It was the day of the annual Channel Four newsreaders’ outing, and this year it was Katie Razzall’s turn to choose their destination. After much thought, peering out of a window of the studio annexe into the pouring rain, she had decided they should picnic next to Schubert’s grave in the Central Cemetery in Vienna.

Between them, Jon Snow and Carl Dinnen both packed and carried the picnic basket.

“It is more of a hamper than a basket,” said Carl, as they lugged it along the path towards the imposing tombstone with its Karl Kundmann relief.

“I wonder how one would best define the difference between a basket and a hamper,” replied Jon.

Lindsey Hilsum, who was walking alongside them carrying a banjo in a banjo case, supplied them with just such a definition.

On this occasion, responsibility for the picnic blanket had been entrusted to Samira Ahmed. The previous year, Krishnan Guru-Murthy had carelessly tossed the blanket into the sea during what had been a startlingly rough crossing. As pro tem captain of the boat, Alex Thomson had tried to shoulder the blame, but there had been much muttering about Krishnan’s cavalier tossage. The general feeling was that, just because the boat was being buffeted by extraordinary waves and seawater was sloshing about the deck was no reason for him to have been such a flibbertigibbet. Jonathan Rugman argued that, given his surname, and the similarity of a blanket to a rug, he ought to be the one charged with bringing the picnic blanket safely to the picnic spot, but Samira overruled him.

“In any case,” she said, “Your name is Rugman, not Blanketman, and there is a difference between a picnic rug and a picnic blanket, a difference which I am sure Lindsey can make crystal clear.”

“I’m not sure I could,” said Lindsay Taylor. It was pointed out to him that Samira meant Lindsey Hilsum.

Kylie Morris and Cathy Newman were lagging behind, grubbing for worms in the rich cemetery soil. They had been told by Gary Gibbon that Viennese worms made the best bait for anglers, though whether this was true or not was a moot point. Gary himself was trying to catch up with Lindsey Hilsum. He was cradling his cornet in his arms and wanted to have a quick chat with her about the duet they would play once the picnic was in full swing. Darshna Soni had suggested a medley of special picnic songs she had written with Sue Turton, but the parts were very complicated, and probably called for a bassoon and xylophone, neither of which instruments was to hand.

By now most of the newsreaders had reached the grave.

“Here music has buried a treasure, but even fairer hopes,” declaimed Faisal Islam, doing an impromptu translation of the epitaph inscribed on the tombstone.

“Who wrote that?” asked Nicholas Glass.

“I think you will find it was the poet Franz Grillparzer,” piped up Simon Israel, who, in spite of the chilly weather, was not wearing any socks. Earlier, he had explained to Victoria MacDonald that this was his small way of testing himself and pitting himself against nature.

Samira spread the blanket out with help from Julian Rush and Lucy Manning, and soon they were all picnicking happily in the shadow of Schubert’s grave. The only thing that cast a pall on their outing was the looming presence in the sky of a flock of rare Viennese vultures. Emily Reuben threw pebbles at them, and Roz Upton shouted bird-scarifying imprecations, but neither tactic made the flock disperse. But it did not rain, as it had threatened to do, and they did not after all have to unroll the big tarpaulin that Nick Paton Walsh had brought along with him just in case.

One of the interesting things about Channel Four newsreader picnics was the way they distributed the food. So, Jon, Samira and Nicholas ate only the cocktail sausages, Krishnan and Sue the celery sticks with a drizzle of gin, Victoria, Julian and Alex the individually-wrapped turnip pies, Kylie and Simon the cheeseballs, Cathy, Katie and Faisal the cheese triangles, Lindsey and Lindsay the potato peelings with suet, Darshna, Roz and Lucy the cuppasoup, Nick and Jonathan the Garibaldi biscuits, and Emily, Carl and Gary the lettuce tart. All of them, however, drank copious quantities of boiled Viennese beans ‘n’ cabbage water, sprinkled with icing sugar.

It was a grand outing, and this year’s pro tem boat captain, Kylie, steered them skilfully and safely back across the channel so they were in the studio by five to seven, in time for the news.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of the combat sports which thrilled the crowds in the circuses of Ancient Rome was the pitting of blind men against ostriches. A savage and ugly spectacle, no doubt, and one quite out of keeping with our modern sensibilities, to say nothing of health and safety legislation. Yet I can’t help feeling that it would make a tremendous subject for a Gladiator-style movie blockbuster. The Antipodean player Russell Crowe – or, as I prefer to think of him, the Artist Formerly Known As Bouffanted Rockabilly Star Russ Le Roq – is so talented an actor one can imagine him playing either a blind man or, caked in prosthetics, an ostrich. What with the computer generated wizardry available to today’s film-makers, he could appear on our screens as both antagonists, and indeed, his image multiplied a thousandfold, as the baying blood-crazed crowd.

I may put my mind to drafting a screenplay, in which our hero is, let’s say, an Ancient Roman haruspex who is blinded when a struggling chicken whose entrails he is attempting to rip out pokes its taloned feet into his eyes. From there it is a short and sorry journey to the Colosseum, where an enraged and starving ostrich awaits. It strikes me that, if there is a need to do the film on the cheap, a high-tech ostrich outfit could be dispensed with. Russell Crowe is, famously, a knitting enthusiast, and given the right wool he could knit his own ostrich costume.

Add a musical soundtrack of bumptious ditties by Randy Newman, and I suspect this could be a surefire hit.

Hepcat buttonmakers Gravelrenche are, I am sorry to say, in the doldrums. For decades, as fashions came and went, Gravelrenche buttons remained impossibly with-it and groovy, favoured by everyone from beatniks to dowager duchesses. Wander as one might from establishment drawing rooms to counterculture flophouses, the sharp-eyed buttonist would spot a Gravelrenche everywhere, on cardigans and greatcoats and weskits and spats. For this reason alone, banks and hedge funds and venture capitalists were willing to advance untold sums of cash to the company, without asking any questions or, indeed, specifying a date upon which they wanted their money back.

Well, the crunch de la credit has put paid to that jolly state of affairs, and over the past six months Gravelrenche has been unable to secure any funding at all, just at the point where button sales have dried up. In the last quarter, the company sold just three buttons, to a demented oligarch, and there is not a single order on the books. Grim-looking envoys from the banks have been seen loitering in the vicinity of the Gravelrenche buttonarium, armed no doubt with terrifying legal papers. The buttonmaking executives, however, are nowhere to be found. But those seeking them are asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering “Where on earth are they?”, they should be asking “Who the hell are they anyway?”

Because the company purports to have been founded by brothers Pierre and Claude Gravelrenche, and operates in the sickly world of fashion, there is an assumption that, when located, its managers will be found to be stylish Eurosophisticates, the Jose Mourinhos of the world o’ buttons. Well, “boff!”, as the French say. The presiding genius of Gravelrenche is in fact a toothless, evil-smelling lumberbones who lurks in a battered seaside boardinghouse and keeps all that cash he has eked over the years under his mattress. It is an enormous mattress. His name is neither Pierre nor Claude, nor even Gravelrenche, but something unpronounceable, the sort of chewy polysyllabic name that demands guttural improbabilities and an excess of phlegm if one wishes to speak it aloud properly. In the unlikely event that this man ever found himself in the boardroom of a bank, he would be turfed out on his grubby ear, mistaken for a vagrant.

What path did so unprepossessing a figure take to become the world’s fabbest buttonmaker? Before answering that question, I want to digress for a moment to take a look at that word “unprepossessing”. What’s that all about? “Possessing” means having, or owning. “Prepossessing” would mean already having or owning, being in possession before the fact. The “un-“ prefix suggests that, far from already owning or having, one has not nor owns not. It is all a bit of a muddle as far as I am concerned, but that does not stop me from deploying the word as and when I want to, without a care in the world. If I wish to be verbose, then verbose I shall be, and a pox upon your strictures!

As for the path of the buttonmaker, that is a fairly straightforward matter. In spite of the unprepossessing figure he presented, and his unpronounceable name, and the stainage upon his clothing, and the vermin creeping in his bouffant, and his curd-like pallor, and his toothlessness, and his frayed elbow patches, and his stink, and his lasciviousness, and his grubby ears, and his filthy neck, and his gullet like a pelican’s, and his squalid patrimony, and his lack of scruples, and his horrible head, and his one eye bigger than the other, and his unfamiliarity with soap, he had an almost eldritch talent for button design. He learned as much early, when he bumped into King Zog I, Skanderbeg III of the Albanians in the street, and the monarch was so smitten with the homemade buttons on the buttonmaker’s homemade cardigan that he emptied his pockets of Albanian and other currencies’ banknotes and coins, pressed them into the buttonmaker’s mucky paws, and begged to be given the buttons in exchange. That very same evening, the King sported the buttons upon his fantastic kingly garb at a palace reception for wealthy Eurogits, and the buttonmaker’s future was assured. Over the ensuing decades, clients such as Ringo Starr and Pat Nixon and Christopher Plummer and Krishnan Guru-Murthy and Monica Vitti and the brothers Miliband and Kathy Kirby bought hundreds and thousands of Gravelrenche buttons, even millions in the case of Mick Jagger, all of them under the impression that they were dealing with swish, effortlessly stylish Pierre and Claude.

Now we know those two dashing Gallic fashion titans never actually existed, and it seems the banks and hedge funds and venture capitalists may have caught on too, for ever since the crunch came, very little cash has been shoved under that enormous mattress in that fetid boardinghouse room on that windswept seafront where the buttonmaker lurks, chewing fish-heads and still, still, making his magnificent groovy buttons.

I am not sure whether to be amused or nauseated to learn that the cleverest person in the known universe is launching Club Fry, “an arena, a forum, a social network, a sodality, a society for the sharing of knowledge and passions”. Nice to know it’s all being organised by what he calls “my team”.

Here at Haemoglobin Towers, I’ve decided that the only possible response is to set up Club Key. Not having a team of spellbound acolytes to do the jiggery-pokery, it might take some time to get it up and running. But what can you expect if you sign up?

Club Key members will meet online, once a month, dressed in the club uniform of food-splattered cybertunics. Discussion will be limited to ornithological topics, for obvious reasons, and grunting, whimpering, whingeing and prating will be actively encouraged. Think of it, not as a Club Fry-style arena or forum blah blah blah, nor as the modern equivalent of a literary salon or eighteenth century coffee house, but as a pond, a brackish and stagnant pond, upon the bottom of which you wallow, breathing through a straw poking up into the stale air above, which is swarming with midges and gnats. Occasionally members will be given the opportunity to sprawl in a virtual drainage ditch, batting away flies and even vultures. Both hissy fits and projectile vomiting will be allowed.

All club meetings will be recorded and posted on YouBoot, a version of the video sharing site which concentrates on violent kicking and stamping while wearing big sturdy hiking boots of the pixellated variety.

I have every confidence that this initiative is going to take off in a big way, and that we shall easily outnumber the members of Club Uberbrain. In fact, I have such faith in the project that to get things started I’m going to splatter my cybertunic with genetically modified sponge pudding and go and round up some injured swallows from the local injured birds hospice right this minute.

 

Speaking of barbarians, as I did yesterday, it’s not often that you come upon the chieftain of a barbarian horde whose name is Chauncey. So I was pleased to learn about such a chap this morning, when I popped into my local Andy Burnham Chat ‘n’ Snack Zone, fought my way through a gaggle of feral hoodies, and sought refuge in the cupboard where a few reference books had been stashed. Soon, I am sure, they will end up in a lime-pit to join the quarter of a million books wilfully destroyed by Waltham Forest Council in the last couple of years, but for now, at least, I had a chance to browse through them for anything which might catch my eye.

And it was an article about Chauncey that I lighted upon, in a big fat book called A Biographical Dictionary Of Barbarian Chieftains Who Swept Across The Plains With Their Hordes On Horseback Wreaking Mayhem And Leaving Ruination In Their Wake; With Six Maps And Twenty-Six Mezzotints. Most of the entries were for barbarian chieftains with names like Hengist and Blegvad and Hagblod, so it was quite a surprise to find one called Chauncey. His full name was given as Chauncey Kittenridge III, and to me that sounded more like a blue-blooded Boston Brahmin than a barbarian chieftain, but what do I know?

Actually, it turned out that Chauncey was indeed the spawn of a wealthy New England family, destined for a career in the banking sector, but that, once astride a horse, some sort of atavistic impulse impelled him to barbarism and sweeping across the plains at the head of a horde. Throughout history, the plains favoured by barbarian hordes for sweeping across, from west to east, have been those that stretch from Asia into Europe, so Chauncey was miffed to find himself on an inappropriate continent. Thus it was that he bid farewell to the living members of the Kittenridge dynasty and made his way to Asia, picking up ruffians as he travelled whom he impressed into the ranks of his horde. He was careful to choose only bloodthirsty thugs who sat well upon horses, for he intended, when the time came for sweeping across the plains, to be fearsome in the extreme, and it would not do to have among his horde the feckless or the merciful or the weedy.

Chauncey himself, however, never lost the impeccable manners that had been drummed into him from childhood, and even at the height of his barbaric career was as much at home in the dining room of a grand hotel as he was setting fire to a barn in some godforsaken village that had the misfortune to be in his path as his horde swept across the plains. As a chieftain, Chauncey had a natural air of authority, and he added to it by sprouting a magnificently hairy beard and by festooning his person with big battered bits of jewellery and raiment. These were not the sorts of adornments that could be mistaken for girly fripperies, for they were heavy and chunky and some were not even of precious metals, but were fashioned from the bones and pelts of slaughtered animals, usually those that charged, terrified, out of the barns the horde set fire to as they wrought mayhem in their sweeping progress from east to west leaving ruination in their wake. Chauncey was particularly fond of a necklace made from the ribcages of goats and chickens, and he liked to polish this with a rag as his horde encamped for the night, warmed by the blaze of a burning barn.

It has been argued that, had Chauncey not been so keen on barbarism, he would have made a fine military commander in the conventional sense. He certainly knew how to keep his horde loyal to him, and suffered no mutinies. He had the knack of instilling camaraderie among his vicious ruffians by encouraging rousing sing-songs as they laid waste to villages and hamlets, songs often of his own composition, usually taking for their subject matter episodes of violence and havoc and chaos close to his heart. Sprightly numbers such as Ho! Boys! Let Us Burn Down The Barn!, Hey! Ho! Boys! Let Us Pillage The Village! and Hidey Hey! Ho! Boys! Let Us Cast The Library Books Into A Lime-Pit! might have topped the pop charts had such things been on the radar of a barbarian horde, but of course they were not, and the very idea that they could have been is simply a foolish fancy, diverting as it may be to imagine a Eurovision or Asiatic Song Contest in which the winners are a tangle of bloodsoaked barbarians festooned with goat-and-chicken-bone necklaces.

According to the Biographical Dictionary, Chauncey eventually succumbed to ennui. His barbarian horde had swept across the plains from east to west, doubled back, swept across them again, headed back and swept across them yet again, dozens of times, wreaking ruination, and it appears there came a point when Chauncey felt that the urges within his soul had been placated. At night, he began to have dreams of lawns in New England upon which he would sprawl, wearing a boater and sharing a picnic with a socialite. When giving orders to his horde, his voice turned to a drawl, as if he were Gore Vidal reminiscing about the Bouviers and the Kennedys and the Auchinclosses. He yearned to attend a weekend party at a Chappaquiddick marina. And so, one vile morning on the outskirts of a destroyed village somewhere on the plains across which he was sweeping, he announced that he was disbanding the horde. He paid off his thugs with hogsheads of bitter grog and distributed among them his baubles of bones and jewellery, and then he galloped upon his horse to a city with a swish hotel, where he booked in and shaved off his mighty beard.

Some weeks later, his barbaric bloodlust decisively a thing of the past, Chauncey boarded a transatlantic liner, ready to return home and to exchange a mess of pottage for his birthright. He had not written ahead to the Kittenridges, but he was confident that he would meet with a warm welcome, and if he did not, was prepared to slip back temporarily into barbarism and unleash pitiless violence, even without his horde to back him up. In the event, it was not a choice he was forced to make, for the transatlantic liner on which he embarked was the jewel of the White Star Line, the Titanic, and he went down with it in the icy waters of the North Atlantic.