Unaccountably, I missed by two years the centenary of the replacement of tin by aluminium in the manufacture of what we still call tin foil. As so often, we have boffins in Switzerland to thank for this innovation, namely Dr. Lauber, Neher & Cie., who opened the world’s first aluminium foil rolling plant in Emmishofen in 1910. For those of you, and I know there are many, who like to keep track of these things, Emmishofen is in the canton of Thurgau, or Thurgovia, in ancient times the home of the people of the Pfyn culture, who apparently kept large numbers of pigs.

As I say, I neglected to mention the centenary at the time, and I know that many readers will have been drumming their fingers impatiently for the past two years, wondering when I am going to get round to telling you what to do with all that tin foil you have accumulated in your kitchen drawer. Well, I am delighted to say that at long last I can turn my attention to this splendidly versatile material. Just bear in mind that when I talk about tin foil I mean aluminium foil, and I am not expecting you to try to track down a stash of the old tin stuff, even if there is any still available, which I suspect there is not.

The best thing you can do with your tin foil is to fashion for yourself a conical tin foil hat. It is important that you make a cone shape, rather than trying to mould the tin foil into the approximate shape of, say, a Homburg or a trilby or a stovepipe hat. Though the wonder of tin foil is that all these hat types could quite easily be made, you must stick to the cone. In part, this is in homage to Jimmy Goddard and the copper cone he used for daily communication with space people. But do not jump to the conclusion that your tin foil cone hat will help you to talk to space people. It won’t. Nor will it protect you from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah. If such phenomena exist, and can dislodge and jumble and even control the innards of your brain, they are hardly likely to be dissuaded by a sheet of tin foil, are they? Nonetheless, when forming your surplus tin foil into a hat, it is well to pay tribute to Jimmy Goddard and the STAR Fellowship, for as Jesus said, “A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house. And he could there do no mighty work” (Mark 6 : 4-5).

But you can do mighty work, wearing your conical tin foil hat. I am thinking specifically of amateur dramatics. Some might call that leisure, rather than work, but believe you me, if you put your heart and soul into it, amateur dramatics can feel like work, and mighty work at that.

There are several parts in the repertoire where the wearing of a conical tin foil hat is absolutely essential. Consider, for example, Old Nahamkin in The Man Who Came To Dinner In A Shiny Pointy Hat by Belper Frisson. It is not, admittedly, a very big part, and for most of acts two and three the character lies apparently dead on the floor of the parlour while all hell breaks loose around him, but just think of the applause that always greets his entrance, and that ringing line “Hello, I have come to dinner, and I am wearing a shiny pointy conical hat”. It is also worth bearing in mind that Old Nahamkin gets to keep the hat on, even after he is poisoned and stabbed and shot by the vengeful Cassandra, he keeps it on throughout acts two and three, lying motionless on the parlour floor, and at no time is the hat snatched by one of the other characters, who gets to wear it instead,

That does of course happen in one of the other great conical tin foil hat parts, the squalid mute in Pepinstow’s An Inspector Wearing A Shiny Pointy Hat Calls. The squalid mute, of course, turns out to be a police inspector, a revelation somewhat less revelatory than Pepinstow intended, given his cack-handed way of giving the game away in the play’s title. But that need not concern you. You will just need to make sure, as the curtain falls at the end of each performance, that you retrieve your conical tin foil hat from the actor playing Sergeant Piffle, who snatches the hat from atop the inspector’s head in that riveting scene at the end of act four, and wears it himself in a clever ploy to foil Jasper’s attempt to gain Nitty’s inheritance. It might be a creaking plot device, but whenever I have attended an amateur troupe’s performance of the play it has never failed to bring the house down.

There are other parts, in some really tiptop dramas, where the wearing of your conical tin foil hat is not actually called for in the script, but adds a certain something to the character. You might get into arguments, or even fisticuffs, with the director, if they are the type of director averse to the disporting of unnecessary conical tin foil hats. If this is the case, the best thing to do is to say that you are under attack from weird unearthly menacing electromagnetic rays and beams and invisible hoo-hah and must wear the conical tin foil hat as protection. Most theatre directors, professional or amateur, will succumb to such a protest, particularly if it is voiced in a wild and high-pitched screech.

If you loathe the very idea of amateur dramatics, you can still find advantageous opportunities for the wearing of your conical tin foil hat. Promenading, loitering, and hiking are all suitable activities, particularly the latter, particularly in the rain, particularly if it is torrential. There is nothing quite like the sound of the incessant pinging of water on metal, as you hike in your conical tin foil hat through a teeming downpour.

I remember the first time I saw the Beatles on television. It was a studio performance of “We Can Work It Out”, which the Wikipedia tells me was filmed on 23 November 1965, so presumably I saw it a few weeks later. The Wikipedia piece also tells me that in the film John Lennon was seated at a harmonium, but I don’t need to be reminded. I recall that clearly, because part and parcel of the memory, for me, is my father announcing that the Beatles had “gone a bit weird”. No doubt he was thinking, not just of one of the fab four swapping his guitar for a harmonium, but of their increasing hair length and the stirrings of that transition from loveable moptops to drug-dabbling counterculture icons. Soon enough it would become apparent that, as Bernard Levin said, and as I can imagine my father echoing, and as I never tire of quoting, “there is nothing wrong with [John Lennon] that could not be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head falls out”.

Though that is my earliest Beatle memory, the point I wish to explore here is that I was already aware of them at this time. My father’s observation made sense, I recall, in a way it would not had they been completely new to me. That is, I understood that they had “gone a bit weird”. With two older sisters who were teenagers in 1965, and who were in possession of a Dansette record player and a batch of Beatles 45s (among other happening grooves), I would have learned about John, Paul, George and Rudyard Ringo at some point before that remembered television show. But when?

Everything we learn, everything we encounter, happens on a particular day. The day before, its existence, whatever it is, is completely unknown to us. And then, one day, we hear about it, see it, read about it. Even those things which seem so much part of the fabric of our world – the Beatles. Shakespeare, cornflakes, cats, tractors, Lembit Opik, lobsters, Ranters, the Great Dismal Swamp, Googie Withers, the First World War, the Second World War, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Springheeled Jack, marzipan, Austria, Orson Welles, fugues, fogous, geometry, spinal fluid, Agamemnon, Potters Bar, Tony Blair, the Munich Air Disaster, haversacks, rucksacks, knapsacks, Dirk Bogarde, the eurozone, synchronised swimming, raspberry jam, “And is there honey still for tea?”, Blodwyn Pig, “per ardua ad astra”, Molesworth 2, Peason, Homburg hats, vinegar, junk bonds, crinkle-cut oven chips, the Titanic, Kierkegaard, Savonarola, Henry Cow, Werner Herzog, lavender shovels, egg nog, Ozymandias, jugged hare, Tinie Tempah, filbert nuts, ectoplasm, squeegee merchants, suicide bombers, mad cow disease, Desperate Dan, Little Plum, Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, Brancusi, the Bible, blasphemy, Buggins’ turn, Botany Bay, Bellerophon, the Bosphorus, Papa Doc Duvalier, creosote, Dagmar Krause, invisible ink, Old Holborn, semolina, toffee, pictures of Jap girls in synthesis, and so on, and on, forever and ever… there was, for all of us, one day, we could pinpoint on the calendar if only we knew, or remembered, when we learned of these people and places and events and things and breakfast cereals for the very first time. There was a day when you had never, ever come across jugged hare before. Then, one day, you read about it, or heard about it, or otherwise learned of it. But how often do we ever remember those first encounters?

I do remember – though I cannot say what the exact date was – when I first heard the word “internet”, in conversation with a geeky computer person. I did not quite understand what it was, nor that it would ever have much relevance to me, certainly not that it was something that would change the world I lived in. I suppose that is the reason we rarely remember, that we rarely if ever recognise that the new information we have just learned will have any significance. It must have been within the past twelve months, I suspect, that I first learned of the existence of Rick Santorum. He will almost certainly fade into obscurity. But, if the voters of America “go a bit weird”, like the Beatles before them, he might end up as the Potus.

The miraculous thing, in a sense, is that today there is a distinct possibility I have encountered something, learned of something, that will in future seem to me commonplace, obvious, everyday, something I cannot imagine the world without. But I have no idea what it is, so I cannot record it.

The other day, as I was wending my way along the city streets, I saw, on the back of a passing bus, an advertisement for a product called Feroglobin.

I have since learned that this is an iron supplement for the formation of haemoglobin. But it seems to me that a moving vehicle is not an advisable place to advertise it, for one glances at the poster, and before one has a chance to read it properly, away growls the bus, out of the range of one’s vision, or at least of my, myopic, vision. I would have liked more time to scrutinise the advertisement, for on that first glance I misread it as Ferogoblin. I then spent rather a lot of time wondering (a) what in the name of heaven a Ferogoblin might be, and (b) why it was advertising itself on the back of a bus. My mind reeled.

Readers may recall that almost exactly a year ago I wrote here about the official colour coding system for goblins. To recap briefly, the agreed categories are as follows:

Red : Hobgoblins.

Orange : Fat Goblins.

Yellow : Pilfering Goblins.

Green : Teutonic Forest Goblins.

Blue : Goblins found under sinks.

Indigo : Wet Goblins.

Violet : All other goblins not classified above.

According to this list, Ferogoblins – which I take to be a contraction of Feral Goblins – must be included in the “all other goblins not classified above” subset, unless of course there are goblins which are both feral and hob, or feral and fat, or feral and given to pilfering, or feral and dwelling in Teutonic forests, or feral and found under sinks, or feral and wet. I suppose such goblins might well exist. But for the sake of argument, and because it is tidier, let us assume there is a discrete type of goblin known as the feral or fero-goblin. Logically, then, it must fall within the “all other goblins” category, which would mean code violet. Yet intuition, and indeed common sense, tell us that violet is not at all the most suitable colour for a feral goblin. In fact it seems utterly inappropriate, the sort of colour one might only apply to a feral goblin in a world turned upside down, a topsy turvy world of chaos and confusion.

This insight leads us to the startling conclusion that feral goblins must therefore be somehow outwith the known colour spectrum. Imagine that! I told you my mind was already reeling, and now it reeled even more. It perhaps also accounts for their feral nature, that they may be untamed and prone to havoc on account of being set apart from the normal run of goblins. Such alienation can cause low self-esteem, as we have learned from many addle-brained social psychologists in recent decades. What could be more damaging to a sense of goblin selfhood than to be forever banished, by one’s very nature, from the visible colour spectrum? It is a harsh fate indeed, so no wonder they turn feral.

However, I was clearly thinking along the right tracks, because so terrible a social stigma could well account for feral goblins advertising their existence on the backs of buses. It is one way to get yourself noticed, as the producers of several dire West End musicals have discovered. But an advertisement on the back of a bus does not come cheap, and one wonders how the feral goblins raised the necessary cash. My guess is that they were in cahoots with the pilfering goblins (code yellow), who diverted a proportion of their ill-gotten gains to the feral goblins in return for the Lord knows what maleficent favours. Being feral, the feral goblins may have agreed to, for example, gnaw and slash at and scratch and screech at innocent passers-by, terrorising them into a state of paralysing fear so that the pilfering goblins could come leaping down from the rooftops and make away with their wallets and purses and cashboxes. No doubt the two groups would then meet in a secluded goblins’ nest to divvy up the proceeds.

This does raise the question of the bus operators’ willingness to accept advertising on the backs of its buses from such nefarious clients. Or, let us say, it would raise that question were it not the case that I misread the advertisement, which turned out to have not a jot to do with goblins whatsoever. You live and learn.

Skippy The Bush Kangaroo might so easily have been called Googie. The eponymous marsupial heroine of the Australian television series, which ran from 1966 to 1968 and is still shown regularly on Iranian state television, was the brainchild of John McCallum (1918-2010), the husband of the late lamented Googie Withers (1917-2011). I am not for a moment suggesting that McCallum compared his wife to a kangaroo, but surely, when he was casting around in his mind for a name for his bouncy outback heroine, and he was thinking of something ending in an “-ee” sound, he must have considered Googie. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems at least plausible, doesn’t it?

It may be that, at breakfast one morning, the successful theatre and film actor and television producer, who served in the Australian Imperial Force in New Guinea during World War Two, looked over at his wife and said something along the lines of “You know, darling, this intelligent kangaroo that will be the heroine of my television series for children, how about calling her Googie?”

Googie, whose birth name was Georgette, may have been amused, and chuckled, or alternately irritated, and chucked the peel of her grapefruit across the breakfast table at her husband. We do not know, and alas they are both now cold in their graves, so we cannot ask them. But a scene like this may well have been played out in the breakfast room of their beautifully-appointed Sydney home one morning in the nineteen-sixties. I am assuming it was beautifully-appointed. I would like to think it was.

If Googie had been amused, and chuckled, it might be that, later, she had second thoughts, and told her husband not to go ahead with “Googie The Bush Kangaroo” but to choose a different name. If, on the other hand, she had been irritated and chucked the peel of her grapefruit at him, he would probably have said something like, “I was only kidding, darling!”, and reassured her with a uxorious kiss. Depending on the size of the Withers-McCallum breakfast table, he may have been able to accomplish this by raising himself slightly from his chair and leaning forwards. It is more likely, I think, for a successful couple living in a beautifully-appointed home, that their breakfast table would have been a tad too large for such a manoeuvre, and John McCallum would have had to stand up and walk a few paces towards where Googie Withers sat. But this is mere conjecture.

As is, I have to say, the possibility that Skippy, the bush kangaroo at the centre of this domestic maelstrom, had already been named Skippy by her keepers at the Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park where the series was mostly filmed, if that was indeed where she lived when not working. Having cast the kangaroo, a wild female Eastern Grey, for whatever qualities she had that made her suitable, McCallum, or more likely a member of the production team delegated to the task, will have asked the keepers the name of the marsupial. “Skippy,” they would have said (not, of course, “Googie”). Thus the series title may have been a fait accompli. I am sure there is documentation in the archives of the Australian Nine Network television channel, or indeed among the paperwork of the Withers-McCallum estate, which could shed some light on this. “Skippy” does seem to be a fortuitously telegenic name for a marsupial heroine, and it is equally likely that the kangaroo was specially renamed for the series. Hence the possibility of that breakfast table conversation.

On a personal note, I should add that, though I have no memory of ever watching an episode of Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, I am certain that I must have done so, at least once or twice, when it was shown on British television, long long ago. The same goes for Flipper, about a dolphin, and Daktari, which I recall featured a lion, or lions. Clearly there was a sixties fad for children’s television shows about wild animals, of both land and sea. One wonders if anybody – John McCallum? Googie Withers? – ever had the idea of bringing Skippy and Flipper and the Daktari lion together, in a special show, a triumvirate of beasts setting the world to rights, like a trio of superheroes.

I was dismayed to note that there exists a Wikipedia section entitled “Falsely negative portrayal of U-boat sailors”. Dammit!, I exclaimed, aloud, cursing that someone, somewhere, had preempted precisely the title of the PhD thesis on which I have been working for years.

It was towards the end of the last century, when I was mentally flailing around seeking a suitable topic for my doctorate, that I happened one day to wander into a theatre, or rather, a “theatre space”. There was no stage as such, but rather a “performative zone”, almost but not quite identical to a dentist’s waiting room, which is where I thought I was going. In this “zone”, several persons were disporting themselves in mysterious ways, some of them physically flailing around much as I was flailing mentally. Perhaps it was that sense of connection which made me pause, and sit, and watch, intently, a performance I might otherwise have dismissed as tomfoolery. The participants cut capers and jumped about and shimmied and threw somersaults and adopted ridiculous postures, and I had absolutely no idea what was going on, but I was sufficiently intrigued that, when it was all over, some hours later, I approached one of the cavorting persons and asked him what it was I had been watching.

“Pant pant pant,” he panted, then added “We are in rehearsals for our adaptation of Wolfgang Peterson’s 1981 epic war film Das Boot, interpreted through the medium of dance.”

I had not seen this film, so I cannot comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation, but I had been struck by the fact that, at certain points, some of the dancers had portrayed their characters quite negatively. One of them scowled a lot. Another seemed a bit weedy. A third had contrived to move his body in the manner of a malevolent beetle. I was sure such behaviour had not been at all common on World War Two submarines. There and then I had an epiphany, and I realised that the falsely negative portrayal of U-boat sailors would be the perfect subject for my doctoral thesis.

I hurried home and set to work. Over the following decade, I put under intense scrutiny each and every portrayal of U-boat sailors I could track down, in films, plays, novels, poems, pop songs, television programmes, operas, operettas, opera bouffes, ballets, even in World War Two Battle Re-enactment Society weekend workshops.

Item : Submariner Second Class Horst Krumbein in The Loathsome U-Boat Sailor, a “monologue for voice and improv jazz ensemble” by Tadaaki Sirinuntananon (1968). Krumbein is depicted as sweaty, myopic, plagued by boils and utterly lacking in social skills.

Item : Submariner First Class Viggo Beckenbauer in The U-Boat Sailor With The Shameful Past, an award-winning drama by radical playwright Geoff Beard (1973). In the opening minutes of the play, we are led to believe that Beckenbauer is a heroic figure. Tall, blond, and impossibly handsome, he strides about the stage while his crewmates gasp and swoon at just how fantastic he is. But then comes the thunderclap, when it is revealed that, back in Düsseldorf before becoming a submariner, he had been convicted of bus fare evasion, forging a dog licence, and half a dozen axe murders. “I joined the navy to forget… to forget,” he pleads in an emotionally wrenching speech, but his crewmates, who it must be said are not subject to falsely negative portrayal by Beard, will have none of it, and they await calm seas and the absence of enemy submarines to surface, and build a pyre on top of the hull, and bind Beckenbauer to a post atop the pyre, and they burn him while dancing in circles, brandishing flaming torches, and chanting.

Item : Captain Hans Gruber in the film Die Hard In A Submarine (2004). To be honest, I ought not pick out the captain as the only negatively portrayed U-boat sailor in this blockbuster, for the entire crew is made up of black-hearted scalliwags and ruffians who take pleasure in stamping their big hefty boots on small scurrying mammals, and similar enormities.

I think that is enough items to be going on with. The point is to demonstrate just how thorough my research had been, the better so you can grasp the degree of dismay I suffered when I thought someone else had not only been ploughing the same academic furrow as I was, but had gone ahead and posted their findings on what our Belgian pals call Het Internet.

Imagine my relief, then, when I actually looked up the Wikipedia entry headed Falsely negative portrayal of U-boat sailors and found that it was merely a 77-word paragraph within the piece about the film U-571 (Jonathan Mostow, 2000). As with Das Boot, I have not seen this film either, in spite of my indefatigable research. Clearly my work is not yet done.

In a comment on my piece in today’s Dabbler, Jonathan Law very helpfully tells us that Rudyard Kipling was named after his parents’ favourite reservoir. It was on the banks of Rudyard Lake in Staffordshire, says Mr Law, that they met and courted and it was here, conceivably, that the poet was conceived. “Clearly,” he adds, “this name-your-child-after-a-favourite-reservoir business is an excellent custom and one that should be adopted by all who trust that their offspring will go on to literary immortality.” I would go further, and suggest that it should be adopted by all, irrespective of any future literary achievement, or lack thereof.

I hesitate to say that the government should take a lead on this, but some kind of concerted national effort will be needed. The first step will be a voluntary agreement among publishers to make bonfires piled high with copies of all their existing “baby names” books and restock the shelves of our bookshops and libraries with “reservoir names” compendia. It will probably be a good idea, however, to retain the current cover designs, usually involving photographs of cute gurgling infants, in order to reinforce the message.

That should be simple enough, but the next stage may prove more difficult. Before we can proudly claim to live in a land where all newborn babies are named after their parents’ favourite reservoirs, those parents will first of all actually have to have a favourite reservoir. It is surprising just how many people do not.

As you know, I always like to back up my assertions with evidence, even if that evidence comes from what our Belgian pals call Het Internet rather than from ancient dusty leather-bound books. In this case, I searched Google for “my favourite reservoir”, eliciting just 675 results, many of which can be discarded because they refer, on closer inspection, to “my favourite reservoir dog”, which is a different matter entirely. Restricting my search to sites based in the UK, which after all is the land where I want my programme to be put into effect, yields a mere 44 results, though I am pleased to say there do not seem to be any dogs clogging up and thus distorting the data. But this hardly bodes well, does it?

That is why I speak of concerted national effort, and why our community education hubs, as I think they are called, have such an important part to play. Before prospective parents can choose a favourite reservoir, they will need to familiarise themselves with as many reservoirs as possible. And while it is one thing to read lists of reservoir names in the new-style baby name books, nothing beats direct experience. That is why I recommend compulsory reservoir-bank picnicking opportunities for youngsters, even before they are old enough to procreate. It is to be hoped that by spending as much leisure time as possible hanging around on the banks of reservoirs, when the time comes to go a-wooing and a-courting, no other possible location will even enter their little heads.

Given the vagaries of British weather, it is perhaps too much to hope that all babies in future will be conceived upon the banks of reservoirs, as it is rumoured was the case with Rudyard Kipling. Nevertheless, a few judicious and sensitively-worded guidelines could be incorporated into sex education lessons, and perhaps some semi-permanent tents could be erected on the banks of our reservoirs, supplied with mattresses and warm blankets. In order that they do not spoil the view, such tents should probably be concealed behind clumps of reservoir-bank shrubbery, where that is present, or otherwise camouflaged, where it is not.

This seems to me an eminently practical plan of campaign, and one which will reinvigorate the national spirit. In the meantime, any prospective parents reading this can make a start by studying this list of reservoirs and making due arrangements to visit each of them in turn. That way you can plump for your favourite before your squalling infant comes triumphantly into the world.

Rudyard Lake : a reservoir in Staffordshire