Because it was constructed mostly from canvas and cloth, and the canvas and cloth were fed on by moths, the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar is sometimes known as the Moth-eaten Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar. Ravaged by moths and time, and lashed by wild winds that blow across the tarputa, it is a wonder the temple still stands, a thousand years after the first devotees entered it through the sacred flap. It has of course been much patched and stitched over the centuries, and its fabric is regularly stiffened with starch, carried in canisters for miles upon miles by worshippers of the hideous bat-god Fatso. For it is He to whom the temple is dedicated.

The wild winds that lash and batter the temple are meteorologically very interesting indeed. Students of the weather have been perplexed by them ever since modern wild wind studies began. Before our scientific age, of course, the sheer weirdness of the winds that blow across the tarputa was ascribed to the mercurial and petulant nature of the hideous bat-god Fatso, for it was thought that He was responsible for them, as He was for everything in the universe. We are wiser now, but no closer to getting to grips with the wild lashing winds.

Those who still believe in Fatso have a simple explanation. For them, the winds are the physical manifestation of the temperament of Fatso’s magic pig. Actually, He has two magic pigs, but we can safely ignore one of them for a moment or two. The idea is that this particular pig – which, it must be understood, is not a real pig in any sense – somehow sends the winds howling across the tarputa whenever it is fractious or hungry or obstreperous or maddened or otherwise out of sorts. Why the hideous bat-god Fatso does nothing to placate His magic pig is an ineffable mystery. The religion dedicated to Him is short on theologians of any stripe, although one of the few to have addressed the problem contended that Fatso spent much of his time pacifying the other magic pig, which, if ever it fully awakened, would make the wild winds that batter the temple seem like tiny pipsqueak gusts of summer breeze. Other so-called scholars argued that this implied the other magic pig was somehow more powerful than Fatso Himself, a clear heresy, so the first theologian was put in a crusher and crushed.

There used to be at least five crushers on the mud plain around the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar, so we must assume that there were plenty of heretics to be crushed. Occasionally, a bright young whippersnapper archaeologist will announce plans for a dig at the site, hoping to exhume a fantastical hoard of crushed bones, but not one of these schemes ever succeeds. It is said that Fatso Himself sabotages the expeditions, by causing shipwrecks and helicopter crashes and by pickling the archaeologists’ brains while they sleep. In these ploys he calls on the assistance of his flock of bitterns. Unlike the two pigs, the bitterns are not magical, but nor, of course, are they real. They are phantom, spectral bitterns, beholden to Fatso for some service He did them in the distant past. We cannot guess what that might have been, for it is a topic suspiciously neglected by all the priests and wizards and jumping-about men who interpret Fatso to his followers. Or, I should say, who used to do so. There are none of them left alive today, at least none that we know of. Believers in Fatso are a dwindling band, often greasy and myopic and spindly and gormless. They tend to lack élan. Most of them, probably, would be crushed in the crushers if the crushers were still there, because one thing we can be quite clear about the hideous bat-god Fatso is that He expected His devotees to cut a dash. There may have been few opportunities for glittering social panache on the prehistoric tarputa, especially with those wild winds, but what rare chances there were were seized on by Fatso’s followers. Great attention was paid to the angles of hats, the tying of cravats, and affectations of toffee-nosed insouciance. This is not to discount a concomitant yearning for the mud, encouraged by one of the magic pigs.

So today there are few who haul their canisters of starch for miles and miles to stiffen the moth-eaten canvas and cloth of the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar. Perhaps in a hundred years there will be none at all. Yet Fatso himself will still, as far as He is concerned, hold sway over the universe, and His magic pig will still make the wild winds blow, and His other, even more frightening magic pig will doze and slumber, dreaming of havoc. It is easy for us to dismiss their very existence. Until, that is, we have struggled, stylishly, across the inhospitable tarputa, and stooped down to crawl through the sacred flap, to enter the Temple. Then we see what all those believers through the centuries saw, a sight so magnificent and terrifying that we sprawl helplessly in the mud, shrieking, brains bedizened, gaga for the god of all gods.

It is, I think, common knowledge that by eating the brains of certain animals we can boost our own mental powers. Granted, this is not a practice which has won the backing of the greatest living Maestro of the Mind, Tony Buzan, but the results can only be described as buzantastic. The difficulty, of course, has always been obtaining brains in the first place, and making them edible. Few of us are so ruthless that we would consider tearing the brains out of the heads of our domestic pets, our cats and dogs and budgerigars, and in any case, those are not the kinds of brains that will do much to supercharge our mental abilities. I know a poor soul who lived on a diet of budgerigar brains for a week, and he is now fit for little else but dribbling and writing features for the Guardian weekend magazine. Similarly, although your local zoo will provide a far greater range of animal brains, some of them particularly mind-enhancing such as the brains of giraffes and of exotic birds, zoos tend to have security guards who will Taser you without compunction should you creep towards the enclosures at dead of night armed with a jemmy, a skull-slicer, and a spoon. Being Tasered does not improve your mental prowess, despite what you may have read in the Guardian. That article was written by budgerigar-brains man.

It is a very welcome development, then, that there is a new section on the delicatessen counter at Hubermann’s where lucky shoppers can buy a huge variety of boil-in-the-bag animal brains at ridiculously low prices. The selection seems to have been made with human mental agility boosting as the basic criterion, for we can find the brains of weasels and pigs and crows and cows and giraffes and hoopoe birds and jellyfish and starlings and wolves and locusts and okapi and trout and flamingos and bears and monitor lizards and corncrakes and carp and badgers and hornets and lobsters and ducks and gazelles and dozens of others, all conveniently packaged and ready to boil.

Faced with such a cornucopia there is an obvious temptation to go overboard and stuff your gob with particularly toothsome brains, such as those of the rooting hog. This is why the staff at Hubermann’s are fully trained to advise on the government’s five-a-day guidelines, and hand out free leaflets with every purchase. To maximise your brain potential, it is important to follow certain tips:

• Your daily intake should include the brains of five different animals
• Make sure you boil the brains in the bag until they are piping hot
• Do not eat the bag
• Best accompanied with a side dish of suet pudding

Having said that, there may be occasions when, in order to boost a particular area of your mental apparatus, a judiciously limited diet can be helpful. For example, you may wish to improve your ability to interpret the scores of the more complex madrigals of Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623), in which case you might want to eat a couple of boil-in-the-bag conger eel brains for breakfast and supper each day. Studies have shown that there are substances in the brains of all eels, but especially the conger, which stimulate those parts of the human mind receptive to madrigal score complexities. Admittedly, these studies are very much in their early stages, and have yet to be given the imprimatur of any recognised academic institute, but the experiments conducted so far have been more than promising. Separate research is being done by historians of both eels as food and of choral music on whether Thomas Weelkes himself ate the brains of conger eels during his time as a Gentleman Extraordinary at the Chapel Royal.

Generally speaking, however, unless you have a specific mind empowerment scheme you wish to propel forward, it is best to stick to those five-a-day guidelines. Make sure you pick up one of the leaflets from Hubermann’s delicatessen counter, and study carefully the many diagrams in the fold-out section so you can learn to tell the difference between the various animal brains available, as it must be said that they all look quite similar when packed into bags.

One final note. Those of you who fret about things can rest assured that, according to the latest press release from Hubermann’s, boil-in-the-bag budgerigar brains are most definitely off the menu.

Beppo was banished to a pompous land where he knew nobody. At the docks, under Kleig lights, for they disembarked from the boat in the middle of the night, his chains were taken off by the skipper himself. Mussing Beppo’s filthy hair, the skipper reminded him that he was now in a land of much pomposity, and forbidden to leave it for forty years.

Beppo saw little pomp at the docks. He saw crates and stevedores and container ships and much else one might expect to see at docks in any land. Never having hung around any docks before now, Beppo was smitten by the novelty of the sights and sounds and smells, and he stayed put. He sat for hours on a bench on the docks watching ships and sailors and crates. He begged for bloaters from the crews of smacks which brought their catch to the docks. He found shelter under a neglected tarpaulin and rubbed unguent into those parts of his flesh where the chains had chafed it. He gawped at floozies roaming the docks in their satins and silks. A floozie with a cloche hat befriended him and talked of the pomposity of the land beyond the docks.

After one hundred days at the docks, Beppo nerved himself to leave. His cloche hatted friend convinced him to go to the capital city, where majestic buildings scraped the sky and the blades of helicopters whirred and the paving slabs along the boulevards were free of grime and grease. But she forgot to tell him about the pompous sentries at the city gates whose lips curled in sneers at Beppo’s approach.

Beppo explained that he had been banished from his own land and that he had come to the capital city to get work piloting a helicopter. His plan, which he did not divulge to the sentries, was to become fat and to grow a moustache and to pilot a helicopter back to his own land where he hoped his new fat moustachioed appearance would deceive his banishers.

The sentries chuckled pompously and marched Beppo off to an area of disused railway infrastructure, where they tied him to the rails. They got this idea from watching a number of silent film serials starring Pearl White (1889-1938), including The Perils Of Pauline, The Exploits Of Elaine, The Iron Claw, The Fatal Ring, The House Of Hate, and Plunder. The sentries overlooked the fact that, the railway being disused, no locomotive would come hurtling towards trapped Beppo as he struggled with the cords that bound him.

The sentries’ knot-tying skills were lamentable, and Beppo managed to free himself within minutes. Then he wandered off along the disused railway track, skirting the capital city. He hoped to find a spot where he might breach the massive granite wall, a spot without sentries and where a certain amount of crumblement had occurred.

Alas! When Beppo found such a spot he discovered that it was used as a conduit by feral, zombie-like ruffians. These creatures had once been full citizens of the capital city but had been shunned due to their lack of pomposity. They now lived in a twilight world, staging raids into the city through the crumblement zone and setting upon passing wayfarers outwith the wall, such as Beppo. They sheared the hair off his head and sprinkled the cuttings on to the soup in their billycans. They made him wear a foolish hat. They poked him with pointed sticks and drooled upon him. His humiliations ceased at nightfall when searchlights from a patrolling helicopter picked out the ruffians and made them flee. The helicopter landed in an adjoining field and Beppo was bundled aboard.

The flight to the helipad in the pompous capital city was a short one, but halfway there the helicopter was engulfed in thick, thick fog, fog so thick that visibility was zero. On 15^th December 1944, Glenn Miller took off in an aeroplane from RAF Twinwood Farm in Bedfordshire, en route to Paris. The aeroplane, and Miller, vanished without trace over the English Channel. Beppo met a similar inexplicable fate.

He has a headstone in the graveyard of the capital city of that pompous land. It is marked with an X, and the earth beneath it holds no bones.

James Joyce was terrified of thunder and lightning, and used to cower beneath a table during electrical storms.

Dr Franklin first showed that lightning is the same as the electricity made by the electrical machine. As the electricity of the electrical machine is got by rubbing glass, so much of the electricity of the air is caused by the rubbing of moist air against dry air. A great deal is made by the turning into vapour or mist of the salt water of the ocean by the sun’s heat or by the blowing of the wind. More water is turned into vapour during the heat of summer and autumn than in winter, and this is why there is more lightning in warm than in cold weather.

There is always a good deal of electricity in the air, and in clear weather it is generally positive electricity. But during fogs, rains, or snows it is usually negative electricity, though it changes often. It sometimes happens that two clouds, one charged with positive electricity and the other with negative electricity, come near each other, and then the two kinds of electricity rush together, when a flash of lightning is seen and thunder is heard.

The lightning is the same thing as a spark from an electrical machine, the only difference being that a flash of lightning is sometimes several miles long and the spark only a few inches. The little spark gives out only a snapping sound, but if we were able to make a spark as large as a flash of lightning it would cause as much noise as thunder.

When a cloud filled with one kind of electricity comes near the earth while the earth is filled with electricity of the opposite kind, the cloud may discharge its electricity to the earth. If any tall object, such as a tree, a steeple, or a house, happens to be near where the cloud discharges, the electricity will often pass down it to the earth. In this way houses are sometimes injured and set on fire, and great trees are blasted into tiny pieces. Sometimes, too, human beings and beasts of the field are struck and killed. It is not safe, therefore, to stand under a tree or close to a high house during a thunderstorm. James Joyce was safe enough cowering beneath his table.

We see lightning in several different forms. Sometimes its flash is straight, sometimes it is forked or zig-zag, sometimes it is round like a ball, and sometimes it spreads over the clouds like a sheet of fire. When a thunder-cloud is near the earth the flash comes straight down to the earth, because there is but little air for it to pass through, but when the cloud is at a considerable distance from the earth, the air in the path of the lightning is made denser or thicker by being pushed together, and as lightning can pass quicker through thin than through thick air, it flies from side to side so as to pass where the air is thinnest. Thus its path is zig-zag or forked. When there is a very great charge of electricity in a cloud it sometimes forces its way through the air in the shape of a ball. What is called sheet lightning is either the reflection or shine on clouds of a stroke of zig-zag lightning which is too far off to be seen, or light discharges of electricity from clouds which have not enough to cause zig-zag lightning.

When lightning passes through air it leaves behind it a vacuum – that is, an empty place – and the air rushing in to fill it makes the noise which is called thunder (ukkonen in Finnish). We do not usually hear this until some time after the flash of lightning, because light travels more than a million times faster than sound. Both light and sound travel incredibly faster than a human being, James Joyce, say, taking a stroll in the streets of Trieste. When the thunder-cloud is at a distance, the sound comes to us little by little, and it is then called rolling thunder, just like one of Bob Dylan’s concert tours in the 1970s. But when the cloud is near the earth the sound comes in one almighty crash. We can generally tell how far off a thunder-cloud is by noting how much time elapses between the flash of lightning and the sound of the thunder. If we can count to five as slowly as the ticktocking of a clock between the two, it is certain that the cloud is more than a mile away, and we can probably come out from beneath the table, if that is where we have gone to cower.

Lightning, in its way to the earth, will always follow the best conductor, and when it strikes a building or a tree it will leap from side to side to find it. It likes pointy things rather than blunt or rounded things, and this is why lightning rods have sharp points. Buildings properly fitted with lightning rods are safe from being struck by lightning, because the rods lead off the electricity into the earth. When a cloud filled with electricity comes over the rods, the electricity will flow silently down them until the cloud is discharged, and we see no flash and hear no thunder. We can feel sure the building will not be struck. The tops of lightning rods are usually made of silver or are gilded, so that they may not rust and thus become worthless. The lower end of the rod must be carried down into damp earth. If the earth is dry it is better to carry the end of the rod into a well, because dry earth is not so good a conductor as moist earth, and the lightning might leap from the rod at the lower end and go into the cellar of the building. High chimneys should have lightning rods on them, because the soot in them is a good conductor, as is also the vapour which rises from them when fires are burning.

The word lightning in Finnish is salama. A flash of lightning is salaman leimahdus.

Beppo was bilked by Frabbo, so he plotted his revenge. Beppo came armed with a stiletto. We are in Verona, circa 1566. Frabbo was something of a dab hand at bilking, but no match for a pointy thing prodding at his torso. That was why he wore an iron vest.

They say that Frabbo walked away unscathed that day in 1566. But he never again bilked in Verona. He had been shaken, and there were dents in his iron vest. He embarked upon a ship and sailed away to the New World.

Aboard ship, Frabbo considered the rigging. All those skeins and knots reminded him of the plots in which he had so loved to become entangled. But for Frabbo a New World meant a New Leaf. He would be a good and simple exile.

Frabbo’s brain became dizzy at the exotic strangeness of the New World. Seeking comfort in the familiar, he fell in with Jesuits. He helped them to convert the Inca through fire and flame. He lost all reason.

Frabbo’s tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth and he scampered into the interior naked and loose of limb. The interior was a wild place of dripping foliage and shrieking birds and globular fruits. Frabbo found it horrible.

Come 1576 and Frabbo is enswathed in turquoise raiment. He is deep in the interior and when he snaps his fingers monkey acolytes do his bidding. Ah, but hacking through fronds and creepers comes bilked Beppo at the head of a clanking platoon. It will be man versus monkey, and much blood will be spilt.