On the first night, the man with the hammers came a-crashing through my door. I immediately identified him as Babinsky.

On the second night, the man with the hammers, who was not Babinsky after all, summoned men with whisks and men with tongs. I tried to reason with them.

On the third night, all of them, the man with the hammers included, went off on what they called “night-time manoeuvres”, and left me alone. I smoked my pipe and listened to the rain.

On the fourth night, Babinsky himself appeared. This time I think it really was him. He showed me some very, very convincing documentation.

On the fifth night, the kitchenette was flooded with dishwater. Luckily I had plenty of cloths and rags to mop it up.

On the sixth night, Babinsky and the man with the hammers and the men with whisks and the men with tongs sang Christmas carols. Their voices were surprisingly dulcet.

On the seventh night there was a pox upon my house.

On the eighth night I tossed and turned and could not sleep. Downstairs, Babinsky & Co were plotting an enormity.

On the ninth night they all went off to commit the enormity. I hid in a cubby so they would not take me with them. It was a tiny cubby and I became cramped.

On the tenth night, there was an important hockey match on television. I have never understood the rules of hockey, so I could not understand what Babinsky and the man with the hammers were so het up about.

On the eleventh night, I suddenly realised that the men with whisks and the men with tongs had never returned after committing the enormity. It also occurred to me that I had not read a word about the enormity in the Daily Shovel.

On twelfth night I took stock, and I peeled potatoes. I peeled potatoes and I peeled potatoes. By the light of the silvery moon I peeled potatoes, and then I peeled potatoes.

Sponges Of The Lumpenproletariat is a magnificent work of social history, a companion volume to Blood Sausage Of The Petit Bourgeoisie. As in the earlier work, the author has tracked down several representatives of the class and interviewed them in depth. Where before we learned so, so much about petit bourgeois blood sausage consumption, now we find out almost too much about the lumpenproletariat and its devotion to sponge, in both its cake and bathtime forms.

This is history turning the world topsy turvy, of course. We think of blood sausage as a workers’ aliment, perhaps a snack to be eaten while tramping between factory and pigeon loft, or in the subterranean gloom of a mine, while canaries tweet in their cages as reassurance that no toxic gases are about to fell the pitmen where they huddle. It is interesting to note that birds feature in both those examples of lumpenprole snacktimes, yet the blood of birds is rarely to be found in blood sausage. Rare, yes, but not entirely unknown. One of the author’s key findings in Blood Sausage Of The Petit Bourgeoisie is that a small subclass of shopkeepers and rent collection men developed a taste for sausages made from the blood of starlings, nuthatches, and whooper swans. Such a commingling of avian gore is against the laws of God, which is perhaps why it was a short-lived fad. Not so with the more common sausages made from the blood of pigs and hens and goats, which are shown to be decisively petit bourgeois rather than lumpenproletarian. Accepted wisdom is knocked on its head.

I wish I could remember the name of the author. I would be lying if I said it was on the tip of my tongue, because it isn’t, chiefly because I no longer have a tongue. A year or so ago, much like accepted wisdom, I too was knocked on the head, by a malefactor, who stole my wallet and my cardigan and, for good measure, broke both my arms and tore out my tongue. When I recovered, I was told I had been set upon by none other than the killer Babinsky, so I was lucky to be still alive. As far as I know, the maniac is still at large, so make sure you lock your doors and stick pins into your little wax Babinsky doll before you go to bed.

And just as we learned about the true social sphere in which blood sausage is prized, so in the new book by wotsisname we discover the importance of sponge to the lumpenproles. I had no idea, for example, that horny-handed sons of toil were quite so partial to dainties such as fairy cakes and sponge fingers. Equally surprising, given they are sometimes called the great unwashed, is the value placed upon bath sponges by the lumpenproletariat. Even those who use their bathtubs for coal storage treasure their sponges, often holding soapsud squeezing contests on some patch of waste ground behind their noisome hovels. I have a dim memory of seeing some such event when I was tot, as the rag and bone man’s cart clopped by pulled by a great grey drayhorse. My pa told me the horse’s bright and battering sandal was fettled for him by Felix Randal, the farrier. As an agricultural worker rather than a lumpenprole, Felix Randal was probably not that big on sponges, either cakey or bathtubby, although had he lived long enough to build up his fettling business into a chain of franchises, he might have aspired to becoming a petit bourgeois, and then he could have stuffed himself with blood sausage. It is unlikely, though not impossible, that he would have developed a taste for the blood of horses.

All in all, I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Quite apart from a text which bounds along in sprung rhythm, it has a mighty armature of footnotes, though they are printed in so tiny a font that I wish I had received my review copy before I was attacked by the killer Babinsky. So terrifying was his countenance, ever since that awful night I have had to wear shaded spectacles à la the Irish minstrel and tax evader Paul Hewson. Not only does this becloud my vision but, as you can imagine, it has shattered my reputation as a person of effortless swish and élan.

Oh, and not only footnotes but gorgeous, gorgeous illustrations, in vivid colour, of sponges and blood.

And not only footnotes and illustrations but a really terrific index.

And not only footnotes and illustrations and an index, but a tear-out coupon in the frontispiece of each copy which, when taken to your newsagent, can be exchanged for a blood-soaked sponge. The idea, I think, is that one squeezes the blood from the sponge much as a lumpenprole would have squeezed soapsuds from it, and then one forms the blood into a sausage, and eats it, perhaps with a side helping of sponge cake.

And thus is the clash of classes in the grand sweep of history quietly subverted by this author whose name I am at a loss to recall.

Banished to a remote atoll, I subsisted on molluscs and rainwater. It was my own fault. I had been issued with one of the new-style Anti-Social Behaviour Orders. Now I would have many long years to reflect upon the consequences of brazenly smoking a cigarette at a bus stop, past which an endless parade of vehicles belched noxious fumes. It was, as they say, a fair cop, guv. I readily placed my wrists into the manacles presented by the Community Patrol Invigilation Cadet as I lay sprawled in the gutter following a salutary Tasering. My week in a befouled hulk anchored off the seaside was an enormous help. I was able for the first time to acknowledge the depth of my criminality. I can say, without dissembling, that I positively enjoyed the sensation of being tossed out of an aeroplane and descending, with the aid of an automatically-opening parachute, which I have since ripped up for bedding linen, onto my atoll. For it is, now, very much my atoll, where I subsist upon molluscs and rainwater, and my rapidly dwindling carton of untipped full strength Paraguayan cigarettes.

Only six issues of the children’s comic Zig Et Puce were ever published. Our correspondent Fatima Gilliblat has spent the last ten years writing a definitive study of this milestone in Latin tot literature. Here is an extract from her forthcoming book, a brief summary of the content of each issue.

Zig Et Puce, Number One. Zig steals eggs from the Mavis Nest. Puce whittles a stick. Zig glows like a lightbulb. Puce bangs a pan. Zig clocks off. Puce wears blue pyjamas.

Zig Et Puce, Number Two. Zig, in an extremity of barbarian anguish, pops a cig into a dovecote. Puce outbids a flapper at an auction. Zig melds tarp with gauze. Puce takes part in a testimonial match for a retiring football ace who now has but the one leg. Zig meets Tod. Puce murmurs, like the sea.

Zig Et Puce, Number Three. Zig crunches twigs underfoot as he stalks his quarry. Puce spies a window of opportunity. Zig goes to the gallows. Puce mucks about with currants. Zig looks like Eve Marie Saint in On The Waterfront. Puce reads Simone De Beauvoir in her American circumstance. Zig spits. Puce clanks.

Zig Et Puce, Number Four. Zig is embalmed within the tomb of a great but anonymous ancient Egyptian monkey god king. Puce blots her copybook. Zig has gum disease. Puce clings to the raft of the Medusa. Zig makes much of much that has not panned out as planned. Puce goes for the Bob Stokoe Memorial Bucket.

Zig Et Puce, Number Five (the notorious banned issue). Zig shows grit. Puce, in tumbling, dislodges the Buttons of Beb, which cascade down the mountainside and are scattered about the lanes of a village in a Swiss canton. Zig foots the bill. Puce goes rogue. Zig is in a ditch with Tod and a cup and an owl. Puce dissolves in water. Zig hails the chief. Puce watches Cowards Bend The Knee, or The Blue Hands, with Latin intertitles.

Zig Et Puce, Number Six. Zig milks a cow. Puce milks another cow. Zig pays a visit to the place where it goes “clunk!”. Puce keeps milking cows. Zig is a harbinger of harbours and binges. Puce milks more and more cows. Zig crashes upon the rocks, like the sea. Puce sashays along Kaiser Wilhelm Strasse. Zig whimpers. Puce bangs.

In a comment on Googie ‘n’ Bee, R. writes: I think there could be some useful mileage in Lilian Gish + wasps, too. I am afraid to say that this demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of the connections between stars of the silver screen and the sorts of insects that buzz and fly and sting, the Aculeate Hymenoptera.

A modicum of research reveals a plethora of anecdotal material linking Googie Withers with bees. Much of this is hearsay, and some of it is undoubtedly fictitious, merely the product of fuming brains careening pell-mell into poltroonery for want of any more useful employment. Nevertheless, bloody good anecdotage should never be discounted entirely, as Dobson once said, at a picnic.

Conversely, conversely, say it again daddy-o, you will wander the world for umpteen years before you ever come upon a reliable Gish-wasp story.

Now, useful mileage there may be if we are talking about Tallulah Bankhead and hornets, or Nova Pilbeam and German wasps, or even Vilma Banky and bees. In the latter case we even have a story involving ectoplasmic bee goo, though it has been suppressed by Vilma Banky’s estate, for understandable reasons.

I hope that makes things clear.

This piece was written specifically to placate the person who arrived at Hooting Yard yesterday, having typed “character flaw of mediaeval peasant” into a search engine.

Hello. My name is Cleothgard and I am a mediaeval peasant. I am calling to you across the centuries because I want to tell you about my character flaw. It is not, I am afraid to say, a character flaw that would elevate me into the realm of the tragic. That would be a splendid flaw to have, but I am a mere peasant, and as I look about me in this vale of tears it has not escaped my attention that tragic, and indeed heroic, character flaws tend to be displayed by princelings and such. Mine is more what you might call a mundane flaw. One of the reasons I decided to bellow so hectically that time itself is bedizened and shrunk is that I know with a fair degree of certainty that no poet nor playwright is ever likely to consider my character flaw a fit subject for their pen, or I should say quill, or scratchy stick. I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be. I don’t even know who Prince Hamlet is, or was, or will be, and I was always meant to be a peasant. ‘Twas writ upon the stars.

My character flaw is a tendency to overdo the grovelling when confronted by a baron. When I see one approach, upon his horse, in all his finery, glittering and clanking, accompanied by his retinue, I immediately start to snivel and slobber and I pitch myself forward face down into the muck. Mediaeval muck is much, much filthier than your modern muck. It oozes and stinks and harbours all sorts of minuscule disgusting life-forms, things you have eradicated through science and hygiene. While thus prostrate, I begin to groan incoherently. What I am actually trying to express is the sense that I am but a worm unfit to exist on the same planet as the baron, who is brighter than the sun and completely fantastic, but my abasement is such that I cannot form the proper words with my mouth, which in any case is by now packed with mud.

Bear in mind that at this stage, the baron and his retinue have only just hove into view on the horizon. This is partly what I mean by overdoing the grovelling. My fellow mediaeval peasants are all still going about their business, tilling the fields or scratching at their buboes or, in the throes of the chorea imagnativa aestimative, dancing in a frenzy. When the baron gets closer, a goodly number of them will tug their forelocks and dribble with happiness at the sight of him, but I feel this urge to outdo them. That is my character flaw.

And it is made all the more pathetic by the fact that the baron will not even notice my existence. I am pretty certain this is the case, for over the years, not a single baron passing through our bailiwick has ever acknowledged me. They might command their retinue to smash up the mediaeval farming tools and hack at those tilling the fields with their big sharp swords, or they might burn down our huts, or, very very occasionally, they might turn out to be a so-called “good baron” and distribute alms and largesse. But because of my ludicrous grovelment, flat on my belly in the muck, groaning away, I seem to escape their attention. There is, I suppose, an advantage to this in that I have never had one of my limbs sliced off or smashed to pieces. Thereagain, nor have I been presented with a groat by a good baron’s alms-giving dwarf.

Swings and roundabouts. Fate is meant to decide the lot of a mediaeval peasant like me, but the nature of my character flaw is such that I become a sort of invisible peasant, merged with the muck in which I sprawl, and so Fate passes me by. If I could, just once, stand straight and tall – well, not tall, exactly, because nutritional deficiencies mean I am stunted and shrivelled – but if I could at least stop abasing myself quite so preposterously as soon as I spot a baron half a mile off, then who knows what I might reap?

I dare say in your world o’ the future there are still peasants with character flaws, and good barons and bad barons. And I expect the peasants still till and scratch and dance, and the barons are still really terrific and shine so brightly. Fate will arrange things just so, I assume, even though Fate has taken one withering look at me and left me where I am, slobbering in the muck.