Earlier, we discussed the folk song All Around My Hat, and today I want to attend to its close cousin All Around Somebody Else’s Hat. Strictly speaking, this is not a song so much as a dance with chanting.

The basic idea is that the participants first have to steal somebody’s hat. Any old titfer will do, though personally I would recommend the sombrero or the trilby. Having picked the person whose hat they intend to use, the celebrants surround the victim and stun him or her with poisoned darts. These should be blown through pipes or straws from close range. Aim for the head, being careful of course not to puncture the hat. Occasionally, when obtaining the hat on a busy street in an important metropolis, the collapse of the hat-wearer on to the pavement, and their accompanying groans and feverish panting as the toxins course through their veins, can attract the attentions not only of passers-by but of police officers or community hub support patrol wardens. If this happens, dissemble. It can be helpful to point at a flock of carrion crows in the sky, or to start up a loud and hideous collective jabbering, or both. Pointing at birds in the sky while jabbering usually distracts bumptious persons in uniform, in most cities.

Next, the gaggle of jabbering maniacs should carry the stolen hat off to their lair. This lair can be sited in a cave, or somewhere up in the hills, or, at a pinch, down an insalubrious alleyway within the city itself. Hurl sulphur bombs at any interfering busybodies dim enough to give chase.

Once in the lair, whooping with frenzy and festooned with feathers and necklaces of bones and teeth and engarbed in golden cloth, the dancers place the hat in a puddle of brimstone, surround it with stinky herbaceous clumps aligned in a pattern of esoteric significance, and begin to dance around it, while chanting.

The chant itself can vary, which makes it rather more interesting than the frankly solipsistic All Around My Hat. Recent examples observed in the field have included the incomprehensible hooba hooba gooba nooba, the elitist ad praesens ova cras pullis sunt meliora ad quem ad quod, and the riveting Partick Thistle 3, Stenhousemuir 1.

After three or four days and nights of uninterrupted dancing and chanting, glimpses of the ineffable should swim into vision. These will be branded upon the brain. Later, when everybody has calmed down and taken in fluids, the hat can be plucked from its puddle and returned to its owner, who will almost certainly be found tied to a bed in the nearest clinic, shaking uncontrollably and babbling inanities.

It’s been a twelvemonth since we heard hide or hair of Sedgeweg, the Tewkeston ringer. Much has happened. The Tuppers posted bail, and the ringer himself was seen scratching in limepits. Every so often he’d lift a find to the light and toss it to one side. He’d have to rent a cart or barrow, and that was where the Tuppers came in. They always had something with wheels to hand, they took pride in that, if in nought else. Sedgeweg had his shovel and a broom. Lord knows where he got them from, they were bent and battered, as if they’d been used to bash heads in. But Sedgeweg wasn’t a man given to lifting a finger in fury. He’d popped enough caps in his time, didn’t have to anymore, didn’t want to, couldn’t see the point. He still spent time with otters, by the riverbank, even when he was on his uppers. A collapsed lung was on the cards, the way he was going. The physio kept giving him sideways glances and making new appointments for him. It was quite a clinic he had there, white and bold and with a lawn outside with swings and a seesaw. Tupper money, some said, in whispers, on their punts. Wheels within wheels, that was another thing you heard, in those days. It was just punter babble, though. The ringer hardly heard it, he had his scratching to keep him busy. Go and see him at the limepits one day, he’d like that. He’s a generous and open-hearted man and he’ll share his flask with you likely as not. It always has something hot in it, with not much milk. Sedgeweg has a complicated theory about milk and calcium and bones, not any bones but his own bones. It doesn’t make any sense, but it becalms him at times when he might go all funny and shaky. He can’t count anymore. He has to get a Tupper to count the otters now. It’s come to that.

Lend me your ear while I call you a fool. You were kissed by a witch one night in the wood. Well, you thought it was a witch, but actually it was the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, broadly similar to, but not exactly, a witch. She kissed you, there in the wood, in the night, and then she turned into a crow and flew away, you did not see where to, for it was so dark in the wood. What were you doing there, so late? You ought to have been tucked up in bed in your crumbling chamber on the topmost floor of Sludge Hall. But for reasons known only to yourself, you had set your pig-shaped alarm clock for half past two in the morning, and you woke and dressed in gaudy raiment and stalked down the servants’ staircase and out of the pantry door and along the lane, and when you reached the edge of the wood you pressed on, not stopping, though the trees grew denser and denser, until you met with the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman. She kissed you, and turned into a crow, but you were not transformed, you stayed just as you were, a fool, in the middle of the wood, in the middle of the night.

Did you expect that you too would become a crow, or some other bird, a linnet or a partridge? And had you done so, what then? Did you think you could beat your wings and fly, and follow what you thought was a witch to where she perched, in the form of a crow, upon the sturdy branch of an oak tree? Remember that many of the trees in the wood are smeared with birdlime, and you might have become stuck, waiting helplessly for dawn to break and for the hunting men to come and break your neck and stuff you into a sack. You need have no fear that such a fate will befall the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, for long before morning she will transform herself again, from a crow into a squirrel, or a gnat, and she will have no trouble unsticking herself from the birdlime for she will use her powers. Perhaps you thought that, with one kiss from her, you would be granted those powers? Fool, fool! That is not how it works, and never has been, and you would know that if you had read your storybooks carefully.

As it is, you were left alone in the wood, in the dark, kissed but untransformed, if anything more foolish than you had been before. What then, you wondered, did the kiss portend? And why had the witch, in truth the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, turned into a crow and flown away from you? Did she want you to seek her, to blunder about in the dark wood trying to find her perch, to clamber up the trunk of the oak and join her there in your foolish, still human form? Or did she intend that you turn back, once kissed, turn back and trudge all along the lane back to Sludge Hall, to climb back up the stairs and into your upper chamber and into your bed, and fall asleep, and remember nothing?

Being a fool, you do not know which choice to make, so you simply stand there, in the middle of the wood. Suddenly, above, shifting clouds reveal the moon, the cold-hearted orb that rules the night. Through a gap in the dense leafage of oaks and sycamores and pines, a shaft of silver light beams down upon you. It lights up the mark on your forehead, the crimson mark where you were kissed by the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman. You will not see it until morning when, hearing the boots of the hunting men crunching through the duff, you gather what poor wits you have, and walk out of the wood, not back to Sludge Hall, but out the other side, towards the pond. At the pond, you stoop to see your reflection in the water. You see the head of a fool, bearing the mark of the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman. It is ineradicable. And swans paddle across the pond towards you, dozens of swans. The mark on your forehead begins to glow. It grows hot, until it is burning bright, and you see it reflected in the eyes of the swans. They surround you now, white and silent, as you slump to your knees at the edge of the pond. They will never let you leave them, You belong to them now. They worship you, with the fanaticism only swans are capable of. You are still a fool, but of a new, uncanny type. And as the swans gaze at you, unblinking, you hear the cawing of a crow, somewhere in the sky above, and feel a sharp pang in your forehead, where you were kissed by the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman at night in the wood.

It is likely that most, if not all, of the nuncios you have ever come across have been Papal nuncios. Certainly that was the case with me, until a few weeks ago. I am not a practising Catholic, you understand, but my business activities put me in contact with many envoys from the Vatican, for reasons I may go into later.

So when, on that blistering Thursday at the dog-end of August, my factotae announced that a nuncio had come to see me, I naturally assumed him to be of the Papal sort. Before I go on, I ought to explain why it took more than one factotum to make the announcement. By nature I am, and have always been, a highly suspicious man. I trust nobody, not even those who seem to all outward appearance the most saintly. Modern psychotwaddle would ascribe this to some traumatic incident in my infancy, but apart from the time my Pa emptied my post office savings account and fled to Uruguay with his floozie, and the other time when my Ma sold me to a travelling brute, mine was a blissful childhood. No, my lack of trust in humanity – and, I should add, in the animal kingdom – is simply a character trait, like having a sweet tooth, or a penchant for fighting bears. That being so, I employ three factotae, the first to make an announcement, the second to corroborate it, and the third to deploy the coup de grace, which, in the present case, was to usher the nuncio into my presence, to make the provisional visible. It is a happy arrangement, and I make it happier still by rotating the duties of the three factotae, Ned, Ned, and Ned, so none has the opportunity to relax into his role and thus have the opportunity for maleficent scheming against me.

Dismissing the Neds with my usual lordly, if somewhat effeminate, wave of the hand, I cast an eye over my visitor. He was horribly disfigured. Indeed, for a moment I thought he must have come into my chamber straight from one of Mr Lovecraft’s purpler passages. But then I recalled that Lovecraft’s works are fictions, and that his characters have no reality independent of the page. I dabbed at my lips with a napkin and asked the nuncio to state his business.

Such was his disfigurement that he was unable to speak coherently. His mouth was all twisted and scrunched, and, though I could tell he was a man of high breeding and delicate sensibilities, the noises he made were incomprehensible. They were also deafeningly loud, and I had to tear my napkin in two and stuff each half into my ears. The sudden contact of recently-deposited spittle, fabric, and earwax set off a chemical reaction, and the resulting compound seeped into the inside of my head, wormed its way towards my brain, and was eventually to fell me on the spot. But it would take some time to do so, and I was oblivious of my fate, so I continued my interrogation of the nuncio. I explained to him that I could not understand a word he was saying, or rather grunting. My own voice is a mellifluous instrument, by the way, and one which often has the ladies swooning. It surprised me that it had the same effect on the nuncio, who suddenly crumpled to the floor and lay, seemingly lifeless, upon the linoleum.

I tinkled a bell, and my factotae appeared within seconds. No doubt they had been lurking behind the door and listening out for every word, eager to hear something they might later use to undermine me. My first instinct was to punish their imminent treachery by sending them to the brute for a bashing up. But then it occurred to me, if I had been unable to make head nor tail of the nuncio’s strangulated grunts, was it likely that Ned or Ned or Ned would have been able to decipher them, from behind the door panel? Like my cravats, my hearing is exquisite, whereas at least one factotum was as deaf as a post, and the other two were brain-sick. I decided to withhold the threat of the brute for the time being, and instead I commanded one of the Neds to rifle through the nuncio’s pockets. At this stage, I was still under the impression that he was an emissary from the Vatican, and I wanted to know which cardinal had sent him. That would give me some idea how to proceed, for I could split the cardinals into two distinct camps. There were those of whom I was petrified, and there were those who supplied me with the bones of long dead saints. Sometimes the latter group would offer me other, non-osseous, relics, but these were of no interest to me. I’m a bones man through and through.

As soon as the factotum was done rummaging, it became clear that the nuncio had no connection with either set of cardinals. In fact it was doubtful if he was even a Roman Catholic. What came out of his pockets was a heteroclite, and rather sordid, jumble of bittybobs: buttons, string, a snapped elastic band, one or two dead beetles, cake crumbs, unidentifiable muck, a charabanc ticket, a butcher’s pencil, dust, filth, tiny rubber shreds, a semi-sucked cough drop, blotting paper, a hairball, instant gravy granules, a bent safety pin, and several pips. There was no trace of identification whatsoever, nor was there any money, nor a set of keys, nor a carte de visite. This nuncio was either an enigma or a vagabond, perhaps both. So I told the factotae to give him a good kicking.

A nuncio is, of course, a messenger, from the Latin nuntius. It was possible he had been trying to deliver his message verbally before he swooned, but it seemed unlikely. Etiquette would suggest he had been greeting me, using all my honorific titles. There was nothing in his pockets resembling a written communiqué, unless I was meant to interpret the blots on the blotting paper. Then I remembered that long ago, was it in Ancient Rome?, a slave would have his head shaved, an important message tattooed upon his scalp and then, once his hair had grown back, he would be sent scampering in his toga across the hills and plains, appearing to naïve guards and sentries as just another hiking slave, until he reached his destination, whereupon his head would again be shaved and his top secret message successfully delivered. But I am not naïve. I am suspicious. I told one of the Neds to go and fetch the garden shears.

Halfway through his haircut, the nuncio awoke from his swoon and his kicking, and with inhuman strength he flung my factotum across the chamber. The shears went clattering across the linoleum. I thought the new lopsided arrangement of his bouffant rather suited his other disfigurements, and was about to say so, but I did not want him swooning on me again. The patches of his head which were now bared had not, after all, been tattooed. Where, I wondered, was my message?

As well as being suspicious, I am impatient. Before the nuncio had even scrabbled to his feet, I was throwing a fit of petulance. The factotae cowered behind an arras, for they knew just how dangerous this could be. Kingdoms have crumbled, armadas have sunk, birds have fallen dead out of the sky when I have one of my tantrums. Oddly, the nuncio didn’t bat an eyelid, although given his disfigurement, it was difficult to tell if those unbatting flaps of blotchy withered flesh were actually his eyelids. Instead, he minced towards me and snapped his fingers in front of my face.

Throughout my gorgeous pampered life, I had always been resistant to hypnotists. Christ knows they tried, marshalling a panoply of techniques to send me under, but I merely thumbed my nose at them, just as I have thumbed my nose at death itself on many an occasion. But where so many charlatans had failed, the nuncio seemed to know what he was doing, because as soon as I heard that fingersnap I was away with the cuckoos. I mean that literally. I was hunched – or at least, I thought I was hunched – on a high tree branch, a poplar tree, leaning against a nest in which a mother cuckoo was regurgitating grubs and beetles into the quivering upturned gullets of its young. The palace, the fantastic draperies of my chamber, my divan, my factotae, the nuncio himself – all had vanished, pfft! I quickly ran a hand over my face to check that I had not grown a beak. But no, I was still recognisably human, though shrunk, it seemed, to the size of a bird. I took a careful look at the cuckoos.

That was when I heard another snap, and I was back in my chamber, sprawled on the divan, and mercifully much bigger than a bird. Everything was back to normal, more or less. The nuncio was now leaning against the mantelpiece, I noticed, tapping at some sort of hand-held bakelite gubbins with a little pointy-prong. His brow was furrowed in concentration, unless I was misinterpreting his disfigurement. My factotae, however, were behaving rather curiously, even for them. They had bunched up together in a corner, having surrounded themselves with twigs and other tree-loppings, and all three of them had craned their necks so they were staring at the ceiling, and their mouths were open, and they were quivering. They looked, unnervingly, like the baby cuckoos in my hallucination, though bigger and grubbier.

Just then, the nuncio stopped tapping and his contraption spat out a small cardboard rectangle, which he handed to me. A surprising amount of text had been printed upon what I took to be some kind of invoice. But an invoice for what? The nuncio was standing there expectantly, clearly waiting for me to read it, so I did.

INVOICE, it said, For services provided to Prince Fulgencio. One mesmeric intervention to supply a ladder out of a moral quagmire. Payment in full is now due. Groats and florins accepted. You have been served today by Lembit.

There followed the price, which was ridiculous.

Allied to my suspicious nature and my impatience is a tendency to bluster. Boy, did I bluster. There was nothing on the invoice to say for whom Lembit the disfigured nuncio was working, so I jumped to the immediate conclusion that he was merely a chancer who had fetched up at the palace and thought he could pull a fast one. No doubt he had heard the countryside rumours about how I treated my factotae with wilful cruelty and contempt, and thought, by his hypnotic flummery, he could turn me into a wishy-washy do-gooder, a mother cuckoo nurturing its chicks. Well, he, and Ned and Ned and Ned, would soon learn I was grimmer, fiercer and more vengeful than they supposed.

That was pretty much the gist of what I shouted at the nuncio in my blustery way. I may have added something about being perfectly happy wallowing in a moral quagmire, if that was indeed where I was, because it looked like a bloody fantastic quagmire to me, what with its crenellations and draperies and my divan and my many and various palatial accoutrements, mister! Anyway, my loud bluster seemed to do the trick, for the nuncio detached himself from the mantelpiece, where he was again leaning insolently, and minced away out of the door. Before he vanished entirely, however, he flailed his arms in a haphazard yet strangely significant manner, and I found myself gazing over at the factotae, their gullets still upturned, and lawks-a-mercy! a tear came to my eye.

Without knowing quite what I was doing, I went off to the biggest and most well-stocked of my many, many pantries, and returned with a hamper full of toothsome snacks. As if I were a large ungainly mother cuckoo clad in raiment fine, I dropped toffees and buns and bite-size chocoflakes and anchovies and gobstoppers and marinated tofu chunks and processed cheese triangles and custard balls and all sorts of other treats down the quivering throats of my factotae. When they were sated, I cracked open a bottle of aerated lettucewater and poured them each a beakerful. I sobbed as I saw smiles break out on their pock-marked faces. Then I took them out on a charabanc excursion. We visited the Mysterious Piles Of Scum near Sawdust Bridge, the bottomless viper-pit at Shoeburyness, the Old Tower of Löbenicht, and the yeast deposits near Pepinstow. We paused for a picnic in a field splattered with buttercups, in which cows roamed, stupid yet elegant. I took them to see a performance of Binder’s Sonata For Clarinet And Tangerine Pips, and then we hiked o’er some mountains until we reached the eerie barn at Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard. Dusk was falling, so we called in to a kiosk, and I bought Ned and Ned cardigans and a duffel coat for Ned, and a magnetotorch each so they could light their way home. I mussed each of them on their filthy locks and promised them stylish haircuts at a new modern barber’s. When we got back to the palace, tired but happy, I presented them with brand new mattresses and eiderdowns, and even pillows, and before kissing them goodnight I read them a story about a bad evil princeling who wallowed in a moral quagmire but who saw the error of his ways and clambered out of the quagmire on a ladder, and how he handed the keys to his palace to his factotae and spent the rest of his life atoning for his sins by tending the sick and the indigent and the frankly unspeakable.

Before I settled down for the night on the cold stone floor of the smallest and most cramped of my many, many pantries, I went to count the groats and florins in my casket. I opened the lid, and found it empty, save for a small cardboard rectangle. It was a receipt, and it was signed by Lembit the disfigured nuncio, and there was a diagram on it of his arms being flailed in a haphazard yet strangely significant manner. But before I could scream with fury, the admixture of spittle and fabric and earwax went fizz! inside my head, and my brain exploded

I was pondering, so you wouldn’t have to, the Great Helmsman’s weird parallel universe speech at the Labour Party conference last week. In particular, I found myself chewing over what on earth he was talking about when he referred to “new modern technicians”. Who are these people? Are they replacements for old, has-been technicians? Can an old has-been strive to become new and modern?

Because I have read widely in that seam of gibberish mined so profitably by De Bono and Buzan, I was able to enjoy a flash of insight. Recently, I mentioned overhearing a reference to a “visionary cobbler”. It seems to me that the visionary cobbler and the new modern technician are one and the same. No ordinary cobbler, bound by old has-been cobbling ways, the visionary cobbler is – by dint of that very visionariness – new and modern and cobbling away in that bright sunlit upland our leader described for us so majestically.

In this paradise, which is probably a fool’s paradise, but none the worse for all that, new modern visionaries ply their trades while, behind the scenes, feral teenage tearaway mothers are corralled into hostels and council officials obliterate every last scrap of antisocial behaviour Latin.

It is not just cobblers whose lives have been transformed by the new vision. Lamplighters, bootblacks, night soil men, wrights of all kinds, tally-stick tappers, shovelmen, kiters, branglers and fleemsters, all these have swept away their old has-been cobwebs and emerged as new, and very modern, and indeed, technical.

I have seen the evidence with my own eyes. Down the lane from me there is a kiosk occupied for as long as I can recall by a boot-mender. Those whose boots were broken would take their boots to him, and, for a few shillings, he would mend them, if not as good as new then at least with one or two fewer gaping holes or patches of distressed stitching. This was quite clearly an old has-been way of doing things. Now, the kiosk has been covered in new modern plastic logos and the boot-mender himself has a new slick hairstyle and trendy spectacles, and his old crumpled beige overalls have been replaced by a stylish outfit, in mauve and teal, with clean lines, and a laminated namebadge. He is now, one might say, a visionary cobbler. And I for one am blissfully happy that, instead of simply getting my boots repaired, I am given a personalised and computer-readable boot health-check, together with a coupon for a complimentary plastic beaker of fruit ‘n’ fibre ‘n’ seeds ‘n’ plumstones ‘n’ curly kale juice from the brand new kiosk next door.

Onwards and upwards with the new modern technicians and the visionary cobblers!

Whenever I come upon the phrase “over-egging the pudding”, I want to know precisely what sort of pudding is being talked about, with a recipe where possible. I have been known to ask the question aloud, so keen am I to know. If I am out and about, on a bus for example, or sitting on a municipal park bench, my sudden cry of “Yes, yes, but what kind of pudding?” can disconcert those who overhear me. I have never, in these circumstances, received a satisfactory reply to my question, but that is hardly surprising. People just don’t seem to know as much about puddings as they used to. I am not sure why that is. It could be part of the same regrettable civilizational decline which has seen Received Pronunciation disappear from our radio broadcasts and television programmes. You can bet that a 1930s bus passenger or a 1950s municipal park bench occupant would have turned to face me and said, “Eggy pudding, I expect, old chap”, clearly enunciating every last syllable.

I give eggy pudding merely as an example. Remember that the presence of eggs, even too many eggs, in a pudding does not necessarily indicate that the pudding itself is an eggy one. It might be a plum pudding, a suet pudding, or My Lady Kent’s Pudding, to name but a lovely trio of puddings. There are others.

What bothers me, what has me shouting my head off on a bus or a bench, or elsewhere, is the laziness of writers who trot out the phrase “over-egging the pudding” without thinking. I would not for a moment dare compare myself with George Orwell, but he and I have one thing in common, which is that we like to keep count of our eggs. Indeed, I would go further than the author of Shooting An Elephant. I like to keep count not only of my own eggs, but of other people’s eggs, and of fictional eggs, and of metaphorical eggs. I am Alfred Hitchcock’s worst nightmare. The point is, if I am told that a pudding has been over-egged, I want to know by how many eggs the recipe has been exceeded, and to know that I need to know the identity of the pudding. Is that a crime?

In this day and age, it probably is. After all, there are council officials reading this who think “egg” might mean “for example” in Latin. They might well turf me out of my bus seat or bench and take me away to a compulsory brain-sloshing workshop, where I will learn that the counting of eggs is pernicious and the identification of puddings is antisocial. Until that day, I shall continue to demand an answer to my question, because I want to know about the eggs, and the puddings, and I make no excuses for being a seeker after knowledge and enlightenment.