I failed to mention, in yesterday’s essay about his love song, that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer. So let me put that right without further ado. Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was a mountaineer, a noted mountaineer. Elsewhere, I wrote of him that “Physically, [he] was not really cut out for mountaineering. He was described by a contemporary as ‘a figure of untold puniness’, and he was indeed tiny and weak, short-sighted, lanky and prone to swooning fits. He was terrified of gnats, horseflies and fruitbats. He had an oversensitive digestive system and had to subsist mostly on thin soup or broth. It was difficult to find a mountaineering team willing to recruit so wretched a specimen, so Ah-Fang did most of his clambering up sheer rock faces solo, a man alone testing himself against the elements”.

This description was called into question by Brian Phantasm, who took me to task in the pages of Puny Mountaineers Monthly, accusing me of getting my Ah-Fangs mixed up. As if! There were not exactly dozens of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who were accomplished mountaineers, in love with Mrs Gubbins, and perished in the Hindenburg disaster. Granted, there may have been a couple of others, but – tellingly – Mr Phantasm – sorry, Doctor Phantasm – though what he is a doctor of God alone knows – the doctoring of signatures on counterfeit documents, probably – um – I think I have lost my thread. Let me begin that sentence again. Granted, there may have been a couple of other Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorps who met the necessary criteria, but – tellingly – Doctor Phantasm does not identify the one he accuses me of getting mixed up with the Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp I was writing about. I hope that is clear. I am becoming somewhat befuddled in defending myself against these outrageous charges, and outrageous they are, as is Doctor Phantasm’s dress sense, but it is best to cast a veil over that, and a very thick veil, made of many blankets, as if he were a prisoner being ushered between police car and police station, covered to outwit the press photographers. It is my fond hope that one day Phantasm himself will be placed under arrest, and then he might stop attacking me in the pages of little-read magazines.

Our initial falling out, some years ago, was occasioned by a piece he wrote in News Of The Screes, a small circulation mountaineering journal devoted, as its title suggests, to scree, the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders. It was an ill-written and intemperate rant, the gist of which, when one got past the swearwords, was that the word “scree” should be dropped and replaced by “talus”, which means the same thing and has become the scientifically-approved term. “Scree” is of Old Norse origin, whereas “talus” derives from French. Now, I am neither Norse nor French, and Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was Sino-Dutch, so my championing of “scree” is not based on any infantile sense of chauvinism. But champion “scree” I do, without apology, in all weathers. It is clearly the more apposite word for the accumulation of broken rock fragments at the base of crags, mountain cliffs, or valley shoulders which serves as its definition. Go to a scree and have a go at clambering across it if you don’t believe me. Better, be there when tumbling rock fragments from the upper slopes come crashing down to add to the scree, and raise the earflaps of your mountaineering hat to listen carefully. I am sure you will agree that “scree” beats “talus” hands down, whatever our French amis and scientists might say on the matter.

I wrote a letter to the editor of News Of The Screes, arguing my point and suggesting that Doctor Phantasm was an oaf and a dunderpate and probably a forger of doctored signatures on important documents. Thus our war of words began, and it continues to this day. So when he writes to accuse me of mixing up my Ah-Fangs, I swat his article aside as I might swat one of the gnats Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp was so affrighted by. That is my Ah-Fang, of course, not one of Brian Phantasm’s putative unidentified Ah-Fangs.

My Ah-Fang spent much of his mountaineering time clambering across scree. His puniness was such that he often grew exhausted, panting, panting, panting, while barely across the scree, whatever the steepness or otherwise of its gradient. For remember that some scree is steeper than other scree, depending on its geographical location and indeed the circumstances of its geological formation, whether created by dint of mechanical weathering by ice, chemical weathering by mineral hydration and salt deposition, thermal stresses, topographic stresses, or biotic processes. [Note to self: make a study of the word “dint”.] Sometimes Ah-Fang was so puffed out from clambering over a mere few yards of scree that he collapsed upon it, gazing hopelessly upwards to where the summit he aimed to ascend vanished in the clouds. Could there be a more pitiable image of a mountaineer?

But we must bear in mind that some scree can prove to be devilishly difficult terrain. All those rock fragments, often loose, can be perilous, even when one is not puny. So let us not mock Ah-Fang, or rather his memory, as the despicable and quite probably criminal Brian Phantasm has done in his latest piece of grievous folderol. No fewer than ten pages of last week’s issue of Screeds On Scree were given over to a disgraceful rewriting of history, in which Phantasm claims that Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp used stilts and some kind of anti-panting elixir to cross the scree at the foot of Big Oddly-Shaped Mountain Number Seven in 1929, one of his most famous ascents, and the one for which he was awarded a medal – the very medal I snapped up at an auction of Ah-Fang memorabilia which was then stolen from me by a footpad who bore a striking resemblance to Brian Phantasm. I have no proof, and I have never knowingly met this hellhound, but my assailant had a bouffant and cummerbund and winklepickers identical to those sported by Phantasm in the one grainy black and white photograph of him that I have seen, a copy of which I keep pasted in my Enemies Book (page 149, lavender series).

And so once again I must take up my butcher’s pencil to rebut, or refute, I can’t remember which, the calumnies rained down upon Ah-Fang. But I will continue to defend his memory until the cows come home. And no, they are not coming home now, o’er the rain-soaked loam.

A recent survey suggests that the truculence of peasants comes top in a list of baronial dissatisfactions. A huge percentage of barons expressed the view that a truculent peasantry caused them greater mental anguish than the crumbling of castle crenellations, outbreaks of disease in cows, and torrential rainfall.

Elspeth Grimpenmire, of pollsters YouBaron, said “This is an important finding. It shows that subjugation of the peasantry is high on the list of policy initiatives most barons would support. For the king to faff about with pie in the sky ideas about improving the lot of belligerent rustics shows just how out of touch he is.”

The king has not issued an official statement in response, although a palace spokeschamberlain insisted that plans were well under way for increased smiting, burning of villages, destruction of crops and associated mayhem.

No one from the peasantry was available for comment. That doesn’t really matter, as they are all illiterate and would be incapable of reading any snag-toothed babble reported here in any case.

Questions were raised about the reliability of the survey, however, when it came to light that only three barons were polled, each of whom was an empanelled official of the Association of Brutish Barons. From its grim headquarters in a castle keep on the edge of a marsh known locally for the poisonous vapours which hover in a mist o’er it, the Association regularly sends out marauding gangs of ruffians to bash up and lop the limbs off selected peasants. These gangs will usually haul back to the castle carts piled high with whatever agricultural produce they can gather from the peasantry’s pitiful patches of tillage, together with a few hostages.

An Association spokesbrute explained “If we don’t terrorise the peasantry, who will?”

Doctor Dust, an alchemist and necromancer retained by the Association as a consultant, recently passed his hands in oddly significant sweeping movements over a bowl containing a decoction of boiled amphibians, herbs, blood, semen, twigs and black bile and, after gazing into it for an hour, announced something which, unfortunately, came out as gibberish. But it is thought his eldritch manoeuvres, accompanied by various portents seen in the sky, suggest an uprising of the peasants at a future time.

“What Doctor Dust can see in his mysterious bowl is all the more reason to suppress the rabble in the here and now,” said a brutish baron, sharpening the blade of his bloodstained axe upon a whetstone, “We should certainly pay no heed to those so-called enlightened barons.”

The reference is to a newly formed groupuscule, the Association of Enlightened Barons, whose castle headquarters, far from being engulfed by poisonous marsh vapours, is decorated with pretty pink flags billowing in a balmy breeze.

“We like to think of the peasantry as stakeholders,” said one enlightened baron, “And though it may be hard to do blue sky thinking under this leaden pall, with threats of a downpour, we are convinced that they need not be truculent and belligerent, if treated with a little loving kindness and offered the prospect of a future world with many enticing leisure and retail facilities.”

Interestingly, even the peasants themselves ridicule this fatuity. We cannot quote them for obvious reasons, and as it happens most of the peasants we approached for an interview were to be found drunk out of their heads on some gruesome brew, fighting among each other, or lying unconscious in ditches.

Such scenes are welcome to the brutish barons, who will take the opportunity to charge out of their castles on horseback and trample the distracted and insensible peasantry under the clattering hooves of their mighty steeds.

“I often find it gives my horse quite a fillip if I let him crush the skulls of a few peasants while out on an afternoon gallop,” said one baron, “Though of course that is not the only method we use to crush their skulls and other bones. That is why we have dark dank dungeons in our castles, where the more truculent peasantry can be subjected to episodes of barbaric cruelty that would make the devil himself blanch. Even the most belligerent rustic tends to be a little more tractable after he’s had most of his bones crushed.”

In spite of the galloping horses and the dungeons, there has to date been no diminution in the truculence of the peasantry. Some commentators put this down to social factors such as the baronial tendency to have great feasts, with hunks of venison and pig’s heads and puddings made from wrens and quail and coot and partridge and widgeon, and foaming tankards of mead, while the peasants subsist on gruel. Others claim this is the natural order of things, and to tamper with it would turn the world upside down and bring chaos and, ultimately, undermine our entire understanding of the cosmos.

One enlightened baron pops his head over the parapet to offer a different view.

“It can seem one must be on the side either of the brutish barons or of the truculent peasantry,” he opines, “But luckily there is a so-called Blairite third way. It will come to pass.”

We shall see.

You will recall the film Speed (Jan de Bont, 1994) in which Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves are aboard a bus which will explode if it goes below fifty miles per hour, having been primed with a bomb by cackling evildoer Dennis “Don’t try to grow a brain, Jack!” Hopper. I have been wondering if a similar adrenalin-thumping conceit could be applied to the writing of prose.

I am not suggesting I do anything so foolhardy as to ask a disgruntled and slightly maimed ex-police officer to hitch me up to a bomb which will detonate if I stop writing… well, I suppose that is what I am suggesting. Cowardice, or sheer common sense, persuades me, however, to hit upon a less perilous incentive.

I have just spent ten minutes staring vacantly at the screen trying to think what that incentive might be.

In Speed, Dennis Hopper is gleeful when a television reporter describes the fiendish quandary into which he has placed the bus passengers as “the whim of a madman”. He repeats the phrase to himself, chuckling. Now I am an almost inhumanly sensible chap, and not a madman at all, but perhaps the whim of a madman is precisely what I need to give vent to, if I wish to prime my prose with the innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum of the film.

Of course, not everyone would agree that Speed is an appropriate model. Dennis Hopper rather overdoes the criminal mania, Keanu Reeves is wooden, and the best that can be said of Sandra Bullock is that she is irritating. And even though Keanu’s fellow bomb-defusion expert Jeff Daniels is killed off, you know that Keanu himself, and Sandra Bullock, will escape unscathed, and Dennis Hopper come to a grisly end, because it’s that sort of film. But predictability has its own special charms. And predictability plus innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is clearly popular, when we consider that Speed reportedly earned its makers over three-hundred-and-fifty million dollars. Now if I could only devise my madman’s whim, perhaps I could make a similar sum from a piece of prose.

The glum bat of misery swoops o’er my bonce as I stare at the screen and, regretfully, admit to myself that this present piece of prose is not the one that will earn millions. Having said that, should any readers feel impelled to deposit a vast sum of money into the Hooting Yard Paypal account, I would be most grateful.

But, just as Sandra Bullock has to keep her foot on the accelerator of that bus, I have to keep tippy-tapping away. It is true that I will not be blown to kingdom come if I stop. In fact, nothing at all will happen. I do not need to grow a brain to know that. Indeed, I have the freedom to get up and walk away and make a cup of tea, so I think that is what I shall do, right now. If I had a University of Arizona Wildcats tee-shirt, I would take the opportunity to change into it while the kettle is a-boiling.

You will recall that Sandra Bullock’s wearing of a top with the Arizona Wildcats’ logo proves to be a pivot on which the plot of Speed hinges. When last I saw the film I had not yet learned of that other great mainstay of Arizona life, the regional dish greasy doings. It seems to me that either Jan de Bont, or his screenplayperson Graham Yost, or indeed Keanu Reeves or Sandra Bullock or Dennis Hopper or even poor killed-off Jeff Daniels might, at some point during the production, have suggested adding a further layer to the Arizona reference by mentioning, or – better – showing, greasy doings. It would probably be stretching credulity to have any of the imperilled bus passengers tucking into greasy doings, but Dennis Hopper spends much of his screen time gobbling snacks while watching his madman’s whim unfold, so how difficult would it have been to make at least one of those snacks greasy doings? Now I come to think of it, given that, as I said, the dish was unknown to me when last I saw the film, perhaps we are shown Dennis Hopper eating greasy doings! Obviously I shall not rest until I have confirmed whether or not this is the case, so I shall have to watch Speed again, with an eagle eye on the Dennis Hopper scenes.

It has just occurred to me that I do not know what greasy doings look like. I must embark on further research before my next viewing, or I will not know them if and when I see them, and that would be a bloody tragedy.

I don’t know about you, but my feeling is that, were this present piece of prose the bus in Speed, it would be dangerously close to dropping below fifty miles per hour, and thus exploding. Innards-wrenching pell-mell momentum is easier to blather about than to maintain, in spite of the cup of tea which I was hoping would fuel a jamboree of thrills and spills. That may be a lot to ask from a cup of tea, but it has been argued that generations of British chaps could not have built an empire without their cups of tea, and I am not trying to build an empire, merely to write deathless prose, and perhaps earn millions, or thousands, or hundreds, or even just a pittance, by so doing.

Yet all the while the urge to cease and stare, not at the screen but out of the window, at trees and crows, grows ever more intense. What would Keanu do?

They say the devil is in the detail, but is that a fact? I decided to find out. First of all, though, I wanted to have a better idea of “the detail”. I was pretty sure I would know the devil when I saw him, but somehow, paradoxically perhaps, “the detail” seemed a more nebulous entity. So I turned, as always, to the Oxford English Dictionary, which, for its main definition, has this to say:

The dealing with matters item by item; detailed treatment; attention to particulars. Esp. in phrase in (†the) detail , item by item; part by part; minutely; circumstantially. So to go into detail , i.e. to deal with or treat a thing in its individual particulars.

Fair enough. That gave me somewhere to start. If the detail is a minute individual particular item of a thing, what better way to test the thesis than by taking something apart, bit by bit, until the devil in all his evil burning foulness is found, lurking within – or not, as the case may be?

The next step was to choose something to dismantle. Now, it must be said that I am not the most dexterous of chaps. On the contrary, I am a bit of a butterfingers. Dangling on string from the ceiling of my boyhood bedroom were many, many Airfix model aeroplanes – Spitfires and Stukas and Messerschmitts and Sopwith Camels and Boeing 747s and Parker Double Teenies and Harrier Jump Jets and so on – all expertly fitted and glued together and their insignia transfers impeccably transferred, but all these were constructed by my older brother, with whom I shared a room until I was about ten or eleven. I think I tried, at least once, to emulate him, but the resulting plastic plane did not turn out well. As I recall, the only successful model I made was a cardboard head of Henry VIII, cut and folded from a template printed on the back of a Kellogg’s Cornflakes carton.

It occurred to me that I could just smash something to bits, for generally speaking violent smashing requires not dexterity but gung ho and a big hammer. Tempting though this was, however, I felt it would be going against the spirit of the project. I am not sure that fragments and smithereens count as “details” according to the dictionary definition. No, I must be methodical, and pick something apart piece by piece, neatly aligning the individual parts on a suitable surface such as a baize cloth laid out and flattened smooth upon a tabletop. Green baize would make the most suitable background to contrast with the gaudy scarlet hue of the devil, were he indeed to be hiding in the detail.

After much reflection, I had a brainwave. I was sitting there staring glumly out of the window at some crows, humming and hawing whether to dismantle an alarm clock or a bicycle pump or an orrery, when it struck me that of course the simplest thing to take to bits would be something that was child’s play to put together in the first place. Child’s play, literally. I scampered off to a toyshop and bought a Mr Potato Head.

For those of you who have put away childish things (First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians, 13 : 11), and put them away so decisively that you can no longer remember who, or what, Mr Potato Head is, let me remind you. Mr Potato Head is an American toy consisting of a plastic model of a potato which can be decorated with a variety of plastic parts that can attach to the main body. These parts usually include ears, eyes, shoes, a hat, a nose, and a mouth. The toy was invented and developed by George Lerner in 1949, and first manufactured and distributed by Hasbro in 1952. The toy was originally produced as separate plastic parts that could be stuck into a real potato or other vegetable, such as a parsnip or turnip, or even a fruit such as a clementine or a Carlsbad plum. Before leaving the toyshop with my purchase, I checked to see that the model was sold in its constructed state, rather than as a jumble of bits. It would be pointless for me to have to put it together before dismantling it, and in any case, if the devil is in the detail then he would likely be visibly evident within the Mr Potato Head packaging box, his goaty horns and perhaps his pointy fork poking holes in the cardboard or cellophane.

Back home, I took Mr Potato Head out of his box and set him on the green baize cloth upon the tabletop. Was that a whiff of sulphur I smelled? It might have been. Perhaps the devil sensed I was closing in on him, and was giving off hellish vapours in his panic. Thereagain, would the devil panic at being discovered in the detail? He might, rather, be gleeful at being unloosed. I had not thought of that. I sniffed again, and took a very careful look at Mr Potato Head, seemingly so innocent upon the baize. Was I about to take an awful, irrevocable risk? Was I about to unleash Satan from his bondage?

I gazed into the eyes of Mr Potato Head and asked myself, was I being criminally reckless, playing taradiddle with the fate of nations, just to prove or disprove a familiar saying? Was there not an easier way? I came to the conclusion that I have not studied demonology with sufficient intensity to answer the question. And that is why I have made an appointment to see Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit exorcist, to seek his advice, and why Mr Potato Head is still sitting, all his constituent parts connected, undismantled, upon the baize.