Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet, the most magnetic cartoon character of the Atomic Age, was the brainchild of a washed-up has-been called Lamont Pinochet. As with his namesake, the brutal Chilean dictator, Pinochet’s surname was mispronounced as “Pinoshay” by all and sundry. “I have a hard T, like Turandot!”, the cartoonist used to shout, slumped in the gutter, as he often was before the late-flowering success he found with his magnetic hero. Even after that success, he spent much of his time in the gutter, for he had grown familiar with it, and felt comforted by the proximity of drains.

It is said that once, when he was in the gutter, Pinochet got embroiled in a terrific argument with a passer-by who insisted that General Augusto Pinochet himself pronounced his name “Pinoshay”, and that Giacomo Puccini specifically intended Turandot to be pronounced “Turandoh”. The cartoonist was by this time so washed-up that he could barely summon the energy to respond, but it was the one thing he felt fierce about, so he inhaled the fumes from the nearest drain and gave his opponent a verbal battering.

I have my doubts that this incident can be true, for at the time the Chilean would have been a youngster, and not yet a general, and unknown on the world stage. Be that as it may, there is something uplifting in the picture of the bedraggled cartoonist, dressed presumably in rags, gathering his wits in a Winslety gathering way, and demanding his final T be spoken aloud. Which of us can be sure we would have such gumption, even if it seems to be a trivial thing to get into a lather about?

Gumption, of course, is the quality we most readily associate with Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet, together with perkiness and magnetism. In all his adventures, set in the fictional city of Magnetville, battling evildoers and outwitting communists, Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet shows such incredible levels of gumption that, even as we cheer him on, we fret about his health. How is it, we ask, that such a little chap, albeit one whose physical form takes the shape of a snub-nosed perky head atop a large horeshoe magnet, can display such gumption week in, week out, without falling prey to the sort of debilitating weakness and neurasthenia that put Edgar Allan Poe in his grave at the age of forty? Ah, but then we remind ourselves that Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet is fictional, and does not suffer the worldly buffets that beset Poe, and we are relieved.

But worldly buffets certainly beset Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet’s creator Lamont Pinochet. Even before he found himself in the gutter, curled up by drains, he had been thrown from horses, trapped in the mountains, buried alive, stranded on a beach, pursued by bears, ravaged by toxins, imprisoned for tomfoolery, shoved in front of an express train, attacked by irredentists, smothered by pillows, punched by a pig farmer, locked in a cubicle, spat at by Mormons, burned by the sun, plagued by whitlows, bled by cupping, tarred and feathered, and pelted with pebbles. He had also repeatedly had his ears syringed by charlatans. He faced each and every one of these outrages with whining and self-pity, crawling ever further down a moral slope towards degradation and disgust.

And yet all this time he was scribbling his cartoons, on scraps of paper, on the backs of fag packets, on his own forehead. Somehow none of these earlier creations ever caught the public imagination, or even Pinochet’s own imagination. There was a strip based on the more impenetrable essays of John Ruskin. There was a plethora of chapbooks featuring a talking celery stick called Drax, but because Drax came from another, celery-dominated planet, he spoke in space-gibberish. There was a character called Unconscious Squirrel!, a squirrel that was unconscious. Pinochet plugged away, trying out each and every idea that popped in to his head, no matter how stupid, and all the while the gutter beckoned.

The gutter, the gutter… the gutter that, miraculously, inspired Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet. Oh, how I would love to reproduce just one, tiny picture of my cartoon hero. But I cannot, for to do so is forbidden. In his last will and testament, done in cartoon strip form, Lamont Pinochet declared that, with his death, all trace of his life on earth be wholly and utterly obliterated. “I shall be expunged!” sings his alter ego, a singing ringing carpet beetle. And so it came to pass.

Upriver, beyond the rubber tappers’ camp, there is a hut, an apt hut for a Mistah Kurtz, and it is here you will find the ghost of Don Pedro, the Walnut Man. In life, Don Pedro was known as the Walnut Man because he seemed forever to be chewing upon a walnut, and he carried always in his pocket a paper bag crammed with walnuts. When he died, and found himself wandering as a ghost, he learned that there are no walnuts for the dead, none to chew and none to carry in his phantom pockets. His ghost was drawn to the hut upriver as if by magnetism, and now the ghost of Don Pedro haunts the hut, bereft of walnuts, and never at rest.

Mistah Kurtz would have been at home in this hut, set in a thicket of dense foliage, entangled in fronds, a long long way upriver, but Don Pedro’s ghost loathes it. He keens and wails and bashes upon walls and overturns the furniture. Much as he desires to jump into a boat and paddle downriver to where the rubber tappers hang about in their camp, drinking Avigdieppe and exchanging lewd stories, he is impelled to remain in the hut, miserable and craving walnuts.

What did he do in life, Don Pedro the Walnut Man, to earn such a fate? Did he kill, or maim, or crush the spirit of another? Did he offend the mighty forces which parcel out the destinies of the dead? Why is he forbidden to rest, and made to stalk this Kurtz hut upriver, and its little fenced-in garden, where grow wild fruits and berries and trees of precious sap but no trace of walnuts?

If we could answer even one of those questions we would know more than it is proper for us to know. There would be a shift in the balance of things, and a new world would be open before us, but it would be a world even more terrifying than the one we inhabit, and we would want to wrap cloaks around our heads, and hide in the shadows, but we would no longer have any shadows, only a hideous light beating eternally upon us, as it beats upon the ghost of Don Pedro the Walnut Man, even as he crashes into the walls of the hut and knocks over chairs, and still, still tastes those walnuts he chewed, in his memory of the life before, when he had a mouth for chewing, and a paper bag crammed in his pocket.

Another one from the archives…

Historians of crime have long been fascinated by the Birdbag family, whose exploits were regularly recorded in the penny dreadfuls of their day. Seldom has such purple prose been so apt, for their deeds were truly the last word in scampishness and mischief. To rekindle the memories of older readers, and to introduce a new generation to this dastardly clan, here is a brief guide.

 

Corky Birdbag, the fiend who pushed a knock-kneed unfortunate into a lake, and stole his bus ticket.

 

Polly Birdbag, whose forgery of Selected Poems by Walter Pater fooled a docent at the University of Ack.

 

Old Ma Birdbag, whose tunnels were so expertly dug that the police thought moles were responsible.

 

 

Venkad Birdbag, the so-called “Cardboard Hooter Man”, who hooted through a cardboard funnel.

 

 

Loopy Birdbag, the woman who sent consignments of boiled sweets to Stalin and Barbara Stanwyck at whim.

 

 

Fontella Bass-Birdbag, the queasy maven of sabotage who did dark deeds with a whisk and a pin-cushion.

 

 

Park Fang Birdbag, desperate banjo player who often stood next to nondescript ponds for no purpose but evil.

 

 

Smedley Birdbag, wanted by the police of four continents for doing something weird with a toy pig sty.

 

 

 

By request, or possibly cajoling, from a few readers, here is the complete text of The Book Of Gnats, first published in Massacre 4 : An Annual Anthology Of Anti-Naturalistic Writings (Indelible Inc, 1993), edited by the esteemed Roberta Mock. I have taken the opportunity to mop up a handful of infelicities in the text, but otherwise it’s pretty much as written sixteen long and tempestuous years ago. I have mixed feelings about some of these old pieces, written before my Wilderness Years, and I can identify a difference in my method, given that then I was writing for the page, whereas now I am ever conscious that I will be reading aloud. Anyway, here it is. Make of it what you will. Oh, and please note that Dobson, the private detective who appears here, is by no means to be confused with his namesake, the titanic, albeit out of print, twentieth century pamphleteer.

Originally published by Thwack & Rudder Ltd in 1926, The Book Of Gnats was written by the noted aviatrix and explorer Maud Glubb (1873-1958). Well-known for her countless newspaper articles, travelogues, and often indiscreet prefaces to other people’s books, Glubb wrote this – her only work of fiction – by the sputtering light of blubber candles during the ill-starred Bilgegrew Antarctic Expedition of 1911.

Captain Gervase Bilgegrew of the Royal Scrofulous Hussars was, according to the Dictionary Of National Biography, “perhaps the most incompetent person ever to lead a polar expedition”. On the very day the explorers set out from the sprightly little port of Mobster, Bilgegrew burned all the charts, broke the compass, contaminated the pemmican supply, and blinded the medical officer. At the Commission of Enquiry held in 1913 upon the expedition’s return, he first insisted that these were unfortunate accidents, later changing his story under cross-examination to plead that he was only trying to run a tight ship and to instil a sense of discipline into his crew. The full story of the disastrous expedition is told in Curwen’s Polar Hebetude : To The End Of The Earth With A Halfwit, to which the reader is referred.

Glubb herself did not return to her homeland until 1919, for reasons which remain shrouded in mystery. Some reports have her leading rebel troops in the Tantarabim Revolution of 1915, but they are unsubstantiated. Glubb herself never spoke of this missing period in her life. Her biographer Gravel Slobber, despite years of prodigious research, finally conceded that “we are unlikely ever to learn precisely what happened to Glubb during this period”.

Slobber notes that the great aviatrix never intended The Book Of Gnats for publication. The manuscript was stored in a huge mahogany casket in the belvedere of a country house in which Glubb’s friend Laburnum Bails worked as a piano-tuner.  Interviewed shortly before her death in 1968, Bails said that the text would have remained forever locked away had it not been for the intervention of Crocus Thwack, sister of the notorious publisher, toad-collector, and sot Wenceslas Thwack. Like her brother, Crocus was both an alcoholic and a kleptomaniac. At a weekend party hosted by Bails’ employer, she jemmied open the casket in the mistaken assumption that it contained a hidden supply of negus. Finding instead the manuscript of The Book Of Gnats, she stole it and later passed it on to her brother in exchange for a crate of grog.

Why was Wenceslas Thwack interested in a virtually illegible stack of pages, each one blackened by blubber-smoke? Neither Bails nor Slobber can offer an adequate answer. Of course, Glubb was a public figure, and the newspapers often carried reports of her latest exploits, but Thwack & Rudder Ltd had never published any fiction before. In those novel-choked years, they had gained a reputation for issuing only ecclesiastical tracts, bell-ringing manuals, and massive, erudite, unreadable multi-volume works on the obscurer by-ways of ichthyology.

Whatever his reasons, Thwack wrote to Glubb seeking her permission to publish. By return of post, he received an extraordinary reply, thanking him profusely, commending his almost superhuman literary judgement, allowing him to edit the manuscript as he saw fit, and instructing him to pay all the author’s royalties to a charitable institution for retired skindivers. Glubb always insisted that this letter was a forgery, and pursued Thwack through the courts. In February 1928, two years after the book was published, she won her case. Thwack & Rudder’s remaining stock was pulped. Glubb herself employed a private detective named Dobson to track down and destroy all other copies of the book.

A lesser man would have blanched at the prospect, but not Dobson. Within hours of accepting the job, he burgled the publisher’s offices, coming away with sales ledgers, files, invoices, receipts, and threatening letters. His agents fanned out across the country, burning down bookshops, terrorising librarians, and breaking into houses at dead of night. They staked out junk shops, bazaars, and jumble sales. Week by week, Dobson stuck pins into the enormous map on the wall of his office, as more and more copies were traced, purloined, ignited, and obliterated. He sent to Glubb regular monthly reports, detailing successes, setback, near-misses, and red herrings. When her money ran out, and she could no longer pay him, Dobson financed the operation himself.

By November 1934, the task was complete. Thwack & Rudder had printed ten thousand copies of The Book Of Gnats, and there were ten thousand pins in Dobson’s map. A celebration fireworks party was held, Glubb and Dobson personally thanking all the agents who had been so unstinting in their efforts. As they sipped cocktails and exchanged anecdotes, reliving the high points of the great pursuit, one agent remained strangely quiet, preoccupied. Ned Mudbag harboured a terrible doubt. One morning in July 1931, waking up in a grim hotel in Pugwash Magna, Mudbag had an attack of the jangles. He was barely able to make it to the lobby. The standard procedure, with jangles, was to send Dobson a coded telegram, explaining that the agent would be out of action for a couple of days. Dobson was an understanding man. Usually, he would arrange for a bouquet of nasturtiums to be delivered, accompanied by a sympathetic note. On the other hand, if for any reason there was a particular urgency in the case, he would have another agent move in, flamethrower at the ready.

That hot and agonising morning, Mudbag had not sent a telegram. Instead, his brain befuddled, he subcontracted the work to a complete stranger he met on the pavement outside the hotel. It was madness. It was contrary to all his instructions, to everything Dobson had ever taught him. Three years on, poor Mudbag could still not understand what on earth had made him do it. Yes, the stranger had seemed trustworthy. Yes, he had cradled Mudbag in his arms and helped him back up to his room. Yes, he had spoon-fed him custard and mopped his fevered brow. But there was no excuse, and Mudbag knew it, and he had never had the courage to admit what he had done. The worst thing was the nagging doubt. He could never be absolutely certain that the copy of the book he was tracking that day had actually been destroyed.

Ironically, in view of what happened, the stranger was trustworthy. He listened attentively as Mudbag babbled the details of the task at hand. He swore that he would tell no one, and he never did. He even gave away the crumpled banknote which Mudbag thrust into his hands as payment, to a pockmarked mendicant loitering outside the hotel. The stranger had only one flaw – he was severely myopic. He nearly missed the library, entering the municipal baths by mistake, but a passing Jesuit steered him in the right direction. After an hour of squinting and peering along the shelves, the stranger located the book – or so he supposed – deftly concealed it under his mackintosh, walked out of the library, caught a bus to the town dump, and, unnoticed by the superintendent, tossed on to a blazing bonfire the stolen tome – a 1912 reprint of Schmidlapp’s The Ambiguity Of Indigestion.

And so the sole surviving copy of The Book Of Gnats remained, unborrowed, on the shelves of the Pugwash Magna Public Library until 1952, when it was withdrawn from stock and donated, together with some forty other books, to the Cardinal Preen Mercy Home For Demented Paupers. When that institution was closed down in 1966, its library was auctioned off, and The Book Of Gnats was part of a job-lot bought by Grimes Pugh, a secondhand book dealer with a shop in Hooting Yard. Pugh died in 1973, and his business was taken over, after much wrangling, by Dr F X Duggleby MD, who had been struck off the medical register in the same year for the illicit prescription of nose-drops. Duggleby’s new career as a bookseller was not a success, and on New Year’s Eve 1976 he closed up the shop, drank four pints of stout in a seedy tavern, threw himself into a canal, and drowned. The shop was boarded up and the property condemned. Three days before demolition, a big van pulled up outside, and took away the mildewed and rotting books which were piled in tottering heaps in the store-room.

Most of the stock ended up in a furnace, but sharp-eyed scavengers plucked out the few books which were salvageable. The Book Of Gnats was one of them. Eventually, by who knows what twists and turns, it found its way to a charity shop in Pancakes, where, on the fourteenth of January 1987, I bought it for tuppence.

When, some weeks later, I read the book, I was thunderstruck. It seemed to me to be a work of art of the highest quality, tantalising, majestic, profound, and valiant. Since that first, delirious reading, I have not shifted one jot from my opinion. At that time I did not know the curious history of Maud Glubb’s masterpiece, but it did not take me long to discover that the book was long out of print, and unknown to seemingly all my literate and well-read cronies, who are legion. I should explain that I am, like Wenceslas Thwack, a publisher.

I think it was during the foul autumn of 1988 that I decided to issue a new edition of The Book Of Gnats. The previous summer had seen two of my titles sell in unexpectedly high quantities, and for once I was flush with money. I envisaged a deluxe edition, bound in some exotic, and possibly illegal, animal hide, with a cover design by the noted gouacheist Scrimgeour, a learned introduction by myself, and an exhaustive commentary by Glubb’s biographer Slobber.

I am a woman of considerable integrity, and I did not wish to tempt the fate of Thwack’s edition by neglecting to seek permission from the copyright holders. Like most people, I was aware that Maud Glubb had met her death on the sixth of February 1958. She had accompanied the Busby Babes to their European Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade, and on the return journey, she perished, along with the flower of postwar British football, in the Munich Air Disaster. Apocryphal it may be, but I have heard that Sir Matt Busby’s first words after the crash, on coming to in the hospital ward, were “Glubb… Glubb… Glubb”.

Glubb had died intestate, and she had no close relatives. The lawyers discovered that she appeared to have no distant relatives either. Despite the publicity surrounding her death, and a series of public announcements, notices in the press, and radio bulletins, no on ever came forward to lay claim to her estate. No one, that is, except patent frauds, such as a twelve-year-old boy from Idaho named Biff, or Chump, or something like that, who was swiftly revealed to be the victim of an experiment in mesmerism, his actions controlled by a sinister mastermind bent on world domination. This shadowy figure was apprehended and sentenced to a term of imprisonment. Biff, or Chump, freed from his entrancement, returned to Idaho and when last heard of was a “soda jerk”, although quite what such a trade involves is  not known to me.

Control of Glubb’s literary estate fell, by who knows what arcane legal mechanism, into the hands of a Dutch businessman named Jan Van Der Strob. There! I have written down the name of the monster who has reduced my life to misery, and – worse, far worse – has deprived the world of the opportunity to read The Book Of Gnats in its entirety. The three fragments reproduced below, to which this essay forms an introduction, are all that remain of this work of towering genius. How so? Read on, and I will tell you.

On Christmas Eve 1988 I received, via a telephone call, the information I had been awaiting, impatiently, for weeks. Tracking down Glubb’s literary executor had been ludicrously difficult, but now at last I had a name and address. I fired off a letter to Van Der Strob at once, introducing myself, outlining my credentials, and proposing terms for the right to publish Glubb’s only work of fiction. It was a polite, businesslike letter, and I popped it in the postbox on Christmas morning.

On New Year’s Eve, a sniper perched on a rooftop across the street shot me in the leg as I dandled my grandchild on my knee. Seconds later, almost before I began to howl, I heard the unmistakeable sound of a helicopter, whirring above my house. It disgorged a troop of black-clad commandos who shimmied down rope ladders, kicked in the window, already shattered by the sniper’s bullet, and tumbled into my sitting-room, panting and snorting like hogs. In my mind’s eye I see dozens of them, but I suppose there can only have been four or five. My grandchild scuttled for safety behind a large armchair. I was curled up on the floor, wailing hysterically and making rather a spectacle of myself. To my surprise, the commandos ignored me. Instead, they rampaged about the place, overturning furniture, smashing my ornaments, and hurling books across the room.

“Gnats?!” shouted one, in a foreign accent. This was the first indication that the mayhem was in any way connected to Maud Glubb’s masterpiece, but I was in too much of a state to notice it at the time. The commandos spent another half-hour laying waste my house before departing through the windows, haring up their rope ladders into the helicopter, which whirled them away as suddenly as they had come.

This extraordinary circumstance remained a mystery to me until some days later. The gunshot wound, though bloody, was superficial, and I was discharged from hospital after a few hours. I spent the first days of 1989 clearing up the mess of my home. Then, on the fourth of January, I received another visit. This time, at least, my caller used a more conventional means of entry – he knocked at the door and waited to be allowed in. He even had a visiting-card, an old-fashioned touch of which I approved. As he stood, snuffling, in the porch, I read it:

Gulliver Whitlow. UK agent for Van Der Strob International Enterprises GmbH.

Still with no thought in my head that the influenza-wracked gentleman in my porch had any connection with snipers or commandos, I invited him in to my sitting-room. How engaging, I remember thinking, for Van Der Strob to send a personal emissary! I was to be rapidly disillusioned. Whitlow refused to sit down.

“Madam,” he said thickly, “I believe you are in possession of a copy of The Book Of Gnats by Maud Glubb, published by Thwack & Rudder Ltd in 1926. Is my information correct?”

I nodded.

“Our crack squad of commandos, augmented by a sniper, failed to discover this book when they called on you some days ago. Hence my visit. I must insist that you hand over to me the book, together with any photostats and what have you, this very instant.”

You will have little difficulty imagining the pirouettes which took place in my brain. Let us leap forward a minute or two. I have regained my composure, at least outwardly.

“The book is not in my possession, Mr Whitlow,” I announced.

“Do not dally with me, madam.”

“The book is not in this house. If it was, sir, surely your band of thugs would have found it?”

“Commandos, madam, not thugs. Commandos.” He sneezed.

“Bless you,” I said. I have always set great store by politeness.

“Very well,” spluttered Whitlow, holding a surprisingly dainty handkerchief over his mouth, “Where then is The Book Of Gnats?”

“In a safe deposit box in an important bank,” I replied.

I did not intend to divulge any further details, and half-expected Mr Whitlow to start behaving like a comic-book villain, threatening me with unimaginable violence unless I spilled the beans. Instead, still snuffling, he asked me if I had such a thing as a mentholated lozenge. I told him that I allowed no suckable medicaments into my house.

“In that case, madam, I must bid you farewell,” he said. I showed him to the door, and he was gone.

In the next three days, every important bank in the city was looted by a gang of skilled thieves. The police were mightily puzzled by the fact that safe deposit boxes containing gold, jewels, cash, treasures and compromising documents were emptied, but their contents left strewn in heaps in the vaults. Nothing at all, it seemed, was actually stolen. The newspapers hushed up this bizarre series of non-robberies, so I did not find out about them until it was too late. On the third day, of course, Van Der Strob’s criminal minions located my box, found my copy of The Book Of Gnats, and made off with it. To this day, I have failed to recover it. I am a woman bereft. You, who tragically have not read this magnificent work, may sympathise with my plight, but you cannot truly understand it.

One day in February, I received a letter from Van Der Strob himself. All innocence, he wrote that unfortunately he was unable to grant me permission to reissue Maud Glubb’s book, for reasons bound up with the legal intricacies of her estate. Then, pencilled in as a P.S., showing his true colours, the Dutch hellhound added, “As for the manuscript, I personally incinerated it. Heh heh heh!” The wretch! One day, ah, one day I shall pay someone to assassinate him.

After a prolonged stay in a Home for the Bewildered, I set about rebuilding my life. I published books on ducks, spinets, and the Great Dismal Maroons. But Glubb – or rather, her book – continues to haunt me. If only I had a good memory! I could recreate her timeless words in my head, and damn Van Der Strob to perdition. But all that remains of The Book Of Gnats are three paragraphs which, for some forgotten reason, I copied out on to the crumpled wrapper of a boiled sweet in miniature writing during a thunderstorm in the summer of 1987. This scrap evaded the clutches of Van Der Strob’s brutish pack, shoved as it was, unregarded, in the tiniest drawer of my escritoire.

I transcribe the sorry fragments below, and I weep.

I – So was a tempest loosed upon the city, and its very fabric uprooted from the mud. Whirling and howling, the city was dispersed upon the firmament, coming to rest none knew where. And the mud spawned all manner of noisome pests, squirming and wriggling to escape the gigantic puddles which were left in the wake of the storm. These were not puddles of water, no, nor of any liquid known to the human mind. And then my eyes saw, standing fiery on a wooden plinth ringed by scum-pools, the obscene figure of Winckelmann. In his left hand he brandished aloft a scrap of burning linoleum. His right hand was made into a fist. As, dribbling, I watched, the fist was slowly opened to reveal a….. I cannot say. I do not know. For just at the moment my peering, watery eyes would have seen that… that thing, I was startled by a toad, which leapt up at my face, and thwacked me on the forehead, leaving an imprint which remains there to this day, like a brand.

II – The man with the toad-mark flapped his shattered wings. In vain, in vain. Perched on the rock, beaten by harsh winds, encrusted with seaweed, sightless, he was of a sudden assaulted by a voice, roaring at him across a thousand continents. “Man with the Mark of the Toad! Know ye the Song of the Boll Weevils? Aye? Then sing, damn ye, sing!” Whence came that monstrous voice? What hideous nursery had cosseted its owner, what kitchen fed it? “Man with the Mark of the Toad!” it screamed again, pulverizing universes, “Hare ye to me now, leave your drab rock! Shed your cracked wings! Sprout fins, smack the boiling sea with your flippers, come to me! I hold in my gnarled, gnarled hands many gifts for you! I hold anconeal bowls! I hold strangled curlews! I hold pods and gum and pitchblende! Spring forward now! Go from your dour perch! I hold magnification instruments, Coddington lenses, and towels for you! I hold pigeons’ blood, crayons and isinglass! The crayons are of colours no human eye should ever contemplate! The isinglass gleams in a charming handmade jar! The jar has your mark upon it, Man with the Mark of the Toad! Come….” There were hours upon hours of this wretched gibberish, enough to make an ant die. The man with the toad-mark beat his useless wings against the wind and turned his head away. His brow was crawling with gnats. The gnats had come a long way, from barely imaginable puddles of slop where once a city had stood. The City of Gnats.

III – Winckelmann strode importantly through the boulevards of the walled city. He chucked trinkets and baubles to beggars and cripples, holding a vermilion cravat over his nose as he did so. Worms slithered up his dainty anklets, only to be torn away by scrofula-ridden flunkies. Imposing but haphazard, Winckelmann relied upon his most trusted attendant to lead him in the right direction. These boulevards all looked alike to him. He could be going anywhere, were it not for Sigismundo’s genius. As a factotum, he was a treasure. Save for his inexplicable habit of pissing on coinage, Sigismundo was faultless. In this warren of pestilent streets, he knew precisely what to do. Turn right by the trough; ignore the screeching placardists; beat the pedlars insensible with their own clubs; smartly avoid the motorbikes. Before long, Winckelmann and his retinue stood in the courtyard of the Impossibly Huge Building. The stink was repellent, but Winckelmann knew etiquette if he knew nothing else. With an effort, he removed the cravat from his nose and, at a signal from Sigismundo, pushed an envelope stuffed full of flies into the grubby hand of the waiting serjeant-at-arms. A ludicrous ballet of bows and scrapes took place, Sigismundo taking photographs the while. After what seemed like hours, Winckelmann was ushered into an inner chamber. His attendant was not allowed to accompany him. Without his trusted lackey at his side, Winckelmann was a little nervous, but his discomfiture did not last long. No more than fifteen seconds passed before he was greeted by his hosts – a swarm of gigantic gnats, whose thrashing wings knocked Winckelmann mercifully unconscious before they devoured him, every last bit of him, grinding him to dust between their powerful biting jaws. It was over in a flash. Then, buzzing and twanging, the swarm left the chamber as it had entered, through a chute, through a chute, through a chute.

 

 

The chief reason Plutarch and Petrarch never met in a he-man wrestling bout is a matter of simple chronology. Consider their dates of birth and death, Plutarch (46-120) and Petrarch (1304-1374). More than a thousand years separates their days on our little planet, and none of the fantastic time-travel contraptions dreamed up by sci-fi writers and visionaries has ever been built, at least not in any working form. Had one been made, then Plutarch could have been whizzed into the future, or Petrarch into the past, and, suitably attired, or possibly naked and greased like the wrestlers of certain ancient civilisations, the pair could have entertained the crowds, displaying all sorts of he-man wrestling holds, and grunting, and throwing each other around the ring. If their bout was fought according to a brutal set of rules, someone may have needed to stand by with a pail and a mop, to clean up any shed blood, and someone else, preferably a chirurgeon, would be needed to place splints on any broken bones. It is unlikely that either Plutarch or Petrarch would agree to fight to more genteel wrestling rules, for they would not wish to appear namby-pamby to their thousands upon thousands of supporters.

Whose side you come down on depends to a large extent upon your own cranial blips. If you have spent much of your adult life poring over the Parallel Lives and the Moralia, scribbling a lot of notes in the margins, or in a pad, then you will probably cheer on Plutarch and hope that sickening crunching noise you heard is not one of his bones being shattered. On the other hand, if you like nothing better than to curl up in a hammock with a copy of De Remediis Utriusque Fortunae or the Secretum, then you will be backing Petrarch, and wanting to see that pail filled with the blood of Plutarch. Or, if you have wasted your life and never read a word by either of these titans, you may be swayed by, say, Plutarch’s beard or by Petrarch’s hat. The position you will not want to be in is one of neutrality, for you will see how the adherents of both the “Big P-Archs” are violently partisan, with a lust for gore, kept apart by a fence of iron stakes. Not to join one mob or the other is to miss out on the frenzy of the day, and in any case, you will have to choose to sit in one section of the ringside. And in spite of their screaming and gesticulating and spitting, the mobs do sit, quite neatly even, on their benches or their bucket seats. No one wants to spoil the view of the ring, wherein Plutarch and Petrarch land forearm smashes and trip each other up and stamp about in a great show of he-man grappling.

Once you have plumped for your champion, you will want to take out a bet with one of the ringside bookies. Gambling at time-travel wrestling bouts is big, and sometimes ugly, business. Punters’ scuffles tend to break out, and rampant bookie-hounds are unleashed. These are fearsome dogs, each one individually cloned from the DNA of Cerberus, or whatever Cerberus’ equivalent of DNA is. That would be a matter for the mythologists, and it is not a good idea to get embroiled in their arguments, for you would soon go loopy. The bookies set their bookie-hounds on any punter scuffling, or any punter they just don’t like the look of. But carry yourself with grace and good humour and you ought to have no problem placing your bet, whether it is on Plutarch or Petrarch.

This is not, of course, a he-man wrestling match to the death, for both writers need to return at some point to their own times, albeit bruised and bloodied and broken. If for any reason one or both of them were not plopped back into their own small world, whether it be in Boeotia or Arezzo, or thereabouts, there would be a hideous juddering panic-inducing crumplement of the space-time continuum, with unforeseen consequences. One such consequence, weirdly, might be that you wake up in the morning to discover that the world is run by giant hamsters, and all because, after their close-fought he-man wrestling bout, Plutarch and Petrarch wandered off together out of the ring and forgot to return to the wholly fictitious time-machine at the appointed hour. Giant hamsters in charge is one of multifold possibilities, but one I suspect we would all wish to avoid. However attractive the idea of the two literary giants hobnobbing as they vanish over the horizon, arm I arm, it really is important to bundle both of them back, or forward, to their own times, for the good of all, except perhaps the hamsters.