It can be the devil of a job to keep a pigtape sated. The standard pigtape has three basic behaviours: grunting interminably until it is fed, eating the food it is given, and, mercifully, taking post-prandial naps. One learns to treasure those naps, for they are the only respite one gets from the pigtape. Even then, it tends to grunt and snuffle and wheeze in its sleep, so it still makes a noise, though not as horrible a noise as its incessant grunting for food when awake or the absolutely disgusting chomping and slobbering noises it makes when it is eating. It is fortunate that the pigtape is such a tiny being, and the volume of its noises commensurate with its size, otherwise one would be deafened by it, and not merely deafened but driven from polite society, banished to a wilderness. Most pigtapes are audible only to their hosts, which is a bad enough state of affairs.

The correct term is “little pigtape” and it is similar to a tapeworm, except that the pigtape dwells within the soul. This does not mean that the pigtape grunts for spiritual sustenance, such as the reading of books by Deepak Chopra. The food for which it grunts is all too solid – cream crackers and cockles and mussels and lemon meringue pie and bloaters and choc ices and cous cous and pastry and vinegar and a spit-roasted half of an ox and aubergines and dumplings and suet pudding, to name but a baker’s dozen of its cravings. Before at last it is replete and takes a noisy nap, the little pigtape somehow sucks all the food out of your stomach through internal piping to its cranny in your soul.

Because it is so tiny, and dwells within so inaccessible a spot, ridding oneself of a pigtape is well nigh impossible. Maybe not even well nigh, but just impossible, full stop. Certainly there are no recorded cases in the literature of anything resembling a little pigtape being extracted from a body, either during a surgical procedure upon the living or an autopsy upon the dead. Nor is it at all clear how one acquires a pigtape in the first place. We all have our sacred souls, but not all souls provide a home to these minuscule grunting greedy monsters. It is not true, despite what you may have had drummed into you by priests or parents, that the presence or absence of a pigtape is dependent in some way upon one’s moral unbesmudgement. Of course, it is advisable not to eat too much contaminated pork, but for a host of other reasons, such as indigestion or death.

It is said that the cartographer Pamela Lamp became interested in patterns of pressed meat consumption around the world. She travelled from continent to continent, collecting statistics and even attending tastings, when and where such were held, in barns or conference centres. As soon as she had filled a notebook, she shoved it into one of the pre-addressed Jiffy bags she had brought with her, visited the local office of the postal service, and sent the book back home, where it and all its fellows would be waiting for her when her globe-trotting survey was complete. Her assistant, a sycophantic wannabe cartographer, had the keys to Dr Lamp’s house, and kept an eye out for the postie, and whenever a Jiffy bag was delivered she let herself in and took the newly arrived notebook from its bag and arranged it with all the other notebooks on a pedestal notebook stand with attached cartographical work surface, a formica countertop with a design of ruled squares. So when Pamela Lamp came home, everything was ready for her, and she set to work making a world atlas of pressed meats. She let the assistant help her out, but did not allow her to do anything of great importance, for she did not wish the assistant to have any pretext to wangle an acknowledgement in the text. So the assistant lit Dr Lamp’s cigarettes and made cups of cocoa for her and swept the floor with a broom, like Cinderella, but did not make any direct contribution to the atlas. When it was eventually published, the reasoning behind the entire escapade became apparent. For, ever since she was a child, Dr Lamp had been determined to create, singlehandedly, a book which could with absolute justification be called Pam’s Spam Maps.

“Woolworth’s is no more,” said a headline I spotted in a newspaper. I did not quite grasp what it meant – that apostrophe s seemed misplaced – so I ruminated, as I do whenever I encounter something perplexing. My usual method is to stare out of the window awaiting enlightenment, so that is what I did. I felt it would have been of immense help if the view from my window was of a hillside with a lot of sheep on it, but I am afraid to say that all I could see was the perimeter fence of a derelict shopping precinct. Had I been able to see some sheep I could have grabbed a pair of binoculars and examined closely the fleeces of the sheep, assuming they were unsheared, to ascertain why their wool no longer had any worth. In the absence of any useful visual prompt, I was forced to rely upon the cerebral activity buzzing within the confines of my skull – a skull, I should add, that has won plaudits from a number of highly competent phrenologists. Dr Bramblegack described it as “impeccably cranial, with lovely dents”.

After gazing at the collapsing retail hub for a few hours, I reached some preliminary conclusions about wool having no worth. I shall present them to you now, with the proviso that you keep them under your hat until I give the all clear. There is no pressing reason for secrecy, but I find it adds a frisson of excitement to the daily round. For example, when I pop out to buy a pint of milk or a packet of surprisingly delicious vegan pork-style scrapings, I will sometimes pretend that I have been sent on a mission by SMERSH, and loiter outside the shop muttering into a concealed walkie-talkie for an hour or so.

My first provisional conclusion is that wool has gone bad, or become contaminated in some way, and is therefore to be shunned on health grounds. It follows from this that sheep are carriers of bad wool, and must be culled. Few save for the bloodthirsty would willingly slaughter innumerable sheep, so quarantine may be preferred to a cull, if a secure area of sufficient acreage can be found. Helicopters could hover over the site, ensuring no sheep made a run for it after bounding over the barbed wire fence.

My second provisional conclusion is that wool has lost its worth due to a glut. This would not be the first wool glut in history, but perhaps the most severe one. The best way to address the glut is to identify new uses for wool, to stimulate demand. Coupled with an authoritarian approach, the surplus wool would soon get used up. So, step one is to issue a decree that anyone not making conspicuous daily use of the new wool-based products, such as woolly satnav, woolly catnip, woolly bubblebath and woolly fireworks, would be shot on sight.

My third provisional conclusion is a simple one. Wool has had its time, and that time has passed, and we must stride onward to a bright new utopia under the benevolent gaze of the Great Helmswoman, be she Hazel Blears or, at a push, Agnetha Fältskog.

Although I would not wish to prod you towards one or other of my conclusions, it ought to be noted that this piece was typed entirely with a “woolboard”, a thrilling new computer-style keyboard made out of one hundred percent uncontaminated wool.

I was drooling into a pewter pot held by my unpaid companion on the balcony of a sanatorium upon which snow was falling, snow which showed no sign of melting, and I realised it was going to be a hard winter. My companion was a deaf mute, and I could have used sign language to communicate this insight to her, but I was wearing thick woolly mittens against the cold, so I let it pass. She could not lip read my language, and even if she could, my beard is now so majestic that my lips are thoroughly obscured. It further occurred to me that, in a hard winter, I might perish on this balcony, covered in snow. Well, I thought, worse things happen at sea. It is a notion I have often clung to for comfort, but God knows, given some of the calamities that have blasted me over the years I do wonder just how much worse things could have been had I been aboard a boat or a raft. The idea that maritime disasters were worse than anything that could possibly happen to me on land was instilled in me at my mother’s knee, and kept me shorebound even in the teeth of press gangs, blandishments and wanderlust. The press gangs were the hardest to overpower, of course, lumbering brutes flailing cutlasses at me as I staggered drunkenly from a dockside tavern at dawn. Lucky for me that even in my cups I have a gaze that could wither a row of hollyhocks. I mean that literally. It was a trick I picked up from a mountebank in a fairground tent, and one I deploy sparingly. Would it have helped me to face down imperilment at sea? I will never know, it is much too late for me to go a-sailing now. How late it is, how late. That was the title of a book by a sweary Scotchman, I recall, a book that won a prize. I doubt he had a clue what he was talking about. I stare at the falling snow from my balcony, drooling into a pot, and I think I’m the one who knows what “late” means.

The pewter drool-pot is a memento from the long ago morning of my life. It belonged to my mother, as it had belonged to my grandmother and, I think, to my great-grandmother, all of whom kept buttons in it. Women of those eras amassed thousands upon thousands of buttons, never discarding a single one. Into the pewter pot a button would go, with all its fellow buttons. When the pot came into my possession I stuck it in a cupboard for years. Then, when my deaf mute unpaid companion signalled to me that she needed a container to catch my drool, I fossicked in the cupboard and found it. I tossed the buttons, all of them, over the balcony, a different balcony, the one in the home I was ejected from, but below that balcony too lay snow, deep and crisp and even, and the buttons fell there, and were soon buried under another fall, and just as the snow here is unlikely to melt, for we are so high and the air is so cold and thin, so too the snow at home will never ever melt. It is a frozen place, where I come from, and very far from the sea.

I read in the paper today that the governors of a new primary school in Sheffield have decided the word “school” has “negative connotations” and it will thus be known as a “place for learning”. No doubt staff and pupils (or whatever euphemisms they use for them) will find their way around the place by following the “directional pointing devices” so favoured by John Birt when he was in charge of the BBC. I am disappointed, of course, that they neglected to use the correct phrase for “school”, which as we know is “community education hub”.

Horace Walpole wrote that “Sheffield is one of the foulest towns in England”, though he did buy a pair of “quite pretty” candlesticks while he was there.

There were pelicans I hungered to see. Those huge, scooping bills, gulping down fish small and large, from sprats to trout. I felt an affinity with pelicans, even though the only pelicans I had ever seen were illustrations in reference books, The A-Z Of Seabirds and The Life Of Pelicans, for example. Was it because I could imagine opening my gullet and swallowing fish whole? It may have been. It is true my diet consists mostly of fish, bream and plaice, mackerel and eels. Especially eels. I prefer to eat them whole, and raw, and still alive. Into my maw goes the eel, head first, terrified I expect, but then that is the way of nature, creatures feeding upon each other. If I am ever swallowed whole by some beast bigger than me, I will not complain. I will be scared stupid, but nestling within the fear of an imminent doom will be a sense that this is the way the world works. I have never seen myself as a nibbler, a mouse, say, at a piece of cheese, or a beaver gnawing upon a log. There is that in me which is attracted by the engorging of a living, wriggling, squirming, sea-salt smeared piscine creature, all in one go. I expect I get it from my parents, Roman Catholics who dutifully stuck to fish on Fridays and had terrible table manners. Pa would nip out to the fishmonger’s and bring home a wrapped package of something that had been swimming innocently but a couple of hours before, and smear it with sauce and sprinkle it with salt and pepper and cut it up with a knife and fork and ration it out. Greedy me, I always wanted the whole thing, I never wanted to share, and as soon as I was grown and no longer dependent upon my Pa for my fish I would indulge myself, from Saturday to Thursday as well as on Fridays. Haddock, plaice, and those yummy yummy eels, I feasted on them all. When I realised I wanted to eat them alive I stopped going to the fishmonger’s and bought myself a fishing rod and headed for the riverbank, I even got myself wading boots, and I cast my line in the muddy river and discovered a knack for fishing. It was as if they came to me, biting my bait, offering themselves, wanting to be eaten up and serve my appetite. And they did, oh they did, in their teeming thousands, even the swivelbacks and the gunnies and the ling. I have never seen a pelican, but when I preen before the mirror of an evening it is a human pelican I see, one whose stomach is stuffed with fish, a human pelican missing that mighty bill but otherwise just as ravenous, and just as elegant.