O show us the way to the next Brecht symposium. O don’t ask why, o don’t ask why. For we must find the next Brecht symposium and spout twaddle, or if we don’t attend the plenary session and spout twaddle I tell you we must die, I tell you we must die, I tell you, I tell you, I tell you we must lose out on tenure in a professorship in Brecht studies at an important university where we can be paid handsomely to spout twaddle until kingdom come, which is surely not unlike death, in a spiritual sense, is it not, Lars?

O Father Duggleby, did you hear about your horse? It went a-clopping all alone upon the awful cliffs. It is a dreadful thing indeed when a priest’s horse plummets into the sea. You ought to have tied it to a post. See, there is a post there, outside the church repository, a stout post, and it even has a rope attached. You neglected the safety of your horse and your status as a priest will not protect you from the wrath of the Equine Welfare Board. I am told a deputation is already on its way, galloping across the heath.

And come they did, four members of the Board, like the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, terrible in their fury. Father Duggleby hid in the confessional box, but they smoked him out, with incendiary devices. He was tied to the post to which his own poor perished horse should have been tied. And judgment was passed on him.

Father Duggleby prayed that night. Still tied to the post, under a gibbous moon, he begged the Lord his soul to save. But when morning came, they untied him from the post and bundled him into a sack and they carried him on a cart up to the awful cliffs. Banners were flying. The sun burned, brilliant and golden.

When the sack hit the sea, its impact made a splash the like of which none had seen nor heard before. Nor did any of these simple coastal folk have the words to describe what was so anomalous, so eerie, about the splash. They called it the Duggleby Splash, and ever since, on the anniversary, they have tried to recreate it, by tossing the latest priest into the sea in a sack, without success. And every year, on the eve of the anniversary, it is said that a phantom horse is heard a-clopping along the cliffs, each clop sounding like the clack of rosary beads.

And the day after, they send for a new priest, and lo! he comes galloping across the heath.

[This is getting ridiculous, but what can I do? See here and here and here.]

Does our environment shape our language, or is it the other way about? Often, tracing the links between the words in our heads and the things in the world outside our heads is well nigh impossible. Sometimes, though, it can be child’s play. Consider this: I once lived among cowboys, all of whom wore leathern chaps, and in that dusty desert town, men were invariably referred to as “chaps”. Later, when I spent some time in a blasted volcanic landscape riddled with geysers, I found that all the men were called “geezers”. And when I retired to an idyllic cove, sheltered by the happy disposition of cliff and bluff from the wild boiling sea, I was not surprised to learn that the men there were all “coves”.

Though the term originated in thieves’ cant, not one of the coves in the cove was a thief, so far as I was aware. Several of them became my fast friends. There was the one-eyed cove whose life’s work was to translate the Abba songbook into Latin; the cove who grew rhubarb in a hut abutting his house; the snooker champ cove with his natty weskit and hair slathered in shiny shiny oil. And then there was the cove whose tale I shall tell, who can only be described as an enigma.

How to describe him? He was the most unemphatic cove I ever came across, by which I mean that he singularly failed to make even the slightest impression. He seemed to have no definition, no emphasis, neither vigour nor intensity. You might see him every day, but in his absence be quite unable to recall what he looked like. And when he spoke, which was often, alas, he spoke in a monotone, neither fast nor slow, giving every single word equal weight. That might be thought sufficiently odd to give him a certain curiosity value, and thus “character”, but somehow the overwhelming sense was one of blankness. He was so unemphatic that it seemed he did not even disturb the atoms in the air when he entered a room.

One would think such a cove would make no mark upon our cove, but he did. It was the night of the storm so ferocious that ever after it was called the Ferocious Storm. We were snugly sheltered in our cove, of course, but beyond the cliff and bluff the sea was a hideous seething broiling monster of rage and roaring, whipped by a wind that lashed and howled as if demons were unloosed. At the height of the storm, the lantern in the lighthouse off the cove was extinguished. We coves gathered in the tavern, fearing shipwreck, hating the thought of having to provide succour to half-drowned sailors, battered and lacerated on the jagged rocks, for we were cowardly and selfish coves and we liked our idyllic cove just as it was.

And then the singularly unemphatic cove said something, in his blank unmemorable monotone, and he walked out of the tavern and climbed up on to a promontory overlooking the wild and pitiless sea. He took off his topcoat and his wooly and his shirt, and he simply stood there, all night, in the teeth of the gale. For beneath his shirt he wore a vest, and what a vest! It was golden, and luminous, and it shone brighter than the sun. For ships in peril on the sea, it was a warning signal, a thousand times more brilliant than the poor extinguished lantern of our lighthouse. When dawn eventually came, and the storm died, not a ship had been wrecked upon the rocks, not a sailor came crawling, bedraggled and bloody, begging for our help. Atop the promontory, the unemphatic cove put on his shirt and wooly and topcoat and made his way down to the tavern.

We were nonplussed and excitable, firing questions at him. What in the name of heaven was that vest he was wearing? How did it shine so brightly? Where did he get it? Blah blah blah.

He told us everything we wanted to know. But so dull and featureless was his monotone that everything he said went in one ear and out the other, and was instantly forgotten. Over the coming days, one or other of us might have asked him to strip off his topcoat and wooly and shirt and treat us to another look at the glorious vest, but to do so we would have to have noticed his presence, and of course we did not, for if anything he became even more insubstantial, more shadow than cove. Eventually, he vanished altogether, as if he had never been. But I know he was no mere figment, for today, up on the promontory, there is a stone statue of him, stone eyes gazing at the sea, his stone vest painted the brightest yellow we could muster, repainted every day, that it may never lose its lustre.

[Apropos the title, see here.]

In the early days of the regime, we attended a briefing every morning at 0800 hours in the pavilion. One day, the Commodore himself addressed us.

“Men,” he said, “If the regime is to succeed, and succeed it will, we must hunt down the nincompoops, the dunderpates, and the chumps. They are legion. We must hunt them down, round them up, and then inject their brains, one by one by one, with a serum. At this stage the serum is experimental, but early tests on the brains of stoats show promise. You will know George A B Dewar’s dictum that ‘craft, cruelty, concentration – these, with a wonderful suppleness, are the characteristics of the stoat… No animal’ he goes on to say, ‘has the stoat’s reputation for devilry’. How true that is. Yet once the serum has worked its way into their brain-jelly, the guinea pig stoats, if I may use the term, become what we might call regime-fit. And it is an essential part of our programme that our nincompoops and dunderpates and chumps, they too, in their massive numbers, become regime-fit. So you will hunt them down, men, starting today. Nincompoops commonly gather in chalets on mountainsides. The dunderpate will be found in our cities, in the vicinity of important railway stations, or queuing up at kiosks. As for chumps, they tend to inhabit nests, like vipers or robins. You will be divided into three squadrons, with different-coloured socks, and go hence on your essential mission. Any questions?”

My hand shot up.

“To which squadron have I been assigned, O Commodore?” I shouted, with absolutely sincere enthusiasm.

With his mastery of detail, the Commodore was able to rap back at me that I was to be second-in-command of Chump Squadron. My socks would be gash-gold vermilion.

Later that day, after clambering over a hedge in the rain, I saw my first chumps’ nest.

“Look!”, I hissed to my squadmate, “Over there, next to the pylon. If I am not mistaken, that is a nest of chumps.”

There were several foolish people, encamped in a sort of bivouac, behaving foolishly, as chumps would, at a picnic, say.

“Ach, God!” cried my squadmate, channelling Rupert Brooke, “Is that not an evocative sight?”

“Is it?” I replied, irritated. I was already fossicking in my knapsack for the serum.

“Yes,” he said, “Does it not evoke for you that wonderful poem by Dennis Beerpint? How does it go? We ate breakfast in the coppice, squatting on our haunches. Our breakfasts were more toothsome than our lunches. Something something something, in the shade of elms and larches. We tried to stop the toast and jam from smearing our moustaches.”

“Have you taken leave of your senses?” I snapped. “First, it is mid-afternoon, so whatever they are picnicking upon, those chumps are not engaged in breakfast. Second, they are squatting under a looming electricity pylon, not under elms and larches. And third – ”

“Yes, I suppose you are right,” he interrupted, “But still, it is an evocative sight. It seems such a pity that we should destroy it by setting upon them and injecting their brains with the serum.”

“We must do our duty,” I said.

“Would Dennis Beerpint have done his duty?” he asked, irrelevantly. He reached into his knapsack and took out a sketchpad and pencil. “At least let me capture the essentials of this evocative scene with paper and pencil. Then when we are back at camp I can work it up into one of my noted mezzotints.”

It was then I realised that my squadmate was none other than Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist. And thus I learned an invaluable lesson, about poetry, and mezzotints, and chumps, and picnics in the rain. I poured the serum, every last drop of it, into a ditch, and there and then I vowed to do all in my power to topple the regime. We never returned to camp. Instead we joined the chumps in their nest, and shared their toast and jam. I smeared some on my moustache. It felt like a badge of honour.