Which of us does not wish to become a saint? Ask most people, and they will readily admit that the idea of being venerated after death is a very appealing prospect. The paraphernalia of shrines and icons and relics are attractive in themselves, the more so when compared to the utter oblivion into which almost all of us will fall after Death taps us on the shoulder and beckons us away.

And there’s the rub, of course. You have to be dead to be a proper saint, so it is not a standard career option to discuss with your lifestyle coach or your community hub outreach adviser. I am assuming here that you have such a coach or adviser, for who can be expected to make their wary way through the complexities of our contemporary paradise o’ pap without one? If your coach or adviser does recommend sainthood as a viable life-skill to be added to your CV, they are delusional, and you must cut your ties with them at once. Obviously this will lead to a few days of chaotic rudderless miasmic turmoil until you get a new coach or adviser, but better that than a fruitless attempt to achieve living sanctity.

That said, there are certain things you can do, while still alive, to prepare for your canonisation. Depending in large part upon your general health and vigour, and taking into account any dangerous medical conditions, the path to sainthood can be a long one, and there are many pitfalls along the way. When the time comes for your suitability to join the pantheon of enshrined ones is to be assessed, great store will be held by how you conducted yourself in various situations. It is well to be mindful of this, even when no witnesses are present to watch you comport yourself, for someone somewhere will act the tattle-tale, you can be sure of that.

Some activities are altogether safe, in that you need not worry overmuch about besmirching the purity of your soul while engaged in them. Hiking to a picnic spot in an area of outstanding natural beauty, and picnicking thereupon, while watched by sullen cows, is unlikely to threaten your future sainthood. But such opportunities are surprisingly rare, and you cannot spend your entire life on hikes and picnics, much as you might want to. So it is important that you beware of those occasions when it is oh so easy to tarnish your record.

Consider, for example, that you are out a-strolling by the railway sidings, sidings where it is known from time to time for enormous out-of-control locomotives to come thundering along the track, their drivers rendered incapable a couple of miles back by the sudden incursion into the engine cab of a darting hawk or crow. Your path crosses that of a baffled and woebegone orphan, come to pick primroses and peonies to brighten its dank hovel in the slums. What you must do is to resist the temptation to shove the orphan into the path of the oncoming train, cackling evilly as you do so, and thereafter twirling your mustachios like the most hackneyed of stage villains. If you follow your natural impulses, and enact this terrible deed, you are doing a grave disservice to your chances of nabbing that posthumous shrine where thousands will come to worship one of your bones. Instead, reach into your pocket and take out tuppence and give it to the orphan with the instruction to buy itself a choc ice or a toffee apple. No longer woebegone, the orphan will scamper away towards a tuck shop, well away from the path of the screeching train. Be careful, however, that the tuck shop is not on the other side of the railway sidings, for then the orphan will have to cross them to purchase its treat, and it may mistime its steps and end under the wheels of the giant locomotive after all. Though you would not be as culpable as if you had pushed the orphan deliberately, a forensically-minded devil’s advocate at a later date may twist the facts sufficiently to have your motives questioned, with fateful results.

What we can learn from this example is the necessity of being aware at all times of the potential for mishap. Let us say you have an appointment to see your lifestyle coach – the new one, that is, not the delusional one you have dismissed. You arrive at the skyscraper and have, in your pippy bag, along with your usual jumble of tat, a copy of the latest issue of Vacuus Purgamentum magazine, in which you have highlighted an article recommending “best buys” in pointless gossamer fripperies. The purpose of the visit to your lifestyle coach is to seek their counsel regarding the frippery that is just right for you. But also tucked into your pippy bag is a small canister of poison gas spray. You must be very careful, when reaching into your pippy bag at the beginning of the interview, to take from it the magazine and not the canister, for if you have the latter in your hand you are likely to aim it at your lifestyle coach and depress the knob atop the canister. Remember that poison gas is usually lethal, and you may end up having to explain your slip to both an ambulance crew and officers of the law. If an incident like this comes to light when you are being appraised for sanctity, those supporting you will have their work cut out.

Most people are aware that a condition of sainthood is the performance of miracles. Pretty much every saint has at least one attested miracle to their name, so it is understandably tempting to devote some of your time on earth to learning conjuring tricks. The reasoning is that if you can, say, produce a rabbit from a previously empty cardboard box, or saw a goat in half and then make it reappear whole, to resounding applause from an audience of credulous ninnies, or pre-school infants, then such an act can count as your miracle. I am afraid to say that this is drivel. The only miracles worth their salt are ones performed when you are already dead, and there is not much you can do to ensure that a crippled mendicant sprawled in front of your shrine beseeching you to restore their withered limbs gets up and walks away with limbs duly unwithered. A few stop-at-nothing wannabe saints have tried to arrange for such exciting scenes to take place after their demise by bribing down-at-heel actors from their deathbeds, but it is a ploy not without its risks, and rarely succeeds. The average down-at-heel actor will simply flit from your side as you groan your last and spend all the coinage on strong drink, waking up some days later in a ditch with no memory of the bargain they struck.

A further pitfall for the over-ambitious saint-to-be is to be in too much of a hurry to identify the trade or beast or sickness etcetera of which you would like to be patron. Most such patronages have already been allocated, and although there are some duplications, you should not rest your hopes on any particular role. You may have your heart set on becoming the patron saint of hedgehogs, and spend much of your time doing good works among the hedgehog population, setting up sanctuaries and so forth, but this is no guarantee that you will ever be granted your desire. Those who decide on these matters are notoriously fickle, and you may find that all those hours and days and years spent feeding milk through a funnel to injured baby hedgehogs rescued from entanglement in bramble patches would have been better spent in the company of, say, seabirds or television chat show hosts.

As a general rule, lead a blameless life and avoid poison gas canisters and the temptations of railway sidings.

Several readers have written in to ask if A Rustic Lesson is a genuine old folk song, culled from a collection collected by a collector of old folk songs. Figures such as Cecil Sharp and Percy Grainger and Béla Bartók were fond of traipsing the countryside jotting down the ululations of peasants, and my correspondents wonder if the tale of the duck and the devil and the farmer comes from such a source. Indeed it does. A Rustic Lesson was collected by Prudence Foxglove’s cousin Sagacity Wolfbag, a tireless explorer of rustic byways.

It is exactly one hundred years since Sagacity published her anthology Filth & Muck & Fields Of Green, comprising thousands of pages of songs and ballads, lore and legend, recipes and remedies, proverbs, sayings and old saws, many if not all of them nonsensical. The bulk of the material in the book was gathered in one tiny rustic backwater, a dismal huddle of dilapidated huts in a field near the Blister Lane Bypass. Much of it seems to have been relayed to Sagacity Wolfbag by a single, particularly grubby peasant, who was probably in the throes of ergot-related hysteria, and who died babbling in a ditch shortly after the anthology was published.

Thanks to R. for alerting me to the existence of Sagacity Wolfbag.

Oh the farmer’s dancing round a pit. He’s trapped Beelzebub in it. Upon a branch a warbling tit sings: We have chained the devil-oh.

The farmer tramples in the muck. His belly’s full of boiled duck. A chicken makes a warning cluck, says: The devil’s loosed his chains-oh.

The sky above is a sudden black. The devil leaps up on the farmer’s back. He puts the farmer in a sack and he jumps back into the pit-oh.

The chicken clucks and the tit still sings. It beats its frozen little wings. Oh rustics, you must learn these things: Don’t try to chain the devil-oh.

Till your fields and hoe your ground. Harrow the earth and don’t look round when you hear that awful sound: The devil’s boiling the farmer-oh.

That duck he ate avenged its fate. It took Baal’s shape and had Baal’s hate. The farmer learned that much too late, and he’ll dance no more round the pit-oh.

Of all the Tupper cronies, it is Sedgeweg, the Tewkeston ringer, you would want at your side if you were up a creek or in a snowdrift. He was such a reliable man. It was said of him once, rightly I think, that things hinged upon him. Of how many can that be said? Most of us are rarely given the chance to be hinges, and if we are there is the fear that we would not pass muster. That fear can in itself be corrosive, of our hingedness, before we have even set out upon the escapade or brouhaha in which we wish to play the hinge. But Sedgeweg did not know fear. It was alien to him. Once he was pitched, by a mini-madcap, into a pit of scorpions, and was insouciant. You may wonder how a Tewkeston chap could ever find himself in so unlikely a quandary, and wonder you may, until you do your homework. Remember, he was a crony of the Tuppers, by God the best of them! There were others, of course, some ringers but most not, and all have left their tracks, muddy or sleety or oddly magnetic. Sedgeweg’s tracks are – were – something else again. They had a patina of loucheness, even of abandon. They did not sit well with his everyday demeanour, which was forthright and unabandoned. The glint in the eye, the lack of fluff on the collar. When the whole of Tewkeston was on its uppers Sedgeweg did not crumple. And many did. Too many, if the histories are to be believed. Vinder’s soccer coupons were exchanging hands for ludicrous sums, it was that bad. There were no longer any pigs on the pig farms, just bales of hay in fields, bales baled by Tupper at a time when he could still move his limbs. How easy to forget. Have ever so many tubs been thumped to so little purpose? Oh, there were portents. There were simply too many birds in the sky, swooping, cawing, beating their wings more urgently than birds usually do. Only Sedgeweg was prepared to don a polythene suit and descend into the chemical vats. Pregnant women cheered him on from behind a fence. Most of them were praying. You would have, too, no matter what your confession. Trucks pulled up. There was sludge in the piping. And grievous harm? No. Minor sprains, the odd broken wrist, some other injuries, that was all. It was enough.