“Tanquod Shuddery’s bloated frame hove into view from behind the barn.”

This is the opening line of Dennis Beerpint’s latest piece of poetical whimsy. Indeed, it is the only line, for the twee versifier has had a fit of the vapours and put down his pencil. He is pallid, and shaking, and staring wild-eyed into the grate where a few sticks are burning weakly. He wonders if his talent has been dissipated by his newfound devotion to buzzing around in a light aircraft, swooping low over clumps of cows in fields and calling to them in a language they do not understand. Will Dennis get a grip? Can he salvage his poetic gift? Or will he dash out his brains on a paving slab? Don’t miss the exciting new 26-part television drama series Twee Poet In A Light Aircraft Swooping Upon Cows.

When you go wandering through the bogs, in your boots, make sure you do not confuse the elder bog with the younger bogs. It is an easy mistake to make. To the untrained eye, the appearance of the bogs is much of a muchness, one bog looks much like another, and though you might be able to hold in your memory that there is one bog pretty with swamp parsley, and another bog not, still you will probably come away with a picture in your head of general bogdom rather than of this bog and that bog clear and discrete.

There is an old countryside saying, in this countryside anyway, that “every bog was once a puddle”. If that is true, and reason tells us it probably is, then the puddle that became the elder bog was there long, long ago, before you were born. Imagine that. I expect when you were tiny your parents, or your guardian, warned you never to stray near the bogs, and particularly not the elder bog. But now you are grown you can roam at will. You can, if you wish, spend days on end among the bogs, and I have no doubt that you do so. I know I would, if I still had the means, but the bus to the bogs was rerouted a couple of years ago, and now it goes to the tents and statues and nowhere near the bogs. I was told, when I asked, that the bus company decided to bypass the bogs because so few passengers ever wanted to go there, that in fact I was the only person who ever alighted at the bogs. I found that hard to believe, but they showed me paperwork to support their case. I flipped. The bus company person took me down with a pop from his security prod, and I began to spasm. I haven’t stopped spasming, actually, although nowadays the spasms only come once or twice a week. But I can no longer get safely to the bogs, so now I try at least to hold them in my head. You are luckier, you can go to the bogs and stay there for as long as you like.

Did you know that all the younger bogs have names? There are no signposts, nor placards. The names of the bogs are a bit like that countryside saying, known to the countryside persons but to no one else. The bogs are called Lamont, Baxter, Oriflamme, Shambeko!, Cuddy, Gooboohoo, Coldplay, Mocker, Pippy and Hudibidas. At least that’s what I was told, once, by a country person. He may have been pulling the wool over my eyes, of course, for reasons of his own. But I am minded to believe what he told me, because we were standing on a panel of pewter, and pewter encourages the truth, apparently. The pewter panel was embedded in the muck close by a barn. It had been placed there as a sort of “truth platform” during the witch trials, another thing that happened before you were born. The elder bog and the pewter panel were both there, part of the world into which you dropped from your mother’s womb. And most of the younger bogs were already there too, except for Baxter and Cuddy, both so new that even the puddles they grew from were not yet there on your birthday. I know that because I questioned your ma or your pa or your guardian, and they confirmed as much. You will want to know which of them it was I spoke to, but I am keeping that under my hat, as is my prerogative, and do not for one moment think you can have it otherwise. I shall guide you through the bogs, and my price is silence, at least upon the matter of your ma or pa or guardian and what pearls they let fall when speaking to me of you as a tiny.

I said to you that you must learn to tell the elder bog from the younger ones, and you will want to know why. The reason is very simple. The elder bog is the only one that has been painted, by skilled painters and geniuses, and when you roam around it in your boots I want you to be aware that you are stepping through great paintings, not just through any old bog among bogs. Bog At Dawn, Bog At Dusk, and Shimmerings: A Bog are among the masterpieces of art in this country, they hang in the Imperial Gallery and each day thousands file past to gaze upon them with due awe. So when you stomp about in your big boots be aware of what you are stomping through. No artist of repute ever thought it worth painting Lamont or Baxter or Mocker, or any of the other younger bogs, but time and again the elder bog has drawn to it dazzling masters of paint and watercolour and crayon. I am not sure it is true that, as a tourist brochure states, it is the bog most often painted in this land, for I think there may be a bog elsewhere more popular with our painters, as, for example, the bog at Hoobin, but only the elder bog has attracted those artists whose names will resound down the ages, long after you and I are dead. I, with my spasms, will probably die before you do, and you of course have the advantage of being able to hang around the bogs as long as you like. But do not think you will discover an elixir of life in one of the bogs. I thought that, back in the days when the bus still took me there. That is why I kept on going back to the bogs, because of what I had read, in some out of print pamphlet. That is why I flipped when told the bus would no longer take me there. It felt like a death sentence. I can only envy you, skipping along through the bogs, putting up your tent and camping out there for weeks on end, but I pity you too if you think for one minute that you will find the elixir somewhere among Lamont and Baxter and Oriflamme and Shambeko! and Cuddy and Gooboohoo and Coldplay and Mocker and Pippy and Hudibidas and the elder bog. They are all just bogs and hold no key to eternal life. It grieves me to say that, for I used to think I might discover in one of those bogs something transforming and transfixing. That is why I daily took the bus there for years and years, until the bus stopped going to the bogs and instead went to the tents and statues. Even if I had not been beset by spasms, I would have shunned the tents and statues, for what could I learn from them? Everything I know I learned by roaming the bogs. So you would do well to keep alert as you wander in your boots among those bogs, while you still can, young and feisty and brimming with joie de bogs.

The Heft Of Dough is the title of an LP recorded towards the end of the last century by Agnetha and Anna-Frid and Benny and Bjorn (alphabetical order). The Scandinavian foursome were joined on this occasion by virtuoso glockenspielist Dot Tint, who until then was better known as the accompanist of an oompah band devoted to masterpieces of the Baroque. Dot was introduced to Agnetha, Anna-Frid et al, by her brother Rex Tint, the mezzotintist, who had been commissioned by either Benny or Bjorn to create a mezzotint for the cover of an earlier LP by the quartet. Temperamental Rex completed the work but, in a characteristic fit of hysterics, destroyed it before it could be used, alleging that it failed to meet the exacting standards he set himself. This is unlikely to be true, and those in the know suggest it was simply yet another unreasonable tantrum by the talented but tiresome mezzotintist.

His sister possessed a more equable demeanour, and the recording sessions for The Heft Of Dough were notable for their almost uncanny calm. Granted, Benny went postal one afternoon when Anna-Frid sang her lines tapioca rather than, as the score required, marmalade, and he threatened to tear her throat out, but it was only that, a threat, and he was quickly persuaded to go and take a nap. It was Dot Tint who did the persuading, and it was upon Dot Tint’s divan that he napped. Dot took her divan everywhere, for she was overfond of naps herself. Some said her calmness was closer to narcolepsy, and I suppose it is true that she only ever seemed fully awake when bashing beauty from her glockenspiel.

Press interest in the sessions was intense. Agnetha and Anna-Frid and Benny and Bjorn had recently had a hit single with the prize-winning, insanely catchy song Lepanto, the lyrics of which cleverly use the 1571 Battle of Lepanto between the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire as a metaphor for the more obvious pop pap theme of romantic love. To keep intrusive hacks off limits, all approaches to the recording studios were baited with baffles, made of cement. These served a secondary purpose of deterring Rex Tint from barging his way in. The insufferable mezzotintist declared that he had “unfinished business” with Benny, or possibly with Bjorn, and was set on disrupting the recording of the LP. Frustrated by the baffles, he took to stalking the streets of the nearest township, cursing and jabbering, until distracted at last by a fresh commission for a set of mezzotints, though this was a ruse contrived by his sister Dot to lure him even further away from the studio. By the time Rex Tint discovered he had been fooled, he was holed up in a chalet on the other side of the globe while Agnetha and Anna-Frid and Benny and Bjorn and Dot Tint were putting the finishing touches to their LP.

The Heft Of Dough is a concept album in which the fivesome use the heft of a ball of dough as a symbol for various historical attempts to measure the weight of the human soul. Perhaps the best-known of these are the experiments carried out in the early years of the twentieth century by Duncan MacDougall, attending physician at Grove Hall Consumptives’ Home in Dorchester, Massachusetts. MacDougall used an ornate, oversized Fairbanks scale, designed for weighing commercial silk, to weigh his consumptive patients immediately before and after death, reasoning that any perceptible weight loss must be accounted for by the departure of the heaven-, or hell-, or purgatory-bound soul of the deceased. MacDougall was following the lead of the seventeenth century Paduan physiologist Sanctorius, the founding father of metabolic balance studies, who coined the term “insensible perspiration”. One has to admire the manner in which Anna-Frid et al address this material in a deceptively light pop pap format, with Dot Tint’s frantic glockenspieling adding a frisson of frantic glockenspieling.

The critics were not kind, however, The Heft Of Dough being almost unanimously dismissed as a work of pretentious twaddle. One of the most savage reviews of all was penned by Rex Tint, under an anagrammatic pseudonym. After it appeared, in the weekly magazine Mezzotintists Turn Their Hands To Writing Record Reviews, and she swiftly unravelled the anagram, Dot Tint refused to speak to her brother for a decade. Curiously, Bjorn, or it may have been Benny, was more forgiving, and he and Rex Tint renewed their friendship and thereafter spent many a tenebrous Scandinavian dusk sitting together on the rim of a fjord, swathed in coats of rabbit fur, drinking hooch and babbling into the night.

Trudging around an autumnally glum seaside resort the other day, I was halted in the street by a municipal person armed with a clipboard. It was questionnaire time. I gave a series of succinct, if baleful, replies to queries about my views on the various amenities and attractions of the town, and walked onwards towards the deserted beach. I mention this only because, as I stood staring out to sea in the dying light, I wished I had been in O’Houlihan’s Wharf, instead of where I was, for then my answer to the question “How do you rate the local museum?” would have been neither succinct nor baleful but gabbling and overenthusiastic. Wildly so. For it is in O’Houlihan’s Wharf that you will find my absolute favourite museum in the world.

I cannot begin to explain why the Imperial Museum Of Rotting Vegetable Matter And Other Agricultural Waste Product holds me in such a spell each time I visit. Its matchless collection of rotting vegetable matter and other agricultural waste product is unrivalled by any museum anywhere, its special collections of silage and slurry jewels which any museum curator would kill for. (Notoriously, one curator did just that, but his evil scheme was found out and he was transported to a drab rock, a speck of volcanic gabbro girt by mighty seas, where he ended his days being pecked at by auks and petrels.) What once had been the Imperial Palace, where scenes of decadence and debauch played out under the yellow light of a thousand Pastewick lanterns, is palatial still, and the more so now that room upon room upon room is packed to bursting with sacks of rotting vegetable matter and other agricultural waste product in place of the pointy-chinned aristos and royal grotesques who played and partied and waltzed and vomited here in the old times. The lanterns still shed their unearthly Pastewick light, but how truly splendid now the recipients of that yellow gleam! Sack after sack, in tidy rows, in stack upon stack, rotting and pungent.

I said that the museum holds me in its spell each time I visit, and that is true, but not the whole truth, for I am held in its spell constantly, whether I have taken the days-long charabanc ride to O’Houlihan’s Wharf or whether I have not. For at night I dream of the sacks of rotting vegetable matter and other agricultural waste product. I dream of them each and every night, and I think of them in my waking daydreams too, every single day. For that doomed curator who was pecked at on the gabbro was my father, and I hold his memory dear. I, too, would kill, if I could but take possession of the silage and the slurry, the rot and the sludge, the mould and the mush and the muck.