In the annals of nautical heroism, few men have been as nautically heroic as Admiral Bagshawbag of the HMS Crinkle-Cut Oven Chip. Holding sway on the bridge of his majestic ship, standing on one leg of flesh and bone and the other of the finest mahogany from the Dutch Antilles, a papier mâché parrot perched on his papier mâché shoulder, his original shoulder having been shot away during a particularly violent episode of nautical heroism during a mahogany-gathering expedition to the Dutch Antilles a few weeks ago, the Admiral was a man of few words.

One of those words, and the one he spat out more often than any other, was “Piffle!” The Admiral shouted “Piffle!” when he woke up in the morning, and he shouted “Piffle!” last thing at night before he fell asleep. Between times, holding sway on the bridge of his majestic ship, he repeatedly found cause to shout “Piffle!”. The brine-soaked sailors of his crew were not always clear why he was shouting “Piffle!” and nor, to be fair, was the Admiral himself. It may simply have been a verbal tic, if a rather loud and jarring one.

The remains of the actual parrot on which the papier mâché one had been modelled were kept in cold storage in the Admiral’s personal cold storage unit tucked beneath the desk in his cabin. Inside, it was colder than the coldest of refrigerators, indeed it was so cold it was scarcely believable, from a scientific viewpoint. But the Admiral was not a scientist, he was a man of nautical heroism, partly wooden and partly papier mâché and with one eye made of glass and the fingers of one hand moulded from dough and baked to a crisp.

In spite of his nautical heroism the Admiral was, to his crew, a figure of pity, and not mild pity but a heart-rending extravagant pity provocative of strangulated choking sobs and mortification of the bowels. Such pity rendered the crew fairly useless in circumstances where nautical heroism was called for, for example on mahogany-gathering expeditions to the Dutch Antilles. The Admiral tried to pep them up and stiffen their sinews by increasing their rum rations, but this served only to make them more mawkish. Several of the crew, in their cups, wrote tear-stained letters home to their dear old mothers describing in forensic, if intoxicated, detail the pity they felt for their Admiral.

Inside its cold storage unit, the parrot was not actually dead. It was in a state of suspended animation from which the Admiral planned to revive it, so that one day he would be able to perch it on his other shoulder, still – at time of writing – of flesh and bone. To accomplish his plan, the Admiral had set Little Tim the cabin boy to a course of study in matters scientific, including cryogenic freezing and subsequent thawing. Unfortunately, the only book on board ship was a tattered copy of Laughter At The Foot Of The Cross by Michael A Screech, from which several crucial pages were missing.

Little Tim the cabin boy was the one member of the crew who did not pity the Admiral. “I have no time for pity,” he said in his high-pitched little voice when interviewed on Dutch Antilles Radio as part of a series of interviews with ships’ cabin boys. “I have no time for any of the finer emotions,” he continued, “For I have dedicated my life thus far, not that there has been much of it, to preparing myself for future acts of nautical heroism, the sort of nautical heroism in which the finer emotions can play no part. Now hand me that sextant and that cutlass, so I may practise.”

And so the HMS Crinkle-Cut Oven Chip sails on, either towards or away from the Dutch Antilles, with or without a cargo of mahogany. Listen to the wind in the rigging. A wind that kills. It kills the crew one by one, until only the Admiral and Little Tim the cabin boy and the parrot in cold storage are still with us, nautical and heroic, upon a shining sea.

Between the years 1787 and 1804, in the ethereal realms, the dead Gluck and the unborn Glinka became friends and allies. They were drawn together by mutual puzzlement at the absence, from those very realms, of Buxtehude, who had been dead since 1707 and ought, therefore, to have put in an appearance in the mystic aether. Gluck and Glinka, or their spirit-essences, set out to track down Buxtehude, or his immortal soul, a quest which only came to an end when Glinka was transformed into a material mewling infant in 1804. Gluck had to drum his heels and await Glinka’s return to the ethereal realms in 1857. By this time, of course, Buxtehude’s immortal soul had been missing for a full one hundred and fifty years, which is as close as dammit to a cut-off point in the world of spirits.

This is the conceit of an unfinished novel by Algernon Spooky, the so-called “psychic windowcleaner” who has a walk-on part in virtually every single biography and memoir of the first half of the twentieth century. Spooky seems to have known everybody, and frequently got into fist-fights with them. He was a commanding figure, described by Pipton as resembling a cross between a Roman emperor and a harrier hawk, with a bit of the temple of Angkor Wat thrown in. Unfortunately for the fate of his novel, Algernon Spooky had a tin ear and knew nothing of music, so his attempts to bring the souls of Gluck and Glinka and Buxtehude to fictional life are, in the words of Pipton again, “like watching an idiot child drool into a tin cup”.

After scribbling thousands and thousands of words, Spooky realised he was making a fool of himself – not for the first time – and tried to rework the material into a detective thriller. Here, Gluck, Glinka, and Buxtehude became a trio of malefactors plotting dark and dismal deeds. They hid in plain sight, operating from a high-street shoe shop clearly modelled on Freeman, Hardy and Willis. Only when Freeman, or Hardy, or Willis, or Freeman and Hardy, or Hardy and Willis, or Freeman and Willis, or for Christ’s sake let us have done with it, all three of them, got wind of Spooky’s tale and threatened him with a libel suit did that manuscript, too, end up in the dustbin.

But being Algernon Spooky, it was no ordinary dustbin. He styled it his Magical Ancient Egyptian Dustbin From The Realm Of Thoth, and scratched various arcane symbols upon it. He then tried to sell the dustbin to a credulous follower, the Dowager Duchess Dipsy of Poxhaven, warning her that she must never, ever remove the lid from the dustbin for fear of unleashing several malign demons from the ancient mystic city of Gaar. Even poor dim-witted Dipsy saw this for the poppycock it was, and she had Algernon Spooky dragged out of her drawing-room and beaten to within an inch of his life, with cudgels, by her valet, the one time champion wrestler Dinsmore. What happened to the dustbin thereafter is not known.

Algernon Spooky’s illegitimate daughter Poubelle, who acted as his literary executrix, consistently denied the existence of the two Gluck, Glinka, and Buxtehude manuscripts. It was only when Pipton bashed her repeatedly on the head with an electric toaster that she finally spilled the beans.

This post is the latest in our clear-eyed and earth-shattering series What They Don’t Want You To Know.

Have you noticed, when handling your Android device, that if you try to turn the screen round to view it upside down, it immediately flips to restore the default view? This was trumpeted as an exciting and “user-friendly” feature of tablet computers from the very first. It is of course nothing of the sort. It is, rather, a blatant example of the capitalist military industrial complex, probably abetted by the Freemasons and the Zionists and the lizard people from outer space, preventing you from realising that the Android is, in reality, a Clotcud – as revealed below.

O let us now sing the praises of noted Swiss puppeteer Rolf Swisspupp! Preferably to a free jazz accompaniment, with bongos! Or, on second thoughts, let us not, for when we sing it is a godawful caterwauling that sets the teeth on edge and makes birds plummet from the sky, stone dead. Instead, let us list some of the books which, over the past forty years, the noted Swiss puppeteer has interpreted, in dramatic form, in eighteen-hour puppet shows, to adoring audiences in every canton of Switzerland.

The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann

One Lonely Night by Mickey Spillane

Me And My Ectoplasm by Algernon Spooky

The Decline Of The West by Oswald Spengler

Chappaquiddick : The Real Story by James Lange and K DeWitt Jr

Verbose Twaddle by Will Self

The Loch Ness Mystery Solved by Ronald Binns

The Thing On The Doorstep by H P Lovecraft

The Prisoner Of Zenda by Anthony Hope

The Prisoner Of Brenda by Max Décharné

Rolf Swisspupp’s puppets are made from his own secret, patented substance known as Swiss Puppetene™, and this gives them an eerily lifelike appearance. In the words of the puppeteering critic Horst Puppcrit, “these puppets are eerily lifelike, if a few conjoined and twisted pipe-cleaners and a knob of putty can be imbued with life”.

The puppets are mute, chiefly because Rolf Swisspupp’s voicebox was surgically removed following a traumatic childhood ice-skating accident. The sheer dramatic intensity of his productions is made all the more sheer and dramatic and intense by the resounding silence in which they are performed. Dropped pins, etcetera.

In person, Rolf Swisspupp has a haunted and ravaged appearance, which has led to rumours that, when he is alone with his puppets, they come to life and torment him, as Michael Redgrave was tormented by his ventriloquist’s dummy in the film Dead Of Night (1945). Certainly it is true that the Swiss puppeteer has been found on occasion staggering through the streets of Zurich and Lucerne and Winterthur and Geneva, drink-sodden and incontinent.

But if he is a tragic figure, he is also enormously popular with Swiss tinies, who clap their little hands and screech with joy at the mere mention of his name. So if, today, we do not sing his praises, we can screech them, like a small overtired Swiss child, screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech and screech until we are carted off and confined to a remote Swiss facility, high in the Alps, where brutish orderlies will torment us with pipe-cleaners and knobs of putty.

Last week we held a funeral service for the parish wolf, although none of us is sure if it is really dead. Its howling has not been heard for twelve years, though, and under our laws a death certificate can be issued for a missing wolf after just five years. The general feeling in the parish was summed up by the sexton in a notice nailed, Luther fashion, to the door of the church. Even in the absence of a corpse, it would be for the good of the parish if obsequies were held. This was the gist of his notice, though it was couched in the mighty prose he deployed even when writing nature notes for the parish newsletter, and he did not on any account use the word closure.

One reason the sexton is so persuasive is that his appearance and bearing are strongly reminiscent of the actor James Robertson Justice (1907-1975). This is no accident. Over the years, the sexton has worked hard to imitate that booming voice, and he has undergone cosmetic surgery the better to ape the appearance of the man who, when not appearing in films, kept busy as a naturalist, racing driver, and falconry expert.

Before dawn on the morning of the funeral there was a teeming downpour. The rain had ceased by the time we gathered in the churchyard, but the pugton trees were drenched, water droplets dripping from the tiny grey spongy buds, each bud like the brain of a homunculus. An extraordinary number of puddles had formed on the paths, and there are many paths converging on St Bibblydibdib’s, for it is the only church for miles around, all others having been smashed to ruination by the sexton’s predecessor, single-handedly. He was twice the size of the present incumbent, a titan among sextons, and a brute, and the parish has been much quieter since he wilted away and was carted off to a mercy home. No ducks plashed in the puddles, for word had not yet reached them that the parish wolf was dead, or at least thought to be dead, and no duck dared come near for fear of being torn to bits.

I had been asked to read the obsequies, and had prepared what I thought was a pretty speech. I have a weakness for alliteration, and made use of lots of W words, describing the parish wolf as winsome and windswept and waterlogged and wiry and woebegone and witless. There was little truth in any of this, for the signal fact about the wolf was that it was, for the most part, invisible. Kim Fat Goo, the village bus driver, claimed to have seen it crossing the road once or twice, and the preposterous tabloid astrologer Jonathan Cainer, who once spent a week holed up in Old Ma Brimstone’s Bed And Breakfast establishment, said that the wolf paid him nocturnal visits in his dingy room, but few of us gave these tales any credence. Yet despite remaining unseen, the wolf was – or had been – a mighty presence in our parish, and I felt it deserved a memorable send-off, with all those W words, even if what I said was inaccurate.

Our vicar had been abducted by a cadre of rogue Tundists and was tied up in a turret somewhere, so the sexton took charge of the service. When it came my turn to speak, no sooner had I propped my notepad on the lectern and cleared my throat than there came a bellowing of cows from the fields adjoining the church. My words were drowned out. The cows bellowed all day and all night and into the next day, for they were Mad Old Farmer Frack’s cows, and there were hundreds of them, massive and ungainly and bellowing. The funeral broke up in disarray, and we repaired to a hangar at the village airfield, and we ate cake and macadamia nuts under the shadow of gigantic propellers, and when we emerged, look!, ducks populated the puddles. The parish wolf was dead and gone.

This piece first appeared nine years ago.

And so I went, as planned, to Buckinghamshire, there to study the light. I approached the county along a path in Berkshire. Not wishing to waste any time, I had already taken my pocketbook out of my pocket and was holding, in my other hand, my propelling pencil, duly propelled and ready for writing. As I stepped across the (invisible) county boundary, the sun was blotted out, and Buckinghamshire was enshrouded in darkness.

It took a few moments for me to realise what had happened. A gigantic flock of gigantic birds had swooped across the sky, so gigantic a flock, and the birds so densely packed together, that the sun’s rays could not break through. Well, I said to myself, that is an uncommon phenomenon to be sure, but the birds will fly thither and the ceremonial county of Buckinghamshire will again be bathed in light, light which I will study, and make notes upon, preparatory to my hand-written pamphlet on the subject.

But, having swooped in front of the sun, the gigantic flock of birds stopped. I could not see very well, because it was so dark, but they appeared to be hovering in the air, static but for such flapping of their wings as kept them buoyant. The uncommon phenomenon had become uncommoner still.

Not knowing what to do, I decided to eat a sausage. I had several sausages about my person, in two different paper bags in two different pockets. I hoped that in the time it took me to eat a sausage, particularly if I nibbled it slowly, the birds would, after all, swoop elsewhere. I had passed, several yards back, a pathside bench, a suitable spot to consume a sausage snack, so I turned and headed towards it. As I did so, I inevitably crossed from Buckinghamshire back into Berkshire, and – listen carefully – at that precise moment the flock of birds continued their swooping, and the sun reappeared, and light was shining in Buckinghamshire.

If an uncommon phenomenon can become uncommoner still, and then even uncommoner yet, then that is what I had witnessed. Ah well, I said to myself, perhaps I will delay that sausage and start making notes on the light. But as I turned again, and stepped again into Buckinghamshire, that damnable flock of birds swooped in front of the sun again, and stayed hovering there, blotting out all light.

Was I being taunted by birds? There was a simple way to find out. I took a step back, into Berkshire – the birds flew away. I stepped forward, into Buckinghamshire – again, the flock swooped in front of the sun and plunged the world into darkness. I essayed this little pantomime several more times, like a fool, and always with the same result. I retreated to the bench in Berkshire and sat down and ate a sausage.

It was while I was eating the sausage that it occurred to me to make notes on the light in Buckinghamshire from my vantage point a few yards across the county boundary. Then I would not have the pesky birds to contend with. But in the time it took me to eat the rest of the sausage, I had second thoughts. A less pernickety person might have studied the light in Buckinghamshire while sitting a few yards outside the county in Berkshire, but I am pernickety. I have not studied the science of optics with any great diligence, or even at all, but one thing I know is that light, the thing, the phenomenon, is perceived by the eyes, and it is the act of perception, the stimulation of the optic nerves, that is the essence, as it were, of the light. Absent the eye, the light is futile, or indeed non-existent. By this reasoning, if I am in Berkshire then so is the light. I can only see light shining in Buckinghamshire if I am in Buckinghamshire.

But the birds of Buckinghamshire, or at least a gigantic flocksworth of them, were plainly determined to prevent me from seeing that light. Oh, vindictive birds! A poor scribbler sets out on a journey to record the fascinating subject of light shining in Buckinghamshire, and he is thwarted by unfeeling savages of the sky, conspiring against him. Now I had nothing whatsoever to write about. I put my pocketbook back in my pocket, tucked my propelling pencil away in another pocket, and ate another sausage, sitting on a bench in Berkshire where the light, I am sorry to say, was as dull as ditchwater.

Last night I dreamt I wrote Light Shining In Buckinghamshire. My version was completely different to the original – an anonymous Digger tract of 1648 – though it was written in archaic prose and contained a plethora of commas. Indeed, it contained many, many more commas than I would ever be likely to deploy, all things considered, when acting in the waking world, so much duller, most of the time, than the phantasmal world of sleep, and by acting, of course, I mean writing, the act of writing, in prose, with commas, but, boy oh boy, not half as many commas as I, or rather the dream me, managed to pack in, furiously, so many they were tripping each other up, almost, in Light Shining In Buckinghamshire, the dream version. That sentence may be grammatically compromised, but that is the price you pay for a plethora of commas.

My text was hand-written, and it was clear, or dream-clear, that it would remain as an edition of one. Nevertheless, I got the strong impression that my Light Shining In Buckinghamshire was considered by readers to be the best thing I had ever written. I am not sure how I gained this impression, but, you know, dreams are dreams. It is a pity, then, that I cannot remember, in the waking world, a single word of the text. All I recall is the archaic prose and those damned commas.

I am now planning to pay a visit to Buckinghamshire, and to study the light, and to make copious notes on the light in my pocketbook with my propelling pencil and then, upon my return from Buckinghamshire, to parlay those notes into a piece of majestic prose, hand-written, in an edition of one. I will let you know when I am done, and you may make an appointment to come and read it.

Spigot Boy was the eponymous hero of a cartoon strip that ran in the children’s comic The Ipsy Dipsy Doo during the early 1950s. Each week, Spigot Boy’s adventures stuck to a rigid formula. The strip consisted of just four panels, in the course of which the tousle-haired nipper would happen upon an imminent act of civic malfeasance which he would then foil by disguising himself as a spigot. Given these limitations, there was, in each episode, a bewildering fecundity of invention.

Though it no doubt went over the heads of the infant readership, one of the great pleasures of the Spigot Boy strip was that in each episode, at least one of the speech bubbles would contain a direct quotation from the works of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Almost always, the words chosen seemed to fit seamlessly, with no sense that they had been shoehorned in. Occasionally, of course, adherence to the formula meant there was a rather forced, gratuitous quality to the Hopkins quotation, but even when that did happen the strip was saved by, for example, the inclusion of a startlingly-executed picture of a wheatear or a nuthatch in the sky just above and to the left of Spigot Boy’s head in the moments before he adopted his spigot disguise and foiled the schemes of that week’s civic malefactor.

The strip was discontinued after the editrix of The Ipsy Dipsy Doo realised that the villains in each episode were in fact crude caricatures of some of the leading professional foopballers of the day, many of whom were called either Wally or Nat. One seldom meets with top flight professionals named Wally or Nat in the game nowadays, which is a great pity.

But thereagain, one seldom meets with a tousle-haired nipper, fictional or otherwise, who can expertly disguise himself as a fully-functioning spigot at the drop of a hat. That, I think, is a greater pity. And I should know, because I know more about pity than anybody. Pity, putty, and putti – those are my areas of expertise, and you would do well to remember that, for when I am crossed my rages are terrible, not unlike those of a 1950s infant whose copy of The Ipsy Dipsy Doo has been snatched from his tiny little hands and cast into the fire, where it is consumed by flames more terrible than the flames of the deepest pit of hell.

The new year got off to an auspicious start yesterday morning. Almost the first words I heard, after tuning in to Farming Today on BBC Radio Four, were “swan guru”. Outside, it was still the dark before dawn, but I resolved, with new year vim, to go in search of my very own swan guru.

I was not listening to the radio with sufficient attention to learn whether a swan guru was, on the one hand, a human being possessed of breathtaking insight into swans or, on the other, a swan possessed of breathtaking spiritual insight which could act as my teacher and guide. But I knew which one I preferred, and it wasn’t the human being. And so, as the first light of the new year spread across the sky, like a patient etherised upon a table, I set out for Nameless Pond, in search of a swan.

As I lolloped towards the pond, I recalled the popular Hooting Yard series Notable Authors Sitting On Swans, which featured photographs of notable authors sitting on swans. The swan upon which the infant Raymond Roussel sat, for example – was it a mere swan, or was it the writer’s swan guru? I did not suppose I would ever know the answer to that question, but just posing it made me all the keener to lay claim to my own swan guru.

Standing at the edge of Nameless Pond, on which several sprightly and savage new year swans were scudding, I tried to determine which one would be the perfect spiritual teacher. But then I was struck by two thoughts. One, I am extremely myopic. Two, I am ornithologically ignorant. If I were to pick a particular swan, here and now, as my guru, would I be able to recognise that swan on subsequent visits to Nameless Pond? I had to concede that this seemed unlikely. In my world, a swan is a swan is a swan. Well then, that being so, why not choose the swan nearest at hand as my guru? Next time I came here, the nearest swan might well be an entirely different swan, but did that really matter, so long as I received from it the spiritual succour I sought?

Convinced that I had hit upon an effective method of mitigating my myopia and ornithological ignorance, I fixed my gaze upon the nearest swan. The next couple of minutes would prove critical. I had to lay myself open, fully receptive to whatever spiritual wisdom the swan saw fit to impart to me. The better to accomplish this, I gawped, open-mouthed, dribbling slightly, like a dim-witted child. I tried to empty my brain of all conscious thought, and I succeeded so well that I toppled over, having forgotten how to stand upright. Sprawled in the pondside mud, I sensed a terrifying inrush of what I can only describe as swanness or swanosity. It surged through me, magnificently.

I stood up, dusted myself down, bid adieu to my swan guru with a wave of my hand, and set off for home. Woe betide anybody I met along the way. With one thwack of my wing, I would break their arm.

Chocks away! Yes, in a spasm of insane generosity, I have decided to give away all my chocks for Christmas. I shall be distributing them among the poor, the indigent, the feckless, and the riff-raff – that is, pretty much the entire population of my particularly insalubrious bailiwick. I am going to give away every last chock – the one under the draining board, the one beside the bathroom radiator, the many and various chocks scattered higgledy-piggledy wherever I cast my myopic gaze. Do bear in mind that I am not talking about chocs, as in chocolates. I mean chocks. If you are not sure what I am talking about, go and siphon out your ears.

Hooting Yard’s Christmas Chocks Away! Initiative is sponsored by evil plutocrats.

A letter plops on to the mat, signed – with a flourish – by someone who wishes to be known only as “Processed Cheese Enthusiast”.

Dear Mr Key, it reads, You are rightly regarded as a fount of all wisdom and an acknowledged authority on just about any subject one can shake a stick at. At least, that is what I have been told, by an acquaintance of mine. Well, not an acquaintance, exactly, rather a fellow I bumped into on a canal towpath when I was out walking my dog. It’s not a real dog, more of an imaginary one, made out of paper like the adopted children of Arthur Cravan and Mina Loy, but by god it’s a faithful hound. Anyway, the point is that I wasn’t looking where I was going and I collided with this chap, who bore a striking resemblance to one of the figures on the periphery of a Pièta painted by one of the Renaissance painters, though I can’t remember which one. Following our collision, he toppled into the canal, and after I pulled him back on to the path we fell into conversation. At first this mainly consisted of recriminations and dark threats of violence, but things soon settled down and we strolled amicably along chattering away like a couple of chattering birds. I would give you the name of the birds, but I know nothing of ornithology.

Before we parted, near a telephone kiosk, the man mentioned, out of the blue, that you are rightly regarded as a fount of all wisdom and an acknowledged authority on just about any subject one can shake a stick at. I wondered for a moment if he had taken leave of his senses, so I rattled off the standard questions – what year is this?, who is the current Prime Minister?, how much is that doggie in the window? – and he seemed compos mentis. I made a note of your name in my pocketbook, for future reference.

The future has now arrived. When I sprang out of bed this morning, I had a burning question in my head, to which I did not know the answer. As I shovelled my breakfast down my gob, I recalled my encounter with the man on the canal towpath, and that he had recommended you as a peerless source of information on everything under the sun. So as soon as I had completed my post-breakfast digestive exercises, I rummaged about in the various pockets of my various jackets until I found the pocketbook in which I had written down your name. Now you will be agog wondering what it is I wish to ask you.

Well, Mr Key, it is this. As you know everything there is to know, I can safely assume that you are familiar with the Laughing Cow brand of processed cheese triangles, of which I am a great enthusiast. Just in case, I have enclosed with this letter a sample of packaging.

You will note that the cow on the Laughing Cow container is indeed laughing. You will also note, though it is not strictly relevant, that the cow is sporting a pair of earrings which, unlikely as it seems, are formed of a couple of packets of Laughing Cow processed cheese triangles. That is not something you see every day, is it? The question that has been raging in my brain since I woke up this morning is this: what is the cow laughing at? I feel sure you will know the answer, because the man on the canal towpath who I accidentally knocked into the canal told me that you know pretty much everything about everything and willingly share your knowledge with anybody. So please put me out of my misery and for God’s sake enlighten me. What is it that so amuses the cow?

I shall be replying privately to “Processed Cheese Enthusiast” shortly. If any other readers have queries about cow-related matters, or indeed cow-unrelated matters, please feel free to drop me a line.

Some writers are so damned original that they create their own genre. This is true even of certain pulp writers, such as the American scribbler Brent Crude, who was born on this day in 1882. After knocking out short stories at a prodigious rate for magazines such as Amazing Yarns, Astonishing Yarns, and Breathtaking Yarns, in 1922 Crude published his first full-length novel. Flapper In An Airship introduced readers to his heroine the flapper in an airship, and thus was born the entire flapper-in-an-airship genre.

Over the following two decades, dozens of hacks bashed out novels about flappers in airships, but none could match Brent Crude’s industry, nor indeed his ability to devise page-turning pot-boilers about flappers in airships. By the time of his death in 1941, it is thought he had written over fifty novels featuring the flapper in an airship.

Interestingly, Brent Crude was an exact contemporary, 1882 to 1941, of both James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. If he is little read today, it is probably because both flappers and airships have fallen out of fashion. I think, however, he is due for a revival. This is not a view shared by the literary critic Prig Blot, one of the few people who has read all of Crude’s work (or at least claims to have done so).

“These so-called flapper in an airship novels,” he contends, “are all much of a muchness, Careful analysis of the texts, as carried out by me in my Scandinavian ivory tower overlooking the fjords and glaciers of my homeland, demonstrates conclusively that Brent Crude simply shuffled about the same sentences and paragraphs of his first novel, over and over again, occasionally inserting a different adjective here and there. I have wasted ten years of my life reading and rereading and rerereading these foolish books, years I can never regain, and my soul is corroded, and all I am good for now is to eke out what time is left to me chewing salted fish and sobbing into my Scandinavian napkin.”

All of Brent Crude’s books are currently out of print.

I have an acquaintance whose infant son has landed his first dramatic role. He is two and a half, and will be playing one of the Three Wise Men in his nursery nativity play. The part calls for him to deliver the line “I have myrrh”.

He has been rehearsing with admirable diligence. It is, I think, a credit to his acting skills that, while one rarely, if ever, encounters myrrh in 21st century Britain, he gives a compelling performance and one truly believes that, yes, this small child does indeed have myrrh. And he has been able to inhabit fully the character of the Wise Man without having to ask the director “what’s my motivation?”. He comes to it naturally.

As Sir Laurence Olivier said to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, when the latter expressed surprise that Olivier did not employ “the Method”, “It’s called acting, dear boy”.

The offing of Nitty was a terrible, terrible thing. Calamitous, according to some. Listen, for example, to what Monsignor Pivot had to say.

Oh, this is awkward. I thought I had a tape recording, or at least a transcript, of that good man’s peroration, delivered after Nitty was offed but before all the papers were signed and registered and copied and placed on the public noticeboards. But where I thought it was, in my desk drawer, now there is only dust, dust and the detached leg of a beetle, dust and the leg of a beetle and a single paperclip.

I find myself wondering about the beetle and the paperclip to the exclusion of Cadet Nitty. Yes, cadet, for before his offing he had been stripped of his captaincy. His badge had been crushed and his epaulettes burned. But he went to his offing with all his arms and legs intact, unlike the poor beetle. How had its leg become detached and fetched up in my desk drawer? Where was the rest of the beetle? Did it live, lame, or had it died? And what did the paperclip have to do with anything? Had it clipped together papers which, like the incomplete beetle, had since gone missing? Would Monsignor Pivot ever deliver a peroration upon the beetle and the paperclip?

No, of course he would not. He is not that kind of man, and it is not that kind of world. Instead, it is a world where Nitty has been offed, good and proper, never to return.

That saddens me, of course it does, but somehow it is not so sad as a maimed beetle and an abandoned paperclip. I do not set the priorities, I simply feel them, and terrible as it is I know in my bosom that Cadet Nitty will be forgotten, and sooner rather than later, perhaps even before the cows are driven into their byre for the night.

I have said nothing of the dust in the desk drawer. What should I say? Dust is dust. Nitty will be dust soon, if the procedures are followed correctly. As I recall, in his peroration, Monsignor Pivot took pains to stress his hope that they would be. It would only add to the tragedy of Nitty’s offing if, in its aftermath, correct procedures were neglected, or faffed with, as can happen sometimes, shamefully, though it is nobody’s fault. Say it is “the system”, and have done with it. At the end of the day, the cows will still be driven in to their byre.

Now Nitty is no more, and the world, or at least a small corner of it, is reduced to a beetle’s leg and a paperclip. The more one examines them, the more they sing of something, something motley and intangible, as intangible as the Monsignor’s lost peroration, now that I have mislaid the tape recording and the transcript.

I have, somewhere, some glue. If and when I can find it, I will glue the leg of the beetle to the paperclip. While they are still sticky, I will sprinkle them with dust, so that the dust adheres. It is said that the Dude abides, and likewise, the dust adheres. Nitty would have known that, and perhaps, wherever he is, may know it still.

I push the desk drawer shut, and light my pipe, and gaze out of the window at the crows on the lawn. If the crows know anything, they know there will be both a harrowing and a reckoning. Fetch my gumboots. I am going to the dormitory of monkeys.