It seems to me that Hooting Yard ought to have an overarching theme for the new year, a programme or project to act as a spur to my puny and often idle brainpans. The 2012 perpilocution project worked very well, for example, though similar schemes, based on diaries in 2013 and birds in 2014 petered out fairly rapidly. What, then, for 2015?

I have been wondering for quite some time whether I ought to cobble together an Encyclopaedia of Everything. Ambitious as this project is, it would certainly keep me occupied for a year. The challenge is to subdivide Everything into 365 discrete units, allowing me to pluck one from the midden each day and to dazzle you lot with a well-crafted splurge of prose. A moment’s thought, gazing out of the window at crows in the wind, is enough to convince me of the foolhardiness of this idea.

But if, instead of dealing with Everything, I limit myself to one particular topic – say, birds, or eggs, or foopball stars of the 1950s, or instances of shadow puppetry in the cinema – I run the risk of boring both you lot and myself. There must be a happy medium, somewhere between the general and the particular, not quite Everything, perhaps, but an Encyclopaedia of Much. I then have to decide how to construct it, what arrangement to follow. The temptation to stare out of the window again becomes overwhelming.

I could begin, I suppose, by telling you that a window is made out of glass, but that the crow I can see, in the failing light, though the window, is not made of glass. It is entirely possible to make a toy or decorative or model crow out of glass, but it is difficult to imagine a window made out of crows. Let us nonetheless imagine such a thing. You would need to gather together a fair number of crows, and jam them into a frame such that they filled the space within the frame. To keep the crows in place it would be best to slaughter them and then stuff them using your taxidermy skills. You would then remove the glass window in its frame and replace it with the crow window which, I think you will rapidly notice, occludes most if not all of the light blazing in from the outside. Only, right now, the light is failing, not blazing, so the new crow-window makes little difference. Either way, you still need some interior artificial light, such as that emitted by candle-flames, unless you wish to sit slumped in the darkness imagining, out on the lawn, a crow made of glass. Consider, then, how everything relates to everything else, birds to windows, taxidermy to candlelight, darkness to darkness at the dawning of the year.

Encyclopaedia Topics Addressed : candles, crows, glass, stuffing.

If you have found this postage enlightening, please add your ha’ppenyworth to Mr Key’s pot. You may wish to donate even if you remain unenlightened and quite frankly baffled by the sheer stupidity of the foregoing.

Ulu Venv, the apothecary’s mute, O is he dead then? He is, he is ,dead and buried according to the tenets of the church of which he was a member, the Tremendously Fanatical Brotherhood Of Christ’s Bloody Wounds. The protocols of this sect require that the corpse of the deceased be pierced with no fewer than twenty knitting needles and stuffed into a burlap sack along with a lozenge of gutta percha and a sprinkling of talc, the sack fastened with safety pins and tossed down a well at midnight. Such was the end of Ulu Venv.

I was there. I witnessed his burial. I saw his corpse, raddled by scrofulous buboes, yet still recognisable as the Ulu Venv I had met on many occasions on my visits to the apothecary. I saw him pierced and stuffed into a sack, and I saw the sack fastened and tossed down a well. The well was one of my own. I have several wells on my property, none of them productive. I was happy, not to say desperate, to accept a fee from the Brotherhood for the use of one of my wells for the burial of their fellow.

What measure of man was he, Ulu Venv, this mute? I do not mean his physical measurements, which would be of no interest to anybody, and in any case would soon enough be redundant, as his mortal remains shrivelled and rotted within the sack of death. Take a tape measure to him a year hence and your readings would differ violently from any taken moments before he was stuffed into the sack. Violently! No, what I mean is the measure of him in moral terms.

Ulu Venv was mute and he was hapless. He had a great love of budgerigars, both as pets and snacks. Some budgerigars he coddled as pets for months on end before strangling them and roasting their still warm bodies on his little budgie-spit. Then he would transfer the roasted bird to a plate, tuck a napkin around his neck, and make quick work of it with a knife and fork, washing it down with a can of Squelcho! Afterwards he would belch and rinse his plate and cutlery under a spigot, and toss the empty Squelcho! can down a well. Sometimes this was one of my disused wells. I turned a blind eye, not difficult for me, as I am blind in one eye and have limited vision in the other, not unlike Charles Fort towards the end of his life, after all those hours spent in libraries poring over newspapers and scholarly journals. That is not the reason for my own occluded vision. I have never set foot in a library in my life. My own near blindness is an hereditary condition, for which I blame my father’s side of the family. It is said a distant forebear offended the King. In his anger the King cursed my ancestor, yea unto several generations.

Ulu Venv was not blind, but he was mute. The apothecary found this an exceedingly useful trait, for reasons I have not been able to ascertain. Nor have I attempted guesswork. What would be the point? Ulu Venv is dead now, at the bottom of one of my wells, and the apothecary has a new mute, a mute with a lantern jaw and a spiteful demeanour, O so unlike sweet tempered Ulu Venv!

There is a budgerigar perched on my windowsill. I feed it breadcrumbs, and pour a little puddle of Squelcho! into a dent for it to lap. I do this in memory of Ulu Venv, every morning. And though I cannot see them, I know that out there, across my fields, the Tremendously Fanatical Brotherhood Of Christ’s Bloody Wounds are gathered in a ring around one of my wells, and they are keening, keening, and will continue to keen until the cows come home. But the cows, now, are far, far away, and pointing in the wrong direction, and they may never come home again.

Whither art? It’s a question I often ask myself, usually when tucking into a plate of smokers’ poptarts or other breakfast-based snack food. I like to get art out of the way early on in the day, freeing up my time for higher things. I do not practise art myself, but it is a subject of abiding interest to me. Whither art?, I ask, wondering where it will go.

To answer that question, one must of course be familiar with where art has been. One follows its trajectory, from the earliest cave paintings to the latest talentless derivative didactic Marxist video installation bollocks, and one tries to push the line further along, to see whence it leads. Every morning, at breakfast.

Sometimes, alas, those smokers’ poptarts are just too damned delicious, and the brain that ought to be cogitating upon the future of art is instead benumbed in a lovely haze of gustatory bliss. At such times, all thoughts of art fly away, like unto a flock of starlings, and instead I ponder the sheer genius of modern breakfast snack food manufacturing processes.

But the next morning, after a day devoted to the higher things, things such as prayer and beekeeping and shove ha’penny, I return to that burning question, whither art?, as a dog returns to its vomit, and I wrestle with it, at least until breakfast is digested.

Very occasionally, when for example I have a stomach upset, I do not ask whither art?, but instead declaim, in a booming tone, wither, art! I curse art and I envision a glorious new world where art curdles and shrivels until at last it is gone, all of it, forever. But of course we know full well, all that truly withers is Googie (1917 – 2011).

Puny, neurasthenic Cadet Vig was on sentry duty outside Fort Hoity (4 points) when an angel of the Lord appeared unto him (12 points). Cadet Vig trembled in terror (2 points).

The angel of the Lord appeared to be perplexed. It opened its ring-binder, and looked carefully at the weedy cadet, and then at its paperwork, and then at Cadet Vig again, and then back to its paperwork, and its brow furrowed. For the purposes of its earthly visitation, the angel had made use of a hole-punch and inserted all its papers into the ring-binder. Normally, when shimmering in its celestial halls, the angel had each individual sheet affixed to a wall with drawing-pins, the mass of papers spread out for visual oomph, as is the practice with serial killers in television dramas (6 points).

“You are puny, neurasthenic, and outside a fort,” said the angel, “It says here you should be stately, plump, and inside a martello tower.”

Cadet Vig did not know what to say in response, so he merely quaked (2 points).

“Well, never mind.” said the angel, slamming shut the ring-binder, “What fort is this?”

“Fort Hoity,” said Cadet Vig, truthfully.

The angel reopened its ring-binder (1 point), rummaged through the papers, found the entry for Cadet Vig, and said, “According to my records you are meant on this day at this hour to be on sentry duty at Fort Toity” (8 points).

Cadet Vig was on the point of swooning. His legs turned to jelly as he realised that, yet again, he had misread the duty roster. Captain Nitty would be furious (10 points)! The milksop cadet had an awful vision of months stretching ahead doing potato-peeling punishment. How long, he wondered, would it take him to cross the eerie marshes to Fort Toity? Could he get there before Captain Nitty discovered his mistake? He had a sudden bright idea.

“Is it in your power,” he asked the angel of the Lord, “To transport me instantaneously to the sentry post outside Fort Toity, far away across the eerie marshes, so I will not get into one of my pickles with Captain Nitty?”

The angel once again consulted the contents of its ring-binder (6 points).

“Yes,” it said, eventually, “That is well within my power. But I am minded, instead, on this starry starry night, to shower you, Cadet Vig, with teeming thousands, nay millions, of points, more points than any cadet under Captain Nitty’s command has ever been awarded.”

Now Cadet Vig did swoon, He crumpled to the ground, next to the sentry box outside Fort Hoity. As he lay there, robbed of consciousness, innumerable golden shining points rained down upon him. And when he woke, the angel of the Lord had vanished, and stars glittered across the boundless firmament, and here, clanking towards him in full armour, came Captain Nitty, his face purple with rage, his eyes like burning coals (2 points), and Cadet Vig, for the first time in his puny life, was not afraid. He cocked his blunderbuss and took aim at Captain Nitty. He had millions of points!

This story has accumulated a total of 53 points, if I have tallied them correctly.

A letter arrives from Christopher Lamere in New England. (I note, incidentally, that Mr Lamere’s name is an anagram of H[is] R[oyal] H[ighness] Elastic Emperor, though this may not be significant.)

Dear Mr. Key

I want you to know that you are my favorite writer. This may seem like a vast honor for a no-name, penniless, friendless failure of a 25 year old to bestow, but it is God’s truth. The imagery which you conjure gives me chills. The truths you tell with your stories fascinate and disturb me, especially because I often initially read your tales as flights of fancy instead of actual true events. As a resident of New England, your descriptions of far away ye Olde England are unnerving portraits of a distant land which my home tries to imitate.

Imagine my surprise then, while wandering through some not very dense woods which as an American I would never call a spinney, I found myself at the edge of a wooden lake. At first, I was convinced that the plank upon plank of maple wood was merely the foundation for some as yet unconstructed building, but when I pressed my ear to the varnished surface, I heard that interminable sloshing of some hidden beast. I was shocked to find that your story of the wooden lake was not a mere fantasy, but an ominous story of hidden portent.

It’s the most frustrating thing in the world, since it seems like a conspiracy which I was excluded from. Even with words whispered between my close friends, when I broach the subject of vast lake monsters, or even the mere idea of lakes hidden by wood, their whole demeanor changes. It’s as if they’ve never heard of a lake, or monsters, or wood, or even nails. While I have not been ejected from my town as of yet, people tend to narrow their eyes and hiss “outsider” when I come around. What should I do? I don’t own a hammer, and there is no duckpond in my town.

Yours in fear,

Christopher Lamere

Have no fear, Mr Lamere! I have given much thought to what you should do in order to avoid otherwise inevitable gruesome consequences. First, make a magnetic tape-recording of the hissing sounds made by your townsfolk. Under cover of darkness, subject the tape to certain blasphemous manipulations, then use rusty blood-caked garden shears to cut it and form it into a loop, such that, when played, it will repeat after approximately thirteen seconds. Take it to the precise centre of the wooden lake and play it through an enormous loudspeaker or electric hooter at deafening volume. Have to hand a supply of pebbles which you can hurl at any townsfolk who approach, intent on silencing you. As the godawful hiss resounds across the wooden lake and into the dense woods, execute a tableau vivant of a historical or mythological theme – Judith with the head of Holofernes would be apt, or perhaps President Nixon holding his arms aloft just before boarding the helicopter on the White House lawn that ferried him to retirement. From time to time, increase the volume of the hissing tape loop. Before several days have passed, your lack of a hammer and a duckpond will count for nothing. And, as I so often say when dispensing advice, irrespective of the nature of that advice, remember to wear gloves.

Cracks began to appear in his story immediately. So rapid was their onset that the story itself had not even started, as I have just demonstrated. Not only that, but the story was full of holes. There were more holes than there was story, at this stage. If one examined it, the story did not hang together. But it was exceedingly difficult to examine it in any detail, because of the cracks and the holes. These were now so legion that the story itself was barely perceptible. It would be more accurate to say that it was not perceptible at all, by any of the senses, even if all five were in working order. It is, I suppose, vaguely possible, but only vaguely, that someone blessed with a sixth sense might be able to perceive the story, but oh, dimly, dimly. There were just far too many cracks, and far too many holes, and it simply did not hang together. How could you hang a hole, after all, or a crack, even separately, one by one, discrete, let alone all together? It would be a very peculiar nail from which you might hang such a vacancy, or multiplicity of vacancies, if you were minded to try a nail, rather than a hook or a paperclip. But let us assume, for the sake of argument, and for the sake of his immortal soul, that such a nail or hook or paperclip existed, and from it you were able to hang, after much effort and sweat and elbow grease, numberless holes and cracks uncountable. Would you then be any closer to an appreciation of his story? I would aver that you would not, You would be exhausted and still wallowing in ignorance. As it happens, Exhaustion and Ignorance are my middle names. So I need not bother my little head about his stupid story. I can merely collapse, panting, upon my pallet, in a state of bliss.

I am going to have jam today. I had no jam yesterday, or for several days before that, and I think it is very unlikely that I will have jam tomorrow, or for the foreseeable future. The precise extent of the foreseeable future is, of course, a matter of conjecture. Some people have the attention span of a gnat and can foresee little more than the next few seconds, if that. Then there are seers and wizardy persons, who can foretell, or at least claim to foretell, events that occur far into the future. Nostradamus is perhaps the most famous example, but there are others, such as those boffins who concoct long-range weather forecasts. Between the gnat-brained and the seers are the vast majority, the rest of us, who can make reasonable guesses at what might occur a few days or even a few weeks hence, according to our appointment diaries. I know, for instance, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that in a couple of weeks’ time I will, touch wood, be visiting a hospital to see a consultant to find out what he has learned from a study of a sample of my precious blood. Yet it remains possible that this will not happen, for reasons mundane – a rescheduling of the appointment – or dramatic – the hospital collapses to ruin in an earth-shuddering cataclysm. So even the foreseeable future may not be wholly foreseeable. Of one thing I can be sure, and that is the fact that I will have jam today.

I intend to spread it, the jam, on a slice of toast, possibly two slices of toast depending on the amount of jam and the liberality, or miserliness, with which I spread it. I might even eke out three toast-slices’ worth, if I go a bit mad. I know I will have the jam today. From where I sit, if I crane my neck at a certain angle and peer intently through my spectacle-lenses, I can see the jam, in a small plastic container with a tear-off lid, resting on the countertop anent the electric toaster in which I shall be toasting the slices of bread. Will, shall … the future tense. Can I really be sure I will have the jam? Could something happen, mundane or dramatic, to prevent what might otherwise seem inevitable? With the jam in my possession, now, could it yet happen that I will not, after all, have jam today? To which the only conceivable answer is, alas, yes.

I might discover, when tearing off the lid of the container, that the jam is contaminated, and gives off a foul reek, and must at once be consigned to the dustbin. Or, in a variant of the anomalous phenomenon of spontaneous human combustion, there may be an inexplicable occurrence of spontaneous jam combustion, and I will be left with not jam but cinders. All sorts of other eventualities, the likely and the unlikely, are feasible. The only way I can guarantee having jam today is to cease writing, right this second, and make my toast, and spread my jam, and eat it. So that is what I shall do, and I will report back.

*

Mission accomplished. I had jam today! Hurrah hurray! Though it is only fair to say that it tasted far less toothsome than I had hoped. It was bland jam. Tomorrow, I hope instead to have marmalade. But it is best not to hope too desperately, for who knows what might occur, before the sun rises tomorrow, to crush my marmalade desire?

Pitched past pitch of grief, I wept buckets of tears. Then, on my bakelite wireless set, I heard Chrissie Hynde commanding me to stop my sobbing. I usually find Ms Hynde persuasive, and in spite of the fact that I felt more pangs, I did as she bid. The buckets were both about three-quarters full. I hoisted them, one in each hand, and carried them off across the blasted heath. I hoped to get a good price for my tears from the tearmonger.

“What have you got for me today?” he asked, when I came toiling up to his kiosk. He was a fat slick duplicitous argumentative mocking gloomy patched-up greasy dribbling bug-eyed ragged vitamin-deficient debauched great bear of a man, all frills and flaps, and I did not warm to him, but he was the only working tearmonger in that part of the glade.

“Two three-quarter buckets of my own grief-stricken tears,” I said, lifting the buckets on to his counter. He eyed them coldly.

“What use are they to me?” he snarled, “You are neither an orphan nor a virgin, if memory serves.”

“Look,” I said, imploring him, “These tears were wrung wildly from pangs of grief. They must be worth something.”

“I might see my way to giving you a soup,” he said.

“A soup?” I asked, “What is that in panes, soilings, and pins?”

I knew very well that a soup was worth only a fraction of a pin, but I hoped, hopelessly, to shame the tearmonger into offering me a little more. He started faffing about with a sachet of gruesome murder victim’s widow’s tears.

“See this?” he said, “Tears shed in the actual presence of the lumbering walrus-moustached psychopath Babinsky, as he buried his axe in the head of the poor woman’s husband! Now those are tears that fetch a pretty pin,”

“But I was pitched past pitch of grief!” I protested.

He dipped his fingers into one of the buckets, then licked them with his unholy tongue, tasting my tears.

“Not salty enough for true grief,” he said, “And in any case, the buckets are only three-quarters full. In my experience, true grief gives vent to unstoppable tears. I think you were just moping.”

Under my breath, for the first – and, I hope, last – time in my life, I cursed Chrissie Hynde. I knew it would be pointless to appeal to the tearmonger. I had him down as a jazz-funk fan. There was little I could do but accept his soup. He gave me an eggcupful of minestrone, and I turned away, heading for that place in the past we’ve been cast out of, oh oh oh oh oh oh.

Greetings, Ephesians! How are things in Ephesus? Better, I hope, than they are here at Haemoglobin Towers, where we are having terrible troubles, including an infestation of pipistrelle bats, a plague of locusts, a dog in a manger, mange on our turnips, an outbreak of scrofula, gluten intolerance, incursions by barbarians, hot flushes, cold sores, ungainly hat angles, foopball hooliganism, unearthly manifestations of the ghost of Googie Withers, and more general withers of our googie and our boogie and our jazz-funk groove. We have all that to contend with, Ephesians, while you lot are no doubt sprawled on your Ephesian divans in Ephesus, gobbling grapes and swigging tumblers of intoxicant fluids and having a debauched time of it.

Anyway, the reason I am writing is that I hope to escape from the several horrors swirling about Haemoglobin Towers and have booked a charabanc to Ephesus, leaving from the bus station at Sawdust Bridge next Tuesday at noon, or nearish to noon. But I do not have anywhere to stay when eventually I arrive in Ephesus, assuming I do arrive and do not perish from poisoning by the fumes of the charabanc, which is old and clackety and has not, so far as I know, passed any of the rigorous vehicle safety tests one might hope it had.

Still, I must keep my pecker up and stride boldly into the future without worrying my little head too much about expiring from noxious vapours. So if we assume I will turn up at the bus station in Ephesus at some point, is there anybody among you Ephesians who could put me up in a chalet, or a room, or a tent, or even on a picnic blanket open to the elements? I am afraid I am penniless, and cannot pay a sou by way of rent, but I will happily entertain my hosts by singing lustily to the accompaniment of a piccolo. I have a repertoire of several pieces, cover versions mostly, including my own “interpretations” (for want of a better word) of Vienna by Ultravox, Dr Bogenbroom by Jethro Tull, and The Poem of Ecstasy by Alexander Scriabin, whose hands, incidentally, were as tiny as my head is tiny, proportionately speaking, if that means anything concrete, which upon examination it probably does not, but then I am having difficulty concentrating as in addition to all the other troubles listed above there is now a swarm of wasps outside my window, desperately trying to find its way in to my ill-appointed boudoir.

Oh, and one more thing, Ephesians. The charabanc driver has just informed me that he has absolutely no idea how to get to Ephesus, so if one among you could provide simple directions, so simple that even a dimwit could understand them, that would be dandy! Grace be with all them that love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity. Amen.

One foul and thunderous day, Prince Fulgencio was much pained to learn that there was, running amok in his castle, a reprehensible tot.

“Whence comes this reprehensible tot?” he asked the henchman who had brought him this news. Prince Fulgencio hated all tots, infants, and tinies, with a hatred that burned his black soul.

The henchman was ignorant of the provenance of the tot, but he was rightly terrified of Prince Fulgencio’s rages, so he made up a story about the tot having been delivered to the castle in the talons of a fierce and gigantic bird of prey. There were many holes in this tale, and it would not have stood up to the merest scrutiny, but in his petulance and rage the Prince did not listen to it carefully, and he accepted it without question.

“Find the tot and throw it down the deepest well in my domain,” roared the Prince, “And then find the bird of prey and trap it in a net!”

The henchman wrote these commands down in his henchpad, so he would not forget them, then clanked away in his armour to one of the many pantries, where he joined other henchmen who were carousing and glugging great flagons of fermented goaty milk and henbane. Not long thereafter, all the henchmen were sprawled on the floor of the pantry in a stupor, away with the fairies.

Meanwhile, up in his chamber, Prince Fulgencio’s rage was unabated. So terrific was his temper that he began to see hallucinations, not the least of which was the reprehensible tot itself, grown to an enormous size, and banging a spoon against a bowl.

“I am at the end of my tether!” shrieked the Prince, “I am become unhinged!”

It was rare for Prince Fulgencio to demonstrate such a level of self-awareness, though had he but paused to consider the matter he would rapidly have apprehended that there were neither tethers nor hinges about his person. On the contrary, he was dressed in his finery, silks and satins and rich brocade, garish, bright as fire, brighter than the sun which had not shone on his castle for years uncountable.

“I have no need of sunlight,” the Prince had said, in his calmer moments, “For I pour forth my own princely effulgence, so dazzling it blinds all those who have the temerity look upon my countenance.”

This was of course a delusion, but there was nobody in the castle who dared to tell Prince Fulgencio what was what. Nobody, that is, save for the reprehensible tot, who now came scampering into the Prince’s chamber. It was much, much smaller than the phantom version born of the Prince’s visions, yet no less alarming. It was unkempt, and spotted with patches of milky sick, and emitted a deafening keening.

“Why are you not at the bottom of a well?” cried Prince Fulgencio.

But the reprehensible tot had not yet learned to form coherent words. Gazing directly into the Prince’s face, it screamed and wailed, and then belched up another gobbet of sick.

The Prince called for his henchmen, but they did not come, for they were still away with the fairies. And it was those very same fairies, of course, not a bird of prey, which had delivered the reprehensible tot to the castle, into the presence of the Prince. From that day forth, the tot would cling to the Prince, like a witch’s familiar, keening into his ear and splattering him with sick, until, truly at the end of his tether and truly unhinged, Prince Fulgencio gave up the ghost, and anointed the tot as his dauphin, his son and heir, whereupon the tot of a sudden broke into human speech, and called for the henchmen, and had Prince Fulgencio thrown down the deepest well in his domain. For years uncountable, thereafter, peasants would often see, circling over the well, a fierce and gigantic bird of prey which, when peered at closely, dissolved into a shower of fairies, fairies stained with sick.