Returning from Belshazzar’s feast, Agnetha and Benny grew increasingly despondent, and by the time they reached the hotel both of them were staggering under the oppressive weight of grim Scandinavian misery.

“If Fernando were here,” groaned Benny, “He would brighten things up. He could draw sunbeams from a cucumber.”

“You forget that Fernando is but a fictional character in a songlet, Benny,” snapped Agnetha. Tears were rolling down her cheeks.

“Oh,” said Benny, staring out of the hotel window. He saw Anni-Frid flit past, like a phantom. Agnetha was beating her fists upon a piece of pine furniture.

“At least here there is no mysterious writing upon the wall, as there was at the feast,” added Benny, trying to open a crack in the gloom.

All of a sudden Björn came striding manfully into the hotel lobby. His hair and beard and face and clothing were blackened from the charcoal he had been burning.

“I am looking for Anni-Frid,” he said, “Have you seen her?”

“No,” said Benny, lying through his teeth. But had he really seen her? Or were his eyes playing tricks on him again, as they had in Uppsala?

“Check the abandoned cow byre,” said Agnetha, “She went there earlier to clean her rifle.”

“Since many years I haven’t seen a rifle in her hand,” said Björn. He dashed outside into the mist that engulfed the hotel grounds.

Agnetha and Benny slumped in the lobby armchairs, expecting to hear a rifle shot in the distance. But none came. The only sound was the whirring of the fan above their heads and, outside, the strange cries of such Scandinavian birds as had not flown south for the winter.

“Anyway, how would Fernando draw sunbeams from a cucumber?” asked Agnetha, eventually.

But Benny had fallen asleep, lost in dreams of Belshazzar.

It’s been a while since we paid a visit to the groovelab, high in the Swiss Alps, where tireless boffins attempt to isolate the essential core of Hooting Yard’s grooviness. But we may have to pack our pippy bags and hike over there again, for it appears that objections have been raised to the very practice of grooving itself. Our dulcet-voiced South African correspondent Letta Mbulu has found herself leaping to the defence of all things groovy by asking, in the form of song, the cogent question What is wrong with grooving? Actually, Ms Mbulu asks what is wrong with groovin’, but I fear we ought not encourage her use of apocopation, otherwise we start getting into Hootin’ Yard territory, at which point civilisation begins to crumble.

I pause here briefly to note that Ms Mbulu’s name is an anagram of Umlaut Belt (or Bëlt), which is, as we know, the name given to a far, far distant string of glittering stars and planets somewhere in this or another galaxy, dubbed as such by a fearsome Teutonic astronomer great of beard and brain alike. His own name, alas, I cannot quite recall. It is not even on the tip of my tongue. It is as if it has been utterly expunged from my memory, possibly by a bash on the bonce received when negotiating an Alp in Germany, on my way to Switzerland, there to visit the groovelab boffins.

I had my pippy bag and my hiking apparel, and I had a handful of feed for any goats that might cross my path as I wended my way. The sky was blue, and I thought of Ruskin. Well, in truth I thought of both Ruskin and Letta Mbulu. I wondered, as I often have, if Ruskin would have got down with the Hooting Yard groove, had he been born in a different era. We tend not to associate Ruskin with grooviness of any kidney, but that is a mistake, I think. It has not escaped my notice that his very name suggests a Mbuluesque apocopation. What is wrong with Ruskin’?, indeed.

Had I had my portable metal tapping machine upon my person upon that Alp, I may well have pranged a message to Ms Mbulu, insisting that she make a new recording of her song substituting Ruskin’ for groovin’. Not that this would have gone down too well with the boffins in the groovelab, who I know consider Ms Mbulu their staunch champion and her song their anthem. When your working day consists of exhausting hours of experimental groovy research, it must be a terrific dampener to learn that some are calling into question the practice of grooviness itself, its tenets and ethics and its jib-cut. I was keen to speak with the boffins, to see how they were bearing up, to spread some pep. Though I am often of lugubrious mien, I am not averse to dispersing pep where and when I can, particularly among boffins confined to their fastness in the Swiss Alps. I had gifts for them, too. Stuffed into my pippy bag were samizdat copies of some of the more inspiring letters from Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera.

So there I was, toiling up an Alpine slope, on the lookout for goats, thinking about Ruskin and Letta Mbulu, and nary a thought in my head regarding the beardy brainy Teutonic astronomer who had named the Umlaut Bëlt. Perhaps had it been night rather than day, had the broad sweep of the heavenly firmament glittered in darkness above me, rather than the bronze and battering sun, I might have thought about stars and planets and astronomers old and new, Teutonic and otherwise, and that name I cannot now remember would have come to me. Around it, I could have framed a piece of anecdotage to beguile the boffins over lunchtime sandwiches in their canteen chalet. I would draw together their singing heroine Letta Mbulu with the stars in a distant galaxy, somehow work in Mr Ruskin, and then, la!, flip from my pippy bag the copies of Fors Clavigera to boost their pep. Alas, it was not to be.

As I have indicated, I was well prepared should I meet with any goats who crossed my path. I had handfuls of goat feed, chiefly nettles and genetically modified sultanas and bran flakes, with which to assuage them. What had not occurred to me was that, being Alpine goats, they would be clumping about above the path, and, in a frisky moment, dislodge a rock or two, which, rolling unstoppably down the slope, would land upon my bonce, and knock me out.

It was night when I came to. Above me, the mighty firmament, the stars in their courses glittering against a cloudless black expanse. Out there, somewhere, possibly visible if I had a powerful telescope, was the Umlaut Bëlt. What was it Dobson had written? Of all the belts in all the galaxies, the Umlaut Bëlt can lay claim to being the grooviest belt imaginable. I wondered if the boffins in the groovelab knew that. Try as I might, I could not remember the name of that long dead Teutonic astronomer. I got to my feet. Strewn on the path, I saw the untouched goat feed. Alongside it, my open pippy bag, and the few remaining shreds of my copies of Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, chewed up and munched by the Alpine goats which, like the rocks that had bedizened me, had descended from the slopes. The goats were gone now, and my boffin-gift was gone too. I could hardly present them with the sorry tatters which, in any case, a mountain wind would soon disperse into the night. To arrive at the groovelab without a gift to pep the boffins would be unforgivably ungroovy. Sadly, I turned around, and began the long hike back to my homeland. I was in no mood for grooving. Perhaps I never would be, ever again.

From his exile in a pompous land, reader Mike Jennings very kindly alerts me to a newly published film studies textbook from the University of Ülm:

The title translates as Oi Mate! Are You Looking For A Punch In The Face? : Horst Gack and the Cinema of Belligerence. The first study dedicated to the visionary director of “Goats and Ogres: A Film from the Hillsides”, “Revenge of the Pig” and “The Fatal Duckpond”. This thumping tome collects together essays by some of the most incisive and rigorous minds of Teutonic academia. Unfortunately all the contributors have chosen to remain anonymous following reports that Horst Gack’s mysterious wife and collaboratrix Primrose Dent is “not best pleased” with the book. We know not why, but then she is an international woman of mystery, so her motivations and manias are forever hidden from the public gaze.

What is most startling about the book is that it completely avoids the sort of obfuscatory postmodernist verbal diarrhoea that besmirches so many academic texts these days. The formidable German intellects who have turned their brainpower towards the films of Horst Gack do so in prose so plain and simple it can be understood by tiny tots. This passage, from an essay entitled “The Use Of Smudged Camera Lenses In Revenge Of The Pig“, is typical. It was translated for Hooting Yard by our old pal Fatima Gilliblat:

“See the pig. See the pig in black and white. See the pig blurred. See the pig go from the sty to the barn. See the clouds louring. See the rain falling. Hear Horst Gack cry “Cut!” Hear Primrose Dent cry “No, don’t cut yet!” Hear a kerfuffle. See the camera fall off its tripod. Hear imprecations and threats. See Horst Gack stomp off to lock himself in his trailer. See the pig emerge from the barn and roll in the muck. See Primrose Dent channelling the spirit of Leni Riefenstahl. See the rain continue to pour down relentlessly until darkness falls.”

The harebells are in bloom, and there is a man prancing along, waving a stick. There is phlox and flax, campions, pinks, hollyhocks and bee borage, chrysanthemums and vetch, dahlias, hyacinths and delphiniums, and all the colours seem reflected in the man’s cravat. It is silken, and embroidered with fantastic skill. One admires the casual yet stylish way he has knotted it about his neck. His hat, too, with its elegant angles, is pleasing to the eye. He rounds a pond, still waving his stick. The pond is home to mergansers, teal, and some ferocious swans. The sun emerges from behind an impossibly fluffy cloud, and bathes the scene in light so bright it bleaches the colour from things. The man makes a pause and dips his hand into a pocket of his blazer, from whence he plucks a pair of sunglasses and in one easy movement slides them behind his ears and onto his nose, while still managing that rhythmic wave of the stick with his other hand. A flock of swallows swoops across the sky. The man continues walking, now past a large stone edifice, quite a wonder of masonry. It looks as if it has been plumped down here in this field at random, long ago, for in parts it is crumbling, and it is tilted where the ground has subsided slightly beneath it. Much writing is carved upon one face of it, and the man stops, and stops waving his stick, and reads the words.

HERE LIE THE MORTAL BONES OF THE MIGHTY KING AND CHAMPION VUGLOP THRUST BY SWORD AND FIRE INTO THE ETHEREAL GREY MIST BEYOND WHO IN HIS TIME SMASHED ALL ON EARTH THAT HAD TO BE SMASHED AND IN HIS REIGN SPOKE WITH BIRDS AND IN HIS KINGDOM DID LET GROW TOWERING HOLLYHOCKS AND TREES OF QUINCE HE UNDID HIS FOES AND SPIES AND SCUM HIS HEAD WAS HUGE HIS CRANIUM SOLID AS THE ROCK OF BEDSOE FROM WHICH THIS TOMB HAS BEEN HEWN TO MARK THE SPOT WHERE HE FELL ON THAT AWFUL DAY WHEN PUNY WANKERS THROUGH LEGERDEMAIN AND CONJURING TRICKED HIS MAJESTIC PERSON AND BROUGHT HIS REALM TO RUIN HIS BONES ROT AND HIS FLESH BE EATEN BY WORMS HIS MEMORY HELD IN THE BEAKS OF THE BIRDS AND THE  PIPS AND BUDS AND PETALS OF THE FRUITS AND FLOWERS O MIGHTY VUGLOP LET THINE ENEMIES SHRIVEL UP IN TERROR AT YOUR MAGNIFICENCE THIS DAY AND ALL DAYS HENCE UNTIL YOUR KINGDOM IS BUILT AGAIN WITH STONE AND SWEAT THEN BALLOONS AND BIG FLYING MACHINES WILL SOAR ACROSS THE SKY PROCLAIMING ON BANNERS TO ALL ON EARTH YOUR GLORY IT SHALL BE

All of this is in Latin, or possibly Goat Latin, but we are given subtitles. Having read it, the man spits upon the masonry, and strolls on, again waving his stick. Suddenly, in the harsh sunlight, from nowhere, comes a trio of grunting toughs, who maul and manhandle him to the ground and drag him into a pit. The light grows brighter until the screen is completely white, and then appear, in a lovely font, bold and black, the words:

“I Profaned A King’s Tomb” – Peter De Vries, The Mackerel Plaza, MCMLVIII

Thus the opening of Horst Gack’s new film Oubliette Of Fops, the follow-up to his award-winning Het Ontbijt. Where that earlier masterpiece limited itself to a small group of Belgians eating breakfast in a cafeteria, this latest work operates on a much broader canvas, at least in terms of ambition. Granted, after the opening scene the bulk of the “action”, if we can call it that, takes place in the oubliette of the title, a tenebrous hellhole scarcely more expansive than the breakfast cafeteria, in which various semivisible fops and bravos groan and languish. But this is primarily a film of ideas, ideas hatched not by Horst Gack but by his wife and collaboratrix Primrose Dent, international woman of mystery. So what we have, over three or more hours, is a series of meditations upon kingship, temporal power, being eaten by worms, and the desperate quandary of fops consigned to an oubliette for profaning a king long dead. “If we live we live to tread on dead kings” go the words of the song, and this perhaps was the refrain running through Primrose Dent’s head as she wrote the screenplay while jetting between important capital cities, staying in expensive hotels, and sipping cocktails on terraces which, not so long ago, or not too far in the future, ran or would yet run with the blood spilled by revolutionaries or counterrevolutionaries, and in some cases by irredentists. It is this context which makes the film so rich, so appealing, and it certainly compensates for Horst Gack’s trademark cackhanded camerawork and those infuriating longueurs of which he seems so fond. Or perhaps, as the critic Giles Lapwing has asserted more than once, the prizewinning director is simply a hapless incompetent.

Oddly enough, Lapwing himself actually has a walk-on part in the film. In a piece of bravura hyperrealism, Horst Gack shows him being abducted from his Pointy Town pied à terre, bundled on to a rickety cart, and driven by wild horses across a desolate and unspeakable landscape before being thrown by the same trio of toughs into the oubliette. What are Horst Gack and mysterious Primrose Dent trying to tell us here? For if there is one thing the world knows about Giles Lapwing it is that he is the most unfoppish of men. Indeed, such is the general shabbiness of his appearance and demeanour that he has on countless occasions been ejected from sophisticated soirées, much like the Emerald Isle crooner Van Morrison. Sometimes the pair of them have been kicked into the streets in tandem, memorably when trying to gain access to their own joint birthday party at the Grand Metropolitan Palace o’ Fops ‘n’ Dandies on the quayside regeneration zone at O’Houlihan’s Wharf. By all accounts Lapwing and Morrison were pursued by outraged Palace habitués to the end of the pier, whereupon they toppled into the sea and had to swim out to a barnacle-encrusted rock.

Oubliette Of Fops is certainly a challenging piece of cinema, and it will be interesting to see what the critics make of it, if, indeed, any of them get a chance to see it. Word has it that while Horst Gack is preening himself ready for the festival circuit, Primrose Dent is keeping all existing prints of the film under lock and key in one of her mysterious secret cavernous subterranean secure storage facilities. There are at least four of these on each continent, their exact locations of course known only to the international woman of mystery herself. Horst Gack is apparently ignorant of their existence, happily accepting his wife’s increasingly gnomic pronouncements, issued in the form of scribbled notes passed over the breakfast table. It is reminiscent of the scene in Het Ontbijt, where the husband and wife at the cafeteria’s corner table pass coded teabags to each other.

There are at present no plans to release Oubliette Of Fops in 3D, though apparently a Smellovision version is on the cards. The smells will be those of lemon verbena, turpentine, and snackbar fug.