Yesterday I remarked that you’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are a weed and a milksop. But clearly, you need not do any such thing. It is simply an example of the worst kind of aspirational pap peddled by pop singers and television programmes and so-called “lifestyle” magazines which besmirch the cultural landscape like so many contaminated puddles in which mutant aquatic beings slither and squirm and squirt toxic gack.

You might argue that I am over-egging my metaphor, but to do so would suggest that there is such a concept as “too many eggs” which, unless you are Alfred Hitchcock, is absolute nonsense. How in the name of heaven could one ever have too many eggs? Surplus ones can be placed in storage and used as and when they are required, whether you are whipping up a tasty egg-based recipe or deploying a metaphor when wishing to execrate the twaddle that threatens to engulf us all. Or one can distribute one’s spare eggs to paupers. A pauper with an egg is no less a pauper, of course, but better an egg in his hand than a bowl for begging.

If you are really becoming overwhelmed with eggs, and your chosen pauper looks halfway capable of poultry husbandry, you could even give one of your hens to him. At a stroke, you will have reduced the pauper population by one, for a hen-owning person cannot properly be considered a pauper as such. He has risen to the status of a property owner. Though his property may be only a single scraggy hen, it is still property. Some are dismayed at the idea of treating even the least of God’s creatures as objects of ownership, but that is the kind of sentimental drivel expounded by scruffy wastrels who would have us living in the dark ages, without antibiotics, or indeed industry, surviving on berries and nuts and rainwater.

Such a prescription can appear attractive when under the onslaught of contemporary pap. It is easy to imagine that one might live a more fulfilling life huddled in a cave snacking on almonds instead of being bombarded by visions of cavorting popstrels demanding that we search for the hero inside ourselves, or insisting that our hearts will go on. But remember, we can tread a more lustrous path, one with the benefits of poultry ownership and antibiotics, and much, much else besides, and as we make our way along that path, a basket of surplus eggs in one hand and a hen in the other, we should keep our eyes peeled for paupers crumpled in ditches along the way, paupers we shall raise out of pauperdom with gifts of eggs and a hen, and also of any berries and nuts and bottles of saved rainwater we may be carrying in our capacious pockets.

You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself, particularly if you are the sort of weedy milksop who gets sand kicked into your face by musclebound beach bullies of pronounced homoerotic tendencies. The search for the hero must be addressed with rigour, and you must not allow yourself to be distracted. That is why you should immediately head off towards the dunes and find a secluded nook where you can cogitate uninterrupted. Take your towel with you, and your picnic basket, and the piccolo you brought to the beach with you to practise upon and which was the cause of much cruel merriment to the bronzed hulks who kicked sand in your face. But do not play your piccolo in the nook, for your mellifluous if inexpert piping will betray your location, and it is imperative that you remain quite alone during your search.

It is, of course, a wholly cerebral search, one in which you must marshal all your mental powers to find within yourself the heroic instinct. Shut your eyes and imagine you are a microscopic being on an Isaac Asimov-style fantastic voyage through your body, beginning at the top of your head and working your way slowly down to your tiptoes. Somewhere between the two you will hope to find the hero. If you get all the way to your tiptoes without running it to ground, work your way back upwards, making sure you examine every little cranny and hideyhole, particularly any that might be lurking in the vicinity of your liver or your kidneys.

If, even after the most tremendous searching, you have still not found the hero inside yourself, you must accept that you are indeed a weed and a milksop. The best thing to do is to slink away from the dunes, and thus from the beach, and to continue your piccolo practice elsewhere, for example in a cupboard or on a deserted sea-girt atoll.

On the other hand, if you do find the hero inside yourself, open your eyes, pick up your towel and your picnic basket and your piccolo, and prance back to the beach to confront the bare-chested bullies. Rap each of them on the nose with your piccolo, and then spit in their eyes and stamp upon their toes. Make sure you have a helicopter standing by to whisk you away as soon as you are done, and as you fly off into the sunset, laugh your head off, and thumb your nose at your tormentors, who will rapidly appear tinier and tinier as the chopper ascends, until they are no bigger than ants, and just as easily squashed.

There is a glade in the woods where, once, gravediggers gathered of an evening when their day’s digging was done, and so it is known as Gravediggers’ Glade. They came directly from their graveyards, and brought their spades with them, leaning the spades against the larches and laburnums and sycamores that dotted the glade. Some came from graveyards far away, too far to trudge on foot, and those gravediggers came on their donkeys, with their spades tied to panniers. There can be something Christlike about a gravedigger riding a donkey along a country lane, particularly if he has a beard and a soulful look in his eyes and is dressed in a white shift. But no competent gravedigger wears white, for gravedigging is filthy work, particularly during rainfall, it is work that throws up clods of earth and muck with which the gravedigger’s clothing is splattered, and so he will wear black or brown or beige, and rather than a shift he will wear overalls or dungarees, of tough cloth, if he knows what he is about. Even a gravedigger so clad, if he has a beard and a soulful look and is wending his way astride a donkey towards the glade as the sun sets can resemble Christ, however, if not quite so perfectly.

What must a spectator make, then, of a continual stream of Christs, one after another, in the evening, on the lane, as they head for their gathering in the glade? Some are on their donkeys and some are on foot, but even the latter can look like Christ, during His Passion, carrying their spades as Christ carried His cross. What a sight, indeed, and one you would have seen if, all those years ago, you had been a peasant tilling his patch beside the lane, or lolling in a haystack knocking back a flagon of cider, or engaged in some other rustic evening pursuit. Thomas Hardy wrote about such things, but as far as I know he never witnessed the parade of gravediggers on their way to Gravediggers’ Glade in the woods. These are not Wessex woods.

There was little that was Christ-like about their gatherings. They leaned their spades against the larches and laburnums and sycamores, and those who had come far tied their donkeys to the same trees with donkey-tying string, so the donkeys would not stray, although they let their spades remain empanniered rather than removing them to lean against the trees alongside the spades of their fellows. No, they no longer looked Christ-like as they gathered, all in black and brown and beige and matted in muck, muck which was splattered in their beards and their hair as well as upon their tough gravediggers’ clothing.

And, gathered together, they began to grunt. They grunted softly, and loudly, and kept on grunting until they had coaxed the Grunty Man, that monster from the bedtime stories of their childhoods, from his lair up in the hills. The Grunty Man came bounding down to Gravediggers’ Glade at inhuman speed, hairy and slobbering and grunting, and as soon as he was among them, the gravediggers fell silent. They stooped to pick pebbles from the ground, and they chucked the pebbles at the Grunty Man, many, many pebbles, but not with great force, for they wished to tease him rather than to harm him. And when they had exhausted the pebbles, the gravediggers began to sing. They all had sheet music tucked into the pockets of their black and brown and beige overalls or dungarees, and they lined up as a choir would line up, and they belted out in their gruff gravedigger voices selections from Charles Ives’ self-published collection of 114 Songs (1922). They sang At Sea and Charlie Rutlage and Like A Sick Eagle. They sang Luck And Work and Grantchester and Ich Grolle Nicht. They sang Songs My Mother Taught Me and The Housatonic At Stockbridge. They sang Marie and Rosamunde and Mists and Watchman and Those Evening Bells. And they sang Tom Sails Away, as a sort of farewell to the Grunty Man, for by now he had sailed, or scampered, away, for he was frightened of singing, and the gravediggers’ songs always made him flee back up to the hills where he cowered in his lair until lured back to the glade by the grunting of the gravediggers when next they gathered there of an evening.

Fear stalks the countryside, especially fear of the Grunty Man, and that is how the gravediggers held their fear at bay. They could have sung songs by other composers, of course, by Schubert or Schumann or Peter Warlock or Peter Blegvad or Yoko Ono, but each of them was fond of Ives and they had splurged their wages on the sheet music for the 114 Songs, trooping into Dennis Pigstraw’s sheet music shop in the village of Cack posing as a choir. All singing terrified the Grunty Man. Teasingly pelted with pebbles and sung at, he never learned that he should ignore the grunting with which he was coaxed from his lair, for his brain was tiny and hot and pitiable, and every single evening he fell for the same trick. Had it happened in Wessex, Thomas Hardy would have written about it, I am sure. But there is much that happens elsewhere in the countryside that no one speaks of or writes of, and that is as much a pity as the weakness of the Grunty Man’s tiny hot brain.