Archive for the 'Prose' Category

You will recall the film Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are aboard a bus which will explode if it goes below fifty miles per hour, having been primed with a bomb by cackling evildoer Dennis “Don’t try to grow a brain, Jack!” Hopper. I have been wondering if a similar adrenalin-thumping conceit could be applied to the writing of prose.

I am not suggesting I do anything so foolhardy as to ask a disgruntled and slightly maimed ex-police officer to hitch me up to a bomb which will detonate if I stop writing… well, I suppose that is what I am suggesting. Cowardice, or sheer common sense, persuades me, however, to hit upon a less perilous incentive.

I have just spent ten minutes staring vacantly at the screen trying to think what that incentive might be.

In Speed, Dennis Hopper is gleeful when a television reporter describes the fiendish quandary into which he has placed the bus passengers as “the whim of a madman”. He repeats the phrase to himself, chuckling. Now I am an almost inhumanly sensible chap, and not a madman at all, but perhaps the whim of a madman is precisely what I need to give vent to, if I wish to prime my prose with the innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum of the film.

Of course, not everyone would agree that Speed is an appropriate model. Dennis Hopper rather overdoes the criminal mania, Keanu Reeves is wooden, and the best that can be said of Sandra Bullock is that she is irritating. And even though Keanu’s fellow bomb-defusion expert Jeff Daniels is killed off, you know that Keanu himself, and Sandra Bullock, will escape unscathed, and Dennis Hopper come to a grisly end, because it’s that sort of film. But predictability has its own special charms. And predictability plus innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is clearly popular, when we consider that Speed reportedly earned its makers over three-hundred-and-fifty million dollars. Now if I could only devise my madman’s whim, perhaps I could make a similar sum from a piece of prose.

The glum bat of misery swoops o’er my bonce as I stare at the screen and, regretfully, admit to myself that this present piece of prose is not the one that will earn millions. Having said that, should any readers feel impelled to deposit a vast sum of money into the Hooting Yard Paypal account, I would be most grateful.

But, just as Sandra Bullock has to keep her foot on the accelerator of that bus, I have to keep tippy-tapping away. It is true that I will not be blown to kingdom come if I stop. In fact, nothing at all will happen. I do not need to grow a brain to know that. Indeed, I have the freedom to get up and walk away and make a cup of tea, so I think that is what I shall do, right now. If I had a University of Arizona Wildcats tee-shirt, I would take the opportunity to change into it while the kettle is a-boiling.

You will recall that Sandra Bullock’s wearing of a top with the Arizona Wildcats’ logo proves to be a pivot on which the plot of Speed hinges. When last I saw the film I had not yet learned of that other great mainstay of Arizona life, the regional dish greasy doings. It seems to me that either Jan de Bont, or his screenplayperson Graham Yost, or indeed Keanu Reeves or Sandra Bullock or Dennis Hopper or even poor killed-off Jeff Daniels might, at some point during the production, have suggested adding a further layer to the Arizona reference by mentioning, or – better – showing, greasy doings. It would probably be stretching credulity to have any of the imperilled bus passengers tucking into greasy doings, but Dennis Hopper spends much of his screen time gobbling snacks while watching his madman’s whim unfold, so how difficult would it have been to make at least one of those snacks greasy doings? Now I come to think of it, given that, as I said, the dish was unknown to me when last I saw the film, perhaps we are shown Dennis Hopper eating greasy doings! Obviously I shall not rest until I have confirmed whether or not this is the case, so I shall have to watch Speed again, with an eagle eye on the Dennis Hopper scenes.

It has just occurred to me that I do not know what greasy doings look like. I must embark on further research before my next viewing, or I will not know them if and when I see them, and that would be a bloody tragedy.

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that, were this present piece of prose the bus in Speed, it would be dangerously close to dropping below fifty miles per hour, and thus exploding. Innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is easier to blather about than to maintain, in spite of the cup of tea which I was hoping would fuel a jamboree of thrills and spills. That may be a lot to ask from a cup of tea, but it has been argued that generations of British chaps could not have built an empire without their cups of tea, and I am not trying to build an empire, merely to write deathless prose, and perhaps earn millions, or thousands, or hundreds, or even just a pittance, by so doing.

Yet all the while the urge to cease and stare, not at the screen but out of the window, at trees and crows, grows ever more intense. What would Keanu do?

There may be circumstances in which you wish to ascertain whether your dog is barking up the wrong tree. I wouldn’t know; I don’t keep a dog myself. But I can imagine a situation where such knowledge could prove critical. If I speak of the matter in the abstract, that is because of a total lack of hands-on dog-based experience on my part. Some might argue I am precluded from pronouncements about the issue – if we can call it an issue – by dint of this lack, but I beg to differ, much as a dog might beg for a bone from his master’s table. Note that in spite of a deep ignorance of dogs and their ways I am yet able to pluck from the storehouse a vivid illustrative example of common dog (or doglike) behaviour to get my point across. Let those who scoff be hushed, so we can get on with it.

Though for present purposes we need consider only an abstract dog barking abstractedly up an abstract tree, I find that concrete examples can be a boon to the dimwit. Not that I think for one minute that anyone reading this is a dimwit, you understand. Still, it is best to be on the safe side, and a scribbler never knows if or when his words may fall into the clutches of a dunderpate. So for our examples let us take one dog and four trees, a mastiff, say, and a pine and a larch and a sycamore and a wych elm. However unlikely it may be in the real world, let us say there is, in the middle of nowhere, that is in a vast and otherwise featureless flat expanse of land, a row of four trees, planted in a straight line, equidistant, with roughly six yards between them. Blot everything else out of your mind. Well, everything except the dog, which you need to remember, though it has not yet entered the scene. So far we just have the line of trees, the pine and the larch and the sycamore and the wych elm. We could have a line of more, or slightly fewer, trees, but four is a manageable number for the dimwits.

Now, look! Here comes a monkey, scampering towards the trees at high speed. I did not mention the monkey earlier, partly because I did not wish to overtax your brain and partly because, in any case, it will soon be out of sight. The monkey, you see, is being pursued by the dog, the mastiff, and is hurtling pell mell towards the line of trees, up the trunk of one of which it will climb with breathtaking monkeyish agility, and then conceal itself in the high leafage. This duly accomplished, the monkey is, as promised, out of sight.

Enter the dog, panting, in hot pursuit. Those of you who are keen on dogs may wish, at this point, to form a closer bond with our abstract mastiff, so let us dub it Desmond. Imagine Desmond now, stopping short of the line of trees. It is intelligent enough to realise that the monkey must be hidden high up in either the pine or the larch or the sycamore or the wych elm, but not sufficiently savvy to know, just yet, which one. I ought to point out here that I hold no opinion either way on the intelligence of dogs, nor do I have a clue whereabouts in the hierarchy of canine intelligence the mastiff can be placed, as compared, say, to a boxer or a dachshund. Let us credit Desmond with enough nous to realise that, as the monkey is no longer visible anywhere in the vast featureless flat expanse of land, it must have climbed and hidden in the leafage of one of the trees. Remember that Desmond is only an abstract dog, after all.

We now come to the nub of the matter. Desmond thinks that by barking at the foot of the trunk of the tree atop which the monkey is hiding, he can somehow persuade the monkey to climb down and deliver itself into his, Desmond’s, waiting paws. At least, I assume that is what is going through the head of any dog that barks up any tree at its quarry. Whether this is sensible behaviour is another matter entirely. Quite frankly, if I was the monkey, I’d stay put. But we must deal with the world as it is, not as it ought to be, and in the world as it is the dog would bark up the tree, especially if it has been driven to distraction by the antics of the fleeing monkey. That seems plausible.

But which tree does Desmond bark up? According to basic probability theory, the likelihood is that he is going to bark up the wrong one. You can work through the permutations in your head if you like. One of the reasons I limited the line of trees to four is so that you could do so without becoming number-dazed. Add just one tree to the row, for example a cedar, and the chances of Desmond barking up the wrong one grow ever greater.

If Desmond barks up each tree in turn, for a period of, say, a minute or so at the foot of each one, he will sooner or later, to your untold relief and mine, bark up the right one. That is, unless we throw in an added complication. The monkey, being a monkey, might well be agile enough to leap from treetop to treetop, thus from larch to pine to sycamore to wych elm and back again, so that at no point is Desmond barking up the right tree. In these circumstances, we could aver, without fear of contradiction, that Desmond is barking up the wrong tree. Conversely, though the monkey of his original pursuit may avoid the dog’s barking, there may be loitering, in each of the trees, other creatures, such as squirrels, of close or even equal interest to a panting barking desperate mastiff. So you see, even in the simplest concrete example drawn from abstract propositions, things become hopelessly, hopelessly entangled. ‘Twas ever thus, in the wide wide world.

To create a composite Dickensian character, it is necessary to cobble together elements from Adams, the Aged Parent, Arabella and Benjamin Allen, the Artful Dodger, Mr Ayresleigh, the Avenger, the Bachelor, Bayham and Laura Badger, the One-Eyed Bagman, the Bagnet family, Major Joseph Bagstock, Jack Bamber, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Barbara, Miss Barbary, Martha Bardell, Thomas Bardell, Barkis, Old Bill Barley and Clara Barley, the Barnacle family, John Barsad, Charles Bates, Bazzard, Belle, Benjamin, Betsy, Mr Bevan, Biddy, Bitzer, Stephen Blackpool, Cornelia Blimber, Noddy and Henrietta Boffin, Josiah Bounderby, Lawrence Boythorn, Sally Brass, Sampson Brass, Madeline Bray, Walter Bray, Jefferson Brick, John Browdie, Good Mrs Brown, Alice Brown, Mr Brownlow, Inspector Bucket, Rosa Bud, Bumble, Jack Bunsby, Serjeant Buzfuz, Harriet, James and John Carker, Richard Carstone, Sydney Carton, John Baptist Cavalletto, the Reverend Chadband, the Cheeryble brothers and Frank, Edward and John Chester, Louisa Chick, Anne Chickenstalker, Anthony, Jonas, Martin and Old Martin Chuzzlewit, Ada Clare, Noah Claypole, Colonel Chowser, Compeyson, David Copperfield, Clara Copperfield, Mrs Corney, Bob Cratchit, Tiny Tim Cratchit, Creakle, Sophy Crewler, David Crimple, Mr Cripples, Canon Crisparkle, Vincent and Mrs Crummles, Jerry and Mrs Cruncher, Alderman Cute, Captain Cuttle, Solomon Daisy, Charles Darnay, Rosa Dartle, Dick Datchery, Lady Honoria and Sir Leicester Dedlock and Volumnia Dedlock, Ernest and Madame Defarge, Ned Dennis, Mr Dick, Young Dick, Deputy Winks, Mrs Dilber, Colonel Diver, Dodson and Fogg, Mr Dolls, Fanny and Florence Dombey and Paul Dombey and Paul Dombey Junior, Amy, Edward, Fanny, Frederick and William Dorrit, Daniel Doyce, Edwin Drood, Bentley Drummle, Duff, Durdles, Emily, the Marquis St Evrémonde, Fagin, Fan, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Mr Feeder, Mr Fezziwig, Flora Finching, Horatio Fizkin, Affery and Jeremiah Flintwinch, Miss Flite, Fred, Mrs Gamp, Joe Gargery, Abel Garland, Mr and Mrs Garland, Walter Gay, Mr George, the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future, Mr Giles, Thomas and Tom Gradgrind, Mary Graham, Grainger, Edith Granger, Mr and Mrs Grayper, Grewgious, Arthur Gride, Gridley, Mr Grimwig, John Grueby, Mr and Mrs Gulpidge, Mrs Gummidge, William Guppy, John Harmon, Mrs Harris, James Harthouse, Estella Havisham, Miss Havisham, Arthur Havisham, Captain James Hawdon, Sir Mulberry Hawk, Mrs Heep, Uriah Heep, Werner Herzog, Charlie, Gaffer, and Lizzie Hexam, Betty Higden, Mrs Hominy, Luke Honeythunder, Hortense, Mr and Mrs Hubbles, Hugh, Leo and Mrs Hunter, Jem Hutley, Jaggers, Janet, John Jarndyce, John Jasper, Dr Anthony Jeddler and Grace, Marion and Martha Jeddler, Mr and Mrs Jellyby and Caddy Jellyby, Jenny, Alfred Jingle, Jo, Mr Jorkins, Captain Kedgick, Kenge, Kenwigs, Mrs Kidgerbury, Krook, Miss La Creevy, Alfred and Sophronia Lammle, Helena and Neville Landless, Mr Langdale, Miss Larkins, Edward and Edwin Leeford, Thomas Lenville, Lewsome, Mortimer Lightwood, Lillian, Mr Lillyvick, Tim Linkinwater, Littimer, Edmund Longford, Jarvis Lorry, Dr Losberne, Lowten, Mrs Lupin, Abel Magwitch, Peter Magnus, Dr Alexandre and Lucie Manette, Mrs Mann, Mr and Mme Mantalini, Jacob Marley, Mr Marton, Mary, Mary Anne, Mrs Maylie, Harry Maylie, Rose Maylie, Mr M’Choakumchild, Merdle, Wilkins Micawber, Molly, Mr Murdstone, Nancy, the Native, Neckett, Charlotte Neckett, Mrs Nickleby, Kate, Nicholas and Ralph Nickleby, Susan Nipper, Newman Noggs, the Norris family, Kit Nubbles, Mr Nupkins, Mr Omer, Dolge Orlick, Major and Mrs Pawkins, Dr Payne, Charity, Mercy and Seth Pecksniff, Clara, Daniel and Ham Peggotty, Mr Perker, the Infant Phenomenon, Samuel Pickwick, Tom Pinch, Pip, Caleb Plummer, Matthew, Herbert and Sarah Pocket, Mr and Mrs Pott, Pumblechook, Daniel and Betsy Quilp, Mr Quinion, George Radfoot, Professor Redlaw, Pleasant and Rogue Riderhood, Monsieur Rigaud, John Rokesmith, Mrs Rouncewell, Richard and Watt Rouncewell, Rosa, Barnaby Rudge, Barnaby Rudge Senior, Mr Rugg, Volker Schlondorff, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bill Sikes, Harold Skimpole, Dr Slammer, Samuel Slumkey, Mr Smallweed, Smike, Mr Snagsby, Augustus Snodgrass, Mr and Mrs Sowerberry, Dora Spenlow, Mr and Mrs Spottletoe, Wackford Squeers, Mrs Squeers, Fanny Squeers and Wackford Squeers Junior, Phil Squod, Stagg, James Steerforth, Dr and Annie Strong, Esther Summerson, Paul Sweedlepipe, Milly and Philip and William Swidger, Dick Swiveller, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Tackleton, Mark Tapley, Simon Tappertit, Tartar, Tattycoram, the Tetterby family, Mrs Ticket, Mr Tiffey, Montigue Tigg, Mrs Tisher, Mrs Todgers, Polly Toodle, Toots, Lucretia Tox, Trabb, Trabb’s boy, Tommy Traddles, Fred and Nelly Trent, Job Trotter, Josiah Tulkinghorn, Tracy Tupman, Prince Turveydrop and Old Mr Turveydrop, Oliver Twist, Meg and Trotty Veck, the Vengeance, Mr Vholes, Margerethe Von Trotta, Old Mrs Wardle, Mr Wardle, Isabella, Emily and Rachael Wardle, Mr and Mrs Waterbrook, Tony Weller and Samuel Weller, John Wemmick, Wim Wenders, John Westlock, Mrs Whimple, Agnes Wickfield, Professor Wigsby, Nathaniel Winkle, Miss Witherfield, Dr Allan Woodcourt, Mr Wopsle, the five sisters of York, Zamiel, and the Zephyr. So get cobbling!

Did you know that Babinsky, the infamous walrus-moustached serial killer, had an idiot half-brother? This chap – who for the sake of convenience we shall call Babinsky 2 – was officially classified as a “type four cretin” under the official idiot classification system obtaining at that time, in that land, under that regime. I am afraid I don’t know how many numbered types of cretin there were, nor of the nature and number of other idiot types, and I have only been able to ascertain Babinsky 2’s official classification after years and years of fossicking about in mouldy archives, at grave peril to my physical and mental health. That is why I walk with a stick and hold what I delude myself are coherent conversations with birds including linnets and partridges.

As a type four cretin, Babinsky 2 was considered to be a peculiarly high-functioning idiot, deemed suitable for such tasks as using a pointy stick to gather litter from verdant parkland, mopping up filth in long corridors, sitting in a tent outside a cathedral, and writing opinion pieces for The Guardian. Unfortunately, due to fuddled bureaucracy, several doctors had instead recommended that the most effective treatment for him, at that time, in that land, under that regime, was to be chained up in a cellar and fed, very occasionally, on slops, or, if that option was not available, to be chained up in an attic and fed, very occasionally, on pap. Such, then, was his plight in the dying days of the corrupt and despicable reign of the double kings Umberto and Ignatz.

Babinsky himself, walrus-moustached and lumbering and psychotic, knew nothing of his idiot half-brother’s fate. They had been parted since they were tiny, if one can for a moment imagine a tiny Babinsky. Yet like us all, the blood-drenched nutcase was once an innocent babe-in-arms, rocked in a cradle and sung to by his mama, though perhaps we ought not examine too closely the words of the songs that good woman sang to him, nor indeed their tunes, if tunes they can be called, for it is probable that it was those very songs, or hideous caterwauls, that laid the eggs of crime within his brain. She did not sing to Babinsky 2.

Their parting happened, unexpectedly, during a family picnic, at a site of bucolic glory, when Babinsky was three and Babinsky 2 was two. There was a sudden thunderstorm. Mama was struck by lightning. A wolf carried Babinsky off into the woods. His idiot half-brother was left behind, drooling on the picnic blanket, deafened by jet fighters swooping low overhead, and by thunder, until he was gathered up and swaddled in the picnic blanket and borne away by a passing widow-woman. Old Mother Sebag-Montefiore had been reduced to penury since the death of her husband in one of King Umberto’s insane wars, or possibly in one of King Ignatz’s sane ones, and she conceived the idea of selling the child. At that time, in that land, under that regime, they had a primitive version of eBay, so she took a snapshot the idiot tot and posted it and waited for bids to come in. All we know now is that at least one bid must have been made, for Babinsky 2 was indeed sold. To whom, and for what sum, we know not, and all trace of him is lost until he turns up, some thirty or forty or, god help us, fifty years later, chained up in a cellar or an attic by dint of bureaucratic fuddle.

At which point his criminal half-brother Babinsky reenters the scene. The double kingdom is on its last legs. Umberto is spending more and more of his time, like Baruch Spinoza, pitting spiders against each other in combat. Ignatz has taken to obsessive annotation of back numbers of the Reader’s Digest. Every day, entire flocks of birds are dropping dead out of the sky, and wherever one looks the potatoes are blighted. The land is descending into a state of anarchy, an ideal playground for a villain like Babinsky. No doubt, on that fateful March morning, cavorting with the wolves in the woods, he was plotting further and ever more heinous enormities. But then word reached him, via the primitive version of spam email prevalent at that time, in that land, under that crumbling regime, that his idiot half-brother, Babinsky 2, was languishing, chained up in a cellar or an attic and fed, very occasionally, on slops or pap, and all because of a fuddlement regarding precisely which classification of cretin type he fell into.

It is important for the reader to understand that for all his derangement and dementedness and bloodlust and psychopathology and the echoes of those mad horrible maternal songs ricocheting forever inside his skull, Babinsky was filled with a boundless fraternal devotion to Babinsky 2. How often he had vowed, if once he could find his lost half-brother, to clasp him to his bosom and slobber over him and teach him all the tricks of strangulation and slicing up and bone-smashing and other such murderous techniques as he had mastered! Oh, he had vowed as much at least three or four times during the long insanitary decades of Umberto’s and Ignatz’s kingship.

So now, on this windy March morning, apprised at last of his idiot half-brother’s plight, Babinsky preened his walrus moustache and set off for the grim bleak vile border outpost where Babinsky 2 was confined. On the way, he killed and killed and killed again. Close to the border, he stopped in a post office to ask for directions, and while he was there he bought some postage stamps. Well, to be more accurate, he did not so much buy them as steal them, having first snapped the spine of the postmaster and chopped him up with an axe. Having wiped his hands clean on one of his many rags, Babinsky was disconcerted to note that the heads of both Umberto and Ignatz had been scratched out on the postage stamps, and in their place was a hasty potato print of quite a different head, a head which bore a distinct resemblance to Babinsky himself.

“What can this mean?” he shouted, in vain, at the bloodied body-parts strewn across the post office floor.

What it meant was that, only the day before, the regime had finally collapsed. Umberto and Ignatz had been helicoptered into exile on a faraway sea-girt atoll. The revolutionary council had freed Babinsky 2 from his chains, and his cellar, or his attic, and installed him as their puppet leader. From that day on, for untold years, Babinsky 2 ruled the land, idiotically, chained up, sprawled on innumerable soft plush cushions, in the presidential palace and fed, copiously, with fruit ‘n’ fibre breakfast cereal and smokers’ poptarts and Feroglobin vitamin supplements.

Babinsky himself was never granted an audience with the puppet potentate, but he had other fish to fry, and bones to break, and throats to slit, and gore to spill.

For a couple of years early in the present century I had a mobile phone. By current standards it was a clunky and primitive affair, on which I was able to make telephone calls (which I did), send text messages (which I rarely did) and play a few games (which I never did). One day the rental period expired and I did not immediately renew it, nor did I investigate any shorter-term or pay-as-you-go options. I put the phone in my desk drawer where it nestles still, gathering dust.

Owning a laptop and being a constant user of what our Belgian pals call Het Internet, it would be both preposterous and pretentious to call myself a latterday Luddite. But the laptop is, I think, the only thing I own which marks me as a citizen of the twenty-first century. Discounting the unused mobile (itself a 1990s model) which, it is true, could be juddered back to life (I assume), I have nothing else that I couldn’t have owned in, say, 1960. I have no television or microwave oven or digital camera or any other space age devices. This is not a conscious pose, a foolhardy attempt to be a living anachronism. I am, for example, perfectly happy to use teabags rather than leaf tea (though how I miss the tea strainer as a numinous everyday object!). It is simply that I find it possible to live a contented life without all this stuff. And whenever I sit on a bus and watch people jabbing at the tiny keyboards on their devices, or listen to them jabbering away on their phones, and when I can restrain myself from throwing a pocketful of pebbles at their heads, I am reminded that I am better off without these things, and that one day I am going to take that old mobile phone out of the desk drawer and throw it in the bin, or crush it underfoot, or donate it to a passing mendicant.

But as I say, the laptop is an essential part of my life, one I would miss much, much more than I miss tea strainers. And it is because I am an online kinda guy that I am aware of such things as apps, which as far as I can gather are the multitudinous wonders available – essential – for mobile phones and smart phones and iPads and tablet PCs and whatever else the digital person-about-town is jabbing and gazing at and jabbering into. So it seems to me only right that in this brave new world there really ought to be a Hooting Yard app, even though I wouldn’t use it myself. The question is, what in the name of all the saints in heaven would a Hooting Yard app actually do?

It has occurred to me, you see, to employ a gaggle of unpaid interns to work – tirelessly, chained in a cellar, fed on slops – on the development of the Hooting Yard app. The technology, of course, holds no terrors for these young persons. They might gawp uncomprehendingly at a tea strainer, but the creation of an app comes as naturally to them as breathing. Nevertheless, in their plaintive little voices, they pipe up “What is it you want the Hooting Yard app to do, Mr Key, innit?” And thus far I have no answer ready for them. (Though in a happy moment I did consider the possibility that my app might deliver a disabling electric shock to the user upon their each and every utterance of the barbarism “innit”.)

Having got this far, however, and recognising that a world without a Hooting Yard app is a world not worth living in, I feel I must plough on, indefatigably. But the interns will grow restive when they have completed the interim project with which I have fobbed them off, the development of the iTea Strainer. So I am appealing to the constituency of Hooting Yard readers and listeners to drum up ideas. You will, I am sure, have been sat there, jabbing and gazing at and jabbering into your device, always with that nagging thought at the back of your puny pea-sized brain that, however exciting and versatile and efficient and entertaining your pad or pod or digithingummyjig, its true potential has yet to be unleashed, because what it really needs, to justify its very existence, let alone its cost, is to have inserted into its electronic innards the app of apps, the Hooting Yard app.

When you have worked out what it will do, let me know, and I will tell the interns, by way of a note scribbled in pencil on a scrap of paper rolled up and sent through pneumatic tube down to the cellar.

Unaccountably, I missed by two years the centenary of the replacement of tin by aluminium in the manufacture of what we still call tin foil. As so often, we have boffins in Switzerland to thank for this innovation, namely Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie., who opened the world’s first aluminium foil rolling plant in Emmishofen in 1910. For those of you, and I know there are many, who like to keep track of these things, Emmishofen is in the canton of Thurgau, or Thurgovia, in ancient times the home of the people of the Pfyn culture, who apparently kept large numbers of pigs.

As I say, I neglected to mention the centenary at the time, and I know that many readers will have been drumming their fingers impatiently for the past two years, wondering when I am going to get round to telling you what to do with all that tin foil you have accumulated in your kitchen drawer. Well, I am delighted to say that at long last I can turn my attention to this splendidly versatile material. Just bear in mind that when I talk about tin foil I mean aluminium foil, and I am not expecting you to try to track down a stash of the old tin stuff, even if there is any still available, which I suspect there is not.

The best thing you can do with your tin foil is to fashion for yourself a conical tin foil hat. It is important that you make a cone shape, rather than trying to mould the tin foil into the approximate shape of, say, a Homburg or a trilby or a stovepipe hat. Though the wonder of tin foil is that all these hat types could quite easily be made, you must stick to the cone. In part, this is in homage to Jimmy Goddard and the copper cone he used for daily communication with space people. But do not jump to the conclusion that your tin foil cone hat will help you to talk to space people. It won’t. Nor will it protect you from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah. If such phenomena exist, and can dislodge and jumble and even control the innards of your brain, they are hardly likely to be dissuaded by a sheet of tin foil, are they? Nonetheless, when forming your surplus tin foil into a hat, it is well to pay tribute to Jimmy Goddard and the STAR Fellowship, for as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work” (Mark 6 : 4-5).

But you can do mighty work, wearing your conical tin foil hat. I am thinking specifically of amateur dramatics. Some might call that leisure, rather than work, but believe you me, if you put your heart and soul into it, amateur dramatics can feel like work, and mighty work at that.

There are several parts in the repertoire where the wearing of a conical tin foil hat is absolutely essential. Consider, for example, Old Nahamkin in The Man Who Came To Dinner In A Shiny Pointy Hat by Belper Frisson. It is not, admittedly, a very big part, and for most of acts two and three the character lies apparently dead on the floor of the parlour while all hell breaks loose around him, but just think of the applause that always greets his entrance, and that ringing line “Hello, I have come to dinner, and I am wearing a shiny pointy conical hat”. It is also worth bearing in mind that Old Nahamkin gets to keep the hat on, even after he is poisoned and stabbed and shot by the vengeful Cassandra, he keeps it on throughout acts two and three, lying motionless on the parlour floor, and at no time is the hat snatched by one of the other characters, who gets to wear it instead,

That does of course happen in one of the other great conical tin foil hat parts, the squalid mute in Pepinstow’s An Inspector Wearing A Shiny Pointy Hat Calls. The squalid mute, of course, turns out to be a police inspector, a revelation somewhat less revelatory than Pepinstow intended, given his cack-handed way of giving the game away in the play’s title. But that need not concern you. You will just need to make sure, as the curtain falls at the end of each performance, that you retrieve your conical tin foil hat from the actor playing Sergeant Piffle, who snatches the hat from atop the inspector’s head in that riveting scene at the end of act four, and wears it himself in a clever ploy to foil Jasper’s attempt to gain Nitty’s inheritance. It might be a creaking plot device, but whenever I have attended an amateur troupe’s performance of the play it has never failed to bring the house down.

There are other parts, in some really tiptop dramas, where the wearing of your conical tin foil hat is not actually called for in the script, but adds a certain something to the character. You might get into arguments, or even fisticuffs, with the director, if they are the type of director averse to the disporting of unnecessary conical tin foil hats. If this is the case, the best thing to do is to say that you are under attack from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah and must wear the conical tin foil hat as protection. Most theatre directors, professional or amateur, will succumb to such a protest, particularly if it is voiced in a wild and high-pitched screech.

If you loathe the very idea of amateur dramatics, you can still find advantageous opportunities for the wearing of your conical tin foil hat. Promenading, loitering, and hiking are all suitable activities, particularly the latter, particularly in the rain, particularly if it is torrential. There is nothing quite like the sound of the incessant pinging of water on metal, as you hike in your conical tin foil hat through a teeming downpour.