Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. These are gods. They are not toys or trinkets, plastic figurines or dolls made out of scraps of wool or straw. They are gods. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. These too are gods. Mighty, imperious gods. Geb is the Great Cackler, Hapi the Father of the Gods, Anubis the Jackal, Khnum the Lord of the Cool Waters, Ra the Sun God, Maat the Goddess of Truth, Aten the Lord of All, Sekhmet the Mighty One, Hathor the Mistress of Heaven and Horus He Who Is Above. Bow down before them for they are powerful deities. While you cower in your ditch, grovelling, they bestride the heavens. Not toys, I say, but gods. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. The devourer, the throne, the tearer, the sky, the opener. Above you the sky is black and fat with stars, for it is night, illimitable and desolate, and you are an uncomprehending mite alone on a burning planet, sprawling in your ditch. They are gods. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. Big, towering, potent gods and goddesses. Aker the Double Lion God. Khepri He who comes into existence. Sobek He who causes fertility. Taurt the Great Lady. Seshat, ah Seshat, the Lady of the Library, and Seth the Lord of Upper Egypt. These are the gods. You are not in Upper Egypt, nor in Lower Egypt. You are not in Egypt at all. But wherever your ditch is, in this night as hard as iron, you abase yourself before these gods, because you must. The time for toys and trinkets, for the bauble and the gewgaw, is long past, and you have left all fripperies behind you. Now there is simply you and your gods, locked together, in the face of the stark blank sky. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. The Chief of Heaven, the Lady of Heaven, the King of the Dead, the Hidden One, the Lady of the House and the Great Goddess. Bow down, bow down. You have a forelock. It is there to be tugged, so tug it. Tug it in obeisance to Thoth, the Great Measurer. And to Ra, to Ra, to Ra!

Now plant your brow in the muck on the floor of the ditch and cast your mind back to that golden happy childhood when you plashed in the paddling pool on a sun-blazed summer’s day. The water was cool and delightful, the water in your paddling pool. Did you rush home wrapped in your big yellow towel and worship Khnum? Did you thank Khnum for the coolness of the water? Dried and cooled, did you clutch your library ticket in your tiny hand and scamper excitedly to the public lending library to borrow a book of fairy stories? You would have looked for something with pictures of elves and wizards and peris and hobgoblins, and found a compendium, perhaps, carried it on tippytoe to the issuing desk bathed in the glorious sunshine streaming through those enormous library windows, had it stamped, and borne your borrowed book away, out onto the path in the bright afternoon. When you got home, safe in your bedroom strewn with pillows and cushions and patchwork quilts and throws, did you cry out in gratitude to Seshat?

Mut. Nut. Horus. Seth. Anubis. These are gods. All-powerful and eternal. I can picture you, a few summers later, older but no wiser, traipsing around in the park at lunchtime. You have a bag of breadcrumbs and you intend to cast them upon the grass as food for sparrows and magpies and starlings, for linnets and ravens, for bufflehead ducks and grebes. Sitting on the rusty bench with its rusty plaque in memory of one long dead who sat here often and adored the view, the view of rooftops and chimneys and football fields and allotments, of tennis courts and orchards rich in cherry trees, I see you casting your crumbs to the birds, and I know that you are not giving thanks to Aten or Geb or Sekhmet or Ptah. No. Still at this time, despite your riches and your bravura, your poor head is filled with visions of Itzpapalotl, Coatlicue, Temazcalteci, Tlaloc, Mayahual, Cihuateto, Huixtocihuatl, Popocatepetl and the like, for these are your gods. In the grip of your delusions, it is perhaps not coincidental that you like to sport a yellow polo neck sweater like the one worn by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and even have your hair cut in a similar mop, though you are not yet going grey, and you insist that you have not seen the film, for you profess a devotion to the silent screen. In your pantheon, Abel Gance rubs shoulders with Oxomoco, Lilian Gish with Quetzalcoatl. You have seen Broken Blossoms more than a dozen times, and sometimes you like to pace the back streets of Limehouse as if in search of the opium dens that are no longer there, the dens from which Sherlock Holmes emerged twitching and shattered in The Man With The Twisted Lip. Those fog-enshrouded days are as distant now as the bright summers of your paddling pool youth, yet you cling to your false gods as you feed the birds and ducks in the park, shaded from Nut’s glittering sky by the overhanging branches of sycamores and hazel trees, on the bench by the magnificent iron railings which were replaced after the war in which you were wounded thrice. You were shot in the stomach, burned by flaming barrels, and crushed by falling masonry, but now there is not a scratch on you, and you have forgotten that terrible day in Scheveningen. You were treated well in the field hospital, but what did you do, once you could again use your hands? You scavenged scraps of wood and built a little toy altar and put it on your bedside shelf, praying to Ixtlilton, your god of healing, for having saved you from the realm of Mictlantecuhtle.

So let us spring forward again now, another ten, twenty years, and now your hair is grey, but no longer cut à la Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Your yellow polo neck is threadbare now, and you use it as a dust-cloth. There is much dust in your home, for the air is never still there. Draughts curl in under the doors and around the window frames, for much of the wood is rotting away under sustained attack by weevils and woodworms, microscopic forms of life you have ignored for too long. Baleful, greasy, plump, a little cracked, you shuffle from room to room, pointlessly, as if you have been kennelled. All your money is gone, exhausted by your postwar debaucheries. You have a blighted reputation and constant pins and needles. That is what accounts for your restlessness, this shuffling from bedroom to pantry to parlour to outhouse, from attic to cellar, and back again, up and down and round and round and always with your liver-spotted fist clamped around a little tin medallion of Montezuma as if that might fend off the night, the darkness, the vastness of eternity. You have a kitten, but it hates you. You have not yet been subjugated by Bastet, but that time is drawing nigh. So you call your kitten Karen Carpenter and feed it with fish that you pluck from ponds, or with eels you thieve from the back-kitchens of canteens, and your kitten hisses at you and claws you and loathes the sight of you. You are fearful of the light in those green eyes, for you rightly sense that they see into your soul, your small and puny soul, all curdled by a life of waste and delusion that Centeotl would bring you corn, that Chantico would warm your hearth, that the wind cried Ehecatl. The gods are in readiness for you and the wind is cold.

Yes, it is night now, and you are in your ditch. The wind is cold and the sky is black and there are no birds, not even crows. Your kitten tore that pitiful tin medallion from your hand and dropped it down a well. You are alone, but for the gods. Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. You have sunk to your knees. That blurred black and white image of Lilian Gish, stricken by panic in The Wind, is fading fast. Like Sherlock Holmes, you too are twitching and shattered, but no opiates brought you to this. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. There is no longer any traffic, no car horns, no rattling carts, no clanking steamer plying across the strait. Despite your wealth, you never did fly in an aeroplane across oceans and continents. You never did go and live in that house on stilts that you pictured in your mind’s eye when you were young. Parks and ponds were your domain, parks and ponds. And now this ditch, a trickle of foul brackish water running through it. You cup some in your hands and splash it on your burning brow but it is not the cool water from the paddling pool given to you by Khnum all those years ago. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. There came that day, that Thursday, when your nerves were so brittle and the pins and needles became too much, and you flung your Montezuma medallion across the pantry and cursed your gods, and the kitten crept up to you and fixed its green eyes on you. You retrieved your tin gewgaw and fled to the park to watch the grebes, but you were shaken. You have not been still since then, you are like the gusts of air swirling around your house, the house you lived in then. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. These are the gods. And Ra. And Anubis. And Thoth, the Great Measurer, Thoth who is ready to take your measure now. Be still. Be measured. Be still.

It was my intention today to use this space to compile a list of nitwits. The idea was to save you, gentle readers, from having to work out for yourselves who was, and who was not, a nitwit. You could simply memorise my list and then, whenever you saw or heard a nitwit, you could cry “Nitwit!”, and pay the nitwit in question no further regard, thus freeing up your time for more salubrious pursuits than being exposed to nitwittery. If your cranial integuments were unequal to the task of memorising the list, you could print it out and carry it with you at all times, in pocket or reticule, hoisting it out to check it when in the presence of a possible or probable nitwit.

I am not suggesting that you do not know a nitwit when you see one, but I thought it would be helpful for you to have a ready made list. Ah, but already your eyes are scanning the splurge of text below this line, and you see no sign of a list. Did my plan gang agley, and if so, why, for heaven’s sake?

Well, jumping out of bed before dawn and plunging my head into a pail of ice-cold water, as ever, I began compiling the list within that same head, wet and freezing. There would be time enough to write down the names of this first flurry of nitwits when I repaired to my escritoire after breakfast, breakfast today being eggy, accompanied by a single smokers’ poptart, washed down with liquefied vitamin-enriched pap. The difference between common or garden pap and liquefied pap is that the latter is runnier, and can be poured into a beaker for the swigging therefrom. Common or garden pap, while still runny, when compared say to a potato or a block of suet, is usually served in a bowl and eaten with a spoon. I know these things.

But I am leaping ahead of myself. Let us return to where I was doubled over with my head plunged into a pail of icy water. The names of seven or eight nitwits sprang to mind before I lifted my head, took a gulp of air, and replunged. During the second immersion I thought of several more nitwits. One more deep breath, and the third and final plunge, and before I was even wrapping a towel around my freezing head I had a mental list of at least a score of nitwits.

I just need to clear something up here before we proceed. I may have given the impression that I am only capable of thinking of the names of nitwits at such times as my head is immersed in ice cold water. Not so! I can as well summon the names of a legion of nitwits with my head wrapped in a towel, or indeed not wrapped in a towel or any other swaddling, just plonked atop my neck breathing in the air, fresh or foetid as may be. Don’t get the wrong idea.

So, as I prepared my breakfast eggs ‘n’ smokers’ poptart ‘n’ pap, with my habitual ritualistic precision, I congratulated myself on having made a splendid start to my nitwit list. And here I must confess that self-congratulation is my fatal weakness. I have been known to give myself a thunderous round of applause simply for completing a mundane task, for instance making my breakfast, or tying my bootlaces. In my defence, I would point out that I only do this because it was recommended to me by the author of the only self-help book I have ever read. In Clap Yourself Stupid! – Ten Steps To A Dementedly High Level Of Self-Esteem, Dr Bruce Terrific – pictured on the back cover wearing splendid moustachios and a cravat – suggests not only applauding oneself but also patting oneself on the back using a patented arm-extension device, striking one’s own medals from milk-bottle caps, and playing tape recordings of the cheering of hysterically overexcited crowds, cleverly modified so they sound as if they are bawling one’s own name through tears of happiness and joy. I have found these methods work wonders, and it is now at least three weeks since I have compared myself to a worm wriggling in the muck.

More names of nitwits popped into my head, now dry and slightly warmer, as I ate my breakfast. I was impatient to get to the escritoire and to start writing them down. At this point, I began to wonder whether I ought to simply scribble the names down, one after another, on sheets of notepaper, or if it would be better to make use of a stack of index cards. If I gave each nitwit their own individual card, I would have space for annotations. These could prove invaluable. Already, in my mental list of nitwits, I had two nitwits with very similar names, differing in fact by only a single letter. Granted, they were both nitwits, through and through, but the nature of their nitwittery varied – one was a saintly nitwit, the other a knave and jackass – and it would not do to mix them up. It also occurred to me that, as my list lengthened, there may be a similar similarity in the name of a nitwit and the name of one who was not a nitwit by any stretch of the imagination. I did not want the users of my list to call its reliability into question by making the assumption that I had included a non-nitwit on a list of nitwits or, worse, that I had declared one who was quite clearly not a nitwit to be a nitwit. Were that to happen, I would run the risk of being called a nitwit myself. Perish the thought!

If only the thought had perished. But it began to gnaw at me, before I had even finished my breakfast, before I had even got as far as my escritoire, and my notepad, and my stack of index cards, and my pot of propelling pencils. Should I be on the nitwit list?, I asked myself, over and over again. Sometimes I answered no, sometimes yes, sometimes I left the question hanging, and it hung over me like the sword of Damocles, to the point where I got all wibblywobbly and frightened and jellylegged and fretful. Hoping for some kind of succour, I reached for my self-help book and stared at the photograph of Dr Bruce Terrific. His black and white eyes gazed back at me, curiously unreadable, fathomless, cold. It was like looking into the unreadable fathomless cold eyes of a swan.

I received no succour, no answer. Mopping up the last bit of egg with the last corner of smokers’ poptart, I decided I could not take the risk of being dubbed a nitwit. If I were called a nitwit, I might become a nitwit, my name at the top of my own list of the names of nitwits. It was a prospect too horrible to contemplate. I banged my fork on my plate and stood up, and I walked right past my escritoire, out through the door, into the freezing cold, and I gulped the icy air, as dawn came crashing across the sky.

Dennis Beerpint’s latest poetry collection, a slim volume of twee verse entitled Groaning Minions, is an experiment in what the weedy ex-beatnik calls “fictional autobiography”. “Fictional”, note, not “fictionalised”. In a preface he makes his intentions clear:

By any measure, my life has been one of unremitting tedium. Nothing remotely interesting ever happens to me, nor do I cause anything of remark to occur. My motto can be encoupleted as “Neither a mover nor a shaker be / Just write verse relentlessly twee”. In my advancing years, however, rightly celebrated as probably the greatest poet ever to tread the earth, I am constantly beset by eager young whippersnappers beating a path to my door, clutching their notebooks and propelling pencils and tape recorders, desperate to hear me tell tales of my life so they might be the one to write the Life. It always amuses me to watch them doze off as I explain that, no, I never swapped beekeeping tips with Sylvia Plath, I was never declared insane like Ezra Pound, I never saw my work turned into a hit West End musical like T S Eliot, and I never even shared a Lemsip with Andrew Motion. Having scurried breathlessly up the path, the wannabe biographers trudge away a couple of hours later, their notebooks empty, their cassette tapes blank.

It has occurred to me that if anyone does ever succeed in writing my Life, the book will be so damned boring that nobody will ever want to read it. Thus I have taken it upon myself to invent a life of thrills and spills and adventures and extraordinary excitement, all of it chronicled in the form of twee and vapid verse. Let future biographers pick over the contents of the present volume, and rewrite it as prose. That will keep them occupied, and I will no longer have to heave myself out of my armchair and answer the doorbell to another panting whippersnapper, and parry a legion of pointless queries about the part I played in the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent and many another world-shuddering kerfuffle.

Beerpint appears to be teasing us here, because there is not a single mention of any of those world-shuddering kerfuffles in the forty-nine poems in the collection. Instead, we get a sort of Ruritanian fantasy, with the fictional poet born and brought up in an eerie and phantasmal castle, surrounded by the groaning minions of the title. Indeed, he gets rather carried away by these minions, whose incessant groaning he is at pains to account for. One, it seems, has a burst appendix. Another groans because he is overtired. A third is a minion of melancholic disposition whose groaning is

Both religious, like a tortured Christian martyr

And existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sartre

I was not going to quote directly from the book, what with Dennis Beerpint’s fondness for unleashing savage packs of wolves at any hint of copyright violation, but perhaps I can be forgiven just the one couplet.

The poet’s growing obsession with the groaning minions is apparent when one considers that, though they make only fleeting appearances in the first half of the book, from poem number twenty-six onwards they are increasingly dominant. In fact, the concluding set of six villanelles seem to consist of nothing but groaning, as if Beerpint’s very psyche has been invaded and overtaken by these minions of his childhood. This is both perplexing and worrying when we lift our eyes from the page briefly to remind ourselves that they are entirely fictional and never actually existed. The unrelenting focus on the groaning minions also means that, in terms of chronology, Beerpint never gets beyond the years of his youth. He thus undermines his own stated purpose of fobbing off the doorbell-ringing wannabe biographers, who are still left in the dark about the poet’s involvement, or otherwise, in such world-shuddering kerfuffles as the Spanish Civil War and the Hindenburg Disaster and the Tet Offensive and the Orpington By-Election and the Relief of Mafeking and the Munich Air Disaster and the Kennedy Assassination and the Cold War and the Cod War and the Arab Spring and the Summer of Love and the Fall of Saigon and the Winter of Discontent.

It may be that he has a second volume of “fictional autobiography” in the works, but quite frankly, let us hope not.

Among thespians, there is a somewhat laughable superstition that one must never mention the title of Shakespeare’s “Scottish play” in a theatre, on pain of who knows what catastrophe. Hence the euphemism. I say “laughable”, but you will note I have avoided giving the play’s title myself. And I have used the euphemism as the title of this piece for a very good reason. Judging by the events of recent days, it would seem that the theatrical curse has come visiting the decidedly untheatrical world of Hooting Yard.

Let me explain. The other day I was exercising my brainpans thinking up subjects for future essays in this series. In a particularly sparky staring-out-of-the-window-at-crows interlude, it occurred to me to write about groovy bongos, Balaam and his ass, replacement bus services, and that which I am now too fearful and full of collywobbles to name. You will, I hope, have read and digested and given much thought to three of those topics, which appeared here on Saturday and Sunday and Monday. The fourth, which I refrain from typing, is due today.

Anyway, I was quite happy to have decided upon four days’ worth of subject matter in a single crow-observance session, so I decided to go out for a walk. I put on a hat with earflaps to counter the cold, and a Tyrolean jacket not unlike the one worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), and I headed towards Nameless Pond. On my way there, I met an acquaintance, who joined me on my circuit of the pond.

“So what have you been up to, Mr Key?” asked this person.

“As it happens, Mr Spraingue, I have had a very profitable morning staring out of the window at crows while thinking of topics for my daily essays,” I replied.

“I would be most interested to hear what those topics might be, Mr Key,” he said.

“Then let me list them for you in the order I suspect I shall be writing them, Mr Spraingue,” I replied. By this time we had reached Nameless Pond and begun our circuit. “First I shall tackle groovy bongos, then Balaam and his ass, then replacement bus services, and when those three are done I shall turn my attention to -” and I mentioned by name the subject which sheer unbridled terror prevents me from repeating here. At the time, however, neither I nor Mr Spraingue had any inkling that aught was amiss. We continued to walk the well-trodden path around the pond, and soon enough we were speaking together of other things, including windows and crows and Chris Huhne and his speaking clock mother. Later I returned home and took off my Tyrolean jacket and hat with earflaps and sat down at my escritoire and began to write about groovy bongos.

Over the next couple of days, though I took my regular walks in the vicinity of Nameless Pond, I saw neither hide nor hair of Mr Spraingue. This is not an unusual circumstance, for he is not a man of routine habits, and days or weeks can pass without our seeing each other. I was unperturbed.

I was unperturbed, that is, until this morning, when I received a message on my metal tapping machine. The message came from a mutual acquaintance of myself and Mr Spraingue. I was told that, no sooner had we parted, after our circuit of Nameless Pond the other day, than Mr Spraingue fell victim to a sequence of calamitous events. He trod in a puddle. In shaking the puddlewater from his Chelsea boot, he lost his balance and toppled over. In toppling over, he bashed his head on a pondside bench. The bench, placed there for wayfarers to rest their weary legs, was made of metal. The trajectory of Mr Spraingue’s toppling meant that the part of his head which bashed against the bench was his ear. Because the bash was not unduly violent, and because he is a manly uncomplaining type of fellow, Mr Spraingue got to his feet and dusted himself down and went on his way. Fatefully, however, in toppling he had thrust out his hands to break his fall and the palm of one hand had landed slap in the midst of a patch of reeking pondside muck. Within this muck lurked many minuscule creeping and crawling things, blind and writhing and riddled with infection. One such tiny, barely visible being attached itself there and then to Mr Spraingue’s hand. Before brushing the mud from his Italianate topcoat, he rubbed his ear, throbbing from the bash anent the metal bench. In so rubbing, he dislodged the tiny creeping thing, which scurried into the shelter of his ear. The rest of the day, I was told, passed uneventfully for Mr Spraingue. He felt none the worse for wear. In the middle of the night, however, he woke up screaming. He leaped from his bed and cut mad capers about his bedroom, repeatedly bashing his head against the walls. When he could not be becalmed, Mrs Spraingue, his inamorata, ferried him to hospital in their gleaming bright red sports car. Medicos shot him full of powerful tranquilisers, so at last he stopped screaming. Assuring Mrs Spraingue that they would keep Mr Spraingue in an induced coma while they worked out what was wrong with him, the medicos insisted she go home and get some rest. Meanwhile, inside Mr Spraingue’s head, the minuscule blind creeping thing had wriggled its way through his ear and burrowed into his cranium, where it had now set about munching his brain jelly. Mr Spraingue’s brain was gigantic in comparison to the tiny being, but its appetite was huge. It will not take many days for it to eat his brain entire. In all this horror, it is perhaps a small mercy Mr Spraingue will never learn that, driving home in the cold misty night, his inamorata stalled the gleaming bright red sports car on a level crossing, in the path of a thunderous oncoming express train, its carriages packed with hundreds of crippled orphans heading for a better life in an Edenic garden city. In the inevitable collision of train and car, all perished, the driver, the orphans, their governesses, and Mrs Spraingue.

It seems clear to me that none of this would have happened had I not been so reckless as to speak aloud the title of this present essay which, for your safety and mine, I have replaced with the euphemism used by theatrical persons when they speak, in the theatre, of The Tragedie Of Macbeth.

It is often remarked that, in an age of mass transportation, what we have lost is the thrill and glamour and sheer romance of travel. It is true that were a modern day Richard Hakluyt to publish a modern day version of The Principal Navigations, Voiages, Traffiques and Discoueries of the English Nation, the navigations, voiages and traffiques would already be familiar to millions, and the discoueries few, if indeed there were any at all. Journeys that were unimaginable even to our fairly recent ancestors we now undertake at the drop of a hat. But was the thrill and glamour and romance inherent in the travel, or does it depend above all on the attitude of the traveller? If the latter, we can still experience the sensations of Hakluyt’s voyagers, of explorers treading into the unknown, of wide-eyed wonderment and awe.

If our attitude is all, then we need not hark back to the past in our choice of transport. However appealing the steam train and the hot air balloon and the vintage car, what they offer is nostalgia. Yet it is possible to find thrills and glamour and romance in bang up to date transport systems if we screw our heads on properly, that is to say, if we adopt a true traveller’s attitude. Consider, for example, that often overlooked wonder of the age, the replacement bus service.

You arrive at the railway station for a routine journey. Perhaps you are simply commuting from home to work, or paying your regular visit to Great Aunt Flo in her seaside retirement home, or taking your monthly trip to a distant city with a castle and an exciting zoo. You already have your train ticket, and as you prance into the station you take it from your inside pocket, ready to present it to a uniformed factotum. It is then you espy, emblazoned with a magic marker pen across a board, a notice telling you that all train services have been cancelled and there is a replacement bus service in operation.

You become aware of fellow passengers standing around the railway station looking lost, tutting and muttering and in some cases seething. They are annoyed and irritated and frustrated. One of them is already shouting his head off at a uniformed factotum, who is blinking frantically and parroting the “line” he has been given by his superiors. You, by contrast, have not a care in the world. You are a true traveller. Bright of eye and determined of gait, you turn on your heel and stride out of the station, seeking the bus stop. And there it is!

There is a bus waiting there for you, its engine already grumbling. A rapid glance confirms that it is indeed the replacement bus service bus that will ferry you to your destination. There is another factotum, wearing a peaked cap, standing on the kerb by the open door. You show him your train ticket, he acknowledges it with a manly nod, and you board the bus and select a seat. At this point, while you wait in a state of high expectation for the bus to rev and slowly ease away from the bus stop, at the outset of your journey, you might take from your bag a piece of fruit, an apple or a pear or a Carlsbad plum, a snack to calm your nerves.

Eventually, your waiting is over. A few more passengers have clambered aboard, some still tutting and muttering and seething, but you block them out of your consciousness. In regrettable modern parlance, they are, or appear to be, bus wankers. But you are of a higher calling. You are a replacement bus service voyager, with the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum now tucked away in your bag. And the door hisses shut and the engine revs and away you go.

“Make it new!” was Ezra Pound’s battle-cry, and that is exactly what happens to your oh so familiar train journey. You stop at all the same familiar stations, yet, crucially, following a parallel yet different trajectory, from an unfamiliar angle, and you stop, not at a platform within the station but at a bus stop outside it. And all along that trajectory, everything you see you see from an unfamiliar angle, including the railway tracks themselves, sometimes visible from the window of the bus, sometimes occluded, as when the bus needs must follow the line of the road where it veers away from the railway line due to the terrain, the physical geography, or historical imperatives. Trees, shrubs, huts, outbuildings, factories, orchards, canals, aerodromes, coppices, lakes, duckponds, churchyards, volleyball courts, swimming pools, chimneys, follies, otter sanctuaries, car pounds, statues, industrial estates, science parks, gin palaces, clock towers, unoccupied plinths, standing stones, plague pits, recently-landed alien spacecraft… each and all, seen from a different angle, are made anew, made unfamiliar. And here and there, scattered along the line, groups of railway employees, with no trains to run, are gathered, smoking pipes or playing improvised games of boules using pebbles or staring at the sky and at the birds in the sky, the engine drivers and ticket collectors and inspectors and buffet stewards gathered together with porters and maintenance men and signalmen, ripp’d from their familiar context, they too are made anew.

You disembark from the bus at the bus stop outside the railway station for which you set out, whether to go to work or to see Great Aunt Flo or to visit the castle and the exciting zoo. You know where the waste bins are inside the station, but here, outside, from this angle, at the replacement bus service bus stop, you must cast your eyes about until you spot one. Only then can you take from your bag and discard the core of your apple or pear or the stone of your Carlsbad plum. And, that done, you can wend your way, now on familiar pedestrian territory once more, but having travelled as a true traveller, with thrills and glamour and romance.

22:21 And Balaam rose up in the morning, and saddled his ass, and went with the princes of Moab.

22:22 And God’s anger was kindled because he went: and the angel of the LORD stood in the way for an adversary against him. Now he was riding upon his ass, and his two servants were with him.

22:23 And the ass saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and the ass turned aside out of the way, and went into the field: and Balaam smote the ass, to turn her into the way.

22:24 But the angel of the LORD stood in a path of the vineyards, a wall being on this side, and a wall on that side.

22:25 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she thrust herself unto the wall, and crushed Balaam’s foot against the wall: and he smote her again.

22:26 And the angel of the LORD went further, and stood in a narrow place, where was no way to turn either to the right hand or to the left.

22:27 And when the ass saw the angel of the LORD, she fell down under Balaam: and Balaam’s anger was kindled, and he smote the ass with a staff.

22:28 And the LORD opened the mouth of the ass, and she said unto Balaam, What have I done unto thee, that thou hast smitten me these three times?

22:29 And Balaam said unto the ass, Because thou hast mocked me: I would there were a sword in mine hand, for now would I kill thee.

22:30 And the ass said unto Balaam, Am not I thine ass, upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? was I ever wont to do so unto thee? And he said, Nay.

22:31 Then the LORD opened the eyes of Balaam, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the way, and his sword drawn in his hand: and he bowed down his head, and fell flat on his face.

22:32 And the angel of the LORD said unto him, Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times? behold, I went out to withstand thee, because thy way is perverse before me:

22:33 And the ass saw me, and turned from me these three times: unless she had turned from me, surely now also I had slain thee, and saved her alive.

22:34 And Balaam said unto the angel of the LORD, I have sinned; for I knew not that thou stoodest in the way against me: now therefore, if it displease thee, I will get me back again.

22:35 And the angel of the LORD said unto Balaam, Go with the men: but only the word that I shall speak unto thee, that thou shalt speak. So Balaam went with the princes of Balak.

There is more to the story of Balaam, but it need not detain us here. The crucial point is that we have no evidence the LORD, having opened the mouth of the ass – that is, given the gift of human speech to Balaam’s donkey – remembers to close the mouth of the ass, or take away the gift of speech, before Balaam and the donkey trot away with the princes of Balak. We must therefore assume that it continues to speak.

That, at least was the conclusion of the dipsomaniacal Irish playwright Finbarr na [Unpronounceable Thicket of Consonants], who in 1959 produced his most famous work, The Donkey Dialogues. When the play begins, Balaam and his ass have taken leave of the princes of Balak and gone a-wandering throughout the Middle East and beyond, ending up – surprise surprise! – in Dublin. They roam from bar to bar, drinking pints of porter, and regaling their fellow-drinkers with what are supposed to be comic skits. Much of the so-called humour relies on the idea that Balaam is a foolish glutton while the donkey is imbued by the LORD not only with a human speaking voice but with His Ineffable Being. The donkey is, in other words, in this reading, God.

Unsurprisingly, the playwright was accused of blasphemy and more than one priest personally socked him on the jaw.

Of more interest perhaps is what has been done with Finbarr’s work in a new adaptation for television. Balaam and his ass are no longer relocated to Dublin, they barely drink at all, and the comedy dialogues are jettisoned entirely. Speaking in generic BBC peasant accents (à la Lark Rise To Candleford) the pair traipse back and forth across the sun-bashed verdant fields between Lark Rise and Candleford, exchanging observations about the peasantry, the weather, and ancient hostilities between the Israelites and the Moabites and the Amorites. Thankfully, there is no attempt at humour.

Whereas in the original, it was difficult for an audience to suspend disbelief at the absurd picture of a talking donkey in an Irish bar, it seems perfectly plausible, in the rustic setting, to have a man and a donkey trudging across the fields chatting to one another. Plausibility alone does not make for good drama, however, and there have been mutterings in the production suite. In the planned second series, Balaam’s ass will be stricken with a mysterious and seemingly incurable donkey disease, allowing for the introduction of a new character, a maverick young veterinary surgeon newly arrived in the countryside muck from the urban metropolis.

There is also talk of giving the talking donkey its own Saturday night television chat show, in which it will interrogate movers and shakers (Rolf Harris, Benedict Cumberbatch, Yoko Ono) on their knowledge of peasants and weather and Israelites and Moabites and Amorites and smiting with sticks.

Are bongos inherently groovy? It’s a good question. There are countless examples of the addition of bongos to a lineup by those desperate to impart grooviness to their combos. Sometimes it succeeds incontrovertibly, as in the transformation wreaked overnight when Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra became Groovy Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos. It is important to note here, however, that though the pulsating rhythm orchestra itself became indubitably groovy, Claude Grimes himself did not. He was a straightlaced and somewhat starchy figure upon whom the mantle of grooviness never sat comfortably, and it would have been better for all concerned had he dubbed the new lineup either Claude Grimes And His Groovy Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Bongos or Claude Grimes And His Pulsating Rhythm Orchestra With Groovy Bongos. Either of those would have been accurate, for they were grooviness incarnate with added bongos. Yet for all their grooviness, few could hear it when they were distracted by the patent absurdity of stiff, unfashionably-dressed Claude Grimes trying to pass himself off as groovy. That is why, shortly after the bongos were added, the combo retired from live performances and kept to the recording studio, where they could give vent to their newfound grooviness uninterrupted by hepcats hooting ridicule at Claude Grimes.

No one listening to those scratchy old 78s today could dispute just how groovy they are, and how that grooviness reaches its apogee in the bongos. But ’twas not ever thus. At around the same time as Claude Grimes was haunting the lobbies of talent agencies on the lookout for a bongo player, another bandleader, Pook Tuncks, had the same idea. One might think that with a name like Pook Tuncks, he had quite enough grooviness to be going on with, because it is by any measure a groovy name. It was of course a pseudonym, taken from an 1864 entry in the Journal of Gerard Manley Hopkins, where the Victorian Jesuit poet wrote “Tuncks is a good name. Gerard Manley Tuncks. Pook Tuncks”. But Pook Tuncks the bandleader was on a mission to become ever groovier. Almost one hundred years after Hopkins, in 1954, he wrote in his own Journal:

I have it in me to become the grooviest person ever to bestride the earth. By my own reckoning, I am currently at a high level of grooviness. I need to screw my courage to the sticking place and take certain steps to become even groovier. My spies tell me that Claude Grimes is planning to add bongos to the lineup of his combo. Even though he is laughably ungroovy there is no doubt that he will impart grooviness to his pulsating rhythm orchestra by doing so. He will be hot on my heels. If I am to propel myself further into the stratosphere of grooviness and leave Claude Grimes a barely visible speck in the far distance, I too must have bongos in my lineup! Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness must become Groovy Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness With Bongos, or perhaps Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Groovy Fantasticness With Bongos.

So Pook Tuncks too haunted the very same lobbies of the very same talent agencies, in the shadow of Claude Grimes, and within days of the latter snapping up a groovy bongoist, so too did Pook Tuncks. At least, he thought his bongoist was groovy. Most bongoists are. But, fatally, Pook Tuncks plucked the wrong bongoist from the pile. Classically trained, with many a certificate and diploma hanging in frames on the walls of his bongoing room, the new recruit was simply unable to get the hang of the happening sounds of fantasticness so dizzyingly played by the combo. A terse entry in Pook Tuncks’s Journal is smudged by tears:

His bongoing is leaden.

Ironically, then, the decidedly ungroovy Claude Grimes was celebrated for the grooviness of his combo, at least after they retired to the studio, whereas the once impeccably groovy Pook Tuncks lost every atom of grooviness he ever had. And the impetus behind these divergent trajectories was bongos.

What we can learn from this is that, contrary to received wisdom, bongos are not inherently groovy. Other factors have to be taken into account. For one thing, the demeanour, attitude, and aptitude of the bongoist are critical. No one becomes groovy just by thumping a pair of bongos, even though the bongos may be groovy in themselves. Much less does the bandleader automatically bask in reflected grooviness simply by dint of adding bongos to the lineup. A certain alchemy has to occur, whether the bongos are added to pulsating rhythms or to happening sounds of fantasticness.

A grooveologist recently posited the intriguing question of what might have happened had Claude Grimes recruited Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, and Pook Tuncks Claude Grimes’s. A rival grooveologist made the compelling point that the pivotal factor may be the bongos, not the bongoist. Had Claude Grimes’s bongoist swapped his bongos with Pook Tuncks’s bongoist, could that have made a vital difference? This takes us into the treacherous territory of whether the grooviness or otherwise of bongos depends upon the bongoist, which in turn forces us to ask if the grooviness or otherwise of any individual bongoist is reliant upon their bongos.

In an ideal world, of course, one could match up groovy bongoists with groovy bongos, while they are still loitering full of hopes and dreams in the lobby of a talent agency. But even then, can the grooviest of bongoists, armed with the grooviest of bongos, necessarily impart grooviness to the combo to which they are recruited? The tragic decline of Pook Tuncks And His Happening Sounds Of Fantasticness, insert the Groovy where one will, would suggest not. He was last seen in 1962, in the gutter outside the Cavern Club in Liverpool, sloshed and stricken and holding out a begging bowl to trendy with-it young persons, who passed him by, neither knowing nor caring who he was.

It is with great pleasure that I have come to this charming – if windswept – seaside resort, at the invitation of the Dobson Memorial Lecture Organising Committee, to speak upon that most fascinating of topics, the administration of lighthouses. First of all, I must confess that it is a topic of which I am almost wholly ignorant. Ask me about ponds, or badgers, and I can rattle on like a maniac for days on end. But I have never even set foot in a lighthouse, and can think of no conceivable reason why I should ever want to. Much as I adore ponds, I am terrified of the sea, for the sea is a fearsome and horrible thing, progenitor of countless nightmares, a vast and unpitying force of nature, hideous to behold and murderous in its immensity.

Still, I have promised to speak of lighthouses, and I am not a man to shy away from a challenge. As luck would have it, my oldest and dearest friend, the Reverend F. X. Heliogabalus, has spent the best part of his life engaged in the administration of lighthouses, and he has been kind enough to share with me some of the more thrilling details of his career.

You may think it odd that an ordained clergyman, indeed a Jesuit, should devote his life to such a calling. Heliogabalus spends his days on horseback, galloping across the land from one lighthouse to another, his pipe clamped in his jaws and his catechism tucked into the pocket of his soutane. The man hardly knows the meaning of rest. Sometimes he will accept an invitation to sleep overnight when a kindly lighthouse keeper offers him a mattress upon which to sprawl, but more often this most driven of priests will ride his trusty steed through the night, careering with alarming speed along clifftop paths whose tempest-racked fences have been broken or uprooted, and where both man and horse are in constant danger of plunging hundreds of feet into the churning waters below.

I beg your pardon. I must pause for a sip of milk of magnesia.

What is Father Heliogabalus up to, charging from lighthouse to lighthouse? I have asked him this question many times, and he simply refuses to answer, merely clamping that pipe in his jaws and raising his eyebrows in a manner I find confoundedly vexing. Oh, there have been times when I have felt like dashing the man to the ground in a fit of deranged violence, but he is much stronger than me, and indeed much taller; at seven and a half feet in height, he is bigger than most people I have come across as I wend my way through life on this blissful and miraculous planet. But I digress. The invitation to give this talk prompted me to ask Heliogabalus once again about life as an administrator of lighthouses. I tracked him down to a filthy harbour south of Hooting Yard, where he was being forced to pause for a few days due to his horse having contracted lockjaw. Heliogabalus was curled up in a chair in the corner of the veterinarian’s waiting room. It was the kind of chair Michael Caine might have sat in in one of those mid-1960s films about swinging London. A number of sick animals – a badger among them, I was distressed to note – huddled together fearfully in the opposite corner of the room, staring wild-eyed at the Jesuit and every now and then emitting whimpers of abject terror.

“I have this effect upon beasts of the field,” said Heliogabalus, languid and unconcerned, “They regard me with dread, as well they might.”

I wondered whether to pursue this comment, and decided against it. I have said that Heliogabalus was my oldest friend, but I admit that there are times when he scares me fair out of my wits. As it was, I had no opportunity to say anything, as my old mucker continued to speak:

“I understand that you wish to know something of my lighthouse administration activities, Key,” he sneered, “Otherwise you will suffer humiliation when called upon to speak of the subject at some godforsaken seaside resort. Is that correct?”

He did not wait for a reply, but – his voice growing louder, and causing the pitiable assortment of ailing badgers, stoats, hedgehogs, lampreys, pigs, cormorants, axolotls and bison to start up a soul-wrenching cacophony of squealing, hissing, whining and other, indescribable noises – he stood up, towering over me, and thundered:

“Imagine a world, Key, a Godless world, bereft of divine order, in which each lighthouse keeper is allowed to do as he or she wishes. Picture them, hundreds, nay, thousands of lighthouses, each running to its own timetable, each setting its lights flashing and rotating and signalling and whatnot whenever the keeper feels like it. What is the result? Chaos, pure and simple! Chaos leading to shipwrecks, tugboat accidents, buoy disasters, general nautical mayhem and the Lord knows what other kinds of marine catastrophe. Is that the world you wish to inhabit? Eh? You would be no better off than one of these sickly beasts here” – he gestured violently towards a tiny hummingbird with a stab wound on its head which was trying to hide behind the veterinarian’s chaise longue – “these foul beasts which quiver and quake at my every word. No, that is not the world we wish to live in. In our world – in God’s world – we must make sure that lighthouse keepers do their work according to a plan. I carry in my saddlebags a thumping great book of over nine hundred pages. It is a manual of lighthouse administration. I have memorised every word in that book, Key. Indeed, though it pains me to say it, I know it better than I know my Bible. So as I traverse this evil land astride my sick and neglected horse, I go from lighthouse to lighthouse to ensure that the keepers are following the rules laid down in the manual. And if they stray from its commands, I smite them.

“Think not, Key, that the commands are onerous. Most of them are simply common sense. But the devil works to undermine the sensible workings of each and every lighthouse. I have seen with my own eyes, for example, a lighthouse keeper of many years’ experience failing to sharpen his pencil over a wastepaper basket. Does he not know that wood-shavings are a cause of fire? That by his actions he could burn down his lighthouse in a matter of minutes? Again, I have seen a lighthouse keeper using a frayed rope to tie his boat to his jetty. It is barely imaginable!”

Such was his excitement that Heliogabalus began to hurl pieces of cutlery at the cowering animals.

“Tell me, ” I ventured, “Do you just call round to these lighthouses and declaim instructive passages from your manual?”

“Why, no,” he replied, chucking a sugar spoon at a weasel, “I am not a harsh man. While in one saddlebag I keep the manual with which to strike terror into the hearts of ingrates and backsliders, in my other saddlebag I carry a selection of useful supplies, the items the keepers do not receive in their regular hampers from the lighthouse equipment warehouse. I bring them things such as gigantic rolls of blotting paper, hard-boiled eggs steeped in maple syrup, specially darned flags from every continent, buckets filled with a solution for the removal of dried ink from hair, reticules for the blind, nozzles to be attached to burst cartons -“

At this point the veterinary surgeon entered the room to announce that the Jesuit’s horse was fully recovered. Heliogabalus took my hand, and nearly crushed it in bidding me farewell. Within seconds he was gone, galloping away to administer his peculiar justice tempered with mercy to the lighthouse keepers of the land. I am glad I am not one of them.