Watching an edifice crumble can provide a salutary lesson. I do not mean the sorts of lessons government ministers are fond of announcing have been or will be learned following the latest debacle. Such announcements are merely the craven bleatings of incompetents. Andy Burnham springs to mind. How I wish he didn’t! No, the lessons we can learn from seeing with our own eyes the crumbling of an edifice are of a wholly different kidney.

I speak from experience, having witnessed the crumbling of many, many edifices, the mighty and the modest, in my career as CEO of Crumbling Edifice Solutions. Before we go any further, let me acknowledge that “Crumbling Edifice Solutions” is something of a misnomer. Our role is not to “solve” the crumbling of an edifice, by which I suppose one might mean nipping the crumblement in the bud, or at least trying to slow its relentless progress towards utter devastation and ruin. We make no such claims. What we do, with consummate swish, is to watch edifices crumble. We act as witnesses.

Let us say you know of an edifice that has begun to crumble. A hasty metal tapping machine message to one of our satellite bureaux dotted around the globe will have one of our agents on site within minutes, setting up a deckchair or camping stool slap bang next to the edifice, equipped with a pair of opera glasses or prismatic viewfinder. Our agent will fix a dispassionate gaze upon the crumbling edifice until it is nought but dust, scattered in the wind. In most cases, an edifice will crumble over many years, even generations, and thus we have in place a flawless system whereby agents work in relays, one replacing another as and when necessary, for example in the event of toilet breaks, lapses of attention, or death.

At the point of complete crumblement, or CC as we call it in our organisational jargon, the agent on duty will stash their opera glasses or prismatic viewfinder in a pippy bag, fold up the deckchair or camping stool, and return to the satellite bureau via funicular railway. All our offices are high above sea level, for up in the empyrean the air is purer and thinner and conducive to la-la. Back at their desk, the agent ponders the lesson learned from watching the crumbling of the edifice, and writes a report. This is where their swish really comes into play, for our agents are recruited not just for their crumblement observation skills, but for their ability to write prose that has undeniable swish. When complete, the report is bound in greaseproof wrapping and lodged in our archive, a purpose-built edifice higher above sea level than even the highest of our bureaux, a granite fortress, remote and inaccessible, with a tower, at the top of which is my own office, from where I oversee the inevitable becrumblement of all that ever was and is and will be.

I had several reasons to sail across the Sound to Stick Insect Island. There were rumours of murder and mayhem and pagan sacrifice. My brother had made the crossing a fortnight before, and no word had come from him. My own homecoming was long overdue. And I wondered if the tiny post office still sold those amusing wax dolls of Captain Tod and Cadet Jarvis. The poking of them with pins was a delightful memory of my childhood, and I wanted my own nippers to share the experience, even though it would never be quite the same on the mainland.

I had been too long gone, I realised, as the skipper brought the boat into harbour. The stone walls were greatly weathered, the fishermen’s huts were dilapidated, the ice cream kiosk was a burned-out shell. Gulls swooped and rampaged.

“You’re quite sure you want me to leave you here?” asked the skipper, as I disembarked. I nodded, slipping some coins into his hairy hand. They were counterfeit, of course, but he would be dead before he could spend them.

I walked up the slope, past the notary’s office and the chapel, and sat on the old familiar bench by the fountain. There was nobody about at this hour. In the square, the stone statue of Cadet Jarvis, much becrumbled, gazed sightlessly towards the woods, as it had done for a century or more. I hoped my business would not take me into the woods.

It was in the woods we found my brother. I was six years old, out with my father for a moonlit walk. Usually, when he went out at night to lay poisoned bait for wolves, he went alone, but on this occasion, apparently, I had been fractious and keening all day, and he thought the moonlight might becalm me. My brother was wrapped in a filthy blanket and wedged in the branches of a tree, a sycamore I think, at about my father’s head height. He was about six months old, and fast asleep. My father placed him gently in the poison bag and carried him home. We never did discover who had abandoned him there. When his hair grew, it was lank and straight and tarry black.

The town, if you could call it a town, began to stir. The butcher came marching up the street, bearing his bloody meat cleaver proudly, like a soldier on parade. The beadle poked his head out of the bailey and sniffed the air. The lantern extinguisher rolled along in his wheelchair, extinguishing the lanterns one by one. Shutters were raised and bells clanged. When the duckman approached the fountain with his ducks in tow, it was time for me to move.

I could not help glancing back at the woods as I made my way, as inconspicuously as possible, towards the stationery shop. The flat above it was where my brother told me he was going to stay. When we parted, on the quayside, two weeks ago, I did not tell him of the knot in the pit of my stomach, wrenched so tight I thought I might die. I did not warn him about the flat over the stationery shop. I did not warn him at all.

The shop was not yet open. I pretended an interest in the window display, of typewriter ribbons set in a riot of stanhopeas, with their pale tiger flowers which exhale from afar a strong and acrid breath, as from the putrid mouths of convalescent invalids. I could smell it through the vents in the window. Eventually I heard bolts drawn back and a latch lifted. Before the door was opened, I gave it a shove, knocking the stationer to the floor. Looking down at his puffy piggy face, I felt both rage and nausea rising within me. But I left him there and, without a word, barged through to the back of the shop and took the staircase two steps at a time and flung open the door of the flat. I knew at a glance it was unoccupied. Popping a Sigsby pill to steady my nerves, I began a search that the most diligent bloodhound would envy. I was careful to leave the place looking untouched, but in a quarter of an hour I had examined every inch of the flat and found not a trace of my brother. The single anomaly was a black and white photograph of the balletomane Nan Kew propped on the mantelpiece. It was singed in one corner. My brother was deaf and blind to the ballet, as he was to all the performing arts.

I returned downstairs to find the stationer in the company of three ruffians. The shop door was locked and bolted again, and so thick was the pungent foliage in the window that the view of the street was completely obscured. I could not see out, and, of course, no passers-by could see in. Two Tilly lamps had been lit to light the interior.

“Well, well, well,” I said, “The old gang’s back together. Or have you never been apart? Still ironing each others’ trousers?”

I sounded more confident than I felt. It was many a long year since I had been face to face with the Weltschmerz Boys. They had terrorised my brother and me as children, they had terrorised the island, and it seemed they did so still.

“You’re going to come with us to the woods,” said one of the gits, his head even puffier and piggier than the stationer’s. His ears looked as if they had been stuck on the wrong way round.

I was about to laugh – or shriek – but one of the others suddenly lunged forward and thumped me in the stomach.

“We’re going to take you to the badger setts,” he said, thumping me a second time. Those were the words I had hoped never to hear again.

There is one dream, or nightmare, that has recurred throughout my nights. My brother and I, sometimes as children, sometimes as adults, are being driven, relentlessly, towards the badger setts in the woods, pursued by the Weltschmerz Boys, the four of them, or sometimes many, many more, more than ever existed in the waking world. They are armed with sticks or bludgeons, and they are roaring. We trip and stumble on twigs or tendrils, the wind howls through the swaying trees, an uncanny, terrible swaying, our clothing is torn to rags, and we are pressed ever closer to the badger setts… I always awake before we reach them. For that I am thankful. Once, sitting in a canteen on the mainland, fiddling with a croissant, my brother, usually so self-possessed, so brusque, confessed to me that he had the same dream, at least once a week. More than once, it had incapacitated him for days afterwards.

The stationer unbolted his door and we stepped out into the milky morning light. The duckman was sitting on the bench, smoking, while his ducks plashed in the fountain. All the lanterns had been extinguished, and the lantern extinguisher had parked his wheelchair outside the tavern, waiting for it to open. From the butcher’s shop came the sound of savage cleaving, and a steady stream of blood trickled out of the doorway into the gutter where it was lapped up by dogs. Cadet Jarvis’ eyes of stone continued their eternal gaze towards the woods.

I was too winded from the thumps to make a run for it. And where would I run to? None of the islanders would help me, not even Mistress Pym in the post office. Nobody even looked at me as we made our way along the street, across the green, and on to the lane. There were dozens of people out and about now, some like sleepwalkers, some hailing each other or stopping to exchange a few words, words I knew, bitterly, would be incomprehensible to me now. I was a stranger here, become invisible. They all knew better than to meet my eye, to register my presence. I was too much changed for any of the older folk to recognise in me the boy I’d been, and the plastic surgeons on the mainland were too skilled to leave telltale scars.

I did not even recognise my brother, the first time I saw him after I’d fled the island. They had changed his height and posture and gait as well as his face. It was only when the unfamiliar figure, in the kit of a goatman, a doxy on his arm, leaning on a post in the shadows of the harbour, took from his pochette the filthy ragged blanket he’d been wrapped in as a foundling, and shyly waved it at me, that I knew him. I ran then, tumbling towards him, and kissed him.

Would he be there at the badger setts, changed once again, transformed, made into something awful and strange and grotesque, with paws or flippers, and a gigantic, twisted head, and no eyes, or one eye golden and the other of ruby, gibbering a mad litany? I had never been able to forget the names of all those who, year after year, on the feast day, were taken into the woods and never seen again. Oh, I tried to forget. We all tried to forget. But we never forgot a single name. Captain Tod, Cadet Jarvis, Nan Kew… the names we grew up with, whispered, muttered, barely breathed. When we were children, they sent delicious tingles of terror down our spines. We cherished our fearful shudders, gathered by the ice cream kiosk under the moonlight, each slosh of seawater against the harbour walls prompting another name, counting them off, one by one, year by year.

We were never told what happened to them, once they’d been taken deep into the woods, where the badger setts were. Now, my brother knew. And soon, very soon, as the Weltschmerz Boys steered me away from the lane into the woods, I would know too.

I seem to have made a great clunking mistake. In the piece below, for “groovy” and its variations please read “zippy”, and its variations. There is a material difference, and one not to be sniffed at. Sniffing will not be countenanced. It’s simply not a zippy thing to do.

Dear Frank, writes Tim Thurn, It has long been apparent to me that Hooting Yard is by far the grooviest website on the planet. But how do I actually get down with its groove? Any tips would be most welcome.

Tim is not the only person to ask this, or a similar, question. Boffins in a groovelab high in the Swiss mountains have spent years – or is it mere days? – trying to isolate the Hooting Yard Groove, for the betterment of humanity, while Mrs Gubbins has been indefatigable in her attempts to express the essence of the groove in the form of knitted tea-cosies. Every single time she picks up her needles she fails, fails better, but she goes on, she must go on, she can’t go on, she goes on. We will soon have to build a new depot for all those groovy tea-cosies, unless we can find a charitable foundation prepared to accept them.

But are Tim Thurn and Mrs Gubbins and those Swiss boffins asking the wrong questions? Is there, in fact, a groove to be found? For the true horror may be that the grooviness is entirely superficial, and there is nothing behind it.

Some would have it that such absence of groove is unthinkable. The boffins, for example, having invested a huge amount of Swiss currency in retorts and alembics and bunsen burners and rubber tubing and bakelite knick-knacks and Coddington lenses, not to speak of elbow grease and sweat and pipe tobacco, would be unmoored, cast adrift upon a sea of cognitive anguish, were they to entertain the idea of there not being a groove. I am less fretful on behalf of Tim and Mrs Gubbins, for I know that both of them have other resources, the one a button fetish and the other a predilection for criminal mayhem. If they could but accept they will never get with the putative groove, Tim would be happy as a pig in muck with his buttons, and Mrs Gubbins could round up the old gang and embark upon a series of armed robberies.

Conversely, of course, there is a Hooting Yard Groove, a groove so groovy it outgrooves every other groove ever dreamed up by the grooviest of groovers. Surely I would know about it?, you ask. Well, not necessarily. Take as an example Dennis Beerpint. Ever since the incorrigibly twee versifier transformed himself into a beatnik, he has been, unarguably, the grooviest poet who ever lived. I say “unarguably” because there is not a soul who doubts this, not even Michael Horovitz. And yet Beerpint prances about the streets and coffee bars and milk bars and jazz clubs and happenings of his adopted world blithely unaware of his own irrefrangible grooviness. It is true that he makes much of his goatee beard, polo neck sweater, and hornrims, and that his trousers of choice are of the drainpipe variety, yet he remains free of affectation, almost childishly innocent, and reassuringly inept. But if anybody is down with the groove, daddy-o, it is Dennis Beerpint.

If it is the case that a Hooting Yard Groove truly exists, it is of a different order of grooviness to the Beerpint Groove. The two do not quite cancel each other out, but they cannot happily coexist in the same grooveosphere. Mrs Gubbins demonstrated this when she tried to knit a dual-groove tea-cosy and became so thoroughly entangled in stray skeins of wool that she had to be carted off to a clinic.

And on that cautionary note, I think I will leave it. Tim Thurn may remain in the dark about the groove he seeks, but that is the way with a groove. Once you stop looking, you might just find it. Or, if not, you can go and sprawl in a ditch and stare at the sky. It is immense, and blue, and spattered with clouds.

Trebizondo Culpeper snorted. His was a mighty snort, caused on this occasion by his reading, in the Standard, of the well-known science lecturer Dr. J. Q. Rumball’s theory that the origin of the potato disorder was of an electrical nature.

Trebizondo Culpeper gathered about him a buzz of acolytes, keen young Trebizondo Culpeperists with bright eyes and intriguingly windswept hairstyles.

“Hark!” boomed Trebizondo Culpeper, waving the newspaper aloft, “Rumball is spouting forth his electrical theory of the origin of the potato disorder. Never has it been clearer to me that it is wholly and utterly a matter of gas! Fan out, now, youngsters, fan out and spread the word!”

And so the Trebizondo Culpeperists went each to his own cubicle, and took up his stylus, and scraped on flat sheets of gleaming Trebizondoculpeperiteâ„¢ screeds to the Standard, and to other newspapers, and to magazines and journals and important institutions, discrediting Rumball and his theory and making the case for a gas origin of the potato disorder.

In his eyrie, Trebizondo Culpeper beamed with glee. He ground the Standard under his boot, and he poked pins into a waxen doll of Dr. J. Q. Rumball, and he unscrewed the nozzle on his canister, and put the siphon to his plumpish bulbous lips, and he took a deep, deep draught of the gas.

And when he exhaled, all about him shrivelled and withered and died. He clapped his hands, and called to an acolyte to bring him a platter of newly disordered potatoes.

I went to sea in a fishing smack, and I dangled a net over the side, and I caught, among minnows and weed, a cod. Then I steered for shore. At the quayside, I hurried to my chalet and I slapped the cod on my tabletop and, with great savagery, I gutted it with my bare hands, exposing its innards. I took the liver over to the draining-board, where I had ready a glass jar into the neck of which I’d stuck a funnel. I squeezed and squeezed the liver until my fists ached, until every last drop of oil had dripped down the funnel into the jar. Then I threw the funnel away and took a big iron spoon, and I poured oil out of the jar onto the spoon and inserted the spoon in my mouth and I drank the oil greedily, desperately, gurglingly.

And that, my syphilitic friends, is how I preserve my health, and why I can gambol ‘cross the greensward with the zip and vim of a monkey, when the fancy takes me.

I regret to say that yesterday we overlooked an important anniversary here at Hooting Yard. I refer not to the birthdays of Gilbert White (1720) or Tristan Corbière (1845), nor to the shuffling from this mortal coil of Machine Gun Kelly (1954). Nor am I even drawing to your attention the incident at Chappaquiddick (1969), though you may very well expect me to.

No, what we ought to have celebrated yesterday with flags and bunting and possibly a primitive blood sacrifice was the tenth anniversary of the first ever batch of smokers’ poptarts going on sale. This toothsome “breakfast solution” is rightly celebrated by smokers and poptart lovers throughout the world, or what passes for the world when seen through a fug of dense Madagascan cigarette smoke.

To commemorate what social historians are already calling “the smokers’ poptart decade”, the manufacturers are issuing celebratory packets of brand new Wafer-Thin Organic Potato-Trifle-Flavour Rectangular Ready-Toasted Smokers’ Poptarts, including a free gift with every purchase of a poptart-shaped ashtray made of unbaked clay from the spooky quarry on Blodgett Island.

Legally inescapable health warnings on the packaging have been artfully subverted, thanks to top mezzotintist Rex Tint, whose design incorporates mezzotints showing noteworthy historical figures simultaneously smoking and stuffing smokers’ poptarts down their gullets.

They must have been putting something in Fatima Gilliblat’s cornflakes. We don’t hear from her for many a moon, but now, hard on the heels of her latest recipe comes this thrilling letter:

Pantsil, Mr Key! [This is the form of greeting Fatima always uses, for reasons lost in the fog of doo-dah.] Finding myself at a loose end, and unnerved by inexplicable clunks, I thought it would be a good idea to bury myself in research. As you know, I have long been fascinated by mystic foods devoured by mystic beings, so I trotted off to the library chat ‘n’ snack zone to consult some reference works. I was wondering what, if anything, was the connection between the manna sent down from heaven for the Israelites, in the books of Exodus and Numbers, and ambrosia, as munched by the gods of Greek mythology. It had also occurred to me that there may be a link to the mess of pottage for which Esau sells his birthright in Genesis. Yes, yes, I know most authorities would have it that Esau’s mess was some kind of lentil stew, but I have never been afraid to fly in the face of accepted wisdom, nor indeed to fell sacred cows with my girly fists. I learned a thing or two from the matchless deeds of Tiny Enid, you know.

Having silenced the chattering, snacking, mobile phone wittering teenage hoi polloi with a thunderbolt, I spent some happy hours poring over mystic texts. Pore, pore, pore, that was me, brows furrowed in concentration, scribbling notes in my recipe ideas notebook.

You will be pleased to hear that the result of my studies is a brand new Fatima Gilliblat recipe for what I was going to call The Goo Of The Gods, until it struck me that violent monotheists might take the usual umbrage and I could end up being cast into the outer darkness or beheaded. So I settled on God Goo. For the time being I have decided to keep it a secret formula, like Coca Cola, although I hasten to add that God Goo has nothing whatever in common with that tooth-rotting fizzy pop.

My current plan is to unveil this wondrous goo in a ten-part television series called Fatima Gilliblat’s Spiritually Uplifting Goo Kitchen Paradise. Keep an eye on the schedules.

So who are they, these folk who dwell on the sandbank, in cardboard shelters? For the most part, they are retired sleuths, old hands who met each other long ago at the Picnic For Detectives, where they discovered a shared interest in sandbanks, cardboard hovels, and monsters of the deep. They pointedly ignore the shoals that swim in the shallows beyond the sandbank. There is not an angler among them. The occasional sighting of a lobster or a jellyfish excites them, and such is the brouhaha that one or more of the cardboard shelters collapses, from overbuffeting, and has to be re-erected before the stars come out at night. Not even the hardiest of retired detectives wants to spend the hours of darkness exposed, on a sandbank, to the pitiless gleam of moon and stars. They have their superstitions and their irrational fears, these dwellers on the sandbank, just like anyone else.

In daylight, they keep watch on the waters. Some are armed with electronic devices, run on batteries. They tick off sightings of minor monsters, such as the aforementioned lobsters and jellyfish, in ledgers. But what all of them await is for there to be a great uncanny churning maelstrom from which emerges a gigantic and terrible sea-creature never before seen by human detective eyes.

They set traps and lures, though they know not what precisely might tempt such a monster. Sprats? Minnows? Scraps of cardboard? The liver and lights of a hare or a crow? They have tried all these to no avail.

Every so often the wind whips in and blows their cardboard shelters into the sea. Then, the more nautically-gifted of the retired sleuths, those who once worked in plain clothes aboard ocean liners and cruise ships, perhaps, bound into a rowing boat and strain to retrieve the precious cardboard sheets. There is plenty of space on the sandbank to lay out the soaked and wind-scarred cardboard for drying out in the sun.

In homage to the old days, they picnic, these sandbank sleuths, and they picnic hard. Not for them such girly snacks as watercress sandwiches with the crusts cut off. They bite the lids off jamjars and spit them into a pit. Drifting sands, ah, drifting sands soon cover the pit of lids, it is effaced from the planet’s surface as if it had never been. But down there, beneath the sands, attracted by the metal lids, there are creatures burrowing, blind, mole-like creatures that sniff the metal, and the traces of raspberry jam and marmalade adhering to the metal, and they burrow with their snouts and claws, and one night soon they will push their gruesome heads above the sands, and exult in the moonlight, and gorge themselves on jam and marmalade and cardboard and sleeping sleuths.

The blue flag, tatty, at half-mast, indicates to those watching on the shore that a shoal is present just beyond the sandbank a quarter of a mile out. The green flag is displayed when no shoal can be seen from the helicopters.

It can be difficult to tell blue from green, at certain times of day, even for those without the condition of Daltonism. In milky light, or when a vapour haze descends, the colour of the flag might be blue or green or grey to any but the most acute observer.

Work has begun on developing more robust dyes for the flags. Some have suggested issuing the watchers on the shore with prismatically-enhanced telescopes. Trained cormorants have also been mentioned in a rogue report, although what role they would play remains sketchy.

“These are testing times,” said a brigadier with a great personal investment in shoals. He was supported by those who dwell on the sandbank, in cardboard shelters, whose voices are so rarely heard above the din.

Divers, shellists, and the cadets responsible for the darning of the flags, are due to appear later in the week.

Over at Gourmet, the splendidly-named and obviously übertrendy Adam Brent Houghtaling has had the bright idea of applying Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies in the kitchen. Here at Hooting Yard, of course, we do not need the assistance of the man we know as Brain One (anag.) to inspire our culinary bagatelles. Here is the latest recipe from occasional contributor Fatima Gilliblat.

Boiled (or Broiled) Conger Eel with Sandwich Paste and Brazil Nuts

Take one fully-grown adult conger eel of handsome parts. Rinse it thoroughly in freezing cold water, then dab it dry with a large rectangular beach towel.

Fill an eel-shaped pan with water, place on the hob! hob! hob! and bring to the boil (or broil). Plunge the conger eel into the seething liquid in one easy, elegant, yet startling movement. Add a dash of ground pepper. Leave to simmer for 45 minutes.

Transfer the boiled (or broiled) conger eel onto a platter. Open a medium-sized jar of sandwich paste and spoon the entire contents onto the eel. Use a butter knife to spread the paste so it coats pretty much the whole topside. Place under the grill and toast for ten minutes, or until the colour of Turbinado sugar.

Toss a few brazil nuts onto the platter, and serve. Best eaten with bare hands, tearing the conger eel to shreds, in a sort of frenzy, while listening to the Missa Luba on your hi-fi.