This sprightly homage to Procol Harum first appeared in 2009.

Conquistador, your stallion stands in need of company. For an adventurer and conqueror, especially one who led the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru in the 16th century, this is a lapse on your part. You should never leave your horse alone and abandoned, for it is likely to become fractious, and the last thing you want to have to deal with, either in the jungles or the mountains, is a fractious horse. You might argue that a native Peruvian firing poisonous darts at you through a blowpipe would cause you more concern than a horse in a bad mood, but there you would be wrong.

Let’s say that the native Peruvian’s aim is impeccable, and his poisoned dart plunges into your neck. It is true that you would be surprised, and have only minutes to live as the toxins ravaged your innards, but it is a simple enough matter to pluck the dart out of your flesh and have one of your fellow conquistadors immediately suck on the puncture, drawing every last drop of poison into his mouth before spitting it out. Apply a medicinal poultice to the tiny hole in your neck and job done. You will be as right as rain and ready to carry on adventuring and conquering.

By contrast, if, after abandoning your stallion while you clanked off on foot on an errand of death, you return to it to find it lonely, fractious and temperamental, you may have some difficulty getting back into your saddle. Your horse may rear up on its hind legs and make terrifying bellowing noises. If you are not careful you could end up being crushed under its mighty hooves. A fleck of horse-spittle might land in your eye, blurring your vision. The rest of your conquistador troop may have ridden on ahead, leaving you behind, without food or water, or a compass. You will know, from your training back in Toledo, that it can take hours to becalm a fractious horse, by which time your chances of catching up with your fellow adventuring conquerors before nightfall are remote.

Unless the conquistador who sucked the poison out of your neck has stayed with you, you will now be all alone in a strange exotic landscape, famished. You do not know which fruits and berries are safe to eat, and in any case there will only be fruits and berries available to you if you are in the jungle. As I pointed out earlier, you might be up in the mountains, and there will be little to eat but impacted snow, which you will have to melt and soften before trying to shovel it down your throat. Bear in mind that the air is very thin up in the higher reaches of the Andes, and you will become exhausted quite rapidly, especially if you are expending energy hacking at a patch of snow to make it more easily meltable. Added to these imperilments, your horse will be hungry too, and its fractiousness may return, with a vengeance. You will have to find a way to placate it a second time, and by now it will be wise to your tricks, if it is a clever horse, which it probably is, having been chosen out of so many other horses to go on a conquistadorial campaign. It is also much more difficult to becalm a frightened horse in the dark, and the Peruvian night is far more eerie than the night in Toledo, with which both you and your stallion are familiar.

A further problem will present itself if a nocturnal Peruvian native fires a second poisonous dart into your neck through a blowpipe. Yes, it is simple enough for you to remove the dart, but without a fellow conquistador to suck out the venom, you will have to instruct your horse to do the deed. Not many horses are skilled in such an art. Apart from anything else, their mouths are much bigger than the average conquistador’s mouth, and their teeth are huge, so it is exceedingly difficult for them to get sufficient purchase on your neck to suck with any conviction. Of course, if you have a vampire horse, it will suck away quite happily, but after draining the poison it will continue to suck your blood, until you topple over, pale and dead.

All things considered, conquistador, you are advised never to leave your stallion in need of company. No horse is an island entire of itself. Further tips on looking after your horse when adventuring and conquering in Mexico and Peru are available in the government pamphlet 50 Tips For Conquistadors On Looking After Your Horse When Adventuring And Conquering In Mexico And Peru (Crown Copyright) (out of print).

Poor scribblers whose efforts are repeatedly rejected find solace from cases such as William Golding, who sent the manuscript of his first novel to more than twenty publishers before it was eventually accepted. Although stubborn persistence can sometimes pay off, the example of Golding demonstrates that, when a sympathetic editor offers advice, it can be wise to take it. Thus it is useful to learn that the beardy author made several changes to his book, which started out as the tale of a group of schoolboys trying desperately to remove a blockage of pig fat from a heating duct. He also changed the original title, Lard Of The Flues.

Whither the bint of Shelmerdox? The story goes that she went out a-hiking one morning and never came home. Some said she had a tryst with a tinker and ran away with him to his glen. Others spoke of a mysterious hot air balloon, spotted in the sky above the goaty place around noon. The parish priest insisted he saw her waving from its basket, but he was an old and foolish man and had had sundry hallucinations. There were those who muttered in the shadows of dark and desperate deeds.

Before she left, the bint of Shelmerdox ate an egg on toast and drank half a bottle of gin. She took the time to wash her dishes and place them on the drainer. But she left her purse and keys and passport and engagement ring upon the kitchen table, next to a saucer she used as an ashtray. Had she planned her disappearance, or had she not?.

The bint’s fiancé, the village wrestler, was much distraught. In the market square, by the horse trough, he blubbered like a baby as night fell and there was no sign of her. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman collected his tears in a cup, and boiled them, that she might see in the clouds of steam a vision of the bint and her present whereabouts. But the steam vouchsafed nought but unreadable swirlings, so the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman next eviscerated a few hens and read their hot bloody entrails, again to no avail. The bint of Shelmerdox had vanished off the face of the earth.

On the first anniversary, the village folk gathered in a barn and sang songs for her. They would have lit candles too, had the parish priest not eaten them all in his madness. The songs they sang were the current popular hits of the village and its hinterland, with newly-minted lyrics, some penned by the wrestler, who still wept every day.

Oh where is she now, my Shelmerdox bint? / I dab at my tears with a poor scrap of lint / If only the gods would let drop a hint / Of where she has gone to, my Shelmerdox bint!

The parish priest, whose chain was lengthened so he could just about reach the doorway of the barn, tried to offer up a prayer for the immortal soul of the bint, but he forgot why he was there, and blessed a couple of cows instead. The names of the cows were Puskas and Di Stefano. They were terrific cows, the pride of the village, and the bint had oftentimes patted their heads and whispered in their ears in that sozzled way of hers.

The commemoration was repeated in subsequent years, always with new songs from the village wrestler, still weeping copiously, and with haphazard blessings from the parish priest. One time he managed a spark of lucidity and actually prayed for the bint, though usually his benediction fell upon the cows or a patch of lupins or even the chain that ensured he did not stray beyond the village.

The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman refused to attend any of these ceremonies. But she had not forgotten about the bint of Shelmerdox. Within her hovel, among her dried-up poisonous plants and toads and beetles and pins and pokey-sticks, she carried on her eldritch flummery in secret. She had somehow got hold of the bint’s passport, abandoned on the kitchen table, and made dozens upon dozens of copies of the photograph therein, on the photocopying machine in the village post office, and plastered the walls of her hovel with them. The bint stared out at her, sour, gin-soaked, and half-asleep. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman became fixated upon the bint’s smudged lipstick, convinced that the eerily shifting contours of the smudge in the passport photograph held the key to her vanishing. In some copies, the smudge resembled a subtropical peninsula. In others, it looked like a heron.

On the ninth anniversary, the villagers eschewed the barn and gathered instead at the goaty place. The parish priest’s chain had been shortened after he frightened some swans in the summer just gone, and he stayed in his presbytery, sucking on lettuce leaves for their moisture. The village wrestler dabbed at his tear-stained eyes with his filthy scrap of lint, and sang a threnody.

My broken heart has the weight of lead / I can barely totter out of bed / How many more sobbings must I shed? / My bint is gone, she must be dead.

According to the village’s ad hoc legal system, these words counted as a binding declaration of the death of the Shelmerdox bint. Her home and her remaining personal effects could now be burned entire, all trace of her expunged, and fireworks launched from the village green. The wrestler could stop crying and seek a new inamorata. Even were the bint to reappear, miraculously alive, she would be invisible to the villagers, fated to roam among them as a ghost.

Which, oddly, is precisely what happened, at the very moment the final firework fizzled out and was squelched underfoot by the village postie. Drunk and bedraggled and moth-eaten, the Shelmerdox bint emerged from a shrub clump and staggered across the fields into the village. She smashed the window of the off licence and hoicked a bottle of vagabond’s ruin from the display, but now she was dead to the villagers and nobody saw her.

Nobody save for the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, who inhabited a different, lopsided plane. She beckoned to the bint, and took her into her hovel, where the pair of them drank their fill and babbled about the bint’s lipstick smudge long into the night. When morning came, they trudged arm in arm to the barn, and whispered into the ears of Puskas and Di Stefano, and then the bint of Shelmerdox and the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, and the two terrific cows, headed out of the village, across the fields, and into the hills, and up into the mountains, up where the oxygen grew thin, and they passed, oh! so happy, beyond human ken, forevermore.

Originally posted in 2009.

I Heard The Owl Call My Name was a bestseller in the 1970s, alongside such now neglected titles as Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. What all three had in common was a concern with the ultimate meaning of existence, or at least the meaning of existence in the specific context of blissed-out self-obsessed post-hippy North America. I actually read the latter two titles, in my misguided teendom, though thankfully I seem to have recovered from the experience with no ill effects. But I never got round to I Heard The Owl Call My Name, and thus it continues to intrigue me. Well, not to a debilitating extent. I do not wake up every morning fretting about it, nor have I sought to obtain a copy. What intrigues me is the title.

The book was written by Margaret Craven. Now, over the years I have listened to numberless owls, and not one of them has ever uttered the cry “Margaret Craven”, nor any sound remotely akin to it, no matter how strangulated the voice in which we pronounce it in an attempt to mimic an owl. Aha!, I hear you say, but I Heard The Owl Call My Name is a novel, is it not?, so perhaps the name the owl calls is that of a fictional narrator, rather than of a non-fictional author. This is a persuasive argument until one does a spot of research and discovers that the book concerns a dying Anglican vicar named Mark Brian. Again, “Mark Brian” is not by any stretch of the imagination the sort of sound made by any owl it has ever been my pleasure to hear, as I crunch through the duff on the forest floor in the dead of night, my lantern occasionally picking out the fugitive sight of a small scurrying mammal, its heart pounding in terror. It is in such a place, at such a time, that one is likely to hear owls hooting.

We use the onomatopoeic word “hoot” to represent the call of an owl, or, if we are writing a children’s book, we might deploy “too-wit, too-woo”. We will not, ever, use “Margaret Craven” or “Mark Brian”, and if we ever had a dramatic brain-embranglement and did so, we would befuddle our readers utterly, to the point where they would probably toss our book aside in exasperation, and who would blame them for so doing?

Now as I say, I have not read the book, so there is every possibility that perhaps the dying vicar has a parishioner named Biff Hoot or Ted Toowit or Sacheverell Toowoo, and it is this person who hears their name called by the owl, while crunching through the duff on the forest floor in the dead of night, their lantern occasionally picking out the fugitive sight of a small scurrying mammal, its heart pounding in terror. Biff, or Ted, or Sacheverell then scampers to the church to tell the vicar of this exciting turn of events, and to seek his judicious religious advice on what it might portend, in terms of the meaning of existence, only to find the vicar sprawled on the floorboards in front of the altar, dying.

Why is he dying? Has he been attacked by owls, pecking at him with their beaks and slashing at him with their talons? Owls are more likely to set upon the small scurrying mammals in the nocturnal forest, rather than a human vicar in a candlelit church. So what might account for such a palaver? It could be that, rather than being a stereotypical beardy Anglican vicar, Mark Brian is an effeminate cross-dressing vicar who bears a startling resemblance to Tippi Hedren. In this scenario, the owls would simply be attempting to reenact a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s documentary The Birds (1963). Or we might posit that, on the other side of the forest there is a sinister military-industrial hazchem facility, leakage from which the owls have been exposed to, transforming them from common or garden owls to science fiction monster owls of unbridled savagery.

His life ebbing away, the vicar moans weakly for help, at which point Biff or Ted or Sacheverell comes scampering up the nave. He cradles Mark Brian’s torn and bloody head in his arms, and whispers, “I heard the owl call my name”. The vicar’s eyelids flutter and his breath rattles. Does he still have strength enough to speak, and to reveal to his needy parishioner the ultimate meaning of existence? We would hope so, this being a 1970s bestseller.

I Heard The Owl Call My Name (1967) predates both Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Could it be that both Richard Bach and Robert M. Pirsig were shameless plagiarists? Is the wisdom in their books lifted wholesale from Margaret Craven, who has the dying vicar vouchsafe to Biff or Ted or Sacheverell what it all means?

“You say the owl called your name?”, he gasps, “It is a sign. I understand the language of owls, and I think I know what it would have said next had you stayed to listen, instead of sprinting pell mell out of the forest and through the village and into the church and along the nave to come and cradle me in your arms in my dying moments.”

Biff or Ted or Sacheverell dabs at the vicar’s brow with a dampened rag, trying his best to comfort him, desperate to keep him alive long enough that he might impart the wisdom of the owl.

“You must repair your motorcycle,” groans Mark Brian, “And you must zoom upon it down to the seaside. There you will find a different form of bird life, seagulls rather than owls. The seagull will not call your name. It will swoop and scavenge and soar. Watch it carefully, in the dappled sunlight. Then…”

But before he can complete the sentence – and thus divulge the ultimate meaning of 1970s existence – the vicar collapses and dies.

I hope this is an adequate summary of a book I have never read. If it isn’t, it damned well ought to be.

Originally posted in 2012.

Daniel Barenboim has won many plaudits for his creation of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, bringing together young musicians from different countries in the Middle East to promote the cause of peace. Laudable as his efforts are, several observers have noted that the world of classical music is too small and narrow to have real societal heft. Pop music, they say, is the lingua franca that can genuinely bring people of different faiths together. To this end, and as a faltering first step in resolving the simmering civil war between the two major branches of Islam, a new single has been released. It is a new version of “I Got You Babe” by Sunni and Shia.

Here is a scientific experiment which will intrigue and entertain everybody from tiny tots to tottering crones. You will need to obtain a goodly amount of curd, say about the size of a dinner plate. Divide the curd into two halves by cutting it with a kitchen knife or, if you are feeling violent, which I know is often the case, simply tear the curd in two with your bare hands. Et voila!, you will now have two lumps of curd where once there was but one.

Don’t worry, that was merely the preliminary, not the experiment itself. Now, you must treat the lumps of curd in very different ways. The first lump, let us call it Curd A, must be kept fresh at all costs. You could, for example, wrap it in clingfilm, which is film that clings, and put it on a shelf in your refrigerator. Meanwhile, take the other lump of curd and treat it as you would a piece of furniture you wanted to give a fashionable “distressed” look. You can chuck the curd at the wall, beat it with lengths of chain, leave it exposed to the elements for a week, and so on.

At the end of this process, you will have two spectacularly different lumps of curd. The one wrapped in clingfilm in the refrigerator will be as good as new, whereas the other one, which I forgot to call Curd B earlier, will look old and wretched and like something the cat dragged in. (If the cat does indeed drag it in, while it is outside exposed to the elements, take it back outside and scold the cat.)

I now want you to take both lumps of curd to the nearest duckpond. With all the vim you can muster, chuck them into the pond or, as it might say in the Bible, cast the curds upon the waters. Now watch in amazement as Curd A, the fresh, good as new curd, floats, while Curd B, the old, wretched curd, sinks to the bottom.

Why does this happen? Well, I’m not going to tell you. But one person who knows the answer has written an entire book about it. Her name is Maya Angelou and the book, as I recall, is entitled I Know Why The Aged Curd Sinks.

The communist regimes of the last century threw up their fair share of monsters, among whom Pol Pot was one of the more demented. His Khmer Rouge came to power in Cambodia in 1976. By the time they were overthrown, three years later, around a quarter of the population had perished.

Pol Pot had a vision of a sort of peasant utopia. Accordingly, towns and cities were emptied and the people marched out into the countryside to work on collective farms. He had a particular animus towards “bourgeois intellectuals”, a group which apparently included anybody who wore glasses. Of course, surprise surprise, Pol Pot was such an “intellectual” himself. As a young man, he studied in Paris, from 1949 to 1953.

There is an instructive story from his time in France. Already the first glimmerings of his agrarian revolution were swirling around in Pol Pot’s brain, and an associate suggested he ought to get out of Paris and investigate French farming methods. Pol Pot thus headed off, deep into rural France, and went to stay – uninvited – with a dairy farmer.

For a couple of days, the future tyrant followed the farmer about, observing him at work. This, it seemed, taught Pol Pot all he needed to know. On the third day, over breakfast, he launched into a Marxist critique of the farmer’s age-old rustic ways. He could, he explained, order the cows to do exactly as they were told, just as he would go on to bend the people of Cambodia to his will. The wise old French farmer scoffed.

“You do not understand,” said Pol Pot, never short on self-belief, “Your cows will obey my every word. For I speak the language of cows!”

The farmer chuckled at the young Cambodian upstart, took a last sip of his breakfast brandy, and went out to his barn. He opened the doors, and the cows mooched off across his fields to munch grass.

At this point, Pol Pot appeared at his side. He announced that he would make all the cows return to the barn tout suite, simply by issuing a verbal diktat. He then uttered, at deafening volume, a strange guttural Cambodian cow incantation. To the farmer’s astonishment, the cows ceased munching, looked up, and, at almost uncanny speed, charged across the fields and returned to the barn.

It was a classic case of Pot calling the cattle back.

I am the Mudguard. I guard the mud. And, boy!, there is an awful lot of mud. It’s a full-time job.

The mud covers a large rectangular area on the outskirts of town, just beyond the duckpond and the viaduct. It is known locally as “the muddy field”, though its official name is Plunkett’s Meadow. Nobody living calls it that, but the name is shown on old maps of the area.

I patrol the perimeter of the field from dawn till dusk, day in day out, and sometimes at night too, for example when the regime has declared a state of emergency. At such times I am provided with extra supplies of strong black coffee and/or cans of fizzy pop infused with chemicals designed to stimulate the nerves.

Because of the long hours, and because I am the only mudguard, I live on site, or as near as dammit, in a hut, or chalet, slap bang next to the muddy field. It is, alas, far, far from the sea, but I keep on my bookshelf several paperbacks by Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad. They have a briny smell, having been dipped in seawater and dried by sea-squalls.

My uniform is best described as a blouse and pantaloons. It is a foolish outfit, and often the object of ridicule by wayfaring strangers. To cut a long story short, the Mud Bureau Chef d’Affaires was a fanatical devotee of Spandau Ballet early in their career. That much is true. I have grown used to the hysterical laughter of passers-by and no longer bother to throw pebbles at them.

On a typical day, I rise from my pallet before dawn, ablute, eat a slap-up breakfast in which sausages play an important part, put on my preposterous uniform, and am ready to begin my first patrol as the sun comes up. Brave Helios!, etcetera etcetera. I prance along each side of the muddy field, first clockwise then anti-clockwise, keeping an eye out for anybody or anything that might imperil the mud. I then take a break, perched on a stool outside my chalet for five minutes, but remaining vigilant. I then conduct the second patrol of the day, armed with a pointy stick. And so it goes on, until nightfall. It is very satisfying work.

Once a week, I receive a visit from a senior official of the Mud Bureau. It is rarely the same official. They go about their business in plain clothes, the only sign of their status being a small lapel badge. This depicts a patch of mud, above which hovers a disembodied head. I think this is intended to be a generic human head, but for my money it bears an arresting resemblance to Tony Hadley (b. 1960), the lead singer of Spandau Ballet. The official interrogates me, under a Klieg light, about each patrol of the previous week. I furnish the details using an agreed code, in which sausages play an important part. There is then a little break, during which we might chat about Melville and Conrad, if the official is sea-brained, or other matters, if not. For example we might talk about stamp collecting or foopball or the transubstantiation of the host in the Catholic Mass in Tudor times. During these discussions, the Klieg light is switched off.

As mud goes, the mud I guard in the muddy field, aka Plunkett’s Meadow, is pretty ordinary mud. I cannot claim to have studied it in any great detail, but as far as I am able to ascertain it has no particular features which would distinguish it from other mud, in other muddy fields, if there are any, elsewhere in the land, say on the other side of town, by the fireworks factory and the hen coops, or even further afield, blimey!, in remote areas such as the Security Zone, out towards the sea, which sloshes against the shore, where gulls screech.

Without wishing to boast, I must say that I am damned good at my job. To date, I have guarded the mud with resounding success, in that it has not been imperilled in any way by malefactors and ne’er-do-wells, whose numbers are legion, in spite of regular round-ups by the secret police. I can say with pride that the mud is safe under my watch, a watch shortly to reach its fortieth year of service. I am looking forward to receiving, on the anniversary, my commemorative award, a gorgeous cummerbund.

I am the Mudguard. I guard the mud.

I was at a loose end, staring out of the window looking at crows, and my mind turned to Ali Baba and his Forty Thieves. With a start, I realised how little I knew about them. As luck would have it, the very next day at a rummage sale I picked up a copy of a privately-printed pamphlet by Knud Padde, described on the title page as a Lecturer in Arabian Thievery Studies at the University of Ack-on-the-Vug, or possibly the University of Vug-on-the-Ack. Here is his list of the Forty Thieves, together with “preliminary notes” on each thief.

Corky – a hireling thief, a chump, a talc-powdered wastrel.

Mutcho – greasy, vindictive, base.

Ibster – looms terrible in dreams, licks ice cream cones.

Guff – the boffin of the gang, and sniper, and Tippi Hedren’s penpal,

Spoors – great galumphing fool, Oppidan, thimble-fumbler.

Waxy – waxy.

Geraldo – of monstrous girth, of lively demeanour, of hand-stitched tunics.

Carsten – polishes off raisins, swigs tap water, goes shod in clogs.

Fang – inhabits palatial apartments with his wolf and his minuets.

Sudbury – exists on a higher plane, thumps things, distressed.

Oswin – suffers fools gladly, hung out to dry.

Bantock – dustpan and brush man, Hotspur, clackety rhythm.

Mort – hedger, was a water-bailiff, albino.

Chippy – wanting eggs.

Hardcastle – fevered brow, distorted spine, curly ringlets.

Aptod – when first he flew he blundered into branches of dark trees.

Shopworn – lacks the common touch, hoist by petards, a darling.

Urbane – urbane yet ditzy, polka-dotted, ruminant.

Dobbin – pumped gas back in Montana, unbridled savagery, lacks depth.

Inky – several contradictory reports, buff-coloured envelope, chalk dust.

Hig – shallow, potted, wet.

Anglepoise – Jesuit upbringing, weather station, tarred with broad brush.

Snapper – bolt upright, sprained ankles, Maoist.

Boomer – booming voice, bloody nose, best before dusk.

Chepstow – owls nest in his hair, he plays the piccolo, he eats mashed potato.

Zigzoo – champs at bits, stinks of Jarlsberger, often with conifers.

Delmore – lurid, spiteful, mechanical.

Esher – flabby, subject to fits, member of Tuesday Weld Fan Club.

Jetboy – likely to be found upon rotating things in park playgrounds.

Casement – proudly lumpen, secretly engaged to a flapper, podcaster.

Uck – abnormal alignment of head upon neck, neck grubby, hair unwashed.

Fig – a stone’s throw from the sea, green about the gills, hot to trot.

Straubenzee – sings the songs his mother taught him in that Darmstadt nursery.

Fogbound – clatters to and fro, goes haywire, made of cement.

Wailywaily – hidden behind shutters, brilliantine in his hair, indiscreet.

Burgess – over by the ice rink, underneath the arches, powered by batteries.

Mudguard – guards mud.

Pepinstow – thunderous hooves, brilliant plumage, exquisite table manners.

Dixon – marimba, clutching at straws, gin slings and blood oranges.

Quangocrat – double helpings of sausage-shaped dough snacks.

This is a slightly revised version of a piece which originally appeared in 2011.

Another brief Hooting hiatus may be afoot. Well, not afoot, exactly, rather ahead, for the head is the home of the eyes. As readers will be aware, the Key eyes have lately been pitiful things, subjected to all sorts of medical procedures. Tomorrow I shall be off to the hospital again for an op. It may be that reading and writing will be difficult until such time as I obtain new reading specs with a new prescription. While I am gone, you can rummage around in the archives. Type a word or phrase into the search box above and see what buried treasures you unearth.

My reference to Tuesday Weld the other day prompted a reader to request the repotsage [sic] of this piece from seven long years ago.

Be it known that on the fourteenth day of the month of March in the year of picklings last, MR THUBB, the Hon. Secretary of the Pointy Town chapter of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club, hired a charabanc for the purposes of an excursion to outlying parts of the said town, there to picnic and exchange pictorial collector’s cards of Tuesday Weld, her contemporaries and her peers.

That the driver of the charabanc was a man of frightful countenance and evil reputation. That he was said to have phantom limbs, additional to his given limbs, and that though these could not be perceived by the human eye in ordinary daylight, they were nevertheless present, and said driver might be said to have the form of a gigantic spider were he ever seen whole.

That the cost of the hire of the charabanc and driver was met by subscription to the excursions and picnicking fund of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club, administered by the Hon. Treasurer MR BRIMSTONE. That MR THUBB and MR BRIMSTONE were at loggerheads by cause of imponderables and fathomless mysteries known to none but they and their wives and the late beadle, MR FLAIL, perished of an ague in the month of February past. That the relict of MR FLAIL was confined to a madhouse wherein she did knit, in a phrenzy, in all her hours of wakefulness.

That the charabanc driver, by name BINNS, having agreed a route to the picnicking spot with MR THUBB, did diverge his vehicle up into the hills, whence his intention was to deliver all the excursioning members of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club into the clutches of the Grunty Man, who dwelt in a lair in said hills. That BINNS was to gain no pecuniary advantage from this treachery, in that his sole purpose was mischief and malfeasance. That the babblings of the excursionists within the charabanc excited them to such degree that none took cognizance of the divergence.

That much frost and ice lay on the roads in that month of March for it was a bitter season. That there was no grit to be had nor wherewithal of Pointy Town civic gritting persons to spread it upon the roads if there had been, for they were in dispute with regard to their stipend and held banners in a throng outside the civic hall and had tubs which they thumped with main force. That notwithstanding his great merit as a driver of the charabanc, BINNS caused the vehicle to skid ski-skaw-skoo off the appointed way and go plunging into a ditch some four miles as the crow flies past the Bypass at Blister Lane. That had BINNS taken the route agreed with MR THUBB such accident would never have occurred.

That the gentlemen and ladies of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club conducted themselves with decency and aplomb. That those who had been hurled from the charabanc assisted those who remained within its twisted wreckage to make their escape. That they gathered in the ditch and sipped with due daintiness from flasks of soup piping hot. That the Hon. Correspondence Secretary, MRS GLEETY, distributed to all Dr Gillespie’s Famous And Trustworthy Brain Powders For The Alleviation Of Disorders Of The Nerves And Integuments. That tears of emotion were shed when it was seen that MR THUBB and MR BRIMSTONE were putting aside their differences in the face of calamity and were shaking hands with each other with manly forbearance.

That a considerable time elapsed before it was noted that the charabanc driver BINNS was not present with the others in the ditch. That said BINNS had taken to his heels at the first opportunity. That his fleeing gained much expedition from the fact that his visible heels were accompanied by any number of phantom heels. That the direction of BINNS’ fleeing was into the hills, where he threw himself upon the mercy of the Grunty Man with terrible bewailings that he had failed in his appointed task. That the Grunty Man was a stranger to mercy and grunted loud and awful grunts and dragged BINNS into the depths of his lair. That not hide nor hair of BINNS was ever seen again on this spinning earth.

That the composure of the members of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club was a magnificent thing and a pride unto Pointy Town. That when wounds were bandaged and shattered bones set with splints, they clambered forth each and every one from the ditch to make the journey home on foot. That night fell and they lost their way yet did not once screech in terror nor complain of chill. That they kept their spirits up by calling one to another the titles of feature films in which Tuesday Weld had appeared, to which another would respond by calling out the name of the character she had played in said feature film, so that MR BRIMSTONE might call Rally ‘Round The Flag, Boys! and MRS GLEETY call Comfort Goodpasture, or MR THUBB call The Private Lives Of Adam And Eve and the Hon. Picnics Secretary MRS BLEARS call in return Vangie Harper.

That such jollies were brought cruelly to a close when it happened in the darkness that MR THUBB collided with an enormous block of masonry and was knocked insensible. That MRS GLEETY had exhausted her supply of Dr Gillespie’s Powders but was able to revive MR THUBB with a draught of arquebusade-water from a canister within her handbag. That it was resolved to remain in the lee of the enormous block of masonry pending the break of dawn, for it provided some shelter from a wild wind which now was roaring. That to pass the time until dawn, the excursionists hummed tunes made famous by Dudley Moore and Pinchas Zukerman, respectively the second and third husbands of Tuesday Weld.

That when dawn came and examination was made of the masonry it was found to be covered in greatly mysterious inscriptions in an alphabet unknown to even the most erudite member of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club. That this was by common acclaim MR SHAMBEKO who was the author of many learned books, among them being a history of Pointy Town, a topographical description of the area around the Blister Lane Bypass, and a shot-by-shot analysis of the feature film I’ll Take Sweden, in which Tuesday Weld appeared as the character JoJo Holcomb. That in scraping clumps of mud from the masonry the better to view the inscriptions, it became apparent that much of the block remained submerged below the ground. That MRS GLEETY produced from her handbag a number of gardening trowels which she carried on the aborted excursion in case within the vicinity of the picnic spot had grown such plants as campions and hellebore and lupins for the digging up and transplanting to her garden behind the house on Turpentine Boulevard in Pointy Town. That those of the party not yet faint with exhaustion set to with a will a-trowelling away the mud to reveal as much of the enormous block of masonry as their efforts might allow.

That thus was discovery made of the ancient tomb of Anaxagrotax. That MR SHAMBEKO thereafter wrote an account of the discovery and embarked upon an extensive lecture tour of many countries. That MR SHAMBEKO never failed to acknowledge the inadvertent part played by the evil spidery charabanc driver BINNS. That it remains unknown who or what Anaxagrotax was or in what era he lived if ever he lived at all. That his tomb now gleaming is surrounded by a fence to deter souvenir hunters, and that propped against the tomb, in a plain wooden frame coated with protection against the elements is a publicity photograph of Tuesday Weld, taken circa 1963 during production of the feature film Soldier In The Rain, in which she appeared as the character Bobby Jo Pepperdine. That it is apt that a soldier stands guard in a sentry box beside the tomb of Anaxagrotax, and that it is raining, and that there is no roof upon the box, so the rain falls directly upon the soldier, whose badge declares his name as Private Pepperdine.

The world-famous food-splattered Jesuit was one of the best loved and most successful variety acts of the interwar years. It is believed that he appeared at every single seaside resort in the land, the grandiose and the dilapidated, in and out of season, and always to rapturous applause. Key to his appeal was sheer simplicity. The curtains would open and there, on stage, world-famous and splattered with food, stood a Jesuit. He would extend his arms, almost in crucifixion pose, and gaze at a point slightly above the heads of the audience. There were no frills, no “business” with props. After a few minutes, the curtains would close, and – barring the inevitable encore – that was that. It was a winning formula, but one which, alas, could not transfer to radio, where so many of the stars of variety theatre went on to find fame and fortune.

Throughout the years of his greatest popularity, roughly the decade from 1925 to 1935, the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit managed, miraculously, to preserve his anonymity. We still do not know for certain who he was. We do know, in spite of rumours put about to the contrary, that he was a single, particular individual, and not a series of different Jesuits. This charge was first levelled in a scurrilous newspaper story. In the Daily Voodoo Dolly for the sixth of September 1929, a hack named only as “Our Seaside Resort Reporter” claimed that the original world-famous food-splattered Jesuit had been killed in an accident (picnic, lightning) and replaced by at least seven other Jesuits, who took it in turns to appear at the end of piers, splattered with food. This farrago of nonsense was comprehensively demolished by investigative variety theatre reporter John Pilge, a man who knew his onions.

But even Pilge was not perfect, and it seems he was the source of a common misapprehension of the nature of the Jesuit’s performances. Oft repeated by nincompoop wannabe historians of the seaside variety theatre, this is the idea that the Jesuit stood on stage, initially pristine in his soutane, and that he was splattered with food by members of the audience pelting him with eggs, fruit, cuts of meat, soup, ketchup, ad nauseam. So let me be crystal clear – there is not a shred of evidence that this was ever so. More than that, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the act, and the reason it was so wildly popular, to wit, that the Jesuit simply stood there, stock still, arms outstretched, faintly holy, world-famous, and food-splattered.

There was an art to these performances which we lose sight of in our modern fast-moving age of pap ‘n’ twaddle. It would be a mistake to think that the Jesuit was nothing more than a messy eater with the table manners of Kafka, who simply allowed various stains and spillages to accumulate upon his soutane. Anybody could achieve that, with persistence, determination, slapdash eating habits, and the shunning of laundry. In fact, there was for a time a rival act known as the world-famous bacon-and-egg-besmirched nun. Though a woman of fine manners and terrific personal hygiene, she was bedizened by the lure of the end of the pier limelight, and dedicated herself to allowing much of her fried breakfast to fall upon her habit. It was an effort of will not to send it straight to the laundry, but she gritted her teeth and prayed, and took to the stage. In itself hers was a fairly enchanting act, as she knelt in an attitude of devotion, clutching her rosary beads, displaying her stains of egg yolk and bacon grease. But she was viewed, with justification, as a copycat, and audiences failed to warm to her. She later achieved a measure of success with a completely different act, involving tea-strainers, coat-hangers, and performing monkeys.

The genius of the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit, on the other hand, was that the splattering was carried out, backstage, immediately before each performance. He would remove his soutane, lay it out flat on the floor, and proceed to splatter it with whatever foodstuffs came to hand. He would chuck eggs or fruit at it from across the room, drizzle it with soup and broth and slops and sauces, and shower it with bread- and biscuit-crumbs. Although there is no evidence that Jackson Pollock ever witnessed these preparations, it seems inconceivable to me that he could ever have arrived at his action painting technique without first having watched the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit.

Though there is common agreement that he was, beyond all reasonable doubt, a Jesuit, and food-splattered, several latterday commentators have wondered about that “world-famous” bit. Given that he is not known ever to have performed outside the seaside resorts of his own country, they ask, is there any truth in the claim that he was famed around the world? This was the interwar years, remember, when communications were technologically primitive compared to our own era. How would a variety theatre aficionado in far flung foreign parts ever hear tell of the goings on at the end of a rickety pier in an out of season seaside resort in our blessed land? It is a pertinent question. But it ignores the decisive role played in the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit’s career by his manager.

“Colonel” Tom Emersonlakeandparker was a rogue and a rascal, and an impresario of genius. It was he who first saw the potential of that pristine black soutane, saw it as a blank slate upon which food could be splattered, and then displayed, as in a tableau vivant, to an adoring public. All he had to do, he realised, was to find the perfect Jesuit, first to do the food-splattering, then to stand still with outstretched arms for ten minutes or so upon a seaside stage. By all accounts, he searched for over six years before finding his man – a man whose name still remains a secret. At the first few appearances, billed as the Food-Splattered Jesuit, the act was a flop. But rather than ditch his choice of Jesuit, which he might easily have done, the “Colonel” instead appended “World-Famous” to his stage name. It was a stroke of genius. Crowds thronged to see a figure who was already – they thought – a legend. They were not disappointed, as who could be? Certainly, in today’s entertainment-saturated world, we fail to register just how impoverished we are. In the era of multi-channel television and YouTube and a populace with the attention span of a gnat, we ought to be crying out, in our millions, for a variety act as spiritually enriching as the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit. Perhaps a young tyro Jesuit with a burning desire to entertain the masses is reading this. He will know what to do.

Originally posted in 2012.

Tuesday Weld Goes Berserk is the title of a puppet show created by the noted glove-puppeteer Dot Glovepup. It acts as a companion piece to her earlier, award-winning show Googie Withers Goes Haywire, and has proved equally controversial. Both shows are clearly indebted to the traditional Punch And Judy format, with squeaky, braying voices and demented violence. Dot Glovepup has been forced, in both cases, to add a prominent programme note declaring that “any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental”.

Tuesday Weld Goes Berserk is divided into three acts. In the first, the Tuesday Weld glove puppet is presented as calm, placid, and peaceable. Indeed, one could say that she is wholly inert, the better to contrast with the “going berserk” which follows. This opening scene lasts anywhere between four and fourteen seconds, depending – according to the glove-puppeteer – on the mood of the audience.

In Act Two, Tuesday Weld gets married to the British pianist, actor, and comedian Dudley Moore. She then goes berserk, bashing him around the head with a sock filled with pellets of lead and then shoving him down a well. Immediately afterwards, Tuesday Weld marries the Israeli violinist and conductor Pinchas Zukerman. She proceeds to go berserk, bashing him around the head with a sock filled with wet impacted sand and then shoving him down a mineshaft.

In Act Three, a police officer attempts to arrest Tuesday Weld, but she scampers away and, dressed in a pink duffel coat, goes cavorting at nightfall on the beach at Deal, skipping about and waving her arms before mincing along the pier and vomiting into the sea, an obvious reference to the haunting image of Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey described in the closing pages of All The Devils Are Here by David Seabrook (Granta, 2002).

Critics have questioned the absence from the puppet show of Tuesday Weld’s first husband, Claude Harz. Dot Glovepup, interviewed for the magazine Characters Ignored In Glove Puppet Shows Weekly, hinted that he may appear in a planned “prequel” glove puppet show featuring both Tuesday Weld and Googie Withers.

Tuesday Weld Goes Berserk is currently showing at a temporary kiosk at the end of the pier at Deal. Admission is free to those wearing pink duffel coats.

NOTA BENE : In the text above, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Tra la la. Diddly dipsy dee. Look, there goes a person of unhinged mien. But does an unhinged mien betoken an unhinged mind? Let us find out. Let us follow him on his way. Let us follow him to the ends of the earth. But the earth has no ends! It is a globe, and one can go round and round and round forever, or until one drops, panting with exhaustion, without ever reaching an end. Yes, yes, I know one can come to a strand or a foreland or a cliff, and be faced with the sea – so vast, so wet, so merciless – but one simply hops into a boat, any old tub will do, and sooner or later there will be more land upon which to proceed. There are no ends.

So let us follow this person of unhinged mien wherever he should roam, and if he hops into a boat, well, we too shall hop into a boat. But not the same boat. It would not sit well with our sense of safety to be alone aboard a boat with a person of unhinged mien. His unhingement may be of maniacal bent, and under that cloak of his he may be armed with weaponry, lethal weaponry. Think a sharp sword or perhaps a loaded blunderbuss. Think upon that, though it does not bear thinking about, for we could end up with fatal wounds, toppling from the boat into the sea, there to flail helplessly and drown, if he is indeed a maniac.

Better by far to hop into a second, different boat, and follow. We need not even navigate, simply steer the same course as is being steered by the person of unhinged mien, his cloak now swapped for the blazer of a yachtsman. Its fit is too trim to conceal that sword or blunderbuss, but he may still be armed, a dirk in his pocket or a shiv tucked up his sleeve, ready for the wielding, and the blood and the toppling and the flailing and the drowning in that damnable sea.

Let us follow, them, at a safe distance, until such time as he, and we, spy land ahoy, and disembark upon it might be golden sands or it might be wet impacted mud. He swaps his blazer for a macintosh, like Hitler’s. Is he Hitler? Not dead after all, but on the lam, heading for a villa hidden in the mangrove swamps of South America? Of course not! I am running away with myself. Perhaps I, too, am becoming unhinged, in mind if not mien.

It would not be the first time. There was that big bleak soot-black building high on a hill, Pang Hill, behind iron gates, doubly, no, triply padlocked, where I was kept for years, among persons given to raving and gibbering, and warders, done up in starched white tunics, who patted me on the head and gave me fizzy pop in a plastic beaker, which I slurped with gratitude, though a largeish portion of pop dribbled down my chinnychinchin, the warders dabbing at it with rags. Sometimes, at night, chained to my iron cot, I have fantastic dreams, in which I imagine I am still there, behind high walls on high Pang Hill, and not in some faraway land, across the vast wet merciless sea, in dogged pursuit, to the ends of the earth, of a person of unhinged mien. Tra la la. Diddly dipsy dee.