The other day I visited two current art exhibitions, at galleries across the road from one another. Physically proximate, their contents could not have been more different, and it is instructive to compare them. Well, not really instructive, as that implies learning something, and I learned nothing. My head grows ever emptier as days go by. This is entirely deliberate, as I am signed up to a course of evening classes in the mystic oriental discipline of Goon Fang, the aim of which is to achieve a state of oneness with the universe by emptying the head of all non-essentials. For the true Adept of Goon Fang, almost everything is inessential. I can by no means describe myself as an Adept, for I am at the “Wearer of a Dashing Cravat” level, so low in the hierarchy that, to deploy an analogy with sea creatures, I would be one of those weird blind flat albino beings that skitter near the sea bed, demersal rather than pelagic. I still have far too much in my head.

Thus it was on the recommendation of my Goon Fang Master that I visited the first exhibition. While hitting me repeatedly on the bonce with a stout stick, he explained that whole swathes of my brain would be emptied of content by my spending half an hour in the gallery. He was right, but then he always is. So decisive was the emptying that, in order to write this piece, I have had to reconstruct the forgotten details of my visit through a Goon Fang technique I cannot divulge to the hoi polloi.

The exhibition at the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery presents a series of “installations” and “interventions” which aim to “interrogate” notions of “reified re-re-re-representation” in late capitalist “faff”, “twaddle”, “the Other”, and “pap”. I apologise for all those inverted commas, but the expensively-produced catalogue insists on them. So what did I see? Well, in one room – sorry, “space” – there was an “Occupy” tent, which had apparently been erected outside a cathedral for months on end, next to which was an opened milk-carton, an abandoned mitten, and some breadcrumbs. The title of this “work” was a lengthy quotation from some preposterous Slovenian “philosopher and cultural critic” whose name I cannot recall, other than that it had at least two ‘Z’s in it. Several nanoseconds spent gawping at this “installation” made me realise the great wisdom of my Goon Fang Master, for I could actually feel my brain emptying itself out. Had I spent more time in the gallery, and taken in some of the other exhibits, I might, to return to the sea creature analogy, have been floating upwards from the sea bed so rapidly that I would suffer from the bends. I shall have to ask my Master what to do in those circumstances.

But quite frankly, I could not bear to spend a moment longer in the midst of this drivel. I went outside for a cigarette and it was then I noticed, across the road, another art gallery. On impulse, and narrowly avoiding a collision with a bicycle wanker, I pranced towards its entrance, not even bothering to find out what was on show.

It turned out to be an absolutely fantastic display of over three dozen Vanbrugh chicken paintings. They all looked remarkably similar – a white chicken with a red crop, pictured in a sort of generic farmyard setting – but I am one of those people who know the great secret, that within each of the paintings there is hidden a tiny, talismanic emblem. Find them, and correlate them, and you end up, not just with a series of Vanbrugh chicken paintings, but with an esoteric key to unutterable mysteries. As they are unutterable, I can say nothing more about them. What I can say is that I spent a profitable seventeen hours closely scanning the paintings with my pocket microscope, until I was thrown out of the gallery by a factotum. I was back, waiting impatiently at the entrance, the next morning, and for several days after that. There were lots of paintings to study, some of them quite huge, and finding all those hidden emblems was no easy matter. In some cases, that tiny little brushstroke you think is the edge of an emblem turns out, after all, to be nothing more than an exquisitely rendered Vanbrugh chicken feather. In others, you can spot the emblem relatively quickly, but wreaking the meaning from it can send a man mad.

On one day, I asked my Goon Fang Master if he would accompany me to the gallery. How naïve of me! I fully deserved the bash on the bonce with a stout stick I received. My Master explained to me, in an exasperated manner, that to seek ultimate meaning in the Vanbrugh chicken paintings went against all the tenets of Goon Fang. The sooner I returned to the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery and gazed upon twaddle, the sooner would my brain empty out, and the sooner would I rise to the surface of the sea, become pelagic rather than demersal. He had a point.

He had a point, and I had a throbbing head. But I could not tear myself away from the Vanbrugh chicken paintings. I had found all but three of the hidden emblems, but the jottings in my notebook, made with my trusty propelling pencil, were worse than meaningless until those last three were added. Find them, and I could correlate them all, and be given the key to unlock whatever it was I had to unlock to gain access to the unutterable mysteries. I was driven on by the thought that, if I was privy to those mysteries, I could get hold of a stout stick and bash the Goon Fang Master’s bonce in retaliation. That might teach him a thing or two! As I said, I was hopelessly naïve.

Thursday came, and I was distraught to discover that the Vanbrugh chicken exhibition had been taken down, the paintings loaded on to a lorry and driven to an important sea port and loaded on to a container ship and taken away to a far and foreign land. I wrapped my cravat tighter around my neck and slumped in the doorway of the Cosmo Hoxtonwanker gallery, ruined by art.

Boffins recently conducted a study which showed that, of all aquatic birds, the swan was least responsive to reggae music. As so often happens in science, the findings were counter-intuitive. We would expect swans to be more susceptible to reggae than, say, coots or herons, but it is difficult to argue with the boffins. At no fewer than a dozen sites, including ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres, they set up scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae music, from dawn till dusk, and in some cases from dusk till dawn too. Careful observation of the behaviour of all forms of bird life in the experimental zones, and analysis of electroencephalograms generated by sensors attached to the heads of selected birds, were combined with several other avian-reggae methodologies, and the results were clear. While some coots, herons, ducks, reed warblers and moorhens showed a marked response to roots stylee rhythms, every single monitored swan was utterly impervious, and went about its business, by turns gliding with matchless elegance through the water or savagely attacking things, as is the swanny way.

In one phase of the experiment, the non-stop pounding from scores of loudspeakers of classic tracks from Peter Tosh, Misty In Roots, King Tubby and others was accompanied by the display, on hoardings erected next to the experimental ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres, of large portraits of Marcus Garvey, Haile Selassie, and Jah Rastafari, the latter two being more or less indistinguishable. Most of these portraits were daubed in red and gold and green and black, irrespective of the range of the colour spectrum visible to birds, which is a separate area of study and one which neither I nor the boffins have pursued. Herons proved to be the birds most drawn to Jah, in some cases seemingly almost hypnotised by the combination of sound and image, though buffleheads scored highly here too. Once again, swans showed no response whatsoever to the visual stimulus, gliding past the hoardings with matchless elegance or savagely attacking unrelated things in the vicinity, as is the swanny way.

The study has sent shock waves through both the reggae and the aquatic bird communities, one upshot being a particularly vituperative war of words erupting in the correspondence columns of the leading academic journal devoted to both fields. It was in a long article in Aquatic Birds And Reggae Weekly that the boffins first announced their findings, with lots of diagrams and even a photograph or two of a boffin attaching a brain sensor to the head of a reed warbler. Now the letters pages have been expanded to fill over half of the magazine, as rival boffins contend with each other. Perhaps the most constructive reaction has been from Professor Lars Talc of the School Of Applied Swan Studies at the University of Qaasuitsup in Northwest Greenland. Working with a team of reggae experts and swan lovers, he has posited the idea of creating “reggae for swans”, a specific sub-genre of the music designed to somehow bash into their birdy brains a deep and responsive enthusiasm for the music which they seem to shun.

As part of the project, one group has been assembling as much documentation as possible on any pronouncements Jah Rastafari made, or is alleged to have made, on the subject of swans. Certain wicked persons in Babylon have been putting it about that the material thus far gathered is all forged, counterfeit, or otherwise false. Wicked or not, this charge is convincing in the case of a woollen knitted baggie beanie hat on to which has been embroidered the phrase “I And I ♥ Swans”. It is exceedingly unlikely that this hat actually belonged to Jah himself, as is claimed.

Professor Talc has also suggested that the scores of loudspeakers pounding out non-stop reggae music erected next to the ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres in the experimental zone be made permanent. Indeed, he has gone as far as to say, from his quiet retreat in the Arctic wastes of Northwest Greenland, that wherever on earth swans are to be found, they should be subjected to constant reggae music blasting out of loudspeakers. This has not gone down well with fuddy-duddies who wish to preserve the peace and tranquility of many ponds, reservoirs, lakes, riversides, and meres. Nor does the idea find favour with wet blanket bird welfare types who accuse the Professor of swan cruelty. In response to the latter charge, he has issued a long-winded and in places incomprehensible press release, in which he states baldly that his eventual aim is to create what he calls “a modified swan”, genetically programmed not only to enjoy reggae music but actually to require it in order to remain alive. No wonder Talc has been compared to a latter-day Frankenstein.

There are no swans in Africa.

It came as something of a shock when I learned that my fate was written in the stars. I had no idea that every last particular of my life, from cradle to grave, was foretold in the barely visible movements, thousands and millions of miles away, of fiery burning rocks scattered across the sky. As soon as I learned this, I was avid to know what lay in store for me. Only then did I realise that I could not read the stars, so I went to consult a stargazer.

He ushered me in to his observatory, high on a promontory, and tapped a spindly finger on the end of his telescope. He bade me peer through it, and I saw manifold stars, impossibly distant, burning bright in the night sky.

“Gosh!” I said, “How lovely they are. Yet to me, senseless, devoid of meaning.”

“That is where I come in,” he said, lighting his pipe and puffing on it with the air of a great sage. Then he faffed about with some gubbins and projected the image seen through the telescope on to a canvas screen.

“See this star?”, he said, pointing with a pointy stick at one bright twinkle among the myriad, “This is your guiding star.”

I could only say “Gosh!” again.

“The official name of this star is B76428-552,” he said, “But that is a dull as ditchwater name for a star, so, as with other stars, we give it a more memorable nickname.”

“And what is the nickname of my guiding star?” I asked.

“We call it Fascist Groove Thang,” he said, “It is among a cluster of stars nicknamed after pop records made thirty-odd years ago, when it was first observed through my mighty telescope. I have kept a careful eye on it ever since. That is how I knew you would come to visit me in my observatory today, though I must have misread the signs and portents, for you arrived ten minutes later than I expected.”

“Ah,” I said, “The delay was on account of important roadworks at the Blister Lane Bypass. My bus was diverted down a side road rife with lupins.”

The stargazer puffed his pipe, even more sagely.

“Still, that is a conundrum, and one I must puzzle out. The stars ought to have foretold the important roadworks. They almost certainly did. Much more likely that I somehow misread the signs and portents. I am getting a bit slapdash in my dotage, and my eyesight is no longer what it was. Once it was piercing, like a hawk.”

I commiserated with him, recommended some proprietary eye-drops, and then begged him to reveal what the stars told him about my future. He used the pointy stick to describe arcs and angles across the screen, and finally pointed once again at Fascist Groove Thang, so bright! so twinkly!

“Well, Ivan Denisovich,” he said, “It seems that next Thursday, you will meet a tall, dark stranger, you may have a stroke of good luck, and an opportunity may arise at work. Also, there may be an incident involving a dog, or possibly a tortoise.”

“Wow!” I said, “The person who told me that my fate was laid out in detail in the stars obviously knew what they were talking about. That’s four things that will happen on just one day of my allotted span.”

The stargazer’s countenance suddenly darkened. He took a long, sage, puff on his pipe and he frowned.

“I hope you do not intend to ask me, as some others have done, what is writ upon the stars regarding the precise duration of your allotted span,” he said.

Now, call me a fathead, but the blindingly obvious had not even occurred to me. Of course, if my fate were foretold, that would include the date and indeed the circumstances of my death.

“Actually, no,” I said, “Right this minute I am more concerned about this business with the tortoise next Thursday.”

The stargazer relaxed.

“I did not say it would necessarily be a tortoise. I said there might – might – be an incident involving a dog or a tortoise.”

“Well,” I said, “Could you not peer a bit harder, or describe slightly more precise arcs and angles with your pointy stick, or do whatever it takes to read my guiding star, Fascist Groove Thang, more closely? I would really like to know if there definitely will be an incident, and if so, whether a dog or a tortoise will be involved.”

And I meant it. This is not the place to explain my preoccupation with tortoises – particularly with Thursday tortoises – but it is very real, and exhausting, and occasionally almost fatal.

“I can draw up a chart,” said the stargazer, “Which will break next Thursday down into ten-minute chunks. I will have to observe Fascist Groove Thang more closely, through an even more powerful telescope, in an even bigger observatory upon an even higher promontory. But if that is what you wish, so be it. Bear in mind that the chart will be unintelligible to one with such a puny brain as yours, so I will have to interpret it for you. And of course one must always take account of the vicissitudes of cloud cover. But I think I should be able to come up with a definitive narrative of events, rich in detail, including even the name of the tortoise, if it turns out there is a tortoise involved in the incident, if of course there is an incident.”

“That would be dandy,” I said, and I forked over the stargazer’s hefty fee.

But would it be dandy? Bitter experience told me that tortoises on Thursday spelled ruination and destruction of all my hopes, ever since that picnicking fiasco in Shoeburyness. The less said about it the better, if I wished to retain my sanity. I went to sit in the stargazer’s waiting room, while he pootled off to a bigger observatory on a higher promontory. He had not told me how long it would take him to read my fate in the stars, but he said that if I went and peered through his telescope at Fascist Groove Thang from time to time, I might be able to discern the signs and portents of his return, and the cast of his countenance, and whether the news he brought back with him was good, or bad, or worse… even fatal.

He has been gone now for six days. Tomorrow is Thursday. I have no idea what tidings he will bring, for all I have seen through his telescope is a scattering across the sky of burning fiery rocks, impossibly distant, devoid of meaning, senseless, senseless.

We wish to insert, into the subject’s mental and emotional innards, the qualities of gumption and pluck. For this purpose we resort to specially prepared pickles.

The first step is the preparation of the subject. A ravening hunger for pickles must be created and maintained. There are various methods, most of which involve prolonged starvation accompanied by the eventual provision of jars packed with pickles, and potable water. There are ethical questions to be dealt with, but these can be swept aside, in grand and foppish manner, by appealing to the greater good. Note that one must on all accounts avoid a situation where one is asked to define the greater good, or to say what it is greater than. If necessary, flee, scarper, or assume sudden cretinism.

Once the subject has been imbued with a desperate pickle craving, the pickles can be supplied. As stated, these must be specially prepared pickles, ones which impart gumption and pluck. So, actually, the first step is not the starvation of the subject but the preparation of the pickles. You have to have the pickles ready, for that moment when the subject is hammering their fists upon the skirting board or dado rail of the locked rumpus room, screeching for succour. At this point you must be ready to skip into the room, beaming and jolly, and bearing jars of pickles and a pot of potable water. It helps, too, to have an electrified pole, akin to a cattle prod, with which to zap the subject should he or she attempt to shove you out of the way and scamper from the room in search of unpickled foodstuffs. Usually the subject will be sufficiently weakened to make such shoving and scampering unlikely, but some subjects are wilier and more cunning than others. Wiliness and cunning are the characteristics we wish to expunge and replace by gumption and pluck.

What, then, must one do to the pickles? What indeed? It is not as if the ordinary common or garden pickle is somehow magically engumptioned or implucked, in and of itself. It is not. It is just a pickle. For our purposes, we must have recourse, as so often, to the wisdom of the ancients. More accurately, we must impart a modern twist to the wisdom of the ancients. The ancients, after all, did not have a ready supply of pickles in jars. They may have had certain items pickled in amphorae, yes, but that pickling process was probably undertaken for reasons other than the preparation of tasty and toothsome snacks. Bear in mind that we want the subject to shovel the pickles down their gob with unalloyed gusto, not to gag and become overwhelmed with nausea, as might happen if the pickles are of the kind favoured by the ancients. The ancients were uninterested in gumption and pluck, generally speaking, qualities which became valued later in history.

You will be pleased to learn that you need not remove the pickles from their jars. Simply align the jars in a row upon your counter, then cover them with a tablecloth or blanket. Do ensure that the tablecloth or blanket is freshly boiled and laundered and bears no trace of grime or grease or filth or minuscule creepy crawly life form. Then make passing gestures with one’s outstretched arms over the entableclothed or enblanketted line of pickle jars, palms downward, while intoning the following incantation in a low, ghoulish murmur:

“Spavin. Gecko. Distemper. Hod. Blackguard. O. O. O. Crusty. Bingle. Poop deck. Flan.”

Repeat hundreds of times until you see an eerie, almost invisible vapour – a piquant vapour – rising from the tablecloth or blanket. Then remove it, with one deft flick, revealing the pickle jars. They will look exactly the same as they did before you covered them, but if the wisdom of the ancients is to be trusted, they are now jars packed with pickles ready to be modified. It is a sobering thought that one could, if one were a malefactor, imbue the pickles with one or more of the seven deadly sins. Imagine the havoc one could unleash! But one does not, for one is working for the greater good, is one not?

Injecting, with a syringe, essence of gumption and pluck into the pickle jars is a simple enough matter which need not detain us here. Seal the tiny holes made in the jar lids by the syringe with special wax. Leave for half an hour, then turn all the jars upside down one by one to ensure that the waxen seals hold fast.

There is one further magick bit of flummery to enact before taking the jars to the subject imprisoned and starving in the rumpus room. Obtain an infant and gently tap each pickle jar against its fontanelle, while you imitate the song of the wheatear.

When you have taken the jars and the potable water into the rumpus room, make a quick exit and lock the door again. If you press your ear against the door you should, if all goes well, hear the subject unscrewing the lids from the jars and gobbling down the pickles and glugging the potable water. In no circumstances should you unlock the door just yet. Go for a stroll in a scented garden for the blind, making at least three circuits of the path. When you return, fling open the rumpus room door and bid the subject to go forth, with gumption and pluck.

There have been cases where the subject has failed to respond in the expected manner. If this happens, review very carefully your preparations at all stages of the process. We all make mistakes.

It was blue, it rotated, and it smelled of birds. The blue was cerulean, the rotation was slow and juddery. It was a general sort of bird smell, one could not with any certainty say ‘ostrich!’ or ‘guillemot!’, much as one might wish to. That slow, juddery rotation was accompanied by a very faint clanking noise, so faint that a passer-by, huffing and puffing up the hill, might think he imagined it, as he reached the top, put down his bag, and lit his pipe, perplexity furrowing his forehead as he puffed on the savagely bitter cheap Serbian tobacco, the flesh around his piggy eyes crinkling. If moles or other burrowing creatures had created a temporary tussock on the hilltop, the passer-by might sit on it a while to rest his legs, perhaps take off his big boots and socks, and pick in a desultory way at the sock wool before examining his feet with greater diligence. Flesh the colour of curd, little red sores on his toes, but his eyes would be drawn to that cerulean blue, and he would forget his feet. His socks were blue, too, but that was just a coincidence. His boots were dappled and dun, like a cow’s colouring might be, in a land where there were cows to be seen, unlike this land.

If fog came down and swirled about our passer-by, he would be reluctant to move. With his piggy-eyed vision occluded, that clanking noise would seem less faint, as his hearing grew sharper. Perhaps, too, once he had tapped out his pipe on a stone and the last wisps of the acrid Serbian smoke dispersed, he would become aware of the smell of birds, where there were no birds’ nests.

At the bottom of the hill there is a sordid tavern where miscreants and ne’er-do-wells plot acts of the utmost fiendishness, and cackle as they do so. The tavern’s walls are trimmed with gimp passementerie. It is Shrove Tuesday, so pancakes are being served. Unfortunately, the pancakes have been made with contaminated flour, and in days to come this scene will be referred to as The Mass Poisoning Horror Of Cackpod, Cackpod being the name of the village at the bottom of the hill, or one of its names, for it has others, in other tongues, this being a country of ten different languages, some of them spoken by only a smattering of citizens, and that smattering in its collective dotage.

Our traveller, with his foul pipe tobacco, is not in his dotage, and he crashes excitedly through the tavern door, having scurried down the hillside at the first hint of the fog lifting. There is something in his manner that suggests he is unused to the company of ruffians. There is a throbbing in his pituitary gland and beads of sweat upon his brow. He has of course put back on his socks and boots, and tucked his pipe into the breast pocket of his Austrian Postal Service jacket. Standing at the bar of this repulsive tavern, he asks the landlady for a refreshing, minty potage, with foam on top. He is thinking about cerulean blue, juddery rotation, and the smell of birds, and in his frazzled mind he is swept back to that day years and years ago when he danced a fandangoid hoocha with a floozie who wore a cerulean blue frock and span around like a wild thing as she danced, and though she did not smell of birds she had something of the look of a crow, bright black eyes and a corvine nose, and, yes, her hat was made of feathers, was it not?

The ne’er-do-wells ignore the newcomer, for they are too busy gobbling down the poisoned pancakes which, within hours, will find them writhing and groaning in the sawdust of the tavern floor. Emboldened by the first few sips of his foamy potation, however, the traveller asks the landlady, “I say, what is that thing on top of yon hill, that blue rotating thing that smells of birds?”

His voice is loud, and resounds in the stifling fug of the tavern, and there is a sudden silence. The landlady busies herself, pointedly polishing a tankard with a rag. Every single rapscallion stops chewing on his pancake. A dog that had been curled asleep at the foot of the pianola gets to its feet and pads slowly out of sight into a dark back room. The clock above the bar stops ticking. All is still, and silent, and heavy with menace.

Eventually – it seems as if hours have passed – the ancient dog reappears, and lies down in the doorway. The sounds of chewing and munching and clinking tankards start up again. The landlady flings her rag on to the floor and dishes up more plates piled with pancakes. Queasily aware that he has said something untoward, the traveller slurps down his potage and takes his leave, edging past the sleeping hound. He does not know that within hours all the pancake eaters will be dead and gone, that the dog is tormented by nightmares, that the tavern will be condemned and fall to ruin.

He steps outside. The sky is black. He peers with piggy eyes up to the top of the hill, but the blue rotating thing that smells of birds is engulfed in darkness and no longer visible. He turns to trudge towards Cackpod railway station. The image of that floozie flickers before him, and now he remembers how she winched him onto a ship from the rock where he had been abandoned for forty days, and how they danced and danced the tarantella, and how her frock was blue, and how she span, and how as midnight struck on the tavern clock she turned into a crow.

[Originally posted in July 2006.]

There I was, crumpled and decisive, standing between two trees on the edge of the Blister Lane Bypass. The trees were both yews, I think. I was looking for curlews. The first one I saw was made of plastic, it was a toy or perhaps a decorative figurine. It had been abandoned in the gutter. Then I saw a second curlew, swooping across the blue, blue sky. I did not know it then, but within hours there would be no blue to be seen, for dark and brooding thunderclouds would waft in from the east. A third curlew appeared in my mind’s eye. It was gigantic and ferocious and terrifying. I shuddered. I walked away from the yews, in the direction of Bodger’s Spinney, pulling my resplendent teal cardigan tight about my torso. There was a fourth curlew, an embroidered one, on my necktie. Why in the name of heaven was I wearing a necktie? All of a sudden this length of fabric wrapped around my neck felt like a hangman’s noose. I took it off, with violent jerks, and discarded it in a puddle, where it would remain until discovered later that day by a scavenging hobbledehoy from The Bashings, that gloomy cluster of huts which sane people shirk. Oh, as the tie dropped into the puddle I saw a fugitive reflection in the water of the embroidered curlew, so that made five. It was still only ten in the morning.

By five past ten I had seen another dozen curlews, or it may have been a single curlew seen twelve times, I cannot be altogether certain. I was standing on Sawdust Bridge at the time, feeling hopeless and disgruntled and cantankerous. The tunic I was wearing beneath my cardigan, which I had stolen from an ingrate, was playing havoc with my [invented skin disease], and rashes were appearing. My doctor had prescribed a daily dose of some sort of bean mashed up into a bowl of milk of magnesia, and I had forgotten to take my dose that morning, so keen was I to see curlews.

Later I took a mop and began to clean the floor of one of the corridors in an ugly building which shall remain nameless. I was indoors now, so unlikely to see any curlews. But lo!, little Maisie – a polka-dot-dressed orphan whose parents perished in the Tet Offensive – came rushing up to me clutching her stamp album and showed me her latest acquisitions, a set of twenty bird-related thematics issued by the Tantarabim Interim Authority. I could not help but note, as I shared my Brazil nuts with starving Maisie, that eight of the stamps depicted curlews.

On my way home, as the evening closed in and dark thoughts of skulduggery frolicked in my throbbing skull, I saw a dead curlew on the canal towpath. Bird detectives had already thrown a cordon around it, so I was unable to take a closer look.

That night, by candlelight, I took out my ledger and gave names to each of the twenty-six curlews I had seen. Alcibiades, Bim, Chumpot, Dromedary, Eidolon, Flaps, Gash, Heliogabalus, Inthod…. That is how I started my list. Then I recalled that I had set out to see forty-four curlews. I gnashed my teeth in misery and dejection. And I recalled that I had forgotten to wring out the mop.

You will recognise the above as an extract from Dobson’s pamphletto A Description Of And Reverie Upon Forty-Four Curlews (out of print). Note that I use the word “pamphletto” to distinguish this work from the general run of pamphlets spewed out by Dobson. Note, too, that at this time, and in this place, I am not going to explain the difference between the pamphlets and the pamphlettos. Let it gnaw away at your mental innards, if you will.

Our purpose today is to subject the text to analysis. I have been asked innumerable times – well, numerable, in that I can count the times I have been asked, on the fingers of one maimed hand – whether Dobson is telling the truth, or making the whole thing up. No matter how rigorous our analysis, irrespective of the analytical techniques employed, I am afraid to say this is an unanswerable question. One would need to delve deep into the biography of the pamphleteer, deeper than anyone with working wits in their head has ever seen fit to delve, to pronounce the passage true or false. It may even be a combination of the two, partly fact and partly fiction. Or Dobson may have sincerely believed it to be true, when it was actually an hallucination, or a series of hallucinations, brought on by exhaustion or the jangles or entrancement by a tiny sinister gnome-like fellow dressed all in green. It is unlikely we will ever know.

This is not to say that we cannot analyse the passage, using certain techniques developed by Blötzmann, to ascertain the more important question of whether Dobson would have known a curlew when he saw one. After all, he was a man of boundless ornithological ignorance, as is attested not only by his inamorata Marigold Chew and by several of his acquaintances, not all of them shady characters, but by the pamphleteer himself, in his own words, notably in the pamphlet My Boundless Ornithological Ignorance, Together With A Paean Of Praise To Googie Withers (out of print). And careful study of the present text reveals that, in spite of the promise in the title to describe forty-four curlews, Dobson barely has a word to say about their appearance. Let us tabulate, in an objective tabulating manner, what he does say.

Curlew Number One : plastic

Curlew Number Two : swooping

Curlew Number Three : gigantic, ferocious and terrifying, but also imaginary

Curlew Number Four : embroidered

Curlew Number Five : Curlew Number Four reflected in a puddle

It is with reluctance that I am going to abandon my exciting tabulation, or tabulature, so soon, but quite frankly Dobson has nothing whatsoever to say about the other twenty-one curlews he claims to have seen that day, at least nothing that persuades us they were actually curlews as opposed to, say, godwits or pratincoles or starlings. At no point does he describe what he is looking at in the kind of detail we would like if we were to be convinced that he knew what he was talking about.

This is the level of piercing insight one is able to gain by applying Blötzmannist analysis techniques to a piece of text, although of course it is only piercing when the text under scrutiny mentions birds. Absent birds, and you are left rudderless, disorientated and whirling ever more rapidly into a maelstrom of mental chaos. Or so I am told. By Blötzmann himself. Shouting his head off. On the blower.

NOTE : Many thanks to Vincent Byrne for “pamphletto”. (And “booklettes”, not yet deployed.)