When keeping a tally of gnomes, it is important to be aware of the different varieties, including newly-discovered types of gnome. It is all very well being able to spot, for example, well-known gnomes such as garden gnomes, the gnomes of Zurich, and Rudolf Steiner’s curiously disturbing invisible gnomes, but what will it profit a man if he tallies up some types of gnome but overlooks others entirely?

Consider, for example, the exhausted pipe-cleaner gnomes mentioned in passing on page 149 of Kate Atkinson’s novel Started Early, Took My Dog (2010). To the best of my knowledge, these busy little fellows have not previously been recorded in any authoritative list of gnome-types. Now they have been brought to light, however, it is clear that one must keep an eye out for them when conducting a gnome tally.

Ms Atkinson has little to say about them, although she does note their propensity for drunkenness. We should not be surprised at this, for it does not take much to intoxicate a gnome. And we can hardly begrudge these gnomes their pots of foaming Norwegian lager after a hard day’s pipe-cleaning. Even though you are not a gnome, I expect you too would be exhausted if you were up at the crack of dawn, armed with a scrubbing brush and a bucket of bleach, off to clean pipes until nightfall.

Gnomes are particularly suited to cleaning duties, of course, even when suffering from hangovers, as they usually are. Yet somehow in his magisterial survey of common gnome occupations, Blötzmann omits the pipe-cleaner gnomes, jumping, in his alphabetic list, from oilrig janitor gnomes directly to potting shed snack preparation gnomes. From this we can conclude that the exhausted pipe-cleaner gnomes have deliberately concealed their existence from the wider world, more successfully even than Steiner’s creepy invisible gnomes, which is saying something. The alternative is that Blötzmann failed to notice them, which would mean that his survey is not as magisterial as we have been led to believe. Frankly, that doesn’t bear thinking about. One thing we learn from any half-competent gnome tally is that calling Blötzmann’s expertise into question unleashes those terrible, terrible Blötzmann Reputation Protection gnomes, with their sharpened pins and hallucinatory facial expressions.

1. Now there dwelt in Gath a moptop whose name was Ringo. And one day the Lord appeared to Ringo and he was sore affrighted. Ringo tugged at the fringe of his moptop so it might cover his eyes that he could hide the Lord from his sight.

2. “Be not afeared, moptop!” boomed the Lord, for the Lord always spake in a boom when He appeared in Gath.

3. And Ringo, who carried a stick in each hand with which he thumped animal hides, had dropped his sticks when tugging at his hair.

4. “Pick up thy sticks!” commanded the Lord, and Ringo did so.

5. “What dost thou want with me, Lord?” wailed Ringo. He was an hairy moptop with many rings on his fingers and an innate sense of rhythm.

6. “Thou shalt hie thee hence to Pisgah,” boomed the Lord, “And thou shalt climb to the top of the mountain and thou shalt thump thy sticks there, upon the hides of bison and salamander, stretched upon a frame, and thump them too upon discs of metal, and make a din.”

7. And the Lord made mysterious manoeuvres with his hands and blessed Ringo the moptop, and then He vanished in a cloud of vaporousness, and all was still, and Ringo was alone in Gath.

8. And Ringo betook himself with great haste to the main railway terminus in Gath where he might catch a train to take him all the way to Pisgah.

9. Now at the railway terminus there was a satrap of exceeding girth, and Ringo spake unto him, saying, “I am sent to Pisgah by the Lord, but I know not how I might journey thence from here.”

10. And the satrap led Ringo to a tank engine and commanded him in a voice of great pomp to step aboard. The engine was blue, the blue of heaven.

11. And with chugs and wheezes the tank engine with the moptop aboard set off along the branch line to Pisgah.

12. But lo! unbeknownst to Ringo the satrap of exceeding girth had so arranged things that the engine was shunted into sidings half way between Gath and Pisgah, and there it sat, and would not move.

13. And thus did Ringo the moptop find himself marooned and far from Pisgah, and from the mountain top, and his two sticks dangled from his beringed fingers with nought to thump, and he wept.

O say can you see only indistinct blurs? As you squelch through the marsh on your way to the pig sty.

In the cold misty dawn you are poked at with twigs by the sprites of the marsh who are strident and captious.

You’re not wearing your specs. You’re disorientated. You sink to your knees in the vapours of marsh gas.

The sprites harry you, and they hector you too. You spill all the pigfeed out of your tin pail.

Such a dawning as this, on a wet Wednesday morn, it does make you wonder why e’er you were born.