On My Transformation

I awoke one morning from uneasy dreams to discover I had been transformed into a Beatle. Somehow, uncannily, I was Ringo Starr! So unnerving was this experience that I bashed myself repeatedly on the head with a pair of drumsticks I found at my bedside and knocked myself out, relapsing mercifully into unconsciousness.

But again, I had uneasy dreams, and when I awoke I discovered I had been transformed, but not this time into a Beatle. Now I had become an entirely new Me. Outwardly – indeed, inwardly – I was exactly the same as I had been the previous day. Yet it was clear to me, as I leapt out of bed and plunged my head into a bucket of icy water and shuffled into my kitchenette for a breakfast of devilled hare and jugged kidneys and turned on the radio to listen to an early morning concert of argumentative German improvised racket, that something had changed, something decisive and irreversible. But what?

I decided that the simplest way to work out what had happened to me would be to go about my usual routine, but to monitor myself. So I spent a profitable three or four hours faffing about with the inner workings of my wristwatch. When I was done, it would not only tell the time, but it would keep a continuous check on the state of my soul. If all my tweakings were correct, then at nightfall, when the day was done, my watch would spit out a printed report, with handy bullet points. I could pass this to a consultant for analysis.

The difficulty would be to find a competent analyst. I did not require the services of a brain-quack, but of someone learned in such fields as ornithology, geology, origami, athletics, trellis work, and rustic wisdom. If necessary, I would have to consult separate experts and then correlate their findings. It was going to be an uphill struggle.

Luckily, I am used to uphill struggles, for my chalet is at the foot of an important mountain and every day I have to clamber across scree and up treacherous snow-covered slopes to get to the newsagent’s. That is the first part of my routine. I buy a copy of The Daily Hatchet and a pint of warm untreated goaty milk sloppings, and then I climb ever further up the mountainside, panting, until I reach my other chalet. I have always thought it best to have two chalets, one in which to sleep and ablute and eat breakfast and another in which to while away the day staring out of the window at snow and sky and the various types of birds which flit and swoop in that sky. There are of course other elements to my daily routine, manifold and multiform, but they need not detain us here. Or do they? All of a sudden I am assailed by doubts, and I am only part of the way across the scree. My legs are like jelly. On impulse, I turn back, back to my morning chalet, and I unlatch the door and slam it shut behind me and collapse on the carpet, across which I can see a beetle scurry. An insect, that is, not Ringo.

I lie on the floor wondering if the newsagent will be alarmed by my absence, and by his unsold copy of The Daily Hatchet. Will he call the helicopter police? Will they come in search of me, swooping across the sky, just like the birds? Unlike the birds, will they come scrambling down on rope ladders and kick in my windows and Taser me and haul me up into a chopper and ferry me across the mountains to their sinister compound? Will I be dragged to a cellar and tied to a chair and interrogated under Klieg lights? Will they mistake me for Ringo Starr? Will I be forced to sing Octopus’s Garden, or will they demand that I tell them tales of Thomas The Tank Engine? All these, and other panicky questions throb in my brainpans until I remember that I am not Ringo, I am neither a Beatle nor a beetle. But what have I become? I get up and I go to my cupboard and I take out a hammer and nails and planks and I barricade myself into the chalet.

I have blotted out the daylight, so I deploy an array of blubber candles here and there, on sideboards and mantelpieces and tabletops and counters. When lit, I gaze at the flames, one by one, and I ponder how curious it is that this light is brought to me by what was once the innards of that mighty sea beast, the whale. Will my own innards, in some future state, shed light upon the world? Is that to be my destiny, in my transformed state? Hours pass, with no hint of police helicopters, and one by one the blubber candles sputter and gutter out, and I am left in darkness. Is this, then, my fate, to become some kind of nocturnal being, like an owl or a bat? There are worse fates.

I rummage through the nooks of memory to try to recall what I have learned of the bat and the owl through years upon years of study. I remember little, save for sounds of squeak and hoot and that both bat and owl have the gift of flight. Can I, now, in my transformation, fly? I flap my arms, testing the air, and discover that, yes!, I can fly. I rise so fast that I crash into the chalet ceiling and bash my head and knock myself out.

When I come to, from uneasy dreams, I find I have been transformed yet again, this time into my final glorious state. Look upon my works, ye puny, and despair! For I am become Yoko, and I shall prevail!

Strangulated Hooting

In the course of a blog postage recounting “A Day In The Life”, Outa_Spaceman describes his experience of listening to yesterday’s edition of Hooting Yard On The Air on Resonance104.4FM, broadcast, as ever, live:

Prep and light the fire, hang washing on clothes airer and get comfortable for Hooting Yard on the Air.

Familiar strains of the Caucasian Lullaby fade into horrific coughing and spluttering, ‘Oh God’ intones the despairing voice of Mr. Key, Caucasian Lullaby cuts back in and plays for a distressingly long time. I begin to worry that I might actually have heard Mr. Key’s last gasp. Caucasian Lullaby fades again and Mr. Key resumes the entertainment that I know and love as Hooting Yard on the Air.

Write email to congratulate Mr. Key on best start (in hindsight) to Hooting Yard on the Air ever.

I did indeed manage to time a fit of strangulated choking perfectly to coincide with the start of the programme. At 6.30 PM, I was fine and chipper. Ten or fifteen seconds later I was racked by heaving convulsive coughs and, as I signalled wildly for John, the sound engineer, to bring the music back up, I was unable to breathe. I then staggered out of the studio to the kitchen to get a beaker of water, where I heard, from the office above, the voice of Resonance supremo Ed Baxter calling “Terrific beginning to the show, Frank!”

I gulped down water and gradually regained my composure. Such are the joys of live radio.

On The Pecking Order

Let us get to grips with the pecking order once and for all.

Humdrum pecking. Actuaries, beleaguered and sullen due to the theft of their tables, congregate in the corridor of their building. The janitor has recently been this way with his mop. There are stains on the ceiling. What pecking there is is humdrum, but never frightful. Ghosts patrol the corridors in the upper reaches, ones that once might have haunted clippers of the line, icy fogs notwithstanding, nor palpable. Cutter’s blague. The forensics are not yet in. Raiments of the emboldened.

Dismal pecking. Creatures with livid eyes and snouts, balanced on a knife edge. The stragglers from the Panzer division. Cellophane wrapped around finger food piled tottering on a table, the legs of said table ornate and carved and rich in detail but the detail no longer understandable to the hoi polloi creeping into view from across the lake. Bane of the sugar free. Pecking so dismal it breaks the heart of the uncluttered hordes. Pinking shears and crab apples of the lost.

Gummy pecking. Sacred and profane, there are blots on the landscape. Indescribable colours of the sky and the distant boom of tankers. In all sorts of ditches, all sorts of ditch life. Any pecking as likely as not gummy, within reason. At altitude, deeply unpleasant. Several reports appearing in the press of tocsins rung. That would be the hot press, the steam iron, the oil canister. Stones in the stool. Skimping on lather. Failsafe devices with not a button to be seen.

Lax pecking. Camped out, under Bulstrode’s wing. Cloth of gold and a pattern of miseries. Taps turned on and off. Pewter syndrome. You can’t die from it, not exactly, but you can try. Call on the ones holding the platters. Such lax pecking. It grieves you fit to bust. Well might there be hydrangeas to be tidied into tiers beside the paddock. A rotogravure spoke volumes. Mustard and cress on the blotting paper in the drawer of the desk, and the desk locked.

Untoward pecking. Shrews and pipits. Fungus in the pan. A thief on either side and the ribbons blown away upon the wind. Corks popped, distemper, Falangeist troops out in force. Thrum of the Chesapeake, grit in the oyster. No pecking has ever been so untoward. Teeming pond life packed into a plastic bag and discarded in the gutter. They said it couldn’t be done, but it was, and nightly at that, at that. You had to build it yourself.

We looked into these peckings and we tried to place them in order. It was hard work. Not as hard as breaking rocks, no, but hard. We were not in chains. We sorted the peckings this way and that, hysterical with liberty. Half the time they did not bother to supervise us. They dropped no hints. They sat in their cubby, feet on the table, corpses. When it rained we took shelter in the lea of an orchard. If we looked hard we could see the great stone crucifix far in the distance, on the hill.

Stunned pecking. A plate of mashed potatoes in triangular formation. Jutting out, a handle. The lure of the fire pig. Boats tied up in the harbour, for the time being, until cock crow. God bless them every one. There is absolutely no chance that you will sell an insurance policy to the chaplain. Watch as he pecks, stunned, without even saying grace. Clackety clack on the tracks. Pearls of wisdom. Cone shapes shimmering in milky light.

Flamboyant pecking. Go now, hoist the hoistings. Werewolves have been here. They leave a spoor. Mutterings in the tavern. The steps are filthy. The door is scratched. The peckings are flamboyant. The seeds were strewn, oh long ago, long ago. Who can guess what foliage will one day erupt here? It will happen at night, that’s for sure. Or at dawn, when the hooter sounds to summon the serfs. What will become of the castle walls? Ask the shoemaker.

Brisk pecking. It was in Todd-AO. It had to be. The plans were in a satchel and the satchel on your shoulder. Rubbed by a rubbergloved rubber. So comforting. Say a fond farewell to pins and needles. Carry the satchel far from here. There is no risk it will explode but we want to be on the safe side. We have seen the brisk pecking that sometimes precedes our calamities. There is a list of them pinned on a board in the annexe. It could do with a lick of paint.

Stricken pecking. Such a hateful fellow. Where does he get his shoelaces tied? Those are Satanic knots if ever I’ve seen ’em. He played a blinder, I’ll give him that. Below the waterline, surprisingly. King for a day, but what kind of king, and what day of the week? You had to assume there was something stricken in the pecking. That raft of subsidies. Raft, raft. Time enough to light the lamps when all is said and done and the socks are hung to dry upon the line.

Intransigent pecking. Partial recall. You woke from your coma. Daffodils at the bedside. Litmus paper on the lino. How curious to see pecking with such intransigence. Difficulties of the shadow appointments. Something lurking in the corner. Something nasty in the woodshed. Something lacking in the cabinet. But there is a glossy catalogue to pick from. Highly recommended. Slowly dwindling. Just out of sight, in the twinkling of an eye.

We thought we were done but there was more sorting to do. So we sorted some more. We came up with one order and then another order. And all this time we ourselves were under orders. At the point of a rifle. Behind barbed wire. Till kingdom come.

On Sudden Darting Movements In The Insect World

Many years ago, in the last century, I began to write an epistolatory novel. The opening sentence, as I recall, was

Dear Professor Talc, Thank you for sending me an envelope full of flies.

There were not many sentences after that, three or four perhaps, before it petered out. I did not even get as far as finishing the first of what, I suppose, ought to have been dozens or hundreds of letters. I have no plans to revisit this abandoned work and to try to make something of it. It was a rather foolhardy idea to make one of the protagonists an entomologist, when I know virtually nothing of entomology. I might have been on firmer ground had I had one, or both, or all of my letter-writers be an ornithologist. Though my knowledge of that subject too is scanty, I am able to blather on about birds in a reasonably fluent manner. I cannot say the same about insects. So had I, for example, begun my novel with the line

Dear Professor Talc, Thank you for sending me an envelope full of feathers.

I might have continued. I might have written a long, involved, and emotionally charged epistolatory novel about a gang of corresponding ornithologists. I might, in my mid-twenties, have written a bestselling blockbuster, the paperback edition with a glossy gold-embossed cover, on sale at all the best airport bookstalls. I might have tasted early success, on a global scale, and as a consequence become a very different type of writer. Instead of languishing, as I do, in penury and obscurity, I might today be lounging on the balcony of an Alpine chalet, hearing the approach of my fawning valet, Jarvis, bringing, on a silver tray, my lunchtime tipple of aerated lettucewater along with the usual pile of urgent pleas from Hollywood moguls seeking to obtain the film rights to my latest book. I might have been looking forward to spending the evening leaning against a mantelpiece at a glittering and sophisticated cocktail party, the cynosure of all eyes. But it was not to be, and all because I wrote “flies” instead of “feathers”, and was thus stumped as to what on earth I could write next.

There is a lesson there, I suppose, but one I have learned too late. Or have I learned it at all? This morning, for example, I awoke with the phrase “on sudden darting movements in the insect world” clattering around inside my head. Before I had even leapt out of bed to ablute I decided it would be the title of today’s essay. And thus it proved. But in the thirty years since I abandoned my novel about a gang of corresponding entomologists, have I learned anything more about insects? Have I learned enough, at least, to write something informative and involved and emotionally charged about insects and their human students? The answer comes easily. No, I have not.

Here is what I do know. That there are certain insects which have the facility to make sudden darting movements, so sudden, so darting, that they fill one – well, me – with wonder. Sometimes these insects will be still for a considerable length of time, so still they might be in suspended animation, or dead, and then – whizz! – in a split second, in the blink of a human eye, they have darted off, to a distant spot, where they might resume their eerie stillness.

This is not true of all insects. Ants, for example, those tiny creeping things beloved of Horace Donisthorpe, are not in general given to sudden darting movements. Consider leafcutter ants, which we admire for their stolid implacable scurrying. They do not suddenly flit from their column, distracted by who knows what ant-distraction. Nor do any number of slow lumbering beetles, which we might encounter toiling slowly across our carpets, bent on to us unfathomable beetle business.

But if we turn our attention to, say, the Gerridae, commonly known as water striders, water bugs, magic bugs, pond skaters, skaters, skimmers, water scooters, water skaters, water skeeters, water skimmers, water skippers, water spiders, or Jesus bugs, these are insects much given to sudden darting movements. Pay a visit to a pond and you might profitably watch them, standing still upon the water on their thin spindly stilten legs, before their attention is caught by some tiny waterborne being which serves them for nutriment, upon which they will pounce and devour. Where you or I would take a knife and fork and ever so slowly raise a portion of food to our mouths, the water strider cannot afford such leisure. If it crept towards the tiny waterborne being at snail’s pace, the being would sink or fly out of reach. Hence the evolutionary necessity, for the water strider, of its sudden darting movement. So too for flies, and other insects I might name were I more learned in entomology than I am.

It is diverting to imagine what a human might look like were we able to make sudden darting movements on a par with certain insects. Let us say I am standing beside you at a bus stop when you spot, across the road and some yards to the left, a toothsome snack for which you have a sudden insatiable hunger. One moment, there you are next to me, and then, in the blink of an eye, you have made a sudden darting movement, and appear, as if teleported, across the road and some yards to the left, stuffing your face in a somewhat disgusting fashion with the snack item.

In The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986), Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle suggests this sudden darting facility by jerking his head in spasms. It is rather disconcerting, to see a human act so, and reminds us of the gulf that lies between us and the insect world. Perhaps we ought to be thankful that we are incapable of such sudden darting movements as are made by flies etcetera. Life is stressful enough as it is.

250px-Water_strider_G_remigis

A water strider, snapped before it made a sudden darting movement out of shot

Teach Yourself Danish

It is almost a year ago that I (inadvertently) set out to learn to speak Danish. My beginner’s vocabulary list is here. I am now watching Borgen, and have progressed by leaps and bounds. Here are the latest additions to my phrasebook:

English : briefing. Danish : briefing.
English : spin doctor. Danish : spin doctor.
English : girl power. Danish : girl power.
English : wet tee-shirt competition. Danish : wet tee-shirt competition.
English : famous for fifteen minutes. Danish : famous for fifteen minutes.

On The Bad Vicarage

It was late on a winter’s evening when I turned on to the lane leading to the Bad Vicarage. There was ice in the puddles and the thorn bushes glittered in the moonlight. On the other side of a filbert hedge a peasant person was worrying the ground with an agricultural tool.

“Good evening, peasant!” I called, “Can you tell me who is vicar nowadays in the Bad Vicarage?”

It was twenty years since I had been in these parts. I doubted that the Bad Vicar of the olden days was still in residence, but I wanted to make sure.

“Good evening to you, sir,” said the peasant, resting from his twilight labours and leaning on his implement, “The vicarage is bad indeed, as bad as any vicarage in Christendom. But the vicar whose sinecure it is is, shall we say, a fair to middling vicar. I would not call him good, but he is by no means as bad as the Bad Vicar of old.”

“Thank you,” I said, and felt compelled to add “You are, I may say, very well-spoken for a peasant.”

“I am a so-called New Peasant,” said the peasant, “My soul has been re-engineered by the Great Helmsman, all praise to him. It was he who ensured the destruction of the Bad Vicar, after all.”

“Is that so?” I asked, “Then praise to him indeed, as you say. Yet for all that, the Bad Vicarage is still bad, in spite of its fair to middling vicar, and though you are a New Peasant, here you are at nightfall, tilling the fields or whatever you are doing with that agricultural implement, just as an old peasant would do.”

“The countryside is the countryside, sir,” he said, gnomically, and he went back to work.

I carried on up the lane, my mind a welter of chaos. If the Great Helmsman had wrought the ruination of the Bad Vicar, why had he left the Bad Vicarage standing? And why, installed in it now, was a fair to middling vicar? Were there no good vicars in these parts? My uncle, for example, was a good vicar. Why had he been passed over for the sinecure? But then, was he still alive, or had he been one of the many victims of the Bad Vicar, mourned and unmourned? These and other questions tugged at the reins of my sanity as I approached ever closer the great forbidding gate of the Bad Vicarage.

As if to signal a shift in the very nature of things, just as I raised my hand to grasp the bell-pull dangling from the gate, the bright moon was of a sudden blotted out behind a cloud. I shuddered, but yanked the rope, only to hear a dull flat clunk rather than a clang. A bad bell for a bad vicarage. What else should I have expected?

But the clunk had the desired effect, for peering between the railings I saw the door of the Bad Vicarage creak open, and emerging from it a fellow I took to be the fair to middling vicar. He was young and spry and came bounding up the path to open the gate for me.

“You are the vicar?” I asked.

“That I am,” he cried, with unwarranted bonhomie, “Come, visiting stranger, for the night is a chill one, and you must warm your collywobbles beside a roaring fire.”

And soon enough the two of us were sat in armchairs by the fireside, slurping from beakers of hot and vitamin-enhanced goaty milk froth. Clearly, in destroying the Bad Vicar, the Great Helmsman had spared his goats. I could hear them, tethered in the back garden, bleating and occasionally butting their heads against the wall.

“Explain to me,” I said, coming straight to the point, “How it can be that this vicarage is still a Bad Vicarage, when you yourself, armed with the sinecure, are not a Bad Vicar?”

The fair to middling vicar laughed, slopping some of his milk froth onto the threadbare rug at his feet.

“This will always be a Bad Vicarage,” he said, “The rugs are threadbare, the floorboards are rotting, the paint is chipping, the roof is falling in, the heating is clapped out, the drains are clogged, and the goats are maddened.”

“Could you not see to it that repairs are made and the goats inspected by a veterinary surgeon?” I asked.

He laughed again, but this time it was a hollow laugh of infinite despair.

“What would be the use?” he said.

“Well,” I said, “If both the repair persons and the veterinary surgeons were unstinting in their efforts, it would no longer be a Bad Vicarage. It would become fair to middling, and in time, possibly, even good. Imagine that.”

He put his drained beaker on the rug, stood up, and went to stand by the window, peering out, his back turned to me.

“You have come here, ” he said, after some minutes of eerie silence, “On a cold winter’s evening, uninvited, unannounced. I sense you are no stranger to this place. I can hear in the bleating of the goats that they know you, that they have encountered you before. Just before you arrived, I received a message on my metal tapping machine from the New Peasant stationed behind the filbert hedge at the entrance to the lane. He told me you had no need to ask for directions, that you made your way here with practised steps, indeed that you minced hither as directly as a crow in flight. You nestle in the armchair by the fire and slurp the hot and vitamin-enhanced goaty milk froth from the beaker I have given you, and you know damned well that the rugs are threadbare, the floorboards are rotting, the paint is chipping, the roof is falling in, the heating is clapped out, the drains are clogged, and the goats are maddened. You know the Bad Vicarage as well as you know the back of your hand. Who the devil are you?”

And he spun around to look at me, and I looked back, my red eyes gazing at him like firebolts.

“I am the Bad Vicar,” I said, “Come to regain my sinecure.”

And, at my summons, the maddened goats, their tethers loosed, came crashing through the window.

Our Milieu Is That Of Doctor Ludwig

Last night I dreamed that I was walking in Saint Chad’s Park, past a music rehearsal studio, within which I could hear a beat combo practising. The song I overheard – which, in dreamland, I understood to be a Sleater-Kinney cover version – consisted of a single line, repeated over and over again: “Our milieu is that of Doctor Ludwig”. Very melodious.

On Captain Nitty

It was said of Captain Nitty that he had the gift of the gab. We shall not pause here to define the gab, but instead press on, press on, for time is tight. Time is as tight as Captain Nitty’s tunic, a size too small, the collar of which constricts his throat, thwarting the gab. And without the gab this man is nothing.

Why, then, does he not tear off his tunic and cast it to the winds, or at least loosen his collar, so that he might give vent to the gab? To answer that question, or questions, we need to know something of the regulations, and the esteem in which they were held, then, there. They were draconian and pitiless and unyielding. Yet a man would think no more of bending them than he would of tearing off his own head and tossing it into a stream.

It is in midstream, of a rushing gurgling torrent, that we find Captain Nitty, on this nineteenth century day. He is in it up to his eyeballs, breathing through a leather and gutta-percha contraption strapped to his head, covering his mouth and nostrils, and with a tube, reinforced with the wire from pipe-cleaners, rising above the level of the torrent into the mephitic air. No gab from Captain Nitty, in the circumstances.

But gab, or something like it, from the riverbank, where Captain Nitty is closely observed by howler monkeys disporting in the trees. Howl, then, rather than gab. The monkeys watch his slow progress as he toils along the river, against the current. Are their howls howls of encouragement or of mockery? Captain Nitty hears them not, for the same contraption that affords him the ability to breathe muffles his hearing, its thick woollen earflaps tugged tight against his head by means of a strap buckled under his chin, as tight as his tunic.

It is, perhaps, a mercy he can hardly hear the howler monkeys. Each step is a struggle, and now and then he loses his footing and is submerged in the torrent. He manages to pull himself upright through pluck and vim. For balance, he has a stick. It is not a branch torn from a riverbank tree, but his regulation stick, thick, of tropical wood, with a golden knob. He holds it horizontally in front of him, just above the surface of the water, for at all costs he must not get it wet. Even when he loses his footing he takes care to hoist the stick higher, keeping it in the air though the top of his head is briefly below the waterline.

Here in midstream there is no tree cover to block out the sun. Its burning brilliance batters down, reflected in the golden knob on the end of Captain Nitty’s stick, the golden knob itself as bright as a miniature sun. Captain Nitty must keep one eye closed in consequence, that he is not blinded by it. As he makes his painfully slow progress upriver, he now and then switches the position of the stick, so the golden knob is on his left or his right, to rest one eye and employ the other. It is difficult for him to judge distance with but one working eye. He thought he would reach the rapids at least two hours before he does so.

River rapids! Bane of the unwary! But Captain Nitty is nothing if not wary. He has the gift of the gab and he has a nose for danger. He has been called reckless, and teased for his excessive gung ho. Just as promised, there is a small wood and canvas boat tied to the trunk of a tree at the river’s edge. Captain Nitty makes for it, and clambers in. Now at last he can remove the contraption from his head. His senses are assailed, by the howling of the howler monkeys, now deafeningly loud, and by the stink of rot and foulness and disease and death. He places his regulation gold knobbed tropical wood stick carefully in the bottom of the boat, and lifts the oars, sliding them through the tholes. One would think, watching him, that he has rowed a boat before, but he has not.

But of course there is nobody watching him, nobody human, only the howler monkeys and the billions of tiny buzzing winged things with which the air is riddled. Captain Nitty pulls on the oars and heads inexorably for the rapids. Now he has his back to the shining golden knob on his stick, laid at his feet, and he can keep both eyes open. On the other side of the rapids, if he negotiates them without being tossed from his boat, he has been told to find a patch of land by the riverside and set up camp. He has, in his haversack, the makings of a tent, a stove, a flag, a pack of playing cards, and a Bible. And at nightfall, as the howler monkeys howl and nocturnal birds hoot and screech, and the raging torrent roars, Captain Nitty will cast off his tunic, and hang it up on a clothes line improvised between two trees, and while his sausages cook on the stove he will give vent to his gift of the gab. He will plant his flag and name his camp and name all the land around. He will sing rousing hymns. He will bless the Lord, O Captain Nitty’s soul: and all that is within him, bless his holy name, bless the Lord and forget not all his benefits, who forgiveth all Captain Nitty’s iniquities; who healeth all his diseases, who redeemeth his life from destruction, who crowneth Captain Nitty with loving kindness and tender mercies, who satisfieth his mouth with good things, so that his youth is renewed like the eagle’s. The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for all that are oppressed. He made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto the children of Israel. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and plenteous in mercy. He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. He hath not dealt with Captain Nitty after his sins; nor rewarded him according to his iniquities. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great is his mercy toward them that fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed Captain Nitty’s transgressions from him. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth Captain Nitty’s frame; he remembereth that he is dust. As for Captain Nitty, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children’s children; To such as keep his covenant, and to those that remember his commandments to do them. The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens; and his kingdom ruleth over all. Bless the Lord, Captain Nitty and his angels, that excel in strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the voice of his word. Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts; ye ministers of his, that do his pleasure. Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his dominion: bless the Lord, O Captain Nitty.

He has the gift of the gab, and sausages to eat, and an empire to build.

On Bravura Bunkum

The speech, it was agreed, was bunkum, but it was bravura bunkum. Certainly, to judge by the prolonged clapping of hands at the finish, accompanied by faintly hysterical screeches, it had gone down a storm. I wrote in my diary at the time that it was my first, and possibly last, experience of bravura bunkum.

‘Bunkum’ is also spelled ‘buncombe’. You can take your pick. The Japanese have a word for it, but I do not know what it is. Perhaps they call it bunkum too. I could find out, if I were avid to know, but I am not. Why should I waste my precious hours on this tingling planet wondering what word they use to describe bunkum in faraway Japan? I have better things to do. I made a list of them, in my diary, years ago, and am gradually working my way through it. It is good to have a plan.

Mother looked over my list, shortly after I had compiled it, and crossed out a number of items, savagely, with her pencil. She wore a blue brooch on her bosom and her hair was tangled and as dry as straw. She peered at my list through her lorgnette, lips pursed, emitting the odd snort, and now and then something would cause her grief and she would stab the pencil on the page and slash it back and forth across the words I had written. I cannot for the life of me remember why I let her read my diary in the first place, quite apart from then allowing her to obliterate certain of the plans I had made for my life. It was surely not filial devotion. She was a mad old bat with a fragile grasp on reality. In any case, I could have ignored her scratchings, rewritten my list in a separate notebook with the deleted items reinstated, but I did not. Nor did I ever ask Mother what prompted her disapproval, not that I would have been likely to understand her reply, for her babblings were for the most part incoherent. There were moments of lucidity, usually after she had eaten an egg, but at such times she used the opportunity to give commands to the servants.

So many years have passed that I barely recall the items on my list which Mother scratched out, and so effective was the savagery of the scratchings that they are pretty much illegible. For whatever reason, I never did pursue those plans. One, that can still be read, was a desire to “Collect even more ants than Horace Donisthorpe”. In retrospect, I am rather glad Mother crossed that one out. Donisthorpe devoted six decades to the collection of ants. Six decades! I am not that interested in ants, and I would hardly have had time to do anything else. I might never have fulfilled one of my other plans, which was to “Listen to a lot of bunkum”.

Now that one I did pursue, and I pursued it systematically and with great vigour. If I heard rumours abroad of the speaking of bunkum, I made sure I was on the spot when the time came for it to be spouted. I never made any notes, I had no desire to remember any of the bunkum after the speaker was done. I just wanted to listen. And listen I did, here and there, over the course of many years. It was not beyond my wit nor my means to go to Japan, to hear Japanese bunkum, or whatever they call bunkum in Japan, spoken, but I never did. I am sure Mother would not have stood in my way, had I brandished a ticket for an ocean voyage and a Japanese phrasebook, waved them in front of her, and announced that I was setting out at the break of dawn. Had she recently ingested an egg, she might have questioned me about the purpose of my trip and its likely duration, but she would not have stopped me going. I did not go because, I confess, I was frightened of Japan, of faraway Japan.

No doubt it was an irrational fear. I was not, for example, in the least afraid of huge swathes of the globe, from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. I felt almost affectionate towards eastern Europe, and often had pleasant dreams of Africa. Not that I ever visited these parts, but I would happily have done so had I ever been granted a passport. Sadly, I was not allowed one, by dint of some past infraction committed by Mother in the ambassador’s official residence in a geopolitical hotspot. I never did find out exactly what she had done, or not done, and never asked, in a lucid post-egg moment, when I might have found out. I think there is part of me that did not wish to know.

But I certainly never needed to go to Japan, or to anywhere else, to hear bunkum. There was a vast amount of it to be heard close to home, within the distance of a short bus ride. Perhaps there is as much bunkum elsewhere in the world, or it may be that there is something particular about my little bailiwick that attracts bunkumites – a word defined by the OED as “one who talks bunkum”. Whatever the case, I heard more than enough bunkum over the years, without ever having encountered bravura bunkum.

That was what made Thursday afternoon, in that marquee, on that lawn, in that park, so decisive in my life. Having heard bravura bunkum, I had to ask myself if I wished or needed to hear any other bunkum ever again. I asked myself because I could not ask Mother, who by this time was cold in her grave, in the cemetery adjoining the very same park, her grave set upon a little hillock, where stood a sycamore on the branches of which birds perched, ravens and crows. When Mother first lay there, before the worms got her, I would sometimes go to the hillock and ask questions of the birds. The birds always answered me, cawing, cawing, but I could never interpret the caws nor wring any sense from them. Eventually I ceased to make those visits, and learned to trust to my instincts.

It was instinct that made me take from the sideboard drawer Mother’s pencil, and to cross out the item in my list of plans to “Listen to a lot of bunkum”. I scratched through it savagely, as Mother might have done, but I was calm, eerily calm, as I did so. Now I need never hear any bunkum again. I can move on, at last, to the next item on my list of things to do during my lifetime. I closed the diary, returned Mother’s pencil to the sideboard drawer, and shuffled into the kitchen to boil an egg.

Stuff To Take With You On An Arctic Voyage

On Commander John Ross’s 1818 voyage to search for the North-West Passage,

To justify the expedition’s scientific aims the Admiralty and the Royal Society donated chronometers and compasses – the Isabella carried seven different models of each – plus a number of other instruments, among them Henry Kater’s Pendulum for measuring the ellipticity of the globe, Mr Plentty’s Cork Life Boat, Englefield’s Mountain Barometer and Companion, Burt’s Buoy and Knipper, Trengrouse’s Apparatus for Saving Lives, and Troughton’s Whirling Horizon. John Ross would later contribute to the array with a dredging device of his own invention which he whimsically christened ‘the Deep Sea Clamm’.

Fergus Fleming, Barrow’s Boys (1998)

On Certain Ants

Today is Saint Patrick’s Day. Around the world, persons of Irish heritage – often extremely tenuous – will find in the feast day an excuse to get drunk and sing mawkish songs, and to generally engage in what they laughably call a craic. I am of Irish heritage myself, on my father’s side, but view the sentimental attachment to the Emerald Isle with contempt, so instead of glugging Guinness and tunelessly wailing “O Danny Boy” with tears coursing down my cheeks, I shall turn my attention to ants.

For today we also celebrate the birthday of Horace St John Kelly Donisthorpe (1870-1951), one of the greatest of British ant experts. Independently wealthy, by dint of the family textile business in Leicestershire, Donisthorpe went to the University of Heidelberg to study medicine, but left before qualifying due to a “too sensitive nature”. From the age of twenty, he devoted the rest of his life to the study of ants and beetles.

Horace-Donisthorpe

Over the years, he hunted down ants in Aviemore, Chobham Common, Box Hill, Nethy Bridge, Parkhurst Forest, Rannoch, the New Forest, Matley Bog, Sandown, and Weybridge Heath, but his favourite stamping ground was Windsor Great Park, where he was granted special permission to collect as many ants as he liked, and where many of his discoveries were made. I ought not, perhaps, use the phrase “stamping ground”, as that summons a picture of Donisthorpe stamping his big boots upon the ground, surely inadvisable in the circumstances. I have never collected an ant in the wild myself, but I assume one must tread lightly and oh so carefully.

Donisthorpe was the author of over eight hundred books and papers, including British ants, their life history and classification (1915), Myrmica schencki Emery, an ant new to Britain (1915), Some notes on a paper by Dr. Leach on ants and gnats in 1825 (1918), A list of ants from Mesopotamia; with a description of a new species and a new variety (1918), Guests of British ants (1927), Descriptions of some new species of ants (1931), On the identity of some ants from Ceylon described by F. Walker (1932), On a small collection of ants made by Dr. F. W. Edwards in Argentina (1933), Rhopalomastix janeti, a species of ant new to science (1936), Five new species of ant, chiefly from New Guinea (1938), The genus Lioponera Mayr, with descriptions of two new species and an ergatandromorph (1939), Descriptions of several species of ants taken by Dr. O. W. Richards in British Guiana (1939), The ants of Norfolk Island (1941), Descriptions of new ants from various localities (1941), Description of a new species of Crematogaster Lund, subgenus Physocrema Forel, with a list of, and a key to, the known species of the subgenus (1941), Descriptions of a few ants from the Philippine Islands, and a male of Polyrhachis bihamata Drury from India (1942), A myrmecophilous woodlouse (1943), Myrmecological gleanings (1943), On a small collection of ants from West Africa, associated with Coccidae (1945), Ireneopone gibber, a new genus and species of myrmicine ant from Mauritius (1946), New species of ants from China and Mauritius (1947), Some new ants from New Guinea (1947), A second instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A third instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A fourth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A fifth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1948), A sixth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1949), A seventh instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1949), An eighth instalment of the Ross Collection of ants from New Guinea (1950), Two new species of ants from Turkey (1950), and Two more new ants from Turkey (1950). Rare indeed was the ant which eluded Donisthorpe’s eagle eye.

One thing that is clear from that (partial) list of his publications is Donisthorpe’s enthusiasm for new ants. This was to prove controversial, and he was considered to be “overeager” to identify new species of ants. Indeed, of the thirty new species he identified, twenty-four were subsequently deemed to be insufficiently distinct to be considered separate species or to be synonymous with previous valid species. An example of what we might call his pernickety attempts to identify wholly new types of ant is his description of Polyrhachis hosei, where Donisthorpe admits at the outset that “the general description of P.(M.) byyani would do equally well for this species”. He then details a small number of very minor differences, such as “a larger and more robust insect”, “pronotal spines longer”, “the scale has a somewhat wider arch”, and so on.

Indefatigable ant collector that he was, Donisthorpe was fiercely protective of those he gathered up, and would never allow them to mix with ants collected by others. The following reminiscence, by R W Lloyd in a letter to the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine in 1951, allows us a glimpse of the man, though unfortunately it concerns beetles rather than ants:

Mr Donisthorpe was a very fine Coleopterist, but he had that curious ‘kink’ shared by one or two other people, that he would only put in his collection beetles he had taken with his own hands. Luckily for him he was a man of leisure and he was able to go about the country when he heard of any rare beetles being taken. It led, however, to some curious results, as on a celebrated occasion when a collector in the New Forest got a very rare beetle – Velleius I believe it was – and advised Mr Donisthorpe, who telegraphed him to put a tumbler over it on the ground and keep it there until he was able to go and collect it himself.

When he was not collecting, cataloguing, peering at, and writing about ants. Horace Donisthorpe liked to throw lavish and rambunctious parties at his home in Kensington Mansions, and managed to dissipate much of his fortune in doing so. Just as I shall not be celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day in carouse and revelry, nor will I paint the town red in memory of Donisthorpe. But we should all remember him on this, his 142nd birthday. What better way to mark it than to let him have the last word, in the form of one of the many, many notes he contributed over the years to The Entomologist’s Record & Journal Of Variation?

Homoptera devoured by a bird.

At a recent meeting of the Entomological Society of London, my friend Mr. Eltringham gave an account of some attacks by birds on Lepidoptera, and he said that all such occurrences should be put on record. This no doubt holds good with other insects as well as Lepidoptera, hence the following note.

On June 20th, 1927, at 6.30 a.m., I was looking out of my bedroom window into the garden when I noticed a starling, which settled on a lavender bush, all covered with “cuckoo-spits.” It proceeded to deliberately pick out from the froth all the larval Frog-hoppers, and eat them. I should think this is not a very usual proceeding, as otherwise a flock of Starlings would clear a garden in a very short time, and none of the insects be left. The late Dr. Sharp did, I believe, say that the object of the froth was to attract a wasp, which preyed on the Frog-hoppers! This, however, is not the view usually held by scientists.

Further reading and listening.

Many of the ant-papers by Donisthorpe listed above can be read online, following the links at the Global Ant Project.

Untold thousands of you may have been particularly eager to read this essay, under the misapprehension that it would be devoted to Certain Ants, the legendary quartet of improv racket makers of long ago. You will not be disappointed for long, because if you click here you can listen to a vintage recording.

On Soviet Hen Coops

Soviet Hen Coops is the latest bestseller by blockbuster paperbackist Pebblehead, a sweeping and magisterial cross-cultural history of poultry under Communism. On the face of it, this seems an unlikely subject for a book which has been flying off the shelves of airport bookstalls and has, in the past week alone, earned Pebblehead more money in royalties than J K Rowling has had hot dinners. But then, in the hands of the potboilerist, the most unpromising material is handled with such mastery and aplomb that, in places, it reads like the most nerve-wrenching and nail-biting and heart attack-inducing of thrillers.

So I am told, in any case, as I have not yet read it myself. A while ago, I set myself the task of reading the entire Pebblehead canon, to date, in chronological order, and I do not wish to cheat. Thus far I have reached the autumn of 1972 (Swarthy Fiends In Dungeons Grim) and have a couple of hundred titles to get through before I catch up with the latest tome. Thus I have relied on a specially-empanelled panel of readers to report to me their responses to Soviet Hen Coops. In choosing the panel, I was careful to exclude those with expert knowledge either of Soviet Communism or of hens, for Pebblehead is nothing if not a populist, and it is the general reader, and indeed the barely literate halfwit, for whom the bulk of his output is intended.

Initial reactions were overwhelmingly positive, with the panel giving the book an overall rating of “Fantastic!”. Converted into numerals, this worked out as 10 out of 10, though a couple of panel members were keen to go up to 11. As a sample of a detailed critique, I have plucked this from the pile of written reports:

Having never read a Pebblehead book before, or indeed any books at all, I was absolutely riveted to my armchair. Knowing nothing of Russia and its satellite states in the years between 1917 and 1992, the whole Communism thing was new to me, as was the stuff about poultry, for I have never been near a hen coop in my life, suffering as I do from an allergy to bird feathers. At times it was like reading an adventure story, or as I imagine it might be to read an adventure story. I had to grip the arms of my armchair and cling on by my fingertips, because I got so excited I thought I might topple out of it and fall on the floor. And because  I was holding on so tight to the armchair I could not at the same time hold the book, so I had to have a sort of makeshift lectern erected in front of me, to rest the book upon, and I had to employ an unpaid intern from a nearby orphanage to turn the pages for me. And turn the pages they did, for this book is a real page turner! If I have one criticism, it is that Pebblehead does not tell us anything whatsoever about the state of hens and hen coops in the immediate pre-Soviet era, so we cannot place the state and circumstances and milieu of the Communist hen in any context.

I should interrupt the critique here to let slip some inside knowledge. I have it on good authority that Pebblehead is currently hard at work, in his so-called chalet o’ prose, on a prequel tentatively entitled Tsarist Hen Coops. Clearly, he did not wish to duplicate his material.

One chapter I found particularly thrilling was that which deals, in spellbinding detail, with the sudden and complete transformation of Cheka hen coops into OGPU hen coops on the sixth of February 1922. The footnote which lists other notable events to happen on the sixth of February, including, in 1958, the Munich Air Disaster, is the best footnote I have ever read. It is true I have only read half a dozen footnotes in toto, the ones in this book, but of those six this one is by far the best.

Another passage which had me gulping for air and requiring urgent medical attention was the part about the creation of Potemkin hen coops designed to pull the wool over the eyes of useful poultry idiots, the hen equivalents of Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Reports went back to West European and American hens about the idyllic lives of their Soviet sisters, leading to unrest and kerfuffle in a number of farmyards. I would have liked to learn more about Soviet eggs, but

I am going to interrupt here again, to point out that Pebblehead’s next scheduled blockbuster, when he has finished writing Tsarist Hen Coops, will almost certainly be a fat doorstopper entitled Eggs In The Soviet Union.

Actually, I think we have had quite enough of that readers’ report. I think it is clear from her enthusiasm that yet again Pebblehead has pulled out all the stops and produced a rollicking rollercoaster of a narrative. I just wish I knew how he does it. Day in, day out, he sits there in his Alpine fastness, pipe clenched between his jaws, pounding the keys of that battered Fabiocapello typewriter, which long ago, in 1977, lost its J and K keys and as a result forced on him a complete rethink of his prose style.

Please note that Soviet Hen Coops is entirely devoted to hen coops in the Soviet Union, and nowhere concerns itself with the card game Soviet Hen Coop. My spies tell me that Pebblehead will turn his attention to this exciting pastime once he has bashed out Tsarist Hen Coops and Eggs In The Soviet Union and one or two other books he has in the pipeline. It will certainly be a title to look forward to, not least because Pebblehead himself has been called the king of Soviet Hen Coop players, regularly winning tournaments and having his name engraved over and over and over again on several golden and pewter trophies which he keeps lined up on the mantelpiece in his chalet o’ prose, and dusts with a rag on the rare occasions he can tear himself away from his typewriter.

FBI

I always thought that ‘FBI’ referred to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, but today I learned that the letters actually stand for the Farmland Bird Index.

Now I will be able to make sense of even the most convoluted plot in an American crime drama. All those agents are in fact engaged in the counting and classification of birds. The veil has been lifted from mine eyes!

12774

FBI Agent

bird

Bird