We take as our text for today’s lesson the Gospel of Matthew, chapter ten, verse twenty-nine:

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

Sometimes it so happens that you will go to a sparrow-seller to make purchase of a pair of sparrows, only for him to state an asking price of more than a farthing. Or he might charge a farthing for a single sparrow, but throw in a second sparrow with a “Buy One, Get One Free” offer, in which case you will pay a farthing for two sparrows even if the one sparrow costs a farthing in itself. Thereagain, you might find yourself being offered a free sparrow by a seller of, say, partridges or linnets, who has an unwanted stock of sparrows and cannot wait to be rid of them, for they are greedily eating up his grain and millet that he would rather feed to his partridges or linnets.

So when we ask the question, as we must, are not two sparrows sold for a farthing?, the answer is no, not always, not in all circumstances, come what may, for there may be times and places where we will be asked to pay more, or less, for a pair of sparrows. And from this we can learn much about the ways of God and Man. Yes, the honest sparrow-seller will hand us two sparrows upon receipt of a farthing, but not all sparrow-sellers are honest, while some sparrow-sellers are too honest for their own good. And, as with sparrow-sellers, so too those from whom we buy other birds, not just partridges and linnets, but starlings, and kittiwakes, and seagulls.

But what of the second part of the verse from Matthew 10, that one of them – that is, the sparrows – that one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father? The first part of the verse is a question. The second part is not. It states, quite vehemently and unchallengeably, that, without your Father, one of the sparrows will not fall on the ground. But which of the sparrows is it that shall not fall? One of them will, and one of them will remain in the air, in flight and birdy swooping, until your Father appears, at which point, we must assume, it will plunge towards the earth, just because your Father has arrived.

The more one studies this passage, and I have studied it for years and years, the more problems it raises. Why does one sparrow fall on the ground without your Father? Why does the other sparrow fall on the ground when your Father appears? Is your Father armed with a shotgun, or a catapult? Does His mere presence induce in the tiny frail sparrow a heart attack? And if He can have that effect on a sparrow, what of other birds, partridges, say, or linnets, or starlings or kittiwakes or seagulls or robins or wrens, or even hummingbirds?

These are profound questions, and we must dig deep to answer them, deeper, certainly, than a sparrow may need to dig to light upon a fat juicy earthworm for its morning snack. My own experience has taught me that all that digging will be as nought unless one has first found a sparrow-seller to sell one a pair of sparrows for a farthing. Alas, in this day and age, more leaden than golden, such sparrow-sellers are rare indeed, rarer even than the proverbial hen’s teeth. But the hen is quite another class of bird from a sparrow, as you will know if you have ever kept poultry.

Thus sayeth the Lord.

This piece first appeared in 2011. It seemed particularly pertinent to repost it on today of all days.

There is a song about a lonely goatherd with which I am sure many of you are familiar. This goatherd is usually represented by a puppet (above). We are fortunate to have a picture – indeed, film! – of the lonely goatherd puppet, for there are other noteworthy goatherd puppets of which no images exist. I refer to the Blots, a family of goatherds unparalleled  in their rapacity, shadow puppets of whom were devised by the shadow puppeteer Jasper Weems.

Weems told the story of the Blots through the medium of shadow puppetry. Let us retell it here, using words.

The Blots had been goatherds in the Swiss Alps for generations. Their lives were, and always had been, narrow, pinched, and poor. Then, one day in 1964, the current patriarch of the family, Hans Blot, came upon a newspaper report of a meeting of British Labour Party politicians. One of their number, George Brown, had apparently made reference to the gnomes of Zurich. His interest piqued, Hans Blot read further, and learned that these gnomes, residing in Switzerland’s largest city, were exceedingly wealthy.

Hans Blot, who was a goatherd unparalleled in his rapacity, saw an opportunity to turn around his family’s fortunes. Instead of scraping a living herding goats, the Blots could borrow money from the gnomes and … well, he did not immediately form a plan, but he felt sure that he could turn a modest loan from the gnomes into an enormous pile of cash somehow or other, given his unparalleled rapacity.

Blot did not set off for Zurich right away. First, he drilled the family in the tenets of anthroposophy as expounded by Rudolf Steiner. This was necessary, Blot thought, because he assumed the gnomes of Zurich were the invisible gnomes who live among men but cannot be perceived by the common riffraff, such as goatherds, only becoming visible to those on a higher plane of human existence, such as Rudolf Steiner.

The Blots, driven by their unparalleled rapacity, studied hard, and before long, believing they might now be able to perceive the invisible gnomes, set off for Zurich. Upon arrival, they trooped into the first bank they saw, and were delighted when they realised they could see the gnomes with absolute clarity. Hans Blot proceeded to ask for a loan of money. Though the gnomes of Zurich – who were of course not Steinerian gnomes at all, and were visible to everybody – did not lend out money willy-nilly, they recognised the gleam of greed in Hans Blot’s eyes. Such unparalleled rapacity, they felt, was worthy of their regard. The Blots left Zurich with pockets full of cash.

As winter drew in, they spent long evenings huddled in their noisome goatherders’ hovel trying to think up ways to use the loan to, in the words of an accountant, generate a regular revenue stream. Then, on a blizzard-wracked night, one of the younger Blots, Hansi, as rapacious as her grandfather, had a brainwave.

You know, just up the mountain, she babbled in excitement, there is the chalet of the Prix Poubelle-winning writer N K Freaky. He has his own private funicular railway. We could buy it from him, and then gouge oodles of cash by charging exorbitant funicular railway fares!

All the Blots agreed this was a brilliant idea. And over the next five years, they bought more and more funicular railways, not only in the Swiss Alps but in the Austrian and Italian Alps too, and charged their passengers ever-increasing fares for journeys up and down those sublime snow-topped peaks.

But such was their unparalleled rapacity the Blots were reluctant ever to part with a pfennig. When it came time to repay their loan to the gnomes of Zurich, the Blots simply ignored the demands that plopped through the letterbox of their Alpine hovel. Eventually, the gnomes lost patience. After a secretive conference in a secret chamber in their secretive bank, the gnomes of Zurich fastened upon a terrible resolution. They hired a gang of invisible Steinerian gnomes, who one night burst, unperceived, into the Blots’ hovel, and slaughtered them in their beds, each and every one, from Hans to Hansi.

The foregoing cannot, of course, do justice to the vivid shadow puppetry of Jasper Weems’ shadow puppet version of the story of the Blot family, but I hope it has afforded you a modicum of entertainment.

The other day I was scuttling, as one does, across the floors of silent seas. There is no light down there, and it was cold and very wet. But that’s the bottom of the sea for you. It’s no picnic – though I’ve had my fair share of picnics in the cold and wet. I recall one particular childhood picnic where the lid was left off the marmalade jar, and soon enough it contained half marmalade, half rainwater. I was an inquisitive child. I screwed the lid back on the jar and shook it, violently, until the two substances, the marmalade and the rainwater, were mixed together.

Years later, I wrote a book about this experiment, called Marmalade And Rainwater. Some of you may know of it. It was a bestseller, and won several prestigious awards, including the Prix Poubelle. With the money I received for that, I was able to buy an Alpine chalet with its own private funicular railway.

Success prompted the idea that I could mine my memories of childhood picnics for further books. I began work on a fictionalised account of one such picnic, provisionally entitled Sausages And Wasps. But I couldn’t make it work. After every few pages I would grow exasperated and despairing, and scrunch up what I’d written and toss it down a waste chute. I realised that I was temperamentally incapable of writing about this picnic, even in the guise of fiction, because it had taken place on a hot dry sunny day, whereas what spoke to my imagination was the cold wet picnic.

It seems, though, that readers prefer their literary picnics dry and sunny. My second book, More Marmalade And Further Rainwater, was a complete flop, selling fewer than a dozen copies and winning no prizes whatsoever. It did not take long before I faced financial ruin, so I decided to sell up and move elsewhere. But I made the foolish mistake of selling the funicular railway first. This meant I was unable to go to and from the Alpine chalet without paying a hefty fare for each journey to the new owners, a family of goatherds unparalleled in their rapacity.

How, then, did I get from my high Alpine home to where I am now, lingering in the chambers of the sea? Ah, that will be the subject of my next book, a non-picnic-based memwa. I am taking my time over it. There will be time, there will be time for a hundred visions and revisions before the taking of a toast and tea. And I shall spread my toast with a mixture of marmalade and rainwater.

I write these words with immense difficulty, and in frantic haste. If what I believe is true, I have little more than an hour, perhaps two, before my mind will lose its moorings, the brain inside my head will be reduced to a twitching jelly of miasmic horror, and I will be a hopeless case, raving and gibbering and throwing myself against the walls of this padded cell. I am confined here upon my own insistence. I had to demand that the lunatic asylum staff lock me up, and keep me locked up. If, in an hour or two’s time, I was free to roam the streets among other men, I shudder to think what unimaginable chaos and havoc would be wrought. No, I must remain here, isolated from a world that must, must be protected at all costs from me …. or rather, from the … thing that I will soon become.

Can it really be only a week ago that I was sitting at home, surrounded by my familiar magnets and retorts and cylinders, in peace and comfort, without a care in the world other than the incessant yapping of my neighbour’s dog and the incessant tinkling of the bell dangling from the collar round my neighbour’s dog’s neck and the incessant ululating incantations of my neighbour himself, incantations devised to summon forth the incarnation of the hideous bat-god Fatso, incantations which, thank the heavens, had proved unsuccessful for twenty years and which, one hoped, would remain unsuccessful for a further twenty years and, indeed, forever after? The yapping and tinkling and ululating aside, I was, as I say, in peace and comfort, and could never have imagined the inexplicable horror that was about to unfold. It has been just one week, but I feel I have lived through a thousand years, nay!, a thousand centuries, a thousand millennia in that time.

It all began, prosaically enough, with the telltale sound of the daily postal delivery dropping onto the mat. I put aside the lemon meringue pie I was eating and went to retrieve it. I flicked briefly through the items: a couple of bills, a letter from my bankers, the latest copy of the Reader’s Digest – I quickly scanned the contents page and made a mental note to read, at the earliest opportunity, the article about bringing a monkey out of a medically-induced coma – a couple of advertising flyers, and – fatefully, as I was to learn – a black envelope, addressed by hand in gleaming silver lettering, bearing a postage stamp which, though I looked at it from every conceivable angle, and then from several inconceivable angles, resisted all attempts to see it clearly. It seemed somehow to shift in shape and colour and size, to become invisible and then visible again. I could not even tell whether it was self-adhesive or had had to be affixed to the envelope with a lick of spittle from a human – or inhuman? – tongue.

Placing the rest of my post in the wicker basket on my escritoire, I returned to the breakfast table, took another mouthful of lemon meringue pie, and opened the envelope carefully. The letter inside was unexpectedly ordinary – a single sheet of white paper, covered in black handwriting of commendable neatness and legibility.

Dear Mr Key, I read, I have long been an admirer of your Hooting Yard weblog and the associated podcasts on Resonance FM. It is an enthusiasm fully shared by my colleagues in the Faculty of Blasphemous and Forbidden Studies at Miskatonic University, Arkham, from where I write this letter. To be wholly accurate, I should say that I am writing from the campus annexe in Innsmouth, where the faculty offices are based. Such is our admiration for you that we wish to issue an invitation. There is work that needs to be done – important and urgent work – and we think you are the man to do it. It is a somewhat delicate matter, and I am reluctant to put the details down in writing – and not merely reluctant. Let us say, rather, that the prospect of committing those details to pen and paper fills me with a terrible, nameless dread. For this reason, I would be grateful if, at your earliest convenience, you would telephone me on the number given below.

The number followed, and the letter was signed – in a florid if shaky hand – by Professor Charles Dexter Nyarlathotep, Dean of Faculty. I immediately picked up my telephone receiver and dialled.

After a few rings, there was a click, as if my call had been answered, but no one seemed to be on the wire, and I was about to hang up when my ear caught a faint suspicion of sound. Was someone trying, under great difficulties, to talk? As I listened, I thought I heard a sort of half-liquid bubbling noise – “glub … glub … glub”- which had an odd suggestion of inarticulate, unintelligible, word and syllable divisions. I called “Is that Professor Nyarlathotep?” but the only answer was “glub-glub …. glub-glub” Then my interlocutor, whoever it was – whatever it was – hung up.

If there is one thing I learned from President Nixon it was the advisability of tape-recording all my conversations. (A second thing I learned from him was to relieve stress by mashing potatoes, but that was not pertinent to the current situation.) I plucked the cassette from the machine and hurried next door. I did not go to my ululating neighbour with the yapping dog and the yapping dog’s tinkling bell, but to my neighbour on the other side. This fellow happened to be an eminent and distinguished retired professor of Comparative and Applied Ichthyolinguistics, and I was certain he would be able to help me to understand the strange sounds from the telephone call. Sure enough, having played the tape back to him, my neighbour was able to make an instant translation.

“I have communed with many fish and other aquatic beings,” he said, “And I recognise this at once as the lingua franca of a particularly hideous and unimaginably horrible spawn of the chthonic depths of the sea, depths so deep that all light is blotted out and the creatures there are grotesque blind albino monsters with writhing flippers. One must listen intently to each ‘glub’ to discern its meaning. In this case, it seems you are being invited to Miskatonic University for the purpose of writing the authorised biography of the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred, author of the Necronomicon.”

I thanked the professor, gave him the remainder of my lemon meringue pie, returned home, packed a suitcase, and made my way to the railway station, where I caught the next train to Arkham. At Arkham, I would need to change trains to proceed on the branch line to the university campus annexe at Innsmouth. It was a long journey, and I passed the time by reading my xeroxed copy of Ebn Khallikan’s early (12^th century) biography of Abdul Alhazred. This was the text that claimed, among other things, that the mad Arab had been seized by an invisible monster in broad daylight and devoured horribly before a large number of fright-frozen witnesses. I did not believe a word of this, nor of much else in the book, and as the train passed through bosky rustic backwaters, I grew confident that, as the authorised biographer, appointed by Miskatonic University, I could do a far better job.

When, eventually, we arrived at Innsmouth, I booked myself into a dilapidated and ill-starred boarding house by the quayside. The landlady was a swarthy, bloated dwarf of cretinous appearance. I suspected she was the product of centuries of inbreeding. When completing the register, she asked me, in her weirdly strangulated guttural caterwaul of a voice, punctuated by almost reptilian hisses, to state the nature of my business. Rather than trusting her with the truth, I claimed to be an aide de camp to President Nixon, scouting possible locations for a branch of his presidential library. She scribbled this into her ledger without comment.

It was late, and I was tired, so I declined the landlady’s offer of supper – which appeared to consist of a bowl full of boiled, writhing tentacles swimming in a mixture of brine and goat’s milk – and I retired to my room. As I opened the door, I reeled and nearly swooned. It was cramped and filthy and the wallpaper depicted ungodly patterns, in colours beyond any spectrum known to human science and lines and shapes of some bizarre, alien geometry. I flung myself on to the fantastically uncomfortable bed and prayed for sleep. For several hours I tossed and turned, but eventually I lost consciousness. How I wish I had not! That night, for the first time since infancy, my dreams were haunted by … the Grunty Man!

Most people of my generation will be familiar with this loathsome monster. It was common, when I was a child, for parents to frighten their children to sleep with spine-tingling tales of this creature, dwelling in a deep dark dank cave, hairy and grunting and covered in sores and suppurating boils, a hideous being older than the universe, older than time and space, grunting, drooling, stinking, and ever prepared to come lumbering out of the maw of his cave to visit unimaginable havoc upon the innocent. He had terrified me as a tiny tot, and he terrified me now, the more so because the nightmare was so inexplicably vivid.

Eventually, mercifully, I awoke from this hideous phantasm. I was twitching and shattered. After cursory ablutions, I went downstairs to the breakfast room. When I saw that breakfast was the same bowl of tentacles as the supper of the night before, I excused myself, and crashed unsteadily out of the door. I decided to head straight for the campus to seek out Professor Nyarlathotep. The sooner I obtained comprehensive details of my commission, and signed a contract, the sooner I could leave this benighted, wretched, vile seaside hellhole.

After a short bus ride to the campus, it was a simple enough matter to locate the Faculty of Blasphemous and Forbidden Studies and, once inside, to find the professor’s office. A young woman was sitting at a desk in the anteroom.

“You must be Mr Key,” she said, “I am Miss Dimity Cashew, the professor’s secretary. I am afraid he is not here right now He is off somewhere or other, consulting an abominable tome written in an unknown and possibly bestial alphabet.”

She was a pallid and asymmetrical figure, with a club foot and one withered leg, a withered arm, several extra fingers on one hand and several fingers missing on the other, eyes of different colours which seemed always to be looking in wildly different directions, and her lank hair was scattered with breadcrumbs and a twig or two. I was transfixed. My dementedly thumping heart seemed ready to burst from my breast. I could barely speak, but I managed to splutter some incoherent words. Dimity agreed to join me for a stroll along the Innsmouth promenade.

It was a whirlwind romance, and five days later we were married in St Bibblybibdib’s church. Only on the morning after our wedding night did I snap out of my lovestruck daze and remember why I had come to Innsmouth in the first place.

“The authorised biography of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred!” I cried, “I must go to see the professor at once!”

These words had a strange effect on my new bride. Dimity seemed to shrink visibly and clutched desperately at the bedsheets. Already pallid, what little colour there was drained from her face. She shook her head violently, sending twigs and breadcrumbs flying from her lank hair across the room. And then, for the first time since I had met her, both of her eyes swivelled to fix in the same direction, and she looked straight at me.

“For god’s sake!” she screamed, “Phn’glui mglw’nafh! Wgah’fhtagn! The pit of the shoggoths! Down the six thousand steps … the abomination of abominations … I never would let him take me, and then I found myself there! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The Hooded Thing bleated ‘Kamog! Kamog!’ In the place of utter blasphemy! I can’t stand it! I can’t stand it! My brain! It’s tugging – from beyond – knocking – clawing – Ngr’hfglkhar! The Goat with a Thousand Young! … Oh God!”

Like a fool, I dismissed this as delirium, a fit of the vapours. I told Dimity to have a nice cup of tea and to get some more sleep. And I hurried out towards the faculty office … and, had I but known it, towards my own destruction.

There is little more to tell. I ran to the faculty building and through into the anteroom, past Dimity’s empty desk, until I stood at the professor’s door. I knocked, and heard from inside a weird eldritch unfathomable rustling and panting and … grunting. I threw open the door, and rushed in, and found myself in a room as deep and dark and dank as the cave of the Grunty Man. It was the cave of the Grunty Man! And there, in the Stygian blackness, looming before me, was the Grunty Man himself, in the form of the withered, ancient figure of Professor Nyarlathotep.

“Ah! At last!” he wheezed, “I have been waiting for you. Every ten thousand years, I require a new host body. And here you are!”

And before I had time to scream, or flee, the hideous being shot across the darkness towards me and somehow inserted itself, body and soul, its very being, into me. I felt it settle, adjusting its horrible contours to mine, feeling its way into me, physically and mentally. Desperately, I clung on to a small corner of my brain that remained my own. I have continued to cling to it for as long as I can, but I grow weaker and weaker, and the ‘me’ that clings will soon be no more. That is why I ran as fast as I could to this lunatic asylum and, at gunpoint, demanded to be confined in a padded cell. Its walls and locks will keep humanity safe for a time. But the time will come, years, centuries hence, when the locks will rust and the walls crumble … and then the Grunty Man will lumber forth, in his awful grunting horror, and he shall have dominion over the earth, and all the other planets in all the other universes, forever and ever. I am the Grunty Man!

The latest correspondence in the Hooting Yard postbox:

Dear Mr Key : Your brief list of children’s authors named Enid brought back happy memories. I was surprised, however, that you made no mention of my own favourite, Enid Blytmyfire. Who can forget her series of books about Little Jim, the shamanic singer, poet and counterculture icon, who is revealed as merely a drug-addled alcoholic who dies in a bathtub in Paris?

There is the story about the pauper who steals a pea from a princeling. Or it may be that the princeling steals a pea from a pauper. I can never quite recall which way round it goes. I ought to remember, because god knows I heard the story often enough. My ma, or sometimes my pa, read it to me every single night, for years and years, as my bedtime story. Perhaps that is why I don’t remember it with blinding clarity, because I was always falling asleep as I listened to it. I fell asleep in spite of the undoubted excitement of the story, and of the Sturm und Drang of the violent thunderstorms which were a constant feature of the weather in that place at that time. I suspect my falling asleep came so easily because my ma, or my pa, spiked my bedtime milk of magnesia with a powerful tranquiliser.

I was certainly a tranquil child. I never said “Boo!” to a goose. My parents kept several geese, but I never dared say “Boo!” to a single one of them. Frankly, they terrified me with their honking and their waddling about and the whiteness of their feathers, a whiteness that seemed unearthly. It reminded me of the final scene in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe.

Of course, I was not reminded of this when I was an unlettered tot, it was only later, when I learned to read. At first I read childish comics like The Ipsy Dipsy Doo and The Hammer of Christ, but I was a keen reader and swiftly moved on to Enid Blyton and Enid Blytoff and Enid Blytattheendofthetunnel, before tackling Burgess and Borges, and the gloomy Russians, and potboilers by Pebblehead, until, at twelve, I read Arthur Gordon Pym, after which I was so unnerved by that whiteness that I never read anything else, ever again, just reading Poe’s novel over and over again and again. It remains the only book on my bookshelf, which rather obviates the need for the space provided by a shelf. Hence I have filled it with plasticine models of a pauper and a pea and a princeling.

I made these models myself, visualising the pauper and the princeling based on what little I could remember about my childhood bedtime story, and the pea on close observation of a frozen pea I removed from a packet of frozen peas stored in the freezer compartment of my refrigerator in my kitchen in my chalet high in the Alps near the sanatorium where tubercular patients lie sprawled, exhausted, on balconies.

Among these patients, who I watch through a pair of binoculars, is a fellow with a walrus moustache who closely resembles the lumbering psychopathic serial killer Babinsky. But it cannot be him. If it were, I like to think I would clamber up to his balcony and engage him in conversation and ask him if he, too, grew up listening over and over again and again to the tale of the pauper and the princeling and the pea. If he had, and if he was indeed Babinsky, it would explain a lot about his subsequent career raining violent havoc and mayhem upon the weedy and the blameless and the innocent.

When I tire of watching the Babinsky lookalike, I train my binoculars upon the snow-capped Alpine peaks, white, so white, so unutterably, blindingly white.

Dear Mr Key, writes rock ‘n’ pop critic Rick Rockpopcrit, I was fascinated to read your piece about Pierre et Clothilde yesterday. It is true, sadly, that the duo’s career lay in tatters by the early 1970s. What was missing from your article, however, was any account of Pierre’s later involvement in the punk ‘n’ post-punk scene. My cousin Sid Punkcrit covered this in an article for the monthly magazine Punks Named Pierre in September 1979. I clipped it out with a pair of extremely shiny scissors, and am sending it to you so you can transcribe it and share it with your readers.

Exciting news reaches us that Pierre, previously of chart-non-topping duo Pierre et Clothilde, is making a comeback! He has completely reinvented himself for the punk ‘n’ post-punk era, fronting a new band called Pierre et les Pantoufles (above; Pierre is on the far left). Their first single, Où est Clothilde?, a raucous and godawful discordant din, had me tapping my toes while wearing my own pantoufles. The B side, Clothilde, Mon Amour is less of a toe-tapper and more of a hands-over-the-ears cacophany of cacophonosity.

The band is currently in the studio recording their debut album, Devons-nous jeter cette saleté à  nos pop-enfants, Clothilde? It promises to be a cracker. That is a view shared by Plastic Bertrand, who I bumped into in a corridor on my way to conduct an interview with Pierre. It came as a surprise to me that Plastic Bertrand is not, as I thought, made of plastic. This revelation so disconcerted me that, when I sat down with Pierre, the first thing I said to him was: “Pierre, did you know that Plastic Bertrand is not made of plastic?”

“Oui” he muttered, before launching into a mournful lament about Clothilde, accompanied by copious weeping. Unfortunately, it was all in French, or the dialect of French spoken by Walloons, a language with which I am wholly unfamiliar. So I just sat there trying to look sympathetic, while puffing on a Gitane. There was no sign of the Pantoufles.

By the time Pierre eventually shut up and dried his eyes with a dainty and unpunklike silken handkerchief, I had got through an entire pack of Gitanes and had heard quite enough mawkish Wallonian blathering. I was trying to work out what to do next. I could slap Pierre about and tell him to get a grip. Or I could try to divert him on to a different subject. Best of all, perhaps, I could sweep imperiously out of the room and pursue Plastic Bertrand.

Then the door crashed open, and a woman swept imperiously into the room. I thought for a moment she was some kind of space hippy. Then I realised – it was Clothilde!

Here is a very rare photograph of 1960s pop duo Pierre et Clothilde, performing their chart-non-topper Come Into The Garden, Maud on a Belgian TV show. Like untold dozens of their contemporaries, Pierre et Clothilde have been shoved none too gently into the dustbin of pop history. Yet in their prime, the pair could be said to have been the brightest garlands on the pop music wreath. That, at least, was the verdict of the cultural critic Charles Shaar Loopy, who wrote:

For my money, which in present circumstances is a handful of loose change and a promissory note of dubious provenance, Pierre et Clothilde – which, for monoglots, can be translated as Pierre and Clothilde – are the brightest garlands on the pop music wreath. This wreath, composed mostly of lupins, foxgloves, and stinging nettles, is a lovely thing, a very lovely thing, a thing so lovely that it takes my breath away. It takes my breath away and also causes a nasty rash on my forehead. That’s because I took the opportunity to pop the wreath onto my head when nobody was looking. I wanted to imitate Christ wearing his crown of thorns, but in a sort of pop context, pop being my field of expertise.

Pierre et Clothilde’s career hit the doldrums after a disastrous appearance in Shoeburyness. Pierre had the flu, and Clothilde had the flu too, and the two doses of flu wreaked havoc on their performance of Tooty Foofy Boogie Boo. Charles Shaar Loopy again:

The Shoeburyness crowd, peevish and rancorous to begin with on account of local kiosk closures and an ominous flock of godwits looming above the open air arena, grew uglier. They pelted poor Pierre et Clothilde with pebbles, and gave vent to an ungodly howling, which quickly spread to such rough beasts prowling the undergrowth as wolves and wild pigs. Pigs don’t usually howl, but these wild Shoeburyness pigs were of a different order to your usual pigs, possibly because of their proximity to an experimental research station. But I’m more a pop person than a pig person, so I can’t be sure. As The Young Rascals sang, how can I be sure?, I can’t, I just can’t. [Bursts into tears, and weeps for forty days and forty nights.]

In the early 1970s, Pierre et Clothilde attempted to revive their career. They collaborated with Antipodean pop/folk sensation Keith Potger, once of The Seekers, but the new trio’s version of El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido, released as a single just in time for Christmas 1973, flopped, and flopped dismally, and flopped dismally and desultorily, and flopped dismally and desultorily and irrevocably, and flopped dismally and desultorily and irrevocably and floppily, as floppily as the floppiest imaginable flop, which is saying something. What it is saying is that the single flopped, and flopped dismally, and flopped dismally and desultorily, and flopped dismally and desultorily and irrevocably, and flopped dismally and desultorily and irrevocably and floppily, as floppily as the floppiest imaginable flop. One could paraphrase, but to do so would not change the facts, so it is best not to paraphrase, and simply to repeat the exact same words, for purposes of emphasis.

And where are they now, Pierre et Clothilde? Where indeed? And now indeed, to boot. And Pierre indeed. And Clothilde indeed. Or should I say, et Clothilde indeed? I should. I did. Oh, where are the snows of yesteryear? What becomes of the broken-hearted? Why do fools fall in love? Must we fling this filth at our pop kids? Not even Charles Shaar Loopy can answer that one.

Yesterday I received an annoying email from a company – probably run by teenagers – called SOS.

Hi Frank!, it began, overfamiliarly. I don’t know why I continued reading after such effrontery, but I did.

Here at SOS we’re passionate about helping you maximise traffic to your website. SOS stands for Search Optimisation Solutions, and that’s exactly what we do!

Like a fool, I carried on reading. I suppose I was won over by the thought that I could attract more than thirty-four readers. I became even more interested when SOS gave me one of their so-called “simple yet effective” tips without my having to pay them a penny.

Our research shows that web traffic increases a millionfold if you mention three names on your site. We call them The Three Ks – Kate, Kim, and Keith. That is, Kate Middleton, Kim Kardashian, and Keith Potger.

I am now racking my brains trying to work out how to concoct a story which includes the Duchess of Cambridge, the inexplicable celebrity, and a quarter of Antipodean 1960s pop sensations The Seekers, which is at once (a) credible, (b) morally uplifting, and (c) groovy. If any of the thirty-four of you have any ideas, please let me know in the Comments.

UPDATE : Gosh! Since I posted the above, an hour ago, traffic to Hooting Yard has increased to a whopping thirty-six! Thanks a million, SOS!

In When I Was Borp, the narrator tells us that, on finding fools in his orchard, he drove them out. This may be truth or it may be fiction – he is not an entirely reliable narrator – but either way it is a clear reference to Expulsion Of The Fools From The Orchard, a mag, a maj, oh, a magnificent and majestic oil painting by the noted oil painter Dot Oilpain RA.

Those initials after her name are often thought to indicate, mistakenly, that Dot Oilpain is a member of the Royal Academy. In fact they stand for Rara Avis. The artist considers herself to be a rare bird, and likes to wear a cardboard beak and a suit of feathers when working.

Just as, in her case, the letters RA are misinterpreted, so too her magnificent and majestic oil painting. Expulsion Of The Fools From The Orchard depicts two fools being expelled from an orchard, one male and one female. They are both naked, and the female fool is holding a piece of fruit from which a chunk has been bitten. Understandably, the subject matter is thought to be Biblical. But this is not the case, as Dot Oilpain explained in an interview with Misinterpreted Oil Paintings Weekly magazine.

It is true that I have mined the Bible for inspiration in the past. There are, for instance, my oil paintings of the Gadarene swine, the hairy man and the smooth man, everyone drinking the waters of their own cistern, and the horse saying “ha ha” among the trumpets in the Book of Job. But Expulsion Of The Fools From The Orchard has absolutely nothing to do with Adam and Eve being driven out of the Garden of Eden.

The idea for the painting came from a conversation I had at a swish sophisticated cocktail party. I was not there by invitation – I stumbled into it under the misapprehension that it was a gathering of ornithologists, among whom I hoped to garner some tips for finessing my cardboard beak and suit of feathers, which I always wear when painting. By the time I realised that nobody in the room knew the first thing about birds, I had already drunk several cocktails and I felt a bit woozy. Worried that I might topple over, I leaned against a mantelpiece to steady myself. Also leaning against the mantelpiece, insouciantly, was a fellow who was clearly not an ornithologist but who nevertheless had the air of a jackdaw, or a budgerigar. We struck up a conversation, initially regarding mantelpieces, insouciance, cocktail parties, jackdaws, budgerigars, and the comparative merits of Kathy Kirby and Petula Clark.

Then this chap told me about his orchard, and how it had been overrun by fools fooling about in it. “Are you saying Petula Clark is a fool?” I shouted, in outrage, for if there is one thing I cannot bear it is to hear a word said against Petula Clark. My interlocutor hastened to assure me that we had moved on to a completely separate conversational topic and that he, too, held Petula Clark in the highest regard, higher, perhaps, than any other twentieth-century songstress, with the possible exception of Cathy Berberian.

I spluttered and spat some of my cocktail into the fireplace. “Pshaw!” I yelled, “Cathy Berberian couldn’t sing her way out of a paper bag, compared to the sainted and glorious Petula Clark!” In retrospect I am not sure this assertion stands up to scrutiny, but then nor do most assertions made at cocktail parties after a certain point.

After several minutes of back and forth, and further cocktails, it eventually dawned on me that the orchard full of fools was indeed a completely separate conversational topic and that my umbrage had been misplaced. This in turn led to a creative spark setting off fireworks in my head as I envisaged a magnificent and majestic oil painting entitled Misplaced Umbrage. I was ready to bid farewell to the non-ornithologist and to rush away to my chalet peinture, don my cardboard beak and suit of feathers, and set to work.

But he grabbed my arm and, with a wild look in his eyes, began gabbling about how he had driven the fools from his orchard, caring not a jot that they were naked and that one of them had just started snacking on a piece of fruit. So compelling was his tale that I could not help but listen, rapt, as rapt as I would listen to a Petula Clark platter spinning at 45rpm on my record player. And as I listened, the lineaments of a huge oil painting took form in my mind’s eye. Thus was born Expulsion Of The Fools From The Orchard. I began to paint it that very night. It took months to complete. I do not wish to boast, but I think it is the finest oil painting of fools being expelled from an orchard that I have ever painted, in oil paint, while wearing a cardboard beak and a suit of feathers, the better to inhabit my desired persona of a rara avis, Popsy.

[Popsy is the given name of the editrix of Misinterpreted Oil Paintings Weekly, who conducted the interview.]

Expulsion Of The Fools From The Orchard by Dot Oilpain RA is currently on show at the Staatsgalerie, Pointy Town, as part of the exhibition “Cack-Handed Daubs Of Oil Paint Slathered On Vast Sheets Of Corrugated Cardboard”. Entry is free, on production of a handful of birdseed.

I am often asked what it was like to be borp. For example, I may be leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece at a swish sophisticated cocktail party when a fellow-guest will approach me, sometimes in a wheelchair, and say: “I’m told you were borp. I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me about that, would you?” Or I may be queueing in the post office to buy a postage stamp or two, when the person behind me, sometimes on crutches, will tap me on the shoulder and say: “I could tell by looking at the back of your head that you were borp. What was it like?” Every so often, I am asked in writing, usually in a crabbed and barely legible hand.

I wish I could say that I try to give a full and frank answer. I wish I could say I responded, at least, politely. But I do not.

My usual tactic is to gibber like unto a monkey, toss my not so golden locks, what’s left of them, and execute a little pirouette. I then remove from my blazer pocket a crucifix, kiss it, and set it on fire with my Ignitofab lighter.

As Perkins run through with a rapier, so Himmelfarb bewildered in the gloaming. There are things fit only for the ears of those who dwell in Cretin Town. Was it Browning who wrote about “the bough of cherries some officious fool / Broke in the orchard”? There are no fools in my orchard any longer. I sent them packing, one by one, from Thursday through to the following Monday, yes, even on the Lord’s Day I chased a fool from my orchard, by dint of borp.

Wish me Godspeed, and count the circle of toads, for borp is borp and shall ever be as never be in witlessness and pox.

Why do fools fall in love? It is a question that has taxed the minds of great thinkers throughout history. A notable investigation of our own era, by Lymon in 1956, was perhaps hampered by his extreme youth and that of his research assistants. It is true that some breakthroughs in the advance of human knowledge have been made by youngsters, but in matters of the heart we may prefer to rely on the doddery and decrepit, who are likely to have amassed valuable experience in the field.

Few are as doddery and decrepit as Nisbet Owlhead who, it is thrilling to learn, is at long last on the brink of publishing his findings. Owlhead has been working on this stuff for years, holed up in his top secret laboratory somewhere high in the Swiss Alps. Some decades ago, he provided a glimpse into his working methods in an article for The Rigorous And High-Minded Scientific Bulletin Of Lurve, reprinted here without permission:

In order to find out why fools fall in love, we must first obtain two fools. The easiest way to do this would be to go to Cretin Town and drag off the street and bundle into the back of a van the first couple of fools we encounter. So that is what I did. It is a very long way from Cretin Town to my top secret laboratory somewhere high in the Swiss Alps, so I placed both fools into an induced coma for the duration of the journey by van, train, forklift truck, ship, another forklift truck, another van, another train, and finally funicular railway.

I installed the fools in a sealed but spacious chamber designed especially for my purposes. Before bringing them out of their comas, I did a thorough investigation of their brains, prodding at them with various instruments, to ascertain the precise degree of foolishness. They were fools all right. I could not have been more pleased, so before waking them I treated myself to a slap-up dinner at The Reeking Goat, a Michelin-unstarred eaterie halfway down the mountain. The trough that night was filled with delicious pap and slops, and I mixed easily with the regular clientele of goatherds, peasants, and tubercular alpine invalids.

Back in the lab, after a post-prandial snooze and a few games of pingpong with my hunchbacked assistant, Mungo, I set to work. I injected both fools with a wake-me-up potion, and then retreated to my observation post outside the sealed chamber. After some minutes the fools, as scientifically predicted, fooled about. I was so pleased I had another slap-up dinner, another snooze, and further games of pingpong with Mungo.

On St. Valentine’s Day, I introduced into the chamber a box of chocolates. The following year, I introduced a bunch of flowers. The third and most decisive intervention came on the next St. Valentine’s Day, when I placed in the chamber a cherubic, winged, chubby, naked, curly-haired infant armed with a bow and arrow, which hovered in the air above the fools.

I have every confidence that true love will blossom within that sealed chamber, and when it does I will be ready with my scanners and bleepers and probes and buzzers and pointy things and all sorts of tiptop scientific paraphernalia you could never begin to understand. Mungo keeps it all polished to a gleam with his special rag.

Owlhead celebrated his ninetieth birthday last week with an announcement that he would publish his findings on St. Valentine’s Day 2018, or 2019, or, at a push, 2020.

Next week in this series : What becomes of the broken-hearted?

Here is another golden oldie, buried in the (temporarily hard-to-access) archives. It first appeared on the French-Canadian warbler Celine Dion’s fortieth birthday. The same day, incidentally, was the forty-sixth birthday of MC Hammer, who is frightened of hammers.

There are some questions we can answer without hesitation. Asked “what is your favourite website?”, one hundred percent of sensible people immediately shout “Hooting Yard of course!” with unhinged and hysterical enthusiasm. Similarly, when asked in which schoolbook depository they would prefer to site a sniper’s nest, an overwhelming number of would-be assassins reply “the Texas Schoolbook Depository at 411 Elm Street, Dallas, TX 75202-3317, without a doubt!” For my part, and in spite of the intervening decades, a question I can answer without even thinking is “what was your favourite weekly comic when you were tiny?” It was The Hammer Of Christ, and, within it, the strip I most adored was Buster And Radbod.

Each week, I followed the adventures of the chirpy pair with my jaw dropped and drool flowing freely down my chin, my heart and pulse rates pounding desperately. It was through Buster and Radbod that I learned to read, and I am forever in their debt.

They were, in many ways, an ill-matched fictional pair. Buster was squat, hissy, and preening, given to throwing fits and always attired in a bright yellow duffel coat and a little pointed wooden cap. He existed on a diet of chocolate swiss rolls, sprats, lettuce, and untreated milk straight from the goat. We were never given a glimpse of the goat, but it was understood that it lived in a field a short walk across the verdant hills from Buster’s house and that its name was Buttercup. Buster had more than one iron pail in which he would collect the milk, one painted red and one unpainted, and a third, extra special pail that leaked and that he was always promising to mend, but never did. Buster had too many teeth crammed inside his mouth, certainly more than a non-fictional person would have, and some of them were sharpened into fangs. He liked to sit atop a rotating plinth and spin round and round until he was sick. I was always curious as to the engine which rotated the plinth. It bore a distinct resemblance to undersea drilling equipment I had seen, either in real life or in catalogues, although of course nearly all of Buster and Radbod’s adventures took place on dry land, far from the sea. Buster was once or twice shown to be in possession of a pair of swimming trunks, they were visible in pictures of his open wardrobe, alongside a snorkel and an oxygen canister, but I cannot recall him ever wearing them. Buster had an owl as well as a goat. The owl was also called Buttercup, and Buster treated it cruelly, often pelting it with the shells of pistachio and Brazil nuts throughout the impossibly long afternoons of his idyllic fictional summertime. The owl took its revenge by regurgitating gobbets of semi-digested stoat or weasel on to Buster’s pointed wooden cap, which he would then have to rinse clean under the village spigot. Doing so was always a risky business, for lumbering in the vicinity of the village spigot was the village wrestler, a hairy brute capable of tearing an anvil in half with his great hairy hands. Luckily for Buster, the village wrestler was chained to a post next to the village spigot, and he was blind, so usually it was possible to skip nimbly out of his reach, even though, being squat, Buster was not the most nimble of cartoon characters. Indeed, he was not nimble at all. He slouched and he trudged and he often trailed one of his legs behind him, as if he were a lame child, but this was just rascality. Buster pretended to be lame to diddle small coinage from shopkeepers and the ground staff at the aerodrome, but most of them were wise to his tricks. In quite a few stories Buster and Radbod mooched around the aerodrome, trying to enter the hangars, but they were invariably stymied by one circumstance or another, be it the weather or early closing or an attack of killer bees or a rusty padlock. Once they were about to step into an unguarded and unlocked hangar when they were surprised by the ghost of Sylvia Townsend Warner and fled screaming into the hills. Other literary phantoms haunted the comic strip from time to time, for differing narrative purposes, and not always at the aerodrome. The ghost of Emily Dickinson, for example, hovers in mid-air outside the village shampooist in several frames of a particularly exciting adventure in which a toggle on Buster’s duffel coat is discovered to be a smooth round fragment from the tomb of an ancient Egyptian pharaoh. Buster hires a broom to fight off the ancient Egyptian ghouls who come to reclaim the pharaoh’s toggle. The hiring of brooms, sweeping brushes, dusters, squeegees, rags and other cleaning materials is one of Buster’s hobbies, along with bell-ringing, stamp collecting, making fluted paper cupcake cases, pelting his owl with the shells of pistachio and Brazil nuts, First World War battle re-enactments, tongue twisters, snakes and ladders, playing songs from the Fort Mudge Memorial Dump LP on the glockenspiel, churning up froth in a pail, bandage sculpture, tick tack, tacky tock, driving nails into mud idols, Subbuteo table football, poop tack clatter tack whizz, ping pong, hopping about flapping his arms, conjuring tricks, removing splinters from gashes, cardboard appreciation, amateur dramatics, pencil sharpening, scattering pins all over the place, bowling, bowls and dishes, and running a flea circus. I thought of Buster rather than Radbod as a role model. Buster had nonchalance, élan, a filthy temper, a ready wit, and peevishness. He was insouciant when one of his lungs collapsed. He smoked Gitanes. He sometimes wore his pointed wooden cap at a jaunty angle. He could hold his breath under water for several very very tense minutes. He rattled about in a fantastic old jalopy. He had ambitions to be a bargee on an extensive system of canals. He was a dab hand with a banjo, and not in a musical sense. Once, he felled the blind brute village wrestler with a simple flick of his duffel coat cuff, and afterwards had the grace to polish the blind brute village wrestler’s chain with a hired rag and his own home-made swarfega. He dazzled at cocktail parties. He spat upon hissing coals. He tiptoed from rooms with a swish of elegance. He was off on a frolic of his own.

Radbod, by contrast, was a somewhat colourless character.

Recently I learned that a complete set of The Hammer Of Christ, bound in the hide of a cloven-hooved beast of the barnyard, and containing all the adventures of Buster and Radbod, will be for sale at an auction to be held at the dilapidated Custom House by the harbour steps in the stinking seaside resort where I usually spend my holidays. I am by no stretch of the imagination an experienced auction-goer, and I have no idea how to make a bid. Do I nod, or raise an eyebrow, or hold up a pencil, or flail my arms around? I do not want to cut an idiotic figure, but nor do I want to miss the chance to get my hands on such a treasure. It is a quandary, to be sure.

Having given it much thought, I have decided to take my lead from Buster himself. In one episode of this most marvellous of comic strips, he goes to an auction at a Custom House, not unlike the auction at the Custom House I plan to attend, and, when the lot he covets comes up, he sneaks outside and, through an aperture, pumps into the auction room a fast-acting nerve gas. Or maybe it is just any old gas, I can’t quite remember. I suppose that’s something I ought to check before carrying out my nefarious plan. If I pump the wrong sort of gas through an aperture, who knows what might happen? The problem is that, just as I am ignorant of bidding protocol at auctions, I haven’t got a clue about gases. I know there are lots of different kinds of gas and that they act differently upon the people gathered in a room into which one or other of them is pumped through an aperture, but how I am to go about picking my gas is an absolute mystery. And so, for now, it shall remain, for there is much that trumps gas research in my daily round, and right now I feel, as I so often do, the call of the monkey, and I must pick nits out of my hair and shovel bananas down my throat and swing from larch to sycamore in my larch and sycamore enclosure, beyond the back garden, by the railway lines, where hooting freight trains thunder along the track carrying vast loads of pig iron to Pig Iron Town, where I have never been, and will never go, for it is far, far away, and built entirely from pig iron.

This piece first appeared in 2010. I am reposting it today for reasons which I am sure will be obvious to the woolly-brained among you.

If you are a certain type of folk singer, or vicar, or countryside rambler, you will as likely as not be wearing a jumper or sweater or pullover made of wool. It may conceivably be a polo neck. You more than anyone will know that there is good wool and there is bad wool. I would go so far as to say that, in the matter of wool, there is no middle ground, no grey area. Either the wool is good, or it is bad, and there’s an end on’t.

If your jumper or sweater or pullover has been knitted from good wool, you should count your blessings. Depending on where you live, good wool can be hard to come by. You may have had to send away to some far distant woolly apparel concern to have one of their catalogue items delivered to you through the mails, in a packet. The costs of transportation and packaging will have added to the basic price of your chosen jumper or sweater or pullover, but the outlay is justified when it is guaranteed that the knitwork was done with good wool.

But woe betide you if for some reason you are forced to wear something made from bad wool. Bad wool comes from bad sheep. They may be diseased, or repugnant, or unseemly, or all three. That does not stop unscrupulous shearers from shearing the wool from them and selling it on to equally unscrupulous wool merchants, who in turn have it processed and knitted into garments. It is both sad and astounding what reserves of human skill can be deployed into making something out of bad wool. Spotting a garment on a market stall, or for sale from the barrow of a barrow boy, it may not be immediately apparent whether the wool is good wool or bad wool. It may not even become evident when you put it on, pulling it over your head and inserting your arms and tucking it about yourself. But if it is made from bad wool it will contaminate you, as surely as night follows day. That is the thing about garb knitted from bad wool. The knitting was bad and the garb is bad, because of the bad wool. And, disporting it upon your frame, sashaying along the boulevards of your faubourg, it will make you bad too.

It is a wonder that bad wool has not been made illegal. Perhaps there are happy lands where that is the case. Is that not a pleasing thought, a happy land where all the wool is good, and none of it bad? Alas, it is an impossible dream. For there will always be bad sheep, and bad shearers, and unscrupulous merchants, and ne’er-do-well traders and barrow boys.

Hence, if you are wearing good wool, I repeat, count your blessings, count them until kingdom come, and then count them over again. And if you are wearing bad wool, reflect upon the circumstance, ask what you have done to deserve bad wool. It is likely that you have brought the bad wool upon yourself, through your own contamination, for bad attracts bad, in persons and wool as in other phenomena of the boundless universe.