There was a happy conjunction of words in the Guardian crossword the other day. When solved, the leftmost column on the grid read ANDORRAN VANDAL. Remarkably, these were precisely the words which appeared, in the form of punched-out holes, on the small piece of dun cardboard spat out by the Hooting Yard Analogue Topic Generating Machine, a piece of gubbins I had knocked up for me by a boffin.

Most writers will tell you that the question they are most often asked is “where do you get your ideas from?”Most writers will also tell you that it is a brain-numbingly stupid question to which there is no pat answer. But I have no difficulty answering it. For many years now, I have not had to summon a single idea in my head. Instead, what happens is that a variety of arcane and abstruse data is fed into the Hooting Yard Analogue Topic Generating Machine and, after humming and buzzing for a while, it spits out a small piece of dun cardboard on which is punched out a word or, more often, a few words, thus providing me with my topic and freeing me from the tedium of having to think of anything myself.

So remarkable was the coincidence of my given topic being replicated, exactly, in the Guardian crossword, that I fell out of my chair. How often does that actually happen in real life? But I did, I toppled from my chair and lay sprawled on the carpet, dribbling. After some minutes, I realised that this was a far more comfortable position than sitting in the chair, so I stayed put. The only drawback was that my pencil and paper were up on the desk, and I could not reach them. Still, it was very restful on the floor, so I dozed off. That is why nothing appeared here, on that day, about the ANDORRAN VANDAL, nor indeed has anything appeared here for several days in a row. I have become regrettably enamoured of lying on the floor, dribbling and dozing.

Had I the pep to tell you about the ANDORRAN VANDAL, you would learn that this was a sobriquet once given to Babinsky 2, the idiot half-brother of the lumbering walrus-moustached serial killer Babinsky. Babinsky 2 earned the name during a period in which he went rampaging around Andorra smashing up telephone kiosks and daubing ruderies upon road signs. He dressed in full Andorran national costume while so engaged, and was thus mistaken for a native of that mountainous land.

Further details can be found in a footnote on page 841 of A Thick, Chunky History of Vandalism in Andorra, From 1554 Up To Last Thursday (Spurious Tomes, 2016).

Yesterday, I noted that Elspeth, a character in the soap opera These Plastic Betrayals, was undone by foxgloves. This prompted a letter from Dr Ruth Pastry.

Dear Mijnheer Key, she writes, presuming me to be a Dutchman for reasons best known to herself, I could not help noticing that in the latest episode of These Plastic Betrayals, Elspeth is undone by foxgloves. Now, I yield to no one in the sheer intensity of my admiration for your sure grasp of just about everything in the known universe – with the obvious exception of ornithology, of which you are quite dramatically ignorant – but I must confess as I read these words I spat out my lukewarm vitamin-enhanced milk ‘n’ Lucozade pep drink, all over the tablecloth, embroidered, as it so happens, with a design of foxgloves, by the noted tablecloth designer Dot Foxglovecloth.

Certain other details in the episode, such as vinegar dusks, and stunned nightingales plummeting from rooftops, have the unmistakeable stamp of verisimilitude, of actual phenomena in an actual world actually occurring. But to be undone by foxgloves? Come, come, Mijnheer Key, this strikes me, and I am sure many others, as a fancy born of an overheated brain. I think you would be well advised to go and lie down in a darkened room with a cold compress upon your forehead, and perhaps a cassette recording of sounds designed to encourage relaxation, such as the songs of whales, the breeze rustling through a clump of aspens, or Aleister Crowley invoking the Great God Pan.

Yours more in sorrow than in actuality, Dr Ruth Pastry

It is always a pleasure to hear from Dr Pastry, and I usually reread her letters several times before adding them to the bundle, tied with pink ribbon, which I keep in a cardboard box underneath my sink. On this occasion, however, I tossed the letter aside after a single reading, and am minded to set fire to it later, after I have set out on my very own Quest For Fire, babbling in an artificial primitive language devised by the late Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess.

Dr Pastry will, I hope, forgive me for asserting that she has no idea what she is talking about, whereas I, as always, do. Unlike Dr Pastry, I have scoured the literature, and found innumerable – innumerable! – instances, particularly in soap operas, of characters being undone by foxgloves, unhinged by petunias, and unmanned by primroses. I cannot actually provide any concrete examples here and now, obviously, because I have far better things to do with my time, such as going on a Quest For Fire, and eating my breakfast, and gazing disconsolately out of the window at the crows on the lawn in the rain, and it may well be that I have not really scoured the literature and not really found any examples of floral undoing, or unhingement, or unmanning, whatever that latter might mean, and my claim to have done so is but the product of an overheated brain, but let us not forget that in the country of the Swiss roll, the roll is Swiss.

Now, if somebody will hand me a megaphone, I will shout my head off from a vantage point on a promontory looking out over the vast wet hysterical sea, and I shall frighten the fish and the dolphins and the plankton and the krill, and I shall awake the Kraken!

These plastic betrayals, oh how they discomfit me. Harken, child, harken. Elspeth is keening next to the ha-ha, undone, again, by foxgloves, again. Of Hubert, the verbal mash is clogged, as if by butter unclarified. The child preens near the fort.

They are taking a heronry census. Noddy’s cap snagged on a twig. Elspeth miscounted the bobbins. Of Hubert, oh Hubert!, where is he in that mosh pit? A flock of seagulls might pass unnoticed before the gong is sounded for supper.

The clairvoyant, Hetty, wears night-vision goggles. The child’s toffee apple lies untouched on the windowsill. Elspeth has come unstrung. Of Hubert, dear Hubert, word comes of bathtub gin. They count the herons again, using tally sticks.

What will become of this parcel of land? Soil ne’er smelled so soily. They gathered around the box to watch Blunkett weeping, again. The grain of his voice is tape-damaged. Elspeth drops her empty teacup on the rug. The child genuflects. Of Hubert, silly old Hubert, no angels wassail.

These vinegar dusks tug me to The Clappers. Hetty is up in the tower. The distant Carpathians shimmer. A dog returns to its vomit. Elspeth, and poor Hubert, and the child, pore over photographs. Blunkett in extremis. Hubert’s weasel moustache.

The doctor is coming, on his bicycle. Stunned nightingales plummet from the rooftops. Now the child wails for a choc ice. These iron nostrums, oh how they break us. The box in the corner has collapsed like a pudding. Harken. Harken, to the lovely gunshots.

Breakfast, the next day, veered from egg to herring. The copper came with his truncheon. Hetty’s garb was polka-dotted. They awaited the final heronry count. Pips were spat into the empty grate. Blunkett seemed a distant memory. Wolves circled the grange.

There will be no further episodes of this shabby soap opera. There was a damning review in The Slop Bucket. “Incoherent gibberish from first to last.” And – pffft! – it is swept away and gone.

At a loose end, I signed up for Pilbeam’s Crash-Course in the Imitation of Christ. Earlier in the day, plodding through the streets, I had been given a leaflet. The hawker who handed it to me was a person of regrettable grubbiness, and some of his filth inevitably besmirched the leaflet, which was smudged, with the effect that I misread The Imitation of Christ as The Imitation of Chris.

Chris who?, I wondered, hoping that Pilbeam was taking an overfamiliar tone with regard to the actor Christopher Plummer. It so happened that I was wearing a Tyrolean jacket not unlike the one sported by Plummer in his career-defining role as Captain Von Trapp in the film version of The Sound of Music. Dressed so, I felt I would have an excellent chance of crashing through the crash course and perhaps winning a plaudit or two.

Alas, a falling raindrop washed away the smudge and I realised the course was about Christ rather than Christopher Plummer. Still, I was, as I said, at a loose end, so I headed for the hall where the course was to be held, and I signed up.

Throng and hubbub packed the hall, but I found an empty seat and sat down. Soon enough, a fellow I assumed to be Pilbeam appeared on a dais at the front. The first thing he said was “I am not Pilbeam”

Had I been lured here under false pretences? The speaker cut a pale and widdershins figure and was almost as grime-splattered as the hawker in the street. It may even have been the same man, no doubt a rascal. But I had nothing better to do, so I continued to sit and listen.

“I am sorry to say that Pilbeam is not able to be with us today. He has been incapacitated by Mitteleuropean pig flu, and has asked me to deputise for him. While I would never make so bold as to compare myself to Pilbeam, please be assured that you are in good hands. I have spent many years studying under Pilbeam, eating from the same table, having my hair cut at the same barber’s, with the same pair of scissors, and wearing the same size shoes, like Beckett and Joyce. My name is Lars, rather than Pilbeam, but I can say truthfully that I am the next best thing to Pilbeam when it comes to delivering this crash course.

“So let us turn now to the crash course itself, the aim of which is to furnish you with the skills necessary to imitate Christ. As it is a crash course, we will not be seeking to imitate Christ in every particular. If we tried that” – he chuckled – “we would become so Christ-like there would be a risk of blasphemy. Far better, according to Pilbeam’s precepts, to imitate Christ in a limited way, enough for us to benefit and to become holier than we are, but not so much that we threaten the unique and ineffable goodness of Christ Our Lord Himself.

“I trust you are all keeping up. Excellent. In what way, then, shall we imitate Christ? You will all, I hope, be familiar with the story of the Gadarene swine. It is to be found in all three of the Synoptic Gospels, in Matthew 8 : 28-32, in Mark 5 : 1-13, and in Luke 8 : 26-33. Briefly put, a poor man possessed by demons begs Christ to release him from his torment. Christ duly casts the demons out of the man, and into some nearby pigs, which thereupon go rushing headlong into the sea, and drown. Certain details differ in the three accounts, but that is the general idea.

“Now, Pilbeam states that we can imitate Christ by driving a herd of pigs into the sea, or indeed into any large body of water. We need not worry our little heads about finding a man possessed by demons, and all that hullabaloo. For our purposes, we take a crash course shortcut by imagining we have cast the demons out of the man and into the pigs, and we simply goad the pigs into the water and make damn sure none of them manages to make it back to shore. The important thing, in accurately imitating Christ, is drowning the pigs. Any questions?”

I put up my hand.

“In your opening remarks,” I piped up, when pointed at, “You said that Pilbeam could not be with us because he is suffering from Mitteleuropean pig flu. Could it be that this whole crash course is his way of exacting vicarious revenge upon the flu-ridden pigs he blames for his condition?”

There were several gasps from the audience. Lars paused, menacingly, before responding.

“Seldom,” he roared, eventually, “Seldom have I ever heard so vile a calumny! O, vile!, vile!, the calumny you have committed upon poor saintly bed-ridden Mitteleuropean pig flu-ridden Pilbeam, that paragon among crash course tutors in the Imitation of Christ! How dare you, sir, how dare you?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “It was just a passing thought, that was all.”

Lars seemed mollified, if only slightly.

“There is a fourth, apocryphal version of the story of the Gadarene swine,” he said, “In Pilbeam 6 : 42-51. Here, after driving the pigs into the sea, Christ has his henchmen – sorry, Apostles – attack the man from whom demons have been cast out, beating him insensible with spades and shovels before injecting his bruised and battered body with a virulent strain of Mitteleuropean pig flu and then abandoning him on a remote atoll far, far out at sea. Usually we do not attempt to enact the Pilbeam version on this crash course, for want of a volunteer, but on this occasion we shall take great pleasure in doing so.”

And Lars clapped his hands and summoned his Apostles – sorry, henchmen – and they dragged me out of the hall and off towards a coastal pig farm, and the vast, wet, unforgiving sea.

In the United States, during the 1950s, people often found Communists hiding under their beds. That this was a common phenomenon is clear from the historical record. There are numerous contemporary accounts, of which the following is a typical example. It comes from a letter written to his local newspaper by a solid citizen in one of the Midwestern states.

One day last week, just after turning in for the night and settling down to sleep, I became aware of a rustling noise under my bed. I was far too tired to get up, so, taking my torch from the bedside table, I leaned right over and, with my head upside down, shone the torch under the bed. I was startled to see, lying on the floor, an urbane and stylishly-dressed man who had about him something of the air of an important State Department diplomat. He was faffing about with bits of microfilm.

“Who the hell are you and what are you doing hiding under my bed?” I cried.

“Oh, good evening,” he replied, in the cultured voice of an East Coast Mandarin, “I’m so sorry to disturb you. Allow me to introduce myself. Hiss, Alger Hiss. This is a fine piece of carpet, by the way, very comfortable.”

While he was saying this, he was hurriedly stuffing the bits of microfilm into the pockets of his expensive jacket to conceal them.

“I’m pleased you like my carpet,” I said, “But you haven’t explained what you are doing under my bed.”

Alger Hiss ignored my question and took from an inside pocket of his expensive jacket a pamphlet, which he thrust at me.

“I wonder if I might interest you in this pamphlet,” he said, “It gives a Marxist-Leninist perspective on the current crisis and is well worth reading, should you wish to remove the imperialist blinkers from your eyes.”

“I’m not one for bookish learning,” I said.

“Well, it’s a pamphlet rather than a book. Perhaps you could leave it on your bedside table and pick it up later.”

“Perhaps,” I said, but at that point Alger Hiss unleashed upon me a strange bright-eyed gaze of fiendish Communist hypnotic power, and I promptly fell into a deep, deep, and troubled sleep. When I woke up, he was gone, and there was no sign he had ever been there, save for the pamphlet on the bedside table, which I handed over to my local FBI agent for analysis.

Although we have many similar accounts, what has been lacking to date is counter testimony from Communists themselves, explaining what they hoped to achieve by hiding under beds. All the more welcome, then, is a new book by the pseudonymous “Agent X”. It is entitled Why I Spent Much Of The 1950s Hiding Under The Beds Of Solid Citizens, and is a rollicking good read, or at least it would be were it not padded out with lengthy passages of indigestible Marxist dialectic and incoherent socio-economic blathering. I have extracted the key passage so you do not need to read the whole thing.

I received instructions from Yuri, my Moscow handler, that I was to be a “sleeper”. Unfortunately, the microfilm bearing his message was damaged by pigeons, and it was not entirely clear to me how I was to proceed. Sleeping seemed to be the gist of it, however, and my faith in the Party was unshakeable, so I did not question how useful this would be in fomenting the great proletarian revolution and bringing the hated capitalist United States to its knees. Instead, I found a darkened room with a bed in it and lay me down to sleep.

But something was not right, and I soon realised what it was. The bourgeois comforts of mattresses and pillows and blankets were a terrible distraction, classic techniques of the degenerate system to lull me into false consciousness – or, in this case, false unconsciousness. I eschewed them, and lay down instead in the dark, on the floor, under the bed. Soon enough, word got out among my fellow spies, and we were all at it. Happy days!

Some of these “sleepers” were so fanatical, and so devoted to the cause, that a quarter of a century after the fall of the Soviet empire there are still thought to be several Communists hiding under beds in the American Midwest. Solid citizens, be on your guard!

For this recipe, I read, you will require a bag of frozen crinkle-cut oven chips, six cans of Squelcho!, a turnip, a parsnip, a punnet of Carlsbad plums, and the head of a pre-slaughtered pig.

So I went to the shops and bought a bag of frozen crinkle-cut oven chips, six cans of Squelcho!, a turnip, a parsnip, and a punnet of Carlsbad plums. Obtaining the head of a pre-slaughtered pig proved more difficult. Not one among the parade of shops I frequented had any such thing in stock. The butcher’s, which was my best hope, had its shutters down, and a scribbled sign posted on the shutters announcing closure due to rampant infectious disease, though it did not specify whether this referred to the butcher himself or to his supply of meat.

Sitting on a municipal bench, eating one of the Carlsbad plums, I wondered if I might make a vegetarian version of the dish, using a pig’s head fashioned from marzipan. But my skills as a sculptor or moulder have atrophied since the heady days of my youth at the Institute For Sculpting And Moulding, and I was not convinced my efforts with marzipan would yield anything that looked remotely akin to the head of a pig, By the time I had eaten a second Carlsbad plum, it was clear to me that I would have to go in search of a pre-slaughtered pig and remove its head.

It is surprisingly difficult, in this day and age, to find a dead pig in a small town. I wandered into the countryside, keeping my eyes peeled, peering into bogs and ditches. This proving fruitless, I made my way to the top of a bluff, from where I could see for miles around. The climb was onerous, and when I reached the summit I was thirsty, so I opened one of the cans of Squelcho! and downed it in a single glug.

Gazing out across the countryside, I shouted “Dead pig! Dead pig! Come out, come out, wherever you are!”

I hoped, by this means, to coax into view a peasant, pushing a wheelbarrow in which rested a pre-slaughtered pig. Such a sight is not uncommon in the countryside, or so I am given to understand from my reading of various bucolic texts. In the pauses between my repeated shoutings, I fell to wondering – if an urban person could be urbane, was there an equivalent countryside quality, in which a rustic person could be rustice? I had no opportunity to find out, for after an hour or so atop the bluff, not a single peasant had appeared.

The day was hot, and I noticed that my bag of frozen crinkle-cut oven ships was almost entirely thawed. I was also conscious that I had depleted my stocks of both Carlsbad plums and Squelcho! Unless I returned home in haste, I would end up consuming all the non-pig’s head ingredients for the recipe, and my day would be wasted.

I skittered down from the bluff, like a gambolling lamb, and headed back through the fields of muck towards town. All the while I was racking my brains trying to think of an acceptable substitute for the pre-slaughtered pig’s head. What did I have in my cupboard? Pink wafer biscuits? Peas? A bowl of fayooz? A jar of pickles? Several contaminated cocktail sausages? Blubber? Somehow none of these seemed quite right, nor even remotely suitable. If I was to vary the recipe, then the least I could do was to use something’s head.

By now I was nearing town, so I looked around me with fresh eyes. All I had to do was to spot a living creature, seize it, slaughter it, remove its head, and pop the head into my pippy bag along with the bag of now unfrozen crinkle-cut oven chips, the turnip, the parsnip, and what was left of the cans of Squelcho! and the Carlsbad plums – both further depleted on account of peckishness and thirst during my long countryside trudge.

There were plenty of creepy-crawlies to be seen, but their tiny, tiny heads were hardly fit for purpose. Just as I was losing hope, I came upon a pond, at the edge of which a toad was flopping about. With a cry of inhuman savagery, I fell upon it, seized it, and strangled it. Then I bit off the head, spat it out, wrapped it in a sheet of greaseproof paper I happened to have in my pippy bag, and carried it home. I would not be able to follow the recipe with one hundred percent accuracy, but I felt confident that I could knock together a toothsome supper.

Alas, I did not consider that the toad I pre-slaughtered might be one of those toads that is highly toxic, But so it was. As I write these words, I am shaking violently, sweating, vomiting, and my own head has swelled to twice its usual size. I fear that what I tucked in to, an hour ago, after an exciting time at the chopping board, will prove to be my Last Supper.

One of the incidental pleasures of reading the long-forgotten memoirs of obscure figures from our island history is to stumble upon fleeting mentions of that gruesome ogre of children’s nightmares, the Grunty Man. All of us, I think, can recall the shiver that ran down our spine when we sat at mama’s knee and she read to us tales of the fearsome Grunty Man, lurking in his cave and occasionally emerging into the light to grunt and grunt and lay waste the earth and grunt some more. Now we are grown we can look back with fondness on this loathsome fantastical creature, safe in the knowledge that he never really existed … or did he?

The other day, I was reading the long-forgotten memoirs of an obscure figure in our island history, the expatriate Hollander Joost Van Dongelbraacke. It is an unfathomably dull book, or I should say books, for Van Dongelbraacke managed to eke seven fat closely-printed volumes from what was, by any measure, a fairly uneventful life. I love this stuff and could read it until the cows come home. I was about half-way through volume three when, to my delight and consternation, I came upon this passage:

At luncheon that day I ate a goodly amount of My Lady Kent’s Pudding, but it had not been sufficiently boiled, or perhaps it had been boiled for too long, for shortly after digesting my third bowl-ful I suffered the most terrible mortification of the bowels and had to be carried from my place by the servants and deposited on an an ottoman in the smoking room where I moaned weakly and cursed heaven. Thereafter, to make recompense, when I was able to move I repaired to my private chapel and offered orisons to the Almighty that he might spare me from the horrors inflicted by skittish cooks.

I then determined to berate said cook, and had her summoned from the pantry, only to be told she was not to be found there. I strongly suspected her of being involved in unseemly canoodling with Mr Snippage, the gardener, and so I pulled on my out of doors boots and went striding through the grounds, past the filbert hedges and towards the ha-ha, where Snippage had his hut. While I was walking thus, waving my stick, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the Grunty Man, darting between the elms.

When I reached the hut I banged my fist on the door, hoping to disturb the gardener and the cook. But there was no response, and when I opened the door to peer inside, I found the hut was empty. My mood was now tempestuous, so on my way back to the house I berated one of the estate peasants who was pushing a wheelbarrow full of dead toads from one pond to another. Shouting my head off did me the world of good.

Back in the house, I settled in the library and spent a profitable hour reading a collection of sermons by Parson Freakpit. Outside the sky was louring and there were hints of English drizzle. I closed the book and thought longingly of the canals of my homeland. These thoughts were interrupted by a servant who came to inform me that the cook and Mr Snippage had been seen boarding the mail coach heading for the coast. I cursed heaven once again, kicked the servant all the way along the corridor, and, feeling a renewed mortification of the bowels, shut myself in the Thunder Box until it was time for supper.

For supper that day I ate a goodly amount of My Lady Kent’s Pudding.

Binder’s first piano concerto had no piano part and was not a concerto. There was a piano in the second piano concerto but it was out of tune. The third piano concerto was deafening. The fourth gave Binder the heebie jeebies. Binder’s fifth, or the sixth as it is usually called, was performed in a submarine. Let us draw a veil over the sixth, by which I mean the sixth proper, rather than the fifth, with which it is often confused, performed as it is in a submarine. The seventh is that rare thing, a godawful din. Binder’s eighth, ninth, and tenth piano concertos are audible only to dogs. The eleventh features an electronically modified cat. No animals were harmed in the composition of the twelfth, but the score for the thirteenth piano concerto calls for the ritual slaughter of several otters. The fourteenth is pithy. The fifteenth is punchy. The sixteenth was dedicated to Stalin. The seventeenth is a carbon copy of the ninth. Piano Concerto No. 18 is so vivid it makes grown men weep and grown women have an attack of the vapours. The nineteenth has the charm of a sausage. The twentieth, the brilliant twentieth, is rudderless. Rudders, snapped off boats, are repeatedly and relentlessly bashed on the keyboard during the twenty-first. The twenty-second is popular in prisons. The twenty-third is full of grace. The twenty-fourth was used in a toothpaste advert. The twenty-fifth was written atop an important, stationary mountain. The twenty-sixth is fishy. Binder’s twenty-seventh is his longest piano concerto, a full performance lasting several years. The twenty-eighth consists of a single note, of the performer’s choosing, plinked twice and plonked once. The twenty-ninth is lost. The thirtieth is hidden. The thirty-first tugs at the heart-strings. The manuscript of the thirty-second is rolled up and stuffed into a jam jar, and there is still jam in the jar. The thirty-third is all that the thirty-second is not. The thirty-fourth gallops along like a horse. The thirty-fifth slithers like a worm. Binder said of the thirty-sixth piano concerto “de gustibus non est disputandum”. Raindrops kept falling on Binder’s head while he was writing the thirty-seventh. The thirty-eighth is a biography of Christopher Plummer imagined as a piano concerto. The thirty-ninth steers its way through choppy waters towards an island where brutes disport themselves in wild abandon before sinking into the sea.

Once upon a time there was a little Italian boy made out of wood. He wore a pointy hat, also wooden. In this age of grand illusion, he walked into my life out of my dreams, and forced his way into my scheme of things. This was somewhat unnerving, for it is not an everyday occurrence to find oneself in thrall to a wooden boy. But enthralled I was, to the point where the tables were turned and I tried to fit in with his scheme of things.

In order to do so, I felt I needed to gain a better understanding of what it was like to be made of wood. So I drove to the forest in a Japanese car. I parked at the edge, by a pond, and then I walked deep into the forest and stood there, pretending to be a tree, a pine or an elm. At first I was fidgety, but as the hours passed I found it easier to stand perfectly still, as if I were wooden. I swayed slightly in the breeze.

The little Italian boy made of wood had not followed me to the forest, for he could not drive. I wondered what he was up to, back in my chalet, perched on the edge of a glacier. It was a wooden chalet, so it suited him well, better, in fact, than it suited me. I felt so at home in the forest. Oh I so wanted to sprout leaves and buds!

Several months passed before I was forced to admit that I could not fit in to his scheme of things and that I was not, nor ever would be. made out of wood. I trudged back through the forest towards the pond where I had parked the Japanese car. It had been stolen. I sat on a tuffet next to the pond and I pondered. Pondering by a pond, not made of wood. The sky was immense and immensely blue.

It was a small mercy that I did not know the little wooden Italian boy was a delinquent rascal, and had burned down my chalet the instant I screeched away in my Japanese car. And yet the world keeps turning. That, after all, is in the scheme of things, whether one is wooden or – let us be plain – not wooden, not wooden at all, neither pine nor elm nor any of the other types of wood. They all burn.

The Paradox of Tarleton’s Pebble is a famous, or infamous, conundrum. It was first posed, not by Tarleton himself, but by his valet, the dwarf Crepusco. Legend has it that Crepusco crept into the room where Tarleton was hosting a swish and sophisticated cocktail party attended by various mountaineers, polar explorers, flappers, Jesuits, toad-headed robbers, Quakers, conjurers, reprobates, gas meter readers, spud-faced nippers, fanatics, greaseproof paper salesmen, composers, dentists, tuppenny-ha’penny tosspots, Grand Guignol performers, Chappaquiddick experts, foopball refs, tugboat captains, hedgers and ditchers, gondoliers, minstrels, troubadours, astronauts, emboldened milquetoasts, rhubarbarians, eel-men, dabblers, plotters, coppers, tanners, coopers, fletchers, tailors, tinkers, Oppidans, floozies, weathermen, mavens, bus conductors, out-of-town Pointy Towners, painters, pimps, and potters. Yes, potters. Several potters, indeed more potters than you could shake a stick at, were you minded to do so. Not for the first time, Tarleton had got the precise balance of his swish sophisticated cocktail party guest-list a little askew.

Things were nevertheless going with a swing, in spite of the potter imbalance, when in crept Crepusco. He silenced the hubbub in his usual manner, by holding aloft the gold-painted head of an antique Italianate monkey doll, through which he ventriloquised. Then, in his horrible voice, raucous as a crow, he posed the conundrum which became known as the Paradox of Tarleton’s Pebble.

The effect was instantaneous. The puzzle dizzied the brains of all those present, including Tarleton himself. It dizzied their brains and it also dizzied their bodies, so that the room became a scene of chaos, the guests reeling about, staggering, flailing, vomiting, and groaning.

Well satisfied, Crepusco crept out and returned to his pantry. He replaced the head of the monkey doll on its shrine, fixed himself a snack, and sat in his rocking chair, rocking, creaking, back and forth, through the long winter evening, on the night before the Munich Air Disaster.

Soup-in-the-beard was a condition which affected many Victorian gentlemen possessed of disgusting table manners. It commonly took the form of patches of beard hair becoming soaked in spilled soup, which then dried out, causing the hairs to become matted and malodorous. The spillage would usually occur at the point where the Victorian gentleman, wielding a spoonful of soup and aiming to transfer the full amount into his mouth, would fall at the last hurdle, and send some or all of the spoonful dribbling down his beard. If the bowl of soup was a generous one, as it often was at Victorian banquets, repetitions of this manoeuvre could result in the beard being absolutely drenched, with droplets of the spilled soup dripping on to the elegantly embroidered tablecloth.

Although we do not have precise figures, it is believed that a significant proportion of cases of soup-in-the-beard were caused by uncontrollable tremors of the hand, symptoms of withdrawal from the gargantuan doses of opium favoured by almost all Victorian gentlemen. This does not, of course, excuse their disgusting table manners, which were disgusting, almost as disgusting as – at another time, in another place – those of Franz Kafka.

Contemporary written accounts of soup-in-the-beard are surprisingly few, possibly because it was so prevalent, so much a commonplace, that chroniclers of the time did not consider it worthy of remark. A vivid exception is contained in a letter written by the Dowager Duchess Dipsy of Poxhaven, dated 14 January 1868:

Last night I attended a dinner to raise funds for the Society for the Promotion of Sending Working Class Orphans Down Mineshafts, held at Soot-Blackened House. I was seated next to Walter Mad, whose beard is prodigious. The poor man’s hands were shaking badly, and he confessed to me that he had not had a dose of opium for a full half hour. During the soup course – mulligatawny, to my horror – Walter Mad had a great deal of difficulty transferring the soup from bowl to mouth by means of a spoon, and after a minute or two his beard was sopping wet, almost more soup than hair. I was amused to note that he summoned his valet, who proceeded to wring out the beard, much like a janitor with a mop. Cleverly, Walter Mad commanded him to do this directly over the bowl, so that the soup in the beard replenished the soup in the bowl. By this means, and by several further wringings-out, Walter Mad was still busy with his soup while the rest of us had moved on to the jugged hare and the strangled weasel. His table manners are disgusting, but he gave ten shillings to send urchins from the lower orders down the mines, so his cold black heart is in the right place.

Next week : Egg-On-The-Waistcoat.

Plan B for 2016 is to post a potsage [sic] here every day, except on those days when Mr Key is beset by uurrgghh. So far the plan is succeeding beyond all expectations.

Meanwhile, when not whimpering softly, I have tried to cheer myself up by watching Die Hard : The Director’s Cat, two hours of footage of John McTiernan’s pet moggy, Tiddles, graceful yet unfathomably stupid, prowling around the upper floors of the Nakatomi Building, lapping milk from a saucer, fixing its gaze on things invisible to the human eye, and taking long naps. Yippee-ky-oh, motherfucker!

The plan for 2016 was to post a potsage [sic] here every day. In January, I succeeded, but come the first day of the second month and the plan was as dust and ashes in my mouth. Yesterday I felt decidedly uurrgghh and lay abed, with occasional visits to the Thunder Box, over which we shall draw a heavy black veil. Today I feel almost equally uurrgghh. However, quite fortuitously, I posted two potsages on Sunday. I think what we shall do is to pretend that the RIP for Jacques Rivette actually appeared yesterday, and prance on regardless. I hope to feel less uurrgghh tomorrow, Now, back to bed.