Potsages [sic] are likely to remain criminally sparse for the time being. This is due to the state of my eyes, which make it something of a strain to peer at a screen and attempt to tippy-tap keys with reasonable accuracy.

Following a series of fortnightly injections of a needle directly into my eyeballs, the other day I had an assessment by the consultant, who recommended … further injections of a needle directly into my eyeballs! So that will keep me occupied in the coming weeks.

I do have some ideas skittering around in my bonce, which I shall do my best to post here if and when I am able. One such scheme is A New Life Of Christ. I intend to remain faithful to Biblical sources, while mucking about with nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, and, why not?, plot, characters, and setting. When Galilee moved to Shoeburyness … and lo!, the Lord did topple into the bottomless viper-pit of that seaside place.

One of the most fab of Boxing Day traditions is the annual gathering around the bottomless viper-pit at Shoeburyness. Forming a circle around the pit, and holding hands, the participants come dressed in motley, with trimmings of gimp passementerie. Eyes fixed steadily upon the viper-pit, they then recite passages from various works by Alain de Botton, before singing, to the accompaniment of bassoon and piccolo, “More Than A Feeling” by Boston. They then remain in silent contemplation until sunset, at which point they disperse, all except one, bent on self-obliteration, who is taken by the wrists and ankles and flung, voluntarily, into the pit.

I attended today, as I have done for countless years past, and I am pleased to report that a fine time was had by all. The sole disappointment was that, as usual, not a single viper slithered out of the bottomless pit to grace us with its vipery Boxing Day presence, dammit!

I am grateful to reader Theo Gott, who reminded me of this seasonal squib which originally appeared here six long years ago.

The television presenter Adrian Chiles read the newspaper headline Porpoises rescue Dick Van Dyke and was consumed by jealousy. Ever since he was tiny, Chiles had hankered to feature in an exciting news story alongside sea creatures, and now his thunder had been stolen by the octogenarian pretend chimney-sweep! It was too much to bear.

Yet, rather than turning his twisted mental havoc upon Dick Van Dyke, the West Bromwich Albion-supporting anchorman began to plot vengeance against the very sea creatures which until now had fascinated him. In his mania, he decided to obliterate the largest sea creature he could obtain, to obliterate it in the most disgusting way, by eating it. And he decided to make of his revenge a festive occasion, by arranging his foul dinner to take place on the day when we celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.

What demons swept through his maddened mind, to so finesse his unutterable act? Alas, no hint was given of his motives in the newspaper report which followed, in the cheaply-photocopied Weekly Cetacean News Roundup, under the headline A Whale’s Christmas In Chiles.

I am a janitor at an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. I have a bucket and a mop and a bunch of keys. Sometimes I carry a screwdriver or a wrench or a hammer. My soul glows with a tremendous, overwhelming love of Christ.

As I patrol the corridors with my bucket and mop and keys, I often find myself importuned by wannabe janitors. They dart from nooks and buttonhole me, jabbering questions about janitordom. I display excessive, some might say inhuman, patience with these intemperate pleading nitwits. Only very rarely do I smite one with my hammer.

It is often cold, cold, oh! bitterly cold in Winnipeg. In the factory, the radiators need regular bleeding. When I carry out this duty, I try to concentrate my mind on the blood of Christ, which was shed for me, and for all sinners, even for the wannabe janitors, though they know it not.

Sometimes I have to wipe the blood of a wannabe janitor from my hammer. I use an old frayed much-stained rag, which I then rinse out under a spigot and peg up to dry. I have seen the face of Christ in this rag, many times.

Though I have been the janitor for untold years, I have never actually tasted the evaporated milk made in the factory. I have a horror of semi-sweetened evaporated dairy products, by dint of a childhood trauma. There was a picnic in the Blue Forgotten Hills, and a swarm of wasps, but more than that I cannot bring myself to say.

Every now and then I might come upon a wasp when patrolling the corridors. I sink to my knees and take out my pocket catechism and I comfort myself with the sacred words. Sometimes, in spite of my prayers, I am so fearful of the wasp that I piddle in my pants. I rinse them under the spigot and peg them up alongside the blood-soaked rag. I hide in a broom cupboard to conceal my semi-nakedness until my pants are dry. On these occasions, I usually take off the rest of my clothing, so I can more readily imagine myself Adam in Eden. There is a painting of a serpent on the wall of the broom cupboard.

Nunc dimittis.

In Foff lay patches of glue strewn higgledy. Tarps billowed in a gale that was never a zephyr. There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza. Crack out the canisters of Strontium 90.

So, at any rate, says weedy poet Dennis Beerpint in his new book, Gibberish From An Unalloyed Nitwit. Interviewed by a scribbler next to a filbert hedge, the poet was at pains to punctuate his prattle with words beginning with P. But the scribbler’s tape recorder malfunctioned, so all record of what Beerpint said is lost, as lost as a flea in a jerrycan.

What we might want to know is where Foff lies, and whether there are fleas there. On the other hand, armed with an early morning pint of milk and a copy of The Daily Hammer Of Christ, we might prefer to stroll out to where the steamrollers wheeze in the dawn light, as milky as the milk in our carton, and sing wassailing songs of long ago penned by intoxicated German Fafnirs.

Beerpint’s bucket did not have a hole in it. In Foff, it rested on a shelf in his shed. His shed was precisely twenty times the size of his head. That is how you measure sheds, and huts, and cabins, and kiosks. Look at them all lined up, ordered by size, in multiples of Beerpint head measurement. Now watch as they are flattened by steamrollers.

Now dip your fingers in those patches of glue. It is glue that will hold things together.

Apologies for the lengthy silence. I’ll tell you all about it at another time. For now, in light of the passing of Leonard Cohen, here is a piece I wrote for The Dabbler five years ago.

Cohen tells us, in his song Suzanne, that “there are heroes in the seaweed”. Oh really?, I asked myself, not without a dash of skepticism, And what precisely would heroes be doing, disporting themselves in the sargassum and the kelp? Still, one does not wish to dismiss out of hand the words of a figure of such stature, so I summoned my sidekick and went to investigate.

Out by the aerodrome, we boarded a charabanc heading for the seashore, but not before arming ourselves each with a long and pointy stick. These, I explained to my somewhat dim sidekick, we would use to poke about the seaweed in search of heroes. He seemed satisfied with this intelligence, but as the charabanc gathered speed crossing the wild and windy moors, he babbled questions at me.

Which particular heroes were they, that were to be found in the seaweed? Heroes of Ancient Greece, such as Heracles and Theseus and Jason and Bellerophon? Tragic heroes such as Orestes and Oedipus and Hamlet? Byronic heroes? Guitar heroes? Boys’ Own Paper heroes? Or modern-day superheroes such as Batman and Spiderman and Unconscious Squirrel!, The Unconscious Squirrel? Or would we find, entangled in the seaweed, representatives of all these types of hero, and more? And were they trapped in the seaweed, struggling heroically to escape from it, or had they made it their natural habitat, nesting in it, as it were, even perhaps feeding off it?

I was fairly sure Cohen had not addressed these questions in his song, but to be on the safe side I decided to listen to it again. Pointing out of the charabanc window at a flock of starlings to distract my sidekick’s attention and shut him up, I jammed into my ears the tiny headphones of my iLeonard and pressed “play”. Precisely three minutes and forty-nine seconds later, I removed the headphones and turned to my sidekick, who was still staring out of the window, mouth open, dribbling, though the starlings had long vanished, and the only bird visible in the sky was a lone lark, or it might have been a swift or even an avocet. I know nothing of ornithology.

“Cohen does not expand upon his assertion,” I said, “So we shall have to poke about with our long pointy sticks and see what we shall see. First, though, I think we are both in need of refreshments, so we shall stop at the seaside kiosk for some tea and oranges that come all the way from China.”

My sidekick was happy with this suggestion, and he grinned. It is never a pretty sight, so I closed my eyes. Earlier that day I had climbed a whole mountainside to wash my eyelids in the rain, which had puffed me out something awful, and no sooner were my eyes shut than I fell into a snooze.

When I woke the charabanc was parked in a lay-by at the seashore. I was the only passenger still aboard. Even my sidekick had gone. I disembarked and made my way to the kiosk, where I was sure I would find him stuffing his gob with Chinese oranges. The kiosk was bolted and shuttered, but by following a trail of spilt tea and strips of Chinese orange peel I soon tracked down my sidekick. He was squelching about in a tide pool, poking his long pointy stick into it.

“Have you speared any heroes?” I called.

“Nope,” he replied, “Just sculpins and killifish and blennies and yellow spongefish and sea stars and sea cucumbers and sea urchins and sand shrimps and lobsters and crabs and hermit crabs and green-lined shore crabs and barnacles and nudibranchs and chitons and mussels and scallops and abalones and limpets and snails. Oh, and a sea anemone.”

“No sign at all of Orde Wingate or Captain James T Kirk, to pluck but two heroes at random?”

“Nope.”

I went to sit on a slimy boulder. It occurred to me that heroes might be more likely to swim about in the open sea, festooned with seaweed like mermaids. We would have to hire a rowing-boat to extend our quest. It also occurred to me that it would be cheaper, and far less tiresome, to conclude that Cohen had no idea what he was talking about.

“Come, sidekick,” I called, “Throw away your long pointy stick and let us catch the charabanc home before darkness falls.”

And so we did, but we never made it home. For long before we reached the bus stop by the aerodrome, the charabanc driver killed the lights in a lonely lane and an ape with angel glands erased the final wisps of pain with the music of rubber bands.

In order to fully appreciate (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, a song written and recorded by The Clash in 1978, we must get a firm grasp upon the words in the title. Before we do so, let me be quite clear that I am going to pay no attention whatsoever to the parentheses. In my view – and I grant that I may be in error here – placing “White Man” in parentheses is a mere affectation, and has no significance whatsoever. The truth of this can be underlined by removing the parentheses and judging if it makes any difference. Thus, (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais, or – pfft!, there!, gone! – White Man In Hammersmith Palais. I challenge anybody to insert a very very thin thing, like a cigarette paper, between the two. We may now press on, indomitably.

White. What do we mean by white? Is it a colour or, as some would have it, the absence of colour? The white of an egg – the albumen – is more translucent than white, in its raw state. But fry the egg, in a pan, and voila!, it is indeed white. By the way, it would be a mistake to infer from this that all fried things are white. Most are not.

To gain a sense of overwhelming whiteness, it is well worth reading the closing passages of The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket by Edgar Allan Poe. If you read it while drinking a glass of milk, the effect of whiteness will be redoubled. If, in addition, you tip the entire contents of a tub of talcum powder over your head and look up from your book, from time to time, into a mirror, you will be left in no doubt about what white means.

Next, Man. Man is the male of the species homo sapiens. In most cases, he is a biped, but not invariably. For example, Ian Anderson, the front man – man! – of the band Jethro Tull, prefers to stand on one leg when playing his flute. He is thus, at least temporarily, a monopod.

What else can we say, usefully, about a man? Well, for one thing, we can differentiate between types of men (plural) by placing a qualifying adjective before “man”. This might be in the form of prefix jammed up against “man”, with no space between, as for example “Frenchman” or “postman”, or it might be a discrete, separate, interchangeable word, as in “grunty man” or “stricken man”.

Off the coast of England there is a place called the Isle of Man, but we had better avoid that, particularly as its flag is a triskelion of three armoured legs. That is one and a half standard issue bipedal men, or three Jethro Tull flautists, the thought of which begins to dizzy the brain.

In we can dispatch fairly rapidly. It is a short word indicating that something is contained within something else, for example the talcum powder was in the tub before we upended it over our head. Now, the talcum powder is no longer in the tub. It really is as simple as that. Just be careful not to confuse in with inn. The latter is a tavern or hostelry. If a man enters one, parched and thirsty and covered in talcum powder, he is said to be in an inn. Conversely, if he engages in fisticuffs with another customer, because he is teased for being covered in talcum powder, he risks being thrown out of the inn. The chances of this happening are more likely if, in the inn, he drinks a sufficient quantity of beer to be in his cups. This does not mean he is literally inside a cup, or several cups, as the plural suggests. It is a figure of speech.

We are not going to go further down the road of figures of speech, because quite frankly it is exasperating enough having to explain all this stuff to you, just so you can grasp fully the title of a punk single from almost forty years ago. I have better things to do with my time. So let us wrap this up as soon as we can.

Hammersmith. This is a proper name, referring to an area of London. London is usually pronounced Lund’n, but for amusement’s sake it is better pronounced as it looks, with the two “on”s equally stressed as if one were saying the word on. This is particularly the case when responding to queries from tourists vacantly wandering the streets of London. Now, natives of London may well pronounce Hammersmith as Ammersmiff, depending on their social class. As the son of a globe-trotting Foreign Office diplomat, Joe Strummer, the front man of The Clash, would have been brought up to say Hammersmith rather than Ammersmiff.

Incidentally, I hope I did not give the impression, earlier, that all front men in bands stand on one leg while playing the flute. That is true of Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. So far as I know, it is not true of Joe Strummer of The Clash. But again, I grant that I may be wrong, and if any readers can provide photographic evidence to the contrary I will be happy to issue a correction.

You will note that Hammersmith is a conjunction of two words, hammer and smith. A smith might use a hammer when beating, say, a horseshoe into the required shape at his anvil. Once upon a time this was so widely practised a trade that Smith is a common surname, Hammer less so. Instances of the former are too numerous to mention, though we can give one-time Wimbledon champion Stan Smith as an example. As for the latter, we might note the American hip hoppist M C Hammer, a man who has reportedly confessed to a fear of hammers. As with Strummer, Hammer is not known for monopodal flute-playing.

At last, and not before time, we come to Palais. You will recall, in our discussion of Man, above, that we mentioned a Frenchman. It so happens that a Frenchman says palais where his English equivalent would say palace. Usually, a palace or palais is the sort of building inhabited by the likes of Prince Fulgencio. Hammersmith Palais, or Ammersmiff Palace, is, or was, not that kind of palace. Rather, it was a place where young persons would gather en masse in a sort of mosh pit and disport themselves in an often ungainly manner while listening to loud music or, as some might have it, a godawful racket. There was at least one occasion when Prince Fulgencio himself left his palace, or palais, to enter a mosh pit, where he galumphed about in the presence of a band of troubadours led by a man standing on one leg playing a flute. But that is a tale for another time.

It is to be hoped that you now have a greater understanding of (White Man) In Hammersmith Palais by The Clash. Next week, we shall examine I Close My Eyes And Count To Ten by Dusty Springfield. For your preparatory homework, please read Dobson’s pamphlet Arithmetic For The Blind (out of print).

You can count on the fingers of one, deformed, hand the number of ornithologists who have paid serious attention to the clay pigeon. This is rather surprising, as it is a highly unusual bird. Unlike most birds, the clay pigeon has neither feathers, nor talons, nor a beak. It is flightless, and inanimate. Uniquely in the avian kingdom, it is disc-shaped, and made of clay.

In view of this neglect, the reissue of a classic text is most welcome. All due praise, then, to the Circular Ceramic Bird Press for its recent publication of The Clay Pigeon : Its Migration Patterns, Nesting Habits, And Terrible Attrition Rate Caused By Shooting, written by the wild man of ornithology, Walter Mad, originally issued in 1926, on the eve of the General Strike.

The new edition is a facsimile, down to the last detail, including those endpapers which caused such a fuss and were eventually to lead, by all sorts of weird and eerie twists and turns, to the Hindenburg disaster on 6 May 1937. Let it be clear, once and for all, that Walter Mad played no part in that dreadful event, and was nowhere near Naval Air Station Lakehurst in New Jersey at the time. Yes, yes, his brother Wilfred was there, and they were identical twins, and there is certain photographic evidence, and one or two sworn affidavits, and the compelling testimony of Flossie Pilbrow, the noted spirit medium who perished aboard the flame-engulfed airship and later sent telepathic messages from the beyond, but even when you add all these things up, and take into account eye-witness statements and the so-called “peevish bus conductor’s bombshell”, there remains scarcely a shred of evidence to connect Walter Mad with the disaster.

Better that we remember him for his excellent book on the clay pigeon, even if much of it is ludicrous twaddle that no proper ornithologist has ever taken seriously. But what do proper ornithologists know, eh? Most of them cannot tell a nightjar from a stonechat, especially in cases where both the nightjar and the stonechat have been modelled in clay by tiptop bird ceramicists.

God give me strength.

It is sometimes appropriate to signal a want of sausages in semaphore. For example, you might find yourself sausageless in the middle of a desolate plain, some sort of Biblical wilderness, ravenous for sausages but, happily, in possession of two brightly-coloured flags. If you have a smattering of semaphore, and a broad knowledge of sausage types, it should not be beyond your wit to signal your want of sausages, using the flags, to a distant passer-by. Whether this passer-by will be able to satisfy your sausagelust is, of course, quite another matter.

We should also take into account the very distinct possibility that such a signalling is beyond your wit – in short, that you are witless, or, if not entirely witless, then a halfwit. Standing about in the middle of a plain with a couple of flags yet bereft of sausages is the sort of behaviour we might expect from a halfwit.

Halfwits and dunderpates are not the best people when it comes to accurate and reliable semaphore signals. Indeed, they can become so muddle-headed in their attempts to deploy a pair of flags according to a well-established code that their message is likely to be gibberish. This will leave the distant passer-by scratching their head in confusion and deciding to continue on their stroll, along the edge of the plain, perhaps Luneburg Heath, with their dog in tow.

Most dogs can sniff out sausages with bewildering acuity. There are even some dogs known as “sausage dogs”. It can all become very complicated, especially if you are a halfwit.