereal realms beyond my puny understanding.

I was alone in my room, listening to the Choruses For Doris, and thinking to myself that postwar German culture had not, after all, been demoralised, in spite of the alleged efforts of the CIA.

One day late in the last century I acted as amanuensis to my son Sam, then a tiny tot. He told me a story. I wrote it down. Then I typed it out and made it into a pamphlet entitled The Story Of The Castle, The Knight, & The Dragon (out of print). Here is that story.

Once there was a brave knight and the brave knight heard a sort of dragon noise.

And when he heard it he went to tell his gang of knights to search for the dragon and kill it. And they couldn’t find it.

Well, in the end they found it and they killed it and they went to tell the king and queen and the prince and the princess and all the other people in the kingdom – when they found there was another dragon!

And the king ran up to the chain and he pulled the drawbridge up so the dragon couldn’t get in. And the queen looked out of the window to see if the dragon fell into the water round the castle (the moat).

And the dragon had flown over the mountains and ran back as fast as it could and butted the drawbridge open.

And suddenly the king and queen were surprised, because the brave knight put a spear into the dragon’s tummy and the dragon was dead. So the knight went to tell the people in the kingdom.

Then they saw that the dragon came alive again. And it was a magic spell when the dragon came alive again because the dragon was nice really.

And they found out that it could speak and it said to them that it would do everything for them in the kingdom. It would even find the cannonballs for them. And that’s the end.

And further, let it be known, known and digested, known and digested and regurgitated, regurgitated in the form of words, that it be known better, that in the last century Mudchute was the home of a monomaniac. Actually, to call Caspian Sea Spanglebag a monomaniac is not strictly true, for he had not one but two abiding obsessions.

The first, which is of little interest to us, was his conviction that the tyrant of the Soviet Union was called Josef Starling, while the heroine of Thomas Harris’ The Silence Of The Lambs was named Clarice Stalin. Being bonkers, Spanglebag was unmoved by the facts that the moustachioed and heavily pockmarked dictator chose the pseudonym “Man of Steel” in preference to his real name of Djugashvili, and that the troubled FBI rookie is a fictional character.

But it was the Mudchute man’s belief that hendiadys is a disease afflicting poultry, rather than a figure of speech, which consumed most of his energies. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Spanglebag declared war on the makers of dictionaries, lexicons, grammars and encyclopaedias. Most of the major publishers of reference books have somewhere in their archives a fat file containing letters with that Mudchute postmark, all written by pencil in tiny, tiny handwriting, their tone varying from mild complaint to violent menace. One example will suffice.

I purchased the latest edition of your wordbook, writes Spanglebag on 23rd June 1989, and was surprised to see you define hendiadys as “a figure of speech in which two words connected by a conjunction are used to express a single notion that would normally be expressed by an adjective and a substantive; the use of two conjoined nouns instead of a noun and modifier”. You then go on to list instances from the Bible, such as “a mouth and wisdom” in Luke 21:15, and “the hope and resurrection of the dead” in Acts 23:6. I do not take kindly to spending money on such drivel, and have torn your worthless book to shreds, and I would have scattered those shreds to the winds from atop a hill, were there any high hills in Mudchute, which there are not, so instead I steeped the shreds in buckets of water until they were but pulp, yes! pulp. Please correct your gruesome error in future editions, or I will ensure you become the laughing stocks of the reference book world, and you will weep with shame.

Note that Spanglebag sees no reason to advance his own belief that hendiadys has something to do with sick poultry. To him, it would have been to point out the obvious, like saying that water is wet, that the Pope is Catholic, or that Hooting Yard is by far the loveliest thing on the wuh-wuh-wuh, and not just by far, but far and away, away with the fairies, tiny delicate shimmering beings with wings, which, if they exist, exist only in Cottingley, where they are made of paper, and held in place in the garden by means of pins.

How pertinent is the fact that this odd little man, Spanglebag, lived his whole life in Mudchute, only rarely roaming farther afield? I think it is crucial. It made him what he was, even before the construction of the Docklands Light Railway. It is as if he embodied the spirit of the place, Mudchute’s mud and Mudchute’s chute, the caked, black, stinking mud and the gleaming metal chute down which it slides and slithers and tumbles, into god knows what foul pit of hideousness and eeuurrgghh.

[This is a mildly tweaked version of a piece which originally appeared in August 2005. Can it really be so long ago? Yes, it can. It is.]

Good evening, and thank you for your warm welcome. Well, warm-ish. The clapping petered out rather quickly, and I must say that other audiences, in other auditoria, have shown a sight more enthusiasm. But there we go. I am not complaining. This lecturing lark is much preferable to being out and about in all weathers in the company of sheep, dim-witted and fearful beasts that they are. It is more lucrative too.

But I should introduce myself. My name is Bo Peep. I am often known as “Little” Bo Peep by dint of my diminutive stature. I don’t mind being called “Little”. It has an affectionate ring. But I do object when some newspapers compare me to a dwarf from a Wagner opera. Clearly, the organisers of tonight’s event expected me to be smaller than I am. What a tiny lectern!

The one thing most of you will know about me is that I lost my sheep. I do not deny it. Quite why it caused such a kerfuffle in the press is a mystery to me. I became the poster girl for neglectful and inept shepherdesses, and even now I can barely leave my cottage without some mucky little country urchin calling out to me to ask where my sheep are. It is a trying existence.

Thus I welcome this opportunity to tell my side of the story. It all happened on one of those blustery misty wuthery weathery days, in some godawful rustic backwater. As usual, I was sitting in a field, supervising several sheep. My childhood ambition of intergalactic space travel, of boldly going where no Peep had gone before, seemed as far off as ever. Bored out of my considerably acute mind, I drifted into a doze. And as I dozed, I dreamed.

I dreamt of the moon and a yew tree. The light was blue. Grasses prickled my ankles, and I simply could not see where to get to through the fumy, spiritous mists. The moon dragged the sea after it like a dark crime. Bells startled the sky, eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection bonged out their names. The yew tree pointed up. It had a Gothic shape. The moon was my mother. Her blue garments unloosed small bats and owls. She was bald and wild. The message of the yew tree was blackness, blackness and silence. I started awake, rubbed my eyes, and saw that the sheep I was meant to be shepherdessing were gone.

My immediate hunch was that they had been abducted by a band of roaming Wagnerian dwarves. I had read of several such crimes in the Daily Nibelungenlied And Countryside Advertiser. So, with the gung ho approach for which we Peeps are universally admired, or if not universally then at least in and around Sibodnedabshire, I hoisted my crook and marched off to the newsagent’s kiosk, under those pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing at Ketchworth.

It was not the Advertiser I was looking for. It so happened that this newsagent kept in stock various seventeenth-century tracts, including Dagons-Downfall; or The great IDOL digged up Root and Branch by Roger Crabb, A Fiery Flying Roll by Abiezer Coppe, and The Neck of the Quakers Broken by Lodowicke Muggleton. The one I wanted – obviously – was The Lost Sheep Found by Laurence Clarkson. After a close reading of this pamphlet, I felt sure I would be able to locate my sheep, and they would no longer be lost.

I purchased a copy and repaired to a bosky arbour to read it. I had barely digested the opening paragraph when I was set upon by a vulgar mechanic. He was a repellent and vile and filthy fellow, not unlike a Wagnerian dwarf, though considerably taller. I cried “Unhand me, sir!”, and smashed him in the face with my shepherdess’s crook, neatly breaking his jaw. “Woe betide those who mess with a Peep!” I added, kicking him in the head as he lay sprawled and whimpering beneath a plum tree’s slender shade. Above us, in the shining summer heaven, there was a cloud my eyes dwelled long upon. It was quite white and very high above us, then I looked up and found that it had gone, just like my sheep.

In the course of bashing up the vulgar mechanic, I had inadvertently dropped my seventeenth century tract into a puddle, and not just any puddle, no siree, but a muddy puddle, the muddiest of muddy puddles it had ever been my misfortune in which to inadvertently drop a seventeenth century tract. Laurence Clarkson’s timeless sheep-finding words were rendered wholly illegible. What was a poor Peep to do?

It was at this point, just as I was venting my vehemence upon the sprawled mechanic by biffing him several more times with my crook, that I heard distant baas. Now, in my experience as a shepherdess in and around Sibodnedwabshire, this sound could mean only one thing. It meant there were sheep in the distance!

Like a mad thing, I galumphed towards the sound of baas, and as I approached, I spotted, fleeing, a band of Wagnerian dwarves. It may have been the sight of me bearing down on them with my crook that caused them to scamper so swiftly away. More likely, I think, is that they had belatedly realised the unutterable tedium occasioned by the company of sheep.

It is a tedium I know well. Or, should I say, knew well. For the unexpected outcome of my notoriety as an inept shepherdess who loses her sheep is that not a single farmer will any longer entrust me with his flock. At first, this was a harrowing turn of events. I fell into penury and need. But as my story spread, and songs were sung about me, so infamy uncurdled into fame. I began to be invited on to television chat shows, notably an appearance on Russell Harty Plus. Colour supplements published fawning profiles of me, all warts removed. Now, with these lecture tours, I am raking it in. And I don’t mean the sort of peasant raking that the likes of Huw Halfbacon are doomed to for eternity, in an eerie ever-repeating cycle of fate. No, I am raking in the moolah-boolah, and soon I hope to have saved enough to realise my childhood ambition, and be the first Peep in outer space, lost, like my sheep, but unlike them lost in the stars, lost out here in the stars. little stars, big stars, blowing through the night, and I’m lost out here in the stars …

Dear Hooting Yard, writes “A Traveller”, We understand that your admirable website likes to feature readers’ holiday snaps, and have pleasure in attaching this specimen for your editorial team’s consideration.

Oh, such an evocative snap! It took me back, back to this, which originally appeared nine long years ago, in 2008 …

I went from Wivenhoe to Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. For the journey, I wore upon my head a hat woven from the hair of gorgeous hairy beasts, and a pair of goggles. Otherwise, I was dressed in the sort of suit you might see Edward G Robinson wearing in a film noir, with accompanying spats. It was suggested to me that I might take in Nunhead and Snodland along the way, but I had no time, I had no time.

Other than the sea crossing, for which I commandeered a skiff and its skiffer, I walked the entire route. Whenever I became exhausted, I slept upon the ground, under the bowl of night. I would like to say that I grew familiar with the stars, but I did not. Unless it was cloudy, as it often was, I could see countless stars twinkling above me, but they appeared randomly scattered, and I was never able to discern any patterns. I always woke up with strands of hay in my hair, wherever I had slept. I used my gorgeous woven hat of hair as a pillow.

Though I was walking, rather than cycling, I carried with me a bicycle pump. Often I pumped it, pointing it ahead of me, as an exercise drill, and also as a means of dispersing gangs of gnats or midges hovering in the air. Sometimes I fancied I could hear their faint insect shrieks as they were whooshed out of my path. I refreshed myself with water from duckponds.

I tried to keep a steady pace. There were times when I felt the bile rising in my throat. Whenever this happened, I stopped walking, sat on the ground, took my journal from the pocket of my film noir suit, and wrote a memorandum. Here is an example,

I am no longer in Wivenhoe. Ten minutes ago, walking along a bosky lane lined by what I think are plane trees, I pumped the pump at a cloud of midges, scattering them. Shortly afterwards, I felt the bile rising in my throat. Above me the sky is wonderfully blue and dotted with linnets, swooping. Tonight it will be dotted with stars. The stars do not swoop, they stay where they are, far away in the cold universe, so far away that the linnets can never reach them, and nor can I. But I can reach Cuxhaven, by way of Ponders End, and must do so quickly, while there is still time.

The act of writing in my journal always made the bile subside, and I was able to press on. When it was humid, my goggles steamed up. I carried on walking, as if in a mist. When I came to a stream or a rill I would take off the goggles and dip them briefly in the water, and wipe them dry on one of my film noir sleeves. Sometimes a true, engulfing mist would descend. Then I would get down on my knees, even if where I was was muddy, and take from my pocket my little wooden god, and prop it against a stone, and beseech it. Here is an example of such beseeching:

O little wooden god propped up against a stone, I beseech you to sweep away this engulfing mist and to make visible my path, so that I may walk on fearlessly towards Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. Ooba gooba himmelfarb farbagooba!

The last four word were my incantation, designed to assuage my little wooden god and have it do my bidding. My bidding was always done, for the air would clear, sooner or later, and if the land was flat I could see for miles. One day I was able to see Ponders End far in the distance, and on another day I saw the sea, and once I was on the sea, being skiffed across it by an energetic skiffer in his skiff, I saw Cuxhaven, just in time.

I paid the skiffer to skiff me across the sea. He refused to skiff me otherwise. I had no cash, no chequebook, no debit nor credit card, not even shells or beads or trinkets, but I had honey. Along my journey from Wivenhoe to the coast by way of Ponders End, I had paused whenever I passed an apiary and snaffled honey from beehives. I collected it in pouches strung around my waist attached to a cord, hidden under my film noir suit. Some of the honey I ate to keep myself from fainting, but I was careful to keep some aside, for I did not expect to be skiffed across the sea for nothing. My offer to pay the skiffer in honey was met with great civility, even glee.

I knew that, if ever I made the return journey from Cuxhaven to Wivenhoe by way of Ponders End, perhaps able to take in Nunhead and Snodland given that I would no longer be pressed for time, I would be accosted by several irate beekeepers demanding recompense for their stolen honey. I had time enough, in Cuxhaven, to work out a way to repay them. If time passed and my head remained empty of ideas, I could prop my little wooden god against a Cuxhaven stone and beseech it for a brainwave. If all else failed, I could stay in Cuxhaven, and never go back to Wivenhoe through all the days of my life.

Yet conscience told me this was wrong. It was one thing to be holed up in Cuxhaven, quite another to be holed up in Cuxhaven tormented by guilt that good honest beekeepers had been robbed by my own honey-snaffling hands. Yes, it was true that I bore the bee-stings, but I had sucked the venom and spat it out and rubbed my hands with dock leaves. I still had dock in my pocket, should the bees of Cuxhaven have at me with their stings. I hoped they would not, for I resolved not to take their honey. In Cuxhaven, I had sausages.

Picture yourself in a boat on a river, with tangerine trees and marmalade skies. You are wearing a pair of round gold-rimmed “granny” glasses. Beside you in the boat is your wife, an avant-garde artist from faraway Japan. You turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream. Then you turn your mind back on, just a tad, just enough to imagine no possessions. You wonder if now would be an opportune moment to raise with your wife that malarkey about her acquiring a second apartment solely for the storage of her collection of fur coats. You open your mouth to speak, but what comes out is gibberish. “Goo-goo-g’joob”, you blurt. Your wife looks at you as if you have taken leave of your senses, which, to be frank, you probably have. Perhaps Bernard Levin was right when he wrote that there was nothing wrong with you that could not be cured by standing you upside down and shaking you gently until whatever is inside your head falls out.

It strikes you that such a manoeuvre would be perilous if performed in a boat on a river. Your wife, who would have to turn you upside down, is diminutive, and it is likely that if she made the attempt both of you would topple over, capsizing the boat, and forcing you to swim to the riverbank.

There are, apparently, tales of the riverbank, but you did not write them. Nor did you write tales of topographic oceans. But you did write about that famed ocean-going sailor Sir Walter Raleigh, who you described as a stupid git. You pronounced Raleigh as Rally. Nowadays, people usually pronounce it as Rahley. But in his own time his name was universally pronounced Rawley.

The pronunciation of surnames is important. I have heard tell that an alarming number of young persons confuse you with the Bolshevik psychopath Lenin. These are presumably the same young persons who confuse Clarice Starling, the FBI agent played by Jodie Foster in The Silence Of The Lambs, with your successor Stalin.

Oops! I meant Lenin’s successor, not yours. Now I’m getting things all mixed up in my head. Just like you. Well, you wrote a lot of nonsense too.

Oh cloak of night! Enshroud my hob
On which I boil, in a pan,
A gruel thin, to feed my flock
When morning breaks, and they line up,
Each with his coupon, snipped or torn
From Christ In Extremis! magazine
Bought from the kiosk by the pond
Past the crumbling viaduct
Beyond the hen coops and the sump
Over the hills and far away.

One morning recently, I walked out of my house and along the path to my front gate, and there, standing on the other side of it, was a barbarian. Sensing that he was about to smash my gate down with mighty blows from the heavy wooden club he was brandishing, I moved to distract his attention by pointing up at the sky and saying “Oh look! A peewit!”

According to Pepinstow’s Bumper Book of Barbarians, barbarians are particularly partial to peewits, and will usually become much less barbaric in their presence. But of course, I had invented the peewit, I had pointed at nothing. I was merely playing for time. Soon enough, the barbarian at my gate would realise there was not a nearby peewit, and he would set about smashing down my gate and laying waste to anything and everything in his path, including me.

As he turned his head to look up, therefore, I dug into my pocket for a glob of plasticine, and swiftly fashioned it into a toy or model peewit. It was a pretty cack-handed effort, resembling a punch-drunk starling, or even Stalin, rather than a peewit. I hoped nevertheless it would serve to fool the barbarian and placate him for a minute or two.

This would give me time to make a call to the Defence of Civilisation Foot Patrol, who would come screeching up in their squad cars and Taser the barbarian. You might wonder why a Foot Patrol goes about in cars, but these are strange times, strange times indeed.

Before I had time to call them, however, the barbarian at my gate had ascertained that the sky was empty of peewits, turned his head back to glare at me, spotted the plasticine sort-of-peewit in my outstretched hand, made a series of mawkish icky cooing noises, grabbed the peewit in his huge hairy paw, and begun dribbling. Not for the first time, I gave thanks to Pepinstow.

But in the Bumper Book, Pepinstow advises strongly against the Tasering of placated barbarians. Apparently, this only redoubles their barbarity when the effects of the Taser wear off. Thus I was in something of a quandary. The barbarian, too stupid to realise that the plasticine peewit was not a real peewit, remained as if transfixed at my gate, thus blocking my exit. And I had an urgent appointment at the Village Wrestling Ring!

Also, it occurred to me that the manner in which the barbarian was mauling the peewit, in the mistaken belief that he was coddling it, meant that it would soon lose its peewity shape, and be once again a plasticine glob. As soon as the barbarian noticed this, he would cease the cooing and the dribbling and be once again barbaric. What was it Pepinstow had written? To the barbarian, mauling is coddling, or words to that effect.

I realised I needed a real peewit, one that could fly, and thus coax the barbarian to follow it, away from my gate. But where could I obtain a peewit at short notice? I rushed back indoors and logged in to the ePeewit website on my computer. I noted that there were a couple of fairly local peewit vendors, one of whom offered express delivery by drone. I tried to place an order, but as usual the ePeewit site was agonisingly slow and repeatedly asked me for my password and the name of my childhood pet puppy. I could not remember my password and I never had a puppy.

In desperation, I wondered if I could make my own flying peewit, out of plasticine, by attaching to it a propellor. I had a stash of plasticine, but where could I obtain a propellor? Could I make one using a couple of drinking straws? Damn Pepinstow for not addressing this eventuality!

Then I heard the first crunch! of my gate being smashed by the barbarian’s club. Clearly the plasticine peewit had lost its shape and he was no longer placated. I cowered in a corner, listening to the awful sounds of the barbarian destroying my gate, and my garden path, and my front door, and anything else in his way as he came lumbering, barbarically, into the room. I was about to cry out for mercy, using the wording recommended by Pepinstow, when the barbarian laid down his club, mopped his brow with a filthy rag, and said:

“Good morning to you, sir. I am Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb. I come from a far country, and my brain is hot.”

NOTA BENE : Readers who have immersed themselves in Mr Key’s witterings since the last century may recognise this as an hommage to The Immense Duckpond Pamphlet (1990).

Jasper The Baffled Eel is a brand new children’s book about an eel named Jasper who is baffled. What baffles him? Oh, just about everything that happens in his life as an eel. I don’t need to go into the details, as I am sure you can imagine yourself as an eel and tally up in your head all the things that would baffle you.

I say it is a children’s book, and that is indeed how it has been marketed by the soulless twerps in the marketing department of the publishing house. But I suspect the book may appeal more to older readers, very old readers, those in or approaching their dotage. It may even prove popular among those who have passed beyond dotage into death. At rest and encoffined, what better token of life to take with them, clutched in their cold stiff hands, than this baffling eely book?

There are no illustrations. Most of the words are simple ones, of one or two syllables, with only a few instances of longer or less common words, among which I noted flapdoodle, japonaiserie, and haemoglobin. Jasper the eel is baffled by these words, but you will not be, not even if you are dead, because nothing baffles the dead.

They say walls have ears, but birds and eels do not. They also say that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but try telling that to an eel. You will only baffle the eel, as Jasper is baffled, in a bravura display of realism. It may even be hyperrealism. There were certainly points in the book where I felt, vividly, that I had been plunged into the wide Sargasso sea. I was sopping wet and festooned with seaweed. Though it is fair to say that I am usually sopping and festooned, when reading books. It is, and always has been, my way.

Oh, Jasper! Jasper! Poor baffled eel. No longer a glass eel or an elver, with its life stretching before it, full of promise, but a full-grown adult eel, lost in the immensity of the world’s oceans and seas and rivers and lakes and other watery parts, watery parts that cover seven-tenths of this globe, with its magnetic bits and its vegetation and its eels. For Jasper is not alone.

But he is alone, in this book. Population of eels in its pages – one. One eel, but oh! how he fills those pages, turning up once, twice, even three times before it is time for you to turn the leaf. And that is not surprising, because this is his story. No other eel gets a look in, and nor does any other living creature, other than occasional mentions of a rabbit and a plover and a brass-necked goose. But these are incidental beings. They will, one day, have their own books, in which Jasper the eel may make a fleeting appearance.

I would have been interested to learn more, in this book, about eels and japonaiserie. But then, most people who know me well will attest that I constantly carp on about eels and japonaiserie, to the exclusion of other, perhaps more pressing, matters. I make no apology. Though I may never be transfigured into a sunbeam for Jesus, I have buttered my parsnips, and I will take them with me to the grave, instead of my copy of Jasper The Baffled Eel, which I will donate to an orphanage library, for the future edification of generation after generation of orphaned tinies, as baffled as Jasper by the complexities of this complex and baffling universe.

Now let us all sing Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind?

Last night I dreamt I went to Urk again. Have you ever been to Urk, wide awake or in your dreams? You would surely remember if you had. Urk is a unique place, a tiny Belgian exclave oh! so high in the Alps. More precisely, it is an exclave of the province of Flanders, though its tiny population includes a tiny proportion of Walloons.

Urkites are known to state, with pride, that “nothing ever happens” in Urk. That is largely true. It is so tiny, and so high above sea level, in contrast to the rest of Flanders, that very little of note has ever occurred there. Its official history, available from the kiosk in the street (both singular), runs to a four-page pamphlet printed in very big type, one-and-a-half pages of which consist of advertisements. And the pages themselves are tiny! Just as the kiosk is tiny and the street is short.

Urk never signed up to the European Union’s Schengen Treaty, so visitors – if there are any – still need to show their passports at the frontier. This is a chalet at the foot of the funicular railway which climbs up, up, up, at dizzying steepness, to the village, where the air is thin and the police officer is idle.

As one alights from the railway, one is thrust almost immediately into the heart of Urk. This is the village square. It is a patch of well-tended lawn, with a flowerbed rife with tulips, and a tiny concrete statue of tiptop Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx. It is here you will also find, slumped on a bench, at all hours of day and night, the Blind Goose-Killer of Urk.

When the exclave was founded, by a smattering of Belgian tuberculosis patients over a hundred years ago, it was decreed that only one person in Urk was permitted to kill a goose, and that this person must be blind. All the other laws governing the territory were imported wholesale from Flanders. The origins of the goose-killing edict are obscure, and may have resulted from a misunderstanding. Whatever the case, there has always and forever been a designated Blind Goose-Killer in Urk. It is a lifetime position, one of great honour but paltry reward.

What happens is this. Let us say you are in Urk and you wish to make a goose die. You must go to the bench in the square and rouse the Blind Goose-Killer, who is probably dozing. You introduce yourself, presenting your identity papers, if you are an Urkite, or your passport, if you are a visitor. The Blind Goose-Killer cannot, of course, see these documents, but will enact what is known as “the sniffing and the rustling of the pages”.

You must then state, in Flemish, that you wish a goose to be killed, and ask the Blind Goose-Killer to kill the goose for you. Almost invariably, and while still half-asleep, the Blind Goose-Killer will accede to your request, although once in a blue moon, or if in an ill temper, or if bilious, he or she will refuse. Assuming the answer is positive, you must then go and fetch the goose you want killed.

You hand the goose to the Blind Goose-Killer. Apart from blindness, another characteristic shared by all who have held the position is the possession of a pair of hands with eerie, vaguely inhuman musculature. Once in the grip of these hands, the goose cannot escape its fate. You could say its goose is cooked, though that introduces a second, putative, abstract goose, which is one goose too many, and may serve to befuddle the Blind Goose-Killer, so is best left unsaid.

As soon as it has been strangled, you take the dead goose from the Blind Goose-Killer and offer your thanks. Although they are in receipt of an annual stipend from the burghers of Urk, you should give them some loose change as a tip.

As I said, last night I dreamt I went to Urk again. It was a disturbing dream, more of a nightmare. The entire tiny exclave was overrun with living, honking, dazzlingly white geese. And there, on the bench in the square, was slumped the Blind Goose-Killer, torn and bloody and lifeless. He had been pecked to death.

[This piece originally appeared under the title Tarleton Comes A-Cropper in April 2013.]

And then, as we know, there came the time when Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, came a-cropper. He was in pursuit of a shifty pastry hawker, a man with a barrow, known to galumph along ill-lit lanes. Tarleton carried a torch, sweeping its bright beam ahead of him, both to avoid pits and puddles and in hope that he might catch a glimpse of his quarry. But, as the old saying has it, a torch in the hands of a nincompoop sheds no light.

Incidentally, it is well worth your while to jot down old sayings in a notepad when you hear them. They can be invaluable in establishing rapport with countryside peasants. If you fall into conversation with such a person, you will discover that their utterances often consist of little else but old sayings strung together. By dropping in your own crumbs of rustic wisdom from time to time, you will be able to maintain conversational sparkle in otherwise trying circumstances. The beauty of it is, you do not need to grasp the actual meaning of the old sayings you deploy.

Consider, for example, the one we have just encountered, a torch in the hands of a nincompoop sheds no light. On the face of it, this would seem to make little or no sense, unless we presume the nincompoop has neglected to press the knob that lights the bulb of the torch he is carrying. But one must always avoid presumption, as we learned from Blötzmann (Third Notebook, Lavender Series). Say that saying to, say, a sophisticated urban person at a swish cocktail party, and you face a series of brusque questions demanding that you clarify what you are saying. Say the same words to a peasant in the countryside and as likely as not he will suck thoughtfully on his piece of straw and nod, before parrying with a saying of his own, such as You can’t milk a goat with a hammer.

But wait wait wait! [These are the words erupting inside your head, dear reader. You see, I know you only too well.] Grateful as I am to be given tips on talking to peasants, tips I will no doubt make use of when next I go trudging through an area of rustic squalor, I cannot let pass the clear implication in your opening paragraph that Tarleton was a nincompoop. How can such things be? Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur. a nincompoop? Surely, sir, you are in jest!

Let me answer that. It is true enough that few persons have ever trod this earth whose brains were as acute as Tarleton’s. Indeed, hold his brain in the palm of your hand and you would be astonished at its heft. It is worth noting, in this context, that you could, if you wished to, so hold Tarleton’s brain. It is kept preserved in jelly in a jar in a display case in the lobby of his alma mater, Miss Blossom Partridge’s Institute For The Education Of Frighteningly Adept Tinies. Make an appointment with the bursar, don a pair of gloves, and an attendant will open the display case and unscrew the lid from the jar and, with special tweezers, lift the brain from its protective jelly and allow you to hold it, registering its heft, for up to sixty seconds. The jar is clearly labelled with Tarleton’s name, so you will not mistake it for the brains of other alumni in other jellies in other jars in other display cases in the same lobby.

Now, as true as it is that Tarleton was no dimwit, it is equally true that nincompoopery is to be found in the most unexpected places. Here we might recall another aperçu of Blötzmann’s, from the Fifth Notebook, Lilac Series. No man is all nincompoop, he observed, but all men have an inner nincompoop ever ready to emerge and flourish. Blötzmann compares this inner nincompoop to a mayfly, in a passage I recommend to your attention. His point is that even the most dazzlingly sensible and spectacular minds may, from time to time, and ephemerally, exhibit the sure signs of nincompoopery. This is what, I argue, happened with Tarleton as he stumbled down an ill-lit lane in pursuit of the shifty pastry hawker.

It was night, a black night, moonless and starless on account of a great shroud of cloud. The first incipient sign of Tarleton’s inner nincompoop was that he did not wait until sunrise to go prowling after his quarry. Even the swiftest of shifty pastry hawkers cannot cover too much ground, trundling a barrow, in the hours between dusk and dawn. And though the lane would still be ill-lit, in the daylight, shaded as it was on either side by towering pines and titanic cedars, yet there would be light enough for a man of Tarleton’s piercing vision. Not so on this night, this black unholy night.

Unholy, I say, because it was the one night in the calendar year when imps and goblins are let loose from their fetters and are free to dash about, all mischief and havoc and mayhem. On this night churns are upended, wells poisoned, cows turned inside out. That, at least, is what the peasants believe. It is what they will tell you, in the form of old sayings, if you are willing to listen. The wise man stays abed on St Spivack’s night, they will say, or When Spivack’s Night comes round again, burn a dolly and slaughter a hen.

For all the startling heft of his brain, Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, did not heed such warnings. In fact he dismissed the peasants’ old sayings as nonsensical babble. This was his undoing. This was his nincompoopery. And so he went a-stumbling along an ill-lit lane in the night, sweeping the beam of his torch ahead of him. What was he to do when, of a sudden, a goblin came swooping down and gobbled up the light and swallowed it and then belched it out in the form of thick black poison fumes?

Poor Tarleton was terrified, and in his terror he turned on his heel and ran from the goblin, but he made only a half turn, so no sooner did he begin to flee than he crashed into a towering pine, or a titanic cedar, and came a -cropper, and the bash given to his head dislodged his brain within its cranium, and he fell to the ground, and knew no more.

He might have been dead. The peasant who found him, at daybreak, thought him so, and being a gravedigging peasant, he hoisted his spade from over his shoulder and began to dig a pit in which to chuck the body. He whistled as he dug, an ancient rustic tune, and it was the sounds of his whistling and of his digging that woke Tarleton from his stupor. He rubbed his bonce, but remembered nothing of what had happened during the black unholy night. He did not even remember that he had been pursuing a shifty pastry hawker.

“Where am I?” he asked, in an uncharacteristically weedy and quavering voice, “What place is this? What day is it? Why are you digging a pit?”

The peasant did not reply. He was an obtuse peasant, and a peasant with a stubborn sense of purpose. Having begun to dig a grave by the side of the lane in the shade of towering pines and titanic cedars, nothing would stop him until he had shoved the body six feet under and covered it over with earth. And here was a second instance of Tarleton’s nincompoopery. Close observation of the peasant’s countenance, of the grim determination of his digging, might have persuaded Tarleton to get to his feet and run, run away as fast as he could. But he sat up, and lit his pipe, and listened to birdsong, and he was still sitting and smoking and listening when the peasant, his digging done, threw down his spade and turned and picked up Tarleton in one huge hairy hand by the scruff of his neck and chucked him into the pit and retrieved his spade and began to shovel spadeful after spadeful of soil and muck, rich with worms, over the amateur’s amateur, sprawled in the pit, and soon enough buried, never to be found..

The peasant stamped his great boots on the grave, to smooth the ground and remove all trace of his digging, and then, whistling, he went on his way.

Just one thing. If Tarleton was buried alive in an unmarked grave in an ill-lit lane in an area of rustic squalor, how is it that his brain was retrieved and stored in jelly in a jar in a display case in the lobby of Miss Blossom Partridge’s Institute For The Education Of Frighteningly Adept Tinies?

Ah. I could tell you a thing or two about Miss Blossom Partridge, and certain members of staff at her Institute, that would curdle the blood in your veins. Things innocent ears should never hear. Remember the old peasant saying, Ignorance is better by far / When you see a brain in jelly in a jar.

Last night I dreamt I went to the Nocturnal Pig Observatory again. But it was one of those dreams where everything happens in bright and battering sunlight. This made it particularly disturbing, because, with the exception of the unfamiliar light, everything else in the dream matched my memories of those times. I sat at the console, twiddling the knobs. I made adjustments to the pig scanner with a pair of pliers. I gazed out through the pig-proof plexiglass observation panel, while making indentations in my tally-stick.

One other detail that jarred was the presence, within the Observatory, of an albino chicken. I think it may have been a Vanbrugh chicken. It was so white, and the sunlight so glaring, that the chicken seemed to shimmer, like one imagines an Angel of the Lord come to earth upon a visitation.

I saw no pigs, so in that sense again the dream had an air of brute reality. Not once, in all my years of duty at the Nocturnal Pig Observatory, did I ever spot a real pig. Sham ones, yes, of course, and puppet pigs, and ghosts of pigs. But never a real, solid, porker. The flat wild bleak desolate windswept tarputa is inimical to pigs, thank heaven, but we must always be on the watch. Or at least we used to be, back in those days, when we were pig ignorant.

Now things have changed, many say for the better. Much of the tarputa is no longer as flat and wild and bleak and desolate and windswept as once it was. There are ice cream kiosks and miniature zoos and an aerodrome. There is a huge cement statue, on a plinth, of star of stage and screen Googie Withers (1917 – 2011). There is even, mischievously, an extensive modern state-of-the-art pig sty, though it is of course empty of pigs, including sham and puppet and ghost pigs.

Or is it? One would have to creep up to the edge of the pig sty in darkness, on a moonless night, and train one’s portable pig scanner upon the most likely ghost-haunted parts of the sty, and wait, in silence and awe, for a sighting, to be duly recorded in one’s ghost pig log, with a notch indented on one’s tally-stick. Who among us can say we are truly prepared for such a task?

Since I awoke, I have been thinking, like a man obsessed, about that shimmering albino chicken. What did its dream-presence portend? I can wring no sense from it, as I prance like a ninny across the tarputa, on my way to buy a choc-ice from the kiosk, and to lay a bouquet of gladioli upon the cement feet of Googie Withers. That will make my Thursday complete. And when I settle down to sleep, will I dream of the Nocturnal Pig Observatory again? Will the past haunt me still? Do I dare to eat a peach? Is there honey still for tea? Where have all the flowers gone? What’s so funny ’bout pigs, love, and understanding?

Further details here.