I was very excited the other day to receive a letter inviting me to take part in the television programme My Favourite Jesuit. Some of you may not be familiar with the show, which is broadcast on Channel Ignatius Loyola on weekday evenings at 7.00 PM. In each episode, three guests are given a slot to make the case for their favourite Jesuit. There is then a viewers’ poll and one of the three priests is named Top Jesuit. And that’s it! No prizes, no beatifications, just the joy, for the winning panellist, of having made the most persuasive case, and the consolation, for the two losing panellists, of having done their best, and garnered at least a few votes.

After reading the letter, and emitting a whoop!, and filing it in my letter-filing system under J for Jesuit and then sub-filing it under T for television shows pertaining to Jesuits, it took me about thirty seconds to decide which Jesuit’s cause I would champion. My first, and immediate, thought was of course Gerard Manley Hopkins. But then I removed the letter from its sub-file and read it again, and noted in the small print that the producers had barred Father Hopkins as a candidate. If we were allowed to pick him, apparently, he would feature in every single episode and be voted Top Jesuit time and time again. This seems to me a perfectly sensible outcome, which possibly explains why I am not a television producer.

Still, it didn’t take me long to work out who my second choice would be. It was Ninian MacNamara, who was the chaplain at my school for the latter half of my time there. He couldn’t hold a candle to Hopkins, of course, but he was in his own way a quite magnificent Jesuit.

In spite of the Irishry of his surname, Father MacNamara was a superbly English gent. He had the look, and the manner, of the MP Jacob Rees-Mogg – himself a Catholic – with the addition of a pair of rimless spectacles which lent him the air of a cartoon Nazi villain from the films. His voice, though not quite as posh as “Vox populi, vox Dei” Rees-Mogg, was a fine and resounding instrument. It had a tendency towards the high-pitched and declamatory, rather like Michael Palin’s voice in his “Oh Lord, ooh you are so big” sermon in The Meaning Of Life.

Though his chief concern was, no doubt, our immortal souls, most of his energies were devoted to our cultural improvement. Father Ninian, you see, like so many English Jesuits, was an intellectual. The only thing was, he did not seem to know very much. However, ignorance did not stop him from enriching our little brains, and I am thankful that, unlike Rita Byrne Tull’s trainee teacher friend, he never tried to convince us that the murderous psychopath Che Guevara was somehow kin to Christ. I do not recall Father Ninian ever mentioning politics at all – or, indeed, Christ, come to that.

His great contribution, for the sixth formers, was what I recall was dubbed the Culture Club. (I need hardly add that this was in the days before Boy George was a household name.) This was a weekly after school club where our chaplain would lead us in pursuits such as listening to classical music, reciting poetry, and discussing art. My charge that he did not seem to know much is based on one particular Club meeting, where he gave us a slide-show of portraits of writers, whom we were then invited to identify. Father Ninian didn’t seem to recognise many of them himself – though in retrospect perhaps he was (very skilfully) dissembling for our benefit. If so, he was a damned good actor.

My favourite session of the Culture Club, and one which is quite frankly unforgettable, was when he asked us to choose our favourite poets. But we were not asked to recite their poems – being a natural performer, Father Ninian took that duty on board himself. Now, this being the 1970s, there was of course one earnest young sixth-former whose brain had been frazzled by too much Bob Dylan. Before Sir Christopher Ricks and others took up the Dylan-as-great-poet baton, my schoolmate was already there. Dylan, he opined, stood alongside Wordsworth and Tennyson and all those dead fuddy-duddies, in fact he was probably the greatest poet of this or any other age.

Father Ninian, who was decisively unhip, seemed mildly amused by this encomium. To his credit, however, he treated it with respect, and, taking from my friend his well-thumbed and dog-eared copy of Writings And Drawings (1973), he picked a lyric to recite to us. His choice fell on A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, and he proceeded to declaim it to us, the whole damn thing, verses and chorus, very slowly and “significantly”, in that Michael Palin voice. It was at the same time one of the funniest and most excruciating episodes of my life. How I wish I’d had a concealed tape recorder!

After leaving school I never saw Father MacNamara again and, in truth, seldom gave him any thought. Yet to this day I cannot listen to A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall without hearing his voice and recalling my desperately stifled giggles. For that reason alone he is a worthy candidate to be my favourite Jesuit, and if you watch the show, I hope you will vote for him and make him, for twenty-four hours at least, Top Jesuit.

A while ago I waxed nostalgic about the Malice Aforethought Press, Mr Key’s early adventure in small press publishing. Now I have recalled, out of the blue, that back in the benighted 1970s, when I was but a teenperson, I embarked on a similar, even more amateurish, project. I do not know what has suddenly brought this to mind, but I thought it might be of some passing interest to the fanatical devotees among you lot.

‘Twas in the year 1978 that I turned my attentions to what at the time I thought was “proper writing”. The first fruit of this was a piece called Jonathan Owl-Catcher, which as far as I recall was based on an original idea, as they say, by my pal Carlos Ortega. In the interests of clarity I should point out that this was not the Venezuelan union and political leader of the same name, nor any relation to Daniel Ortega, the President of Nicaragua. Having mentioned the title, I must now confess that I remember nothing else about this story whatsoever.

It was with the second piece written at this time that I had the bright idea of publication. Remember these were the heady days of punk and the DIY aesthetic pioneered by the splendid Desperate Bicycles. Having written Uncle Harold Swats At A Moth With A Broom-Handle And Lives To Tell The Tale, what I ought to have done was (a) said to myself “Lord God Almighty, that is an unwieldy and awful title”, and (b) torn it to shreds and stuffed the shreds into a burning fiery furnace.

Instead, I somehow convinced myself that there was a market for this juvenilia, and I proceeded to storm it. My storming was distinctly ill-conceived and inept. I did not even bother to make the story into a pamphlet. I simply photocopied it and fixed the four or five pages together with a staple in the top left corner. At least it was typewritten rather than done by hand.

I now had to sell the thing, so I decided to place an advertisement. There was at the time a monthly magazine called Vole, an early organ of the ecowanker tendency. Actually it was a far better publication than that makes it sound, edited as it was by the late Richard Boston. Boston was a Grauniad journalist whose writing was both witty and learned. His 1976 book about the British pub, Beer And Skittles, was a sort of Bible for my elder brother, and I shall always remember a newspaper piece he wrote about the prep school teacher recruitment agency Gabbitas & Thring. Until I read that, I thought the pair had sprung fully-formed from the mind of Ronald Searle.

I was a keen if naïve reader of Vole, so I reasoned that all its other readers would be deeply fascinated by my fiction. Accordingly, I placed an ad in the classifieds, offering my story for sale by mail order. As I had to pay by wordage, and the title was so wretchedly long, I think the entire text of the ad amounted to little more than the title, followed by “short story”, followed by my name and postal address. Yes, children, that was the kind of thing we did in the days before Het Internet.

Remarkably, it seems to me now, I received about five replies. One of these people even wrote back, offering words of encouragement. I wish I could remember his name. He was, now I think of it, the first person outside my immediate family and friends, who ever read a word of mine. Good God! He might even be reading this, now! If so, please get in touch. On the other hand, given the passage of time, it might be a case of R.I.P. Nameless or not, ye shall be remembered.

Duly encouraged, I bashed out another story, The Bassoon Recital. I used the proceeds from my five sales to pay for an advert, again in Vole, for this new piece. (I think – I hope – I sent my mentor a free copy.) It was less successful than the first, selling perhaps two, or it might have been three. But fewer, fewer.

Interestingly, no alternative approach occurred to me. As I am sure you are shouting, I could have, for example, waited until I had written a handful of pieces and cobbled them into a proper pamphlet. Or I could have submitted them to magazines. And if I must insist on trying to sell stapled sheets of A4 to punters, I could at least have advertised them elsewhere. But no. By the time I wrote the last piece, On The Quayside, I had become discouraged, and I do not recall advertising it at all.

So what became of them, these masterworks? It is possible, if I rummaged sufficiently, that I might find a yellowing dog-eared copy mouldering at the bottom of a cardboard box in a cupboard. I may indeed make such a rummage. In the meantime, I will tell you what I remember.

The “plot”, if we can dignify it with that word, of Uncle Harold Swats At A Moth With A Broom-Handle And Lives To Tell The Tale is given in the title. I don’t think anything else actually happens.

The Bassoon Recital would be more interesting, influenced as it was by Edward Gorey. Unfortunately that is about all I can recall.

Of the three, I think On The Quayside is the one I would be least embarrassed to post here at Hooting Yard, were I to fall upon it while rummaging. I remember that the text was deliberately laid out so each paragraph consisted of a single sentence. I remember that the tale involved a crate being hoisted off a ship on to a quayside, and a stevedore taking charge of it, and discovering that within the crate was a demented ostrich. I think the whole thing took place in what we might call Hooting Yardy weather, that is, rain, mist, gales.

And after that, silence, until a few years later, when the Malice Aforethought Press was brought howling into the world, and the first vague outlines of Hooting Yard could be discerned.

[Please note that I follow the Geoffrey Willans / St Custard’s spelling ‘foopball’ throughout, as part of my campaign to supplant the more common, yet erroneous, spelling of the word.]

Between the ages of about seven and fourteen, I had two overwhelming passions, foopball and nisbet spotting. I have written about the latter earlier, though it is a topic of abiding interest so I shall probably return to it from time to time. Foopball, it turned out, did not abide, in my case. I went from fanatical interest to caring not a jot seemingly overnight, though I suppose it must have been a more gradual process. Ever since, there have been occasional faint stirrings of the old enthusiasm, for example during World Cup tournaments, but it never holds my attention for long. And in thinking about it, I realise that foopball itself – foopball as foopball – was never the real focus of my youthful absorption.

I played, but ineptly – myopia tends to limit one’s abilities on the pitch. I went to a few live matches, but not many. I watched a lot of foopball on television, but then as now, I had no real appreciation of what I was looking at. The finer points always eluded me. Superb displays of skill, when they occasionally occur, are obvious and breathtaking, but the general run of games, twenty-two chaps darting about (if near the ball) or strolling around (if far from it) is enormously tedious. I never quite manage to comprehend the tactical blather of commentators and pundits, in terms of what I am seeing. What I was fanatical about, when young, was reading about it.

More precisely, I read the history. I was less interested in contemporary doings, match reports, transfer speculations, and whatnot, than I was in the past. One of my favourite players was Steve Bloomer, “the Daisycutter”, and he retired before the First World War. I pored over books and encyclopaedias and part-works, hoovering up and retaining an incredible amount of information. I have forgotten it all now, but at the time I could have recited a list of every league champion and every FA Cup winner, told you the scores of every FA Cup Final and every World Cup Final and every European Cup Final, and on and on ad nauseam. That this had anything at all to do with the brute reality of chaps kicking a ball around on grass was, I now understand, incidental. Had I taken it into my head to pursue any other subject – cricket, or stamp collecting, or ornithology – and pursued it with the same single-minded devotion, I would merely have stuffed my head with a different body of knowledge.

And I further realise that never, since, have I concentrated my mind so determinedly on one particular subject. In adulthood, it has been my way to flit from one thing to another, magpie like, with the result that I know a little about a lot, but could never consider myself an expert on anything. What if, today, I decided to immerse myself in a topic as deeply as I immersed myself in foopball all those years ago? I was certainly an expert then. Perhaps, with age, my brain has shrivelled, and would no longer be capable of the feats of concentration and memory which once came so easily.

The few memories I do retain from my foopball fanaticism are fragmentary. If pushed, I could still name every player in England’s World Cup winning side of 1966. Equally, I could list those who died and those who survived the 1958 Munich Air Disaster. That, incidentally, being the then recent past, I considered the signal event of the twentieth century. I mourned Duncan Edwards with soppy sentimentality.

I remember Puskas and Di Stefano. I remember Nat Lofthouse and Tom Finney. I remember a player named Derek Dooley whose career ended when he was badly injured and had his leg amputated, and the goalkeeper Bert Trautmann, who was also badly injured – a broken neck – but carried on playing in a cup final. I remember the “Matthews final” of 1953. Well, for all of the above I should say rather that I “remember” them, for they were all before my time, they were already in the past. Foopball was something that happened in grainy black and white.

There was history, and there were words. Foopball provided many instances to feed my fascination with words. Why were Real Madrid called Real Madrid? Was there an Unreal Madrid, or a Pretend Madrid? Later on, towards the end of my foopball days, as other areas of human activity began to impinge upon my consciousness, I wondered if there was a Surreal Madrid. Very likely, I thought, given that as far as I understood surrealism equalled Salvador Dali, and he was Spanish.

There was (probably still is) a Scottish team called Partick Thistle. I misread this at first as Patrick Thistle, but after realising my mistake I concocted the idea that the manager ought to be scouting the country for a promising young player called Patrick Thistle, just so he could sign him and make him team captain.

I devised a “dream team” of players whose surnames were also the names of birds – Partridge, Finch, Pratincole – and another of players who shared their names with my schoolteachers. And I recall at one point creating an alternative foopball league, of ninety-two teams whose names were anagrams of the ninety-two teams in the real league.

All the while I was thus happily occupied, every Saturday chaps were kicking a ball around on grass. But what did that matter to me? Oh, I thought it did. But it didn’t.

Let me make it abundantly clear, before I say anything else, that I know nothing of the higher mathematics. I am not proud of this, but it must be admitted. My pea-sized yet pulsating brain may be crammed with a huge amount of learning, but it contains much bigger pockets of profound ignorance. Among these are the higher mathematics, and indeed much of the lower mathematics, and even quite basic physics.

When I was doing my O Levels I suggested to my physics teacher, Mr Giblin – a name merely an O away from Goblin – that entering me for the exam was a fool’s errand, and would only waste my time and the time of the poor drudge who had to mark my paper. Mr Giblin, however, refused to listen to my pleas, and insisted he had every confidence in me. So it was that I turned up for the exam and read through the six questions, of which I was expected to tackle four. Then I reread them, hoping a glimmer of understanding might spark in my brain. My fellow examinees were already scribbling away, brows furrowed, tongues hanging out in concentration. I read through the questions for a third time and realised that, far from having a clue regarding the answers, I had absolutely no understanding of what was being asked of me. It was all a deep and perplexing mystery, as if I were trying to read Hungarian or Finnish. I cannot remember what, if anything, I wrote on my paper, but I felt fully vindicated when the grade I received was not even an “F”, but “Unclassified”. “I told you so!” I crowed to Mr Giblin, who looked at me with genuine disappointment and expressed the view that I had probably just had a bad day. It is true that I had not slept well the night before, having been kept awake by the most violent thunderstorm I had ever experienced.

Thus ended my formal scientific education. I have, from time to time, sought to better myself in this regard, and once spent about six months doggedly reading the New Scientist every week. But the pockets of ignorance remain almost wholly empty, I’m afraid.

However, this did not deter me from devising string theory. Or perhaps I should say a string theory. When first I came across this phrase it occurred to me that a theory about string was something I could tackle, if I devoted myself to it. Who knows, I might flabbergast the world of science. I was by this time no longer in contact with Mr Giblin, of course, but I hoped that he would learn of my fantastic theory in some journal or other and feel a little pang of satisfaction that he had been right all along. Young Mr Key did understand physics! It was that thunderstorm that was to blame for his abject performance in the exam, not pure ignorance! Though this was contrary to what I knew to be the truth, I felt benevolent towards Mr Giblin, and happy to be of comfort to him in his advancing years.

First, though, I had to have a theory with which to stun the world. And before I could come up with a theory, I needed some string. So I went to an ironmongery and bought a ball of string. I could have obtained some from a stationery shop, but I felt that ironmonger’s string was somehow more appropriate for my purposes. It was more technical string. That may or may not be the case, but it was my view at the time, and I went with my instinct.

I removed the little blue paper band from around the ball, and slowly let it unravel, holding one end between my thumb and forefinger while I wandered, in an aimless hypnagogic haze, around the house. Soon enough there was a terrifically long piece of string trailing all over the floor and across the furniture. I let go the end I had been clutching, let it drop, and contemplated the result. What I was hoping was that a theory would immediately begin to form in my brain, a theory about this string, which I could write down, as it developed and took shape. Then I could type it up, from my scribblings, pop it in an envelope, and send it off to a respected scientific journal. Plaudits would be showered upon me, and I might even be given a medal.

Unfortunately, as I stood there staring at the string, my brain was in a similar state to when I had gazed uncomprehendingly at my physics O Level paper all those years ago. No theory whatsoever sprang into my mind, not even a first fugitive flickering of a theory. I spat into the fireplace and painstakingly gathered up the string, rolling it back into a ball, which I then placed on the mantelpiece, next to a vase of poinsettias. I reflected bitterly that I had a superb and cogent poinsettia theory, and went to take a nap.

When I awoke, the string was exactly where I had left it. On closer inspection, I was able to ascertain that not only had it remained immobile, but it had neither unravelled itself nor tied itself in knots. I felt the first stirrings of something in my head. Perhaps not yet a theory, not even an idea, but some faint, stringy, intangible, stringy, amorphous, stringy, stringy, stringy, something. However vague it was, whatever it was, it was potent. For a time it was if there was nothing in the entire boundless universe but my brain and a ball of string. I popped it into my pocket and went out to trudge along the towpath of the old canal in the rain. I could not yet put into words what I had experienced, but they would come, they would come.

That was several years ago now, and the words are still coming. They have not actually arrived, and I struggle to form any coherent thoughts about my string theory, but it is only a matter of time. I have the paper, the envelope, and the postage stamp ready and waiting. And one day I shall astonish the world.

Yesterday I had a persistent earworm in the form of the Skye Boat Song. “Speed, bonnie boat, like a bird on the wing…” I have to say this was a more welcome noise in my head than the usual one, which, as I explained a while ago at The Dabbler, tends to be “Happy Christmas (War Is Over)” by John Lennon and the woman Cornelius Cardew threw out of his house. With the Skye Boat Song echoing through my brain all day, I was able to recall that, when I was an infant, this tune made me well up in tears. I thought it was the most gorgeous melody I had heard in all my six or seven years.

But where did I hear it? We were not a musical family. There was an old bakelite radio in the house, with frequencies for Hilversum and Luxembourg marked (among others), but I don’t have any clear memories of listening to it. We also had a Dansette record player, on which my elder sisters span the latest waxing from the Liverpudlian moptops. Other than that, I think the music I heard most often was the hymns we sang in church every Sunday. Well, some sang, like my father, who had a tin ear but belted out the hymns with misplaced enthusiasm. I just opened and closed my mouth at what seemed like appropriate times.

I must have heard the Skye Boat Song at infant school. Whether it was a recording or was sung by one of my teachers I cannot remember. What I do remember is that it was the first piece of music I had an emotional response to. This was absolutely nothing to do with the words, all that guff about Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping to Skye after his defeat at Culloden. The travails of Scottish royals had no purchase on my heart. And the only words I remember – then as now – are the opening lines as quoted above. It was the tune that stirred me, and made me a tearful little infant.

It would have been a couple of years later that, rummaging through my sisters’ small collection of 45 rpm singles, I came upon a couple of records that I played to death. Neither of them made me weep, but I loved them nonetheless. One was “Can’t Buy Me Love” by the Liverpudlian moptops, the other “Like A Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. Given my lifelong obsession with words, it’s interesting that what I adored about the latter was less the lyrics tumbling out of the singer in that grating whine, but the sound of that band.

A couple more years passed, and then my elder brother began to bring LPs home. His first purchase was Abbey Road. Even at that early age, I loathed “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. I was not entirely convinced by “Octopus’s Garden” either. Sorry, Ringo. The rest of it I rather liked, but there was nothing there to make me weep. Now, years later, I find I can get quite emotional listening to “Golden Slumbers”, but not then. My brother’s second LP was Stand Up by Jethro Tull, featuring the hairy monopod flautist. Here I found something that almost, but not quite, prompted the tears which I was beginning to suspect I sought from music. Clearly I have deep reserves of mawkishness. The penultimate song on side two, “Reasons For Waiting”, tugged at my heartstrings. Listening to it now, I cannot imagine why. I still harbour an extraordinary affection for the early Jethro Tull albums, but if there is sobbing now it is generally prompted by laughter. As with Leonard Cohen, there is a vein of humour in Ian Anderson too readily overlooked. Thick As A Brick is one of the funniest records ever made – and deliberately so, I hasten to add.

One day when I was about fourteen I at last discovered music that brought tears to my eyes, just as the Skye Boat Song had done. This was one of the very few LPs in my father’s scant collection, a recording of Paul Tortelier and Jean Hubeau playing the Elegy and Two Sonatas by Gabriel Fauré. I played it over and over again for weeks on end, tears streaming down my face. That cello will get you every time.

But then I was beset by teenpersonhood, and I fell hopelessly in love with Henry Cow. A love that has survived, of course. But nobody ever accused Tim Hodgkinson et al of mawkishness. I was by now at grammar school, where the ungainly youths split into two musical camps. There were the spotty bespectacled wannabe intellectuals, lapping up prog, and the poptastic kids dazzled by glam. You will not need to be told which tribe I belonged to. Though I should say I had a soft spot for Roxy Music, at least in the early two-Brians period, which my sniffier pals abhorred.

A few years later and punk happened. Young Mr Key was a little slow on the uptake, it has to be said. Spitting pogoists were not my cup of tea. But the John Peel show was, and one night I recall hearing the Desperate Bicycles, and undergoing a Damascene conversion. I think I went so far as to ban records made by men with beards from my turntable. (Fortunately, there were no beards in Henry Cow. Preposterous sideburns, yes. Beards, no.) As punk became post-punk, I became ever more enamoured. Younger readers may struggle to believe that Scritti Politti were once the most brilliant group in the entire universe, as I insisted at the time. That time was lamentably brief, and ended with the release of “The ‘Sweetest Girl’” in 1981, after which everything recorded by Green (real name Paul Strohmeyer-Gartside) can be consigned to a dustbin and buried in a lead-lined vault deep below the earth’s surface.

But time passes, and we grow older, and we sift and sort and filter. And we find ourselves once more wishing to hear music that makes us weep. As David Bowie asked in “Young Americans”, “Ain’t there one damn song that can make me break down and cry?” Well, yes, there is, and in my case chief among them would appear to be the Skye Boat Song. Make of that what you will.