And the Lord came unto the plains of Gath. And he was footsore, having walked for many days without rest. And he sat him down upon one of the tussocks which grow upon the plains of Gath. Then there came a widow woman driving before her a goat. And the goat was thin and bony and of Satanic mien. And the Lord said unto the widow woman:

“Woman! I am your Lord and I am footsore having walked for many days without rest. I have great thirst. Succour me with milk from your goat. This I command.”

Thereupon the widow woman did stop upon her journey and she tied her goat with a halter to a post that was stuck fast in the earth upon the plains of Gath. And she sat down upon the tussock next to the Lord and took from her pouch an infusion of herbs and roots all rolled in the leaf of a phryxinga shrub and one end of this she ignited with fire from heaven and she breathed in the fumes thereof.

“My goat is old and tired and thin and bony and has no milk to give,” said the widow woman.

“Then thou shalt roast in the pits of hell for eternity,” said the Lord.

But before the Lord could make good his threat there came passing upon the plains of Gath several more widow women, some with goats and some with widows’ mites. And the Lord was sore affrighted. Then the widows all together began a keening and a caterwauling and made so mighty a din that the Lord placed his hands over his ears. And the goats did join in, braying, and the widows’ mites did join in, buzzing. And so great was the racket of the keening and the braying and the buzzing that the sun itself trembled and hid and darkness fell upon the plains of Gath.

Then from out of the darkness there came a minstrel toiling across the plains of Gath. And when he came upon the Lord and the widow women and the goats and the widows’ mites he did stop and he placed his lyre upon the ground and listened. And when after many hours passed and the hubbub ceased the minstrel did speak unto the widow women.

“Women! I have come far, for I am of a brutish Germanic tribe, a stranger in the plains of Gath. I am a minstrel, but I have put aside my lyre for I am bewitched by the din of your keening and caterwauling, and the braying of your goats, and the buzzing of your widows’ mites. Come follow me, on the long journey back to the tenebrous Teutonic forests from whence I came, that you might keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz to my tribespeople, for your racket will be as balm to their ears in the land of Improv.”

But before the widow women could follow the minstrel from that place, the Lord rose up from his tussock and with great fury he shouted,

“Is there not one among you who will give succour to your Lord in his grievous state upon the plains of Gath in the darkness?”

And there was silence. And then the sun did reappear, flooding the plains of Gath with light, and close by the tussock a fountain burst forth from the soil, shooting a jet of pure bubbling water high into the air. And the Lord did stand beneath it with his head upturned and his mouth open and he drank of the water. And when he was sated he took a rod and a staff and began to smite the widow women and the goats and the minstrel in terrible rage. But the widows’ mites were tiny and they buzzed away from the scene of the smiting. They buzzed to a cluster of huts just beyond the horizon where there lived a satrap and his minions. And hearing the buzzing of the widows’ mites the satrap and his minions took up their clubs and their staves and their sticks and they did rush like flies across the plains of Gath to the tussock where the Lord was in a great frenzy. And the lyre of the minstrel lay shattered and broken upon the ground.

And the satrap and his minions did set upon the Lord with all their might. And when he was bashed senseless they carried him away across the plains of Gath to their cluster of huts where they locked him up in durance vile. And the widow women and their goats did lick their wounds and dust themselves down and they were joined by the widows’ mites and they did follow the minstrel on a long journey to the tenebrous Teutonic forests where they did keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz and bewitch the tribespeople of Improv, yea unto every generation.

And in his dungeon in a cluster of huts upon the plains of Gath the Lord did bewail his fate. And there came unto him an angel, saying:

“Lord, I am an angel sent by another, greater Lord than thee. I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally. And sparkle out among the fern to bicker down a valley. It is the valley of the shadow of death and the valley along which you must walk unless you buck your ideas up. I shall fling open the doors of your prison if you will but pledge to crawl upon your belly across the plains of Gath and beyond, all the way to the far remote tenebrous Teutonic forests, there to seek forgiveness from the widow women and their goats and their widows’ mites and the minstrel. Do as I command, and when again they keen and caterwaul and bray and buzz, place not your hands over your ears, but stand upon a podium and wave a baton. And your eyes shall glint and your lank and greasy tresses will become as a bouffant. And you will be called Maestro.”

And the Lord did as he was bid by the angel, and he betook himself upon his belly to Improv in Ülm.

Here endeth the lesson.

There is an old joke, a proper chestnut, which begins “A mod and a rocker and a widow and an orphan walk into a bar…” The Oxford English Dictionary does not tell us why we use the word chestnut in this context. It says that the usage “probably” originated in the United States and, curiously, that “the newspapers of 1886–7 contain numerous circumstantial explanations palpably invented for the purpose”. What was in the air in those two years that suddenly made this a debatable issue? Perhaps there was a spate of chestnut madness, similar to the carrot madness that ran rife in Belgium and northern France in the 1850s. No convincing explanation has ever been given for the latter episode, and it happened too late to be addressed by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds (1841).

The bar into which the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan walk in the joke is usually specified to be a seafront bar, no doubt on account of the infamous seaside resort pitched battles between mods and rockers – though not between widows and orphans – in the mid-1960s. Interestingly, however, in one persistently popular variant of the gag, the punchline depends heavily on the bar being the drinking den known as the Tip Top Annexe, a rather seedy establishment on the Crescent in Aden, when it was Prince of Wales Crescent in the British Protectorate of Aden. This was close to the Grand Hotel De L’Univers, where Arthur Rimbaud fetched up on his arrival in Aden in August 1880. There is an echo of Rimbaud in some versions of the joke, when the rocker, or sometimes the widow, is said to have “dried [him- or herself] in the air of crime”. The joke works well enough with or without this observation, as indeed it does when it is not set in the Tip Top Annexe, so long as the punchline is modified accordingly.

In his study Draining The Last Vestiges Of Humour Out Of The Funniest Gags, the pop psychologist Dr Desmond Drain frets away, like a dog with a bone, at the idea that the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan are not, as we would assume, four persons, but two. In this reading, the mod is the widow and the rocker is the orphan. He goes on to posit, in further garbled analytical posturing, that they are a couple in love, smitten with each other, who, before entering the bar – which may or may not be the Tip Top Annexe – have had a tiff, because of a crime committed, either by the mod/widow or the rocker/orphan, where one sides with, or personifies, law and order, and the other represents the forces of crime, disorder, and even, at a pinch, existential chaos. Dr Drain’s own preconceptions and prejudices regarding the values inherent in the different types of music championed by mods and rockers tend to colour his argument, as does the fact that he was orphaned at an early age, when his parents died in the riots which occurred during the outbreak of citrus fruit madness in south coast seaside resorts in the 1970s. Whether or not one gives credence to his interpretation, most people agree that the joke works better with four protagonists rather than two.

Or rather, with five protagonists, for let us not forget that essential addendum, the barman who serves their drinks. Tip Top Annexe types like to have him wearing either a fez or a pith helmet, but any sort of headgear serves equally well. He does have to wear something on his head, however, simply to be able to incorporate into the joke the part where he takes it off and places it on the bar counter. As an experiment, I once told the joke without including this detail and, as expected, it fell completely flat. In fact, some among my audience were so miffed, in spite of being fully aware they had been assembled for the specific purpose of experimental joke-telling research, that they stooped to pick up pebbles and shingle from the beach and pelted me with them, until I had to make a run for it to the safety of the railway station. At least it was pebbles rather than shivs, otherwise it would have been like a scene from Brighton Rock. It was probably not a good idea to conduct my research at the seaside.

In some variants of the joke, though intriguingly not always those which insist upon the Tip Top Annexe setting in Aden, the barman’s appearance is given, and he closely resembles Arthur Rimbaud. We are told he has “the perfectly oval face of an angel in exile” (Verlaine), and is “sympathique… speaks little, and accompanies his brief comments with odd little cutting gestures with his right hand” (Bardey). It is with one of these cutting gestures that the barman accidentally knocks over the absinthe ordered by the mod – or sometimes by the rocker – leading directly to what today’s barbarians might call the “LOL moment, innit” midway through the joke, a particularly clever insertion as it is often taken as the punchline. That the joke then continues only serves to heighten the uproarious hilarity of its side-splitting conclusion. Where the odd little cutting gestures by the barman are absent, the glass of absinthe, or lemonade or vapido ague, is knocked over by another agency, which might be a gust of wind, a stray dog, or an invisible sprite.

It is the venerability of the joke, its status as an old chestnut – not a carrot nor a piece of citrus fruit – which has led, in years of telling and retelling, to so many variations. Their profusion has persuaded some that an effort ought to be made to recover the Ur-joke, stripped of all inessentials. One such attempt, attributed to the japester Fat Billy Cannonball, which has gone down a storm at certain northern seaside resorts, dispenses with the mod and the rocker and the widow and the orphan, and has Arthur Rimbaud himself, walking into the bar of the Grand Hotel De L’Univers on Prince of Wales Crescent in the British Protectorate of Aden on a specific day in August 1880, and ordering an absinthe, or “this sage-bush of the glaciers”, as he puts it. I have yet to hear this version in its entirety, but I have already been rendered helpless with mirth, and must roll about on the floor, convulsed, as if in the throes of a fit. Excuse me while I do just that.

I once had the unnerving experience of meeting, at a cocktail party in an Alpine skiing resort, a real, living and breathing chairlift dingbat. To say I was flabbergasted is an understatement. Like most people, I believed that the Alpine chairlift dingbat was a figure of myth, a boogie man of whom tales were told to frighten the tinies. But no. Here he was, leaning against a mantelpiece, nursing a glass of sfizziggio, telling amusing anecdotes to a rapt audience.

I turned to my companion and hissed, “You cannot seriously expect me to believe that this charming and insouciant fellow is a chairlift dingbat?”

My companion, who had steered me through the crowds to this corner of the room purposely to introduce me to the chairlift dingbat, put her finger to her lips.

“Hush,” she said, “Just wait and see.”

We waited for a break in the conversation and, when it came, my companion, with her effortless social skills, did as she had promised, drew the chairlift dingbat away from the mantelpiece, and introduced us. We talked for over an hour that evening, and parted, very late, having arranged to meet for het ontbijt in a spectacular Flemish cafe in the foothills of an important Alp the next morning. He failed to appear. When I returned to my hotel, all waffled up, I bumped into my companion in the lobby.

“No show,” I complained, “And I still don’t believe he is a chairlift dingbat. We talked for an hour at the cocktail party last night, and he was nothing if not sophisticated and amusing and insouciant. He betrayed no sign of being what you persist in claiming he is.”

“Did you ask him outright?” asked my companion.

“Of course not!” I protested, “It would be an unforgiveable social gaffe to ask such a question at a sophisticated cocktail party.”

“That is true,” she conceded, “And come to think of it, he is unlikely to have given an honest answer. Chairlift dingbats are careful to protect their anonymity when not actually lolling in the corner of a chairlift.”

“Meaning…?” I asked.

“Meaning that they carefully cultivate the demeanour of a chairlift dingbat but are adept at sloughing it off the moment they step out of the chairlift on to terra firma,” she said.

I had no idea what she was talking about, and I was too stodged with waffles to care.

“I am going to lie down in the dark,” I said.

As I lay in the dark, I thought about all I knew – or thought I knew – of chairlift dingbats. That they lurked, unseen, in the corners of chairlifts, waiting to accost the unsuspecting chairlift passenger on his ride to or from the top of an Alpine peak. That they had the appearance of singularly unappealing Swiss yokels and gave off an overpowering whiff of goat. That the babbling to which they subjected their victim was largely unintelligible. That within the confines of the chairlift, creaking on its cables, suspended over the treacherous snow-covered mountain slopes, to be trapped with a chairlift dingbat was a fate too horrible to imagine. That so repugnant was the mere presence of the chairlift dingbat that many a victim felt compelled to throw open the door of the chairlift and hurl themselves to certain death on the treacherous snow-covered mountain slopes below. That when the Alpine politti came to investigate the suicide, there was never a trace to be found of the chairlift dingbat, save for vestigial traces of goaty whiff, soon dispersed in the sparkling Alpine chill.

I sat up in the dark of my hotel room and poured myself a stiffener from the bottle of vapido ague on the bedside table. It was simply incomprehensible that the sophisticated chap who had amused me with anecdotes at a sophisticated cocktail party the night before could possibly be a chairlift dingbat. Dammit, surely such maddening creatures did not even exist, were but the invention of Alpine mythmakers and storytellers. Obviously the cocktail party guest and my companion were in cahoots, playing a trick on me, even now were probably sat together in the spectacular Flemish cafe laughing their heads off at my expense. I took another swig, put on my Christopher Plummer-style Tyrolean jacket, and headed out into the streets of the skiing resort. The air was cold and clear and crisp.

I had sat in the spectacular Flemish cafe a couple of hours ago. Now it was boarded up, and there was a sign in the window. “We have moved”, it said, in several different languages, in many of which I was fluent. I rummaged in my Tyrolean jacket pocket for my gazetteer, to ascertain the location of the new address. The cafe had moved to the summit of the important Alp at the foot of which lay the resort. It was now accessible only by chairlift.

I made my way to the chairlift station, and towards the worst horror of all.

Last night I dreamt I went to Pointy Town again. I was accompanied by an albino hen. Feather-footed we passed through the plashy fen. I awoke to the tolling chimes of Big Ben. Over breakfast I realised I had been dreaming in rhyme, by no means for the first time. I often dream in chunks of verse, and wonder if it’s a kind of curse, a restraint upon more free-form dreaming from which I might wake up beaming, joyous, happy as a lark, rather than misery-racked in the dark. I eat my breakfast in the rain and bewail my fate again.

Thus begins Dennis Beerpint’s verse memoir Dreams Of Pointy Town, in which the weedy poet describes one-hundred-and-forty-four dreams of Pointy Town. The challenge for the reader, apart from getting through this stuff without hurling the book across the room into the fireplace, is to use the various descriptions of Beerpint’s dream Pointy Town to construct a map of the place. This is not a challenge set by the poet, you understand. He couldn’t care less what you do with his book once you have bought a copy. No, it is a challenge I have set myself, to keep me occupied and out of mischief. If I don’t buckle down to such an activity, I might go haywire and start throwing citrus fruit into the sea. Much better that I sit at my escritoire with a large sheet of paper and a propelling pencil and a copy of Dennis Beerpint’s verse memoir, and make a cartographic interpretation of his words.

Here I might echo Marlow, the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness, who says “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps”. Beerpint quotes this very line, and goes on to say

I liked to fill in all the gaps between the roads and railway lines with strings of trees, larches and pines, whether they were actually there or not. Then one day while drawing I made a terrible blot, spilled black black ink on a map of Box Hill. I left it to dry out on the windowsill. While I was gone it was pecked at by linnets. As a youngster would say, “The birds ruined my map, innit?” Well, that’s what they would say, ungrammatically, today, but when I was young that barbarism had not yet sullied my native tongue.

Mindful of Beerpint’s warning, I was using a propelling pencil rather than pen and ink. I did not want to spend untold hours constructing a map of a dreamlike Pointy Town only to blot it with ink and place it on the windowsill to dry out and then to have it pecked at and ruined by linnets. Frankly, I do not know if the linnet is a regular visitor to my windowsill, but any beaked and pecking bird – that is, pretty much all of them – would inflict similar damage. That is the beauty of a propelling pencil.

But the sense of Beerpint’s rhymed remarks is that he was annotating an existing map with his childish strings of trees, scribbled in between roads and railway lines. It begs the question of what sort of map he was working with, if blank space was left between major roads and railway lines. What about rivers and copses and spinneys and tors and ponds and clusters of farm buildings and youth hostels and post offices, to name but some of the features detailed on any map worth its salt? I had drawn at least one of each of these on my own map very early on, very early indeed. In fact, I began by sketching in the course of the Great Frightening River and pinpointing the location of Bodger’s Spinney and the Sawdust Bridge Post Office. That done, I carefully placed my nascent map in a locked and lead-lined drawer, safe from the pecking beaks of linnets. Then I took a nap.

Unlike Dennis Beerpint, I do not dream in rhyme. However, during my forty winks, I did dream, and I dreamt of Pointy Town. Actually, that is not quite right. I dreamt, not of Pointy Town, but of Beerpint’s dream Pointy Town, complete with the albino hen and the plashy fen. When I woke – to the sound of a bevy of linnets crashing into my windowpane – I resolved to fight the sudden urge to go and throw citrus fruit in to the sea and to get back to work on my map. I removed it from the locked and lead-lined drawer and spread it out on my escritoire, but now I found myself befuddled. Swimming in my head now were two dream Pointy Towns, Beerpint’s original and my dream of a dream. Was I going to have to draw two separate maps? And what would happen next time I took a nap? I might dream of Pointy Town again, and it might be a dream of the real Pointy Town or a dream of Beerpint’s dream Pointy Town or a dream of my dream of Beerpint’s dream Pointy Town. I might be awakened by birds crashing into my windowpane to find I had another competing version of Pointy Town to construct a map of. If things went on in this fashion, the necessary maps would multiply incessantly.

That is when I had the idea of drawing a palimpsest map. I would create as many maps of dream Pointy Towns as I had cause to, but I would draw them all on the same big sheet of paper, one on top of another. And I would use the same propelling pencil for each map, so that the details of one would blend in with the details of all the others. This would make it difficult to use the map to find one’s way around the real Pointy Town, but, arguably, it would be much much easier to negotiate a dream path through a dream Pointy Town.

No longer befuddled, I was so happy that I thought I would give myself a treat. Locking the map in its lead-lined drawer, I hoisted a punnet over my shoulder and went out. On the lawn, several concussed linnets were staggering about. I pranced in sprightly steps down to the beach, and threw citrus fruit into the sea.

One of the most unlikely stars of the golden age of the variety theatre was the monologuist Zoltan Jiffy. His monologues, delivered in a booming, robotic monotone, were notorious for going on and on and on and on and on and on. And on. Audiences listened as if spellbound as he told anecdotes, devoid of interest or incident or rhythm or punchlines or anything remotely worth listening to, about topics such as drains and straw and windswept coastal headlands and emus and rutting deer and porches and crumpled paper and tin foil and capercaillies and Wells Fargo and dust and cruise ships and pin cushions and slime and tofu and mental aberrations and hopelessness and armoires and corporate sponsorship and the Great Dismal maroons and hens and albinos and grease and tongue twisters and woodland sprites and goats and hats and court jesters and plumpness and ostriches and vainglory and canned fruits and ampersands and driftwood and macadamia nuts and the Chosen One and balconies and thirst and gravel and designated smoking zones and vodka and shrimps and antimony and the naming of racehorses and the old rugged cross and the Munich air disaster and Rumpelstiltskin and shadows and grains and misanthropy and carrots and podcasts and squeegee merchants and domes and the lives of the saints and putting things in alphabetical order and disarranging them so they were no longer in alphabetical order and rearranging them into qwertyuiop order and disarranging them again and chucking them all out of the window one by one and watching as they plummeted to earth hundreds of feet below, some landing on the unprotected heads of pedestrians, causing injury and in some cases death and then hearing the sirens of both ambulances and police cars and the thumping of boots on the staircase and the urgent pounding at the door, before it was bashed in with main force by a SWAT team and gristle and pangs and knitting needles and sin and egg yolks and bolts of cloth and hendiadys and the river Nile and shabbiness and gumption and freaks and pictures of Jap girls in synthesis and you want to know what happened after the SWAT team bashed the door in, slovenliness and ink patterns and swamps and sewing circles and spelling bees and bees and caster sugar and swimming pools and candour and ullage and slaughter and being placed under arrest and dragged down to the police station and interrogated at length and donkeys and volcanoes and imps and frost and soup and brooms and figs and din and hedges and ergot poisoning and orchards and swollen rivers and cheque stubs and ornithology and vinegar and lapis lazuli and supermarkets and boll weevils and champions and moustaches and confessing to the whole kit and kaboodle and entering a plea of befuddled stupidity and sandalwood and concussion and drip dry laundry and goblins and chalk and power stations and opopanax and brutes and gas and genuflection and full stop, full stop, dammit, I said full stop!

Those in the audience who remained awake could sometimes discern, in Zoltan Jiffy’s interminable monologues, scattered snatches of autobiography. He would appear on stage, in his top hat and anorak and pantaloons and mountaineering boots, and begin to speak, or rather to drone, and he would go on and on and on and on and on and on and on about jugs and clipper ships and monkeys and nobility and the love that dare not speak its name and overcoats and palaeontology and scrimshaw and butter dishes and insignificance and border guards and waste chutes and palimpsests and sharks and litmus paper and hods and shelving units and the old woman who lived in a shoe and target practice and mothballs and sticky buns and enamel and detergent and clementines and Pope Joan and fanfaronades and distemper and jam roly poly and moistness and barbarism and carpets and despair and geese and plums and thunderbirds and axolotls, when he would all of a sudden say something about arranging large heavy objects into alphabetical order and then disarranging them and rearranging them into qwertyuiop order and disarranging them again and tossing them one by one out of a high window in a fit of befuddled stupidity, and the audience would prick up their ears, and listen more carefully, as a coherent story promised to emerge from the prattle, and Zoltan Jiffy would tantalise them by going on to relate the sound of boots stamping hurriedly up the staircase, and a pounding at the door, and then the door being bashed in, and being taken into custody and interrogated, and making a plea of befuddlement and stupidity, and then, just as the audience were desperate, no not desperate, let us say mildly intrigued, in a casual way, to find out what happened next he would revert to babbling inconsequentially about tax inspectors and pomposity and grime and card games and rhubarb and Frankish kings and cavemen and ballooning and mistletoe and the seven dwarves and cobalt and linctus and marmalade and foreigners and bedsteads and cornflakes and partridges and scooters and rabbits and operatic tenors and boarding passes and flailing and reprehensible behaviour and the smell of cordite and rafts and snowstorms and anchors and bosom chums and eglantine and wait for it, wait for it, time for a full stop.

It is thought that what kept the audiences flocking to Zoltan Jiffy’s shows was the hope that, sooner or later, they would tease from him something true and human, some exciting story of his attack of befuddled stupidity and the dropping on to the heads of passers-by large heavy objects, and his arrest and interrogation, and his plea, and then, they hoped, oh how hard they hoped, for the aftermath, to be told what happened next, but it is a small mercy that he never did tell them. Had he done so, they would have learned that, just like the monologuist, they too were incarcerated, forever, in a bleak grim home for the befuddled and stupid, and would remain there for the rest of their lives, to spend hour upon hour day in and day out listening to Zoltan Jiffy prating on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

We all know that good manners cost nothing, and that civility makes the world bearable. Here, then, are some useful extracts from the forthcoming Hooting Yard Book Of Etiquette:

Correct Form Of Address When Ushered Into The Presence Of Prince Fulgencio.
Oh glorious and magnificent Prince! Shaft of sunlight! Absolutely fantastic and gorgeous royal being! Allow me to fling myself into the mud and sprawl there at your feet, clad as always in such elegant bootees!
[So saying, the supplicant should fling himself into the mud and sprawl at the feet of Prince Fulgencio, clad as always in elegant bootees.]

Correct Form Of Address To One Of Prince Fulgencio’s Henchmen.
Eek! Please do not run me through with that rapier nor hack at me with that blood-drenched axe!

Correct Form Of Address To One Of Prince Fulgencio’s Weedy Minions.
Hello! How do I join your ranks?

When Dining At Table With Prince Fulgencio.
The butler, Grimes, will provide you with a plastic spoon with which to sup the slops graciously provided to you by the Prince in return for a cash payment. On no account should you make use of the spoon – to do so would be the most grievous faux pas imaginable, and you would be taken out and shot. Nor should you pick up the bowl and slurp from it directly. Instead, try as best you can to transfer the runny slops from bowl to mouth with your bare hands. You will present a disgusting spectacle and spill much more than you manage to digest, thus confirming Prince Fulgencio’s belief that you are a brutish peasant.

When Faced With A Pig.
Stare at the pig with a thin smile playing about your lips. Twirl your moustachios.

When Locked In The Sty With The Pigs By One Of Prince Fulgencio’s Henchmen.
See above. You will have achieved a rapport with the pigs and may wallow in the filth undisturbed.

Correct Form Of Address When Writing A Formal Letter To Prince Fulgencio.
Oh glorious and magnificent Prince! Shaft of sunlight! Absolutely fantastic and gorgeous royal being! I cannot thank you enough for allowing me to feed disgustingly on slops at your lovely wooden banqueting table. So boundless is my gratitude that I wish only to pay grovelling obeisance to you for the rest of my solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short life. In order that I might better achieve this humble goal, I wonder if perhaps you might bestow upon me the honour of being released from my confinement among the pigs in the pig sty? Of course I realise that such a request is quite without merit and if your response is to have certain of your henchmen come and beat me senseless with clubs and bludgeons that will be reward enough for my insolence.

Correct Form Of Address To Prince Fulgencio’s Henchmen Entering The Pig Sty Armed With Clubs And Bludgeons.
Meek silence punctuated by yelps.

Correct Form Of Address To Bleeding-Heart Do-Gooders Coming To Inspect Prince Fulgencio’s Pig Sty Under Animal And Peasant Health And Welfare Legislation.
Hello chaps! You know what? I have never been happier! Prince Fulgencio is an absolute brick, the most marvellous and wonderful and indeed faultless benefactor, philanthropist and saint ever to have trod the earth. I can see from the expressions of wide-eyed incredulity gouged upon your faces that you think my claims dubious, and that this is some kind of Potemkin pig sty. Good grief! If there were any justice in this world the Prince would be paid a visit by animal and peasant health and welfare inspectors who were not bleeding-heart do-gooders but useful idiots! Come, pigs, attack! Attack!

Correct Form Of Words When Pinning A Medal Of Valour To A Pig.
Oh pig! Thou art valiant!

Protocol For Soothing A Squealing Pig Unhinged By A Pin-Prick.
Pat the pig on the head with one hand, while applying Oriental liniment, unguent and goo with the other. Dab with cotton wool. Cover with disinfectant sticking plaster. Book a series of appointments for pig at mobile travelling-van post-pin-prick pig clinic.

Correct Form Of Words In Any Situation Having Dwelt In A Pig Sty For Several Months.
Bestial grunting.

When Dragged From The Pig Sty And Offered By Prince Fulgencio As A Sacrificial Victim To Appease The Hideous Bat God Fatso.
Offer thanks to Prince Fulgencio by transferring to his ownership all your worldly goods, even if they are mere paltries such as potatoes, turnips, broken farm implements and a dilapidated hovel. Skip happily from the pig sty across the wasteland, pitted with puddles and rife with stinging nettles, to the great stone slab upon which the sacrifice will take place. Weep with fervent joy at the spectacle of Prince Fulgencio, his henchmen, and his weedy minions, all lined up and laughing their heads off as a wizard summons the hideous bat god Fatso with incantations and gibberish and strangely significant arm-movements. Shut your eyes and clap your hands over your ears when the hideous bat god Fatso appears in a cloud of thick stinking black smoke accompanied by a deafening din. Lie back on the stone slab in a relaxed posture, and with strangulated inarticulate cries plead and beg with the hideous bat god Fatso to tear out your hot throbbing heart and toss it into his great tin dustbin. Turn your head to face Prince Fulgencio and, with your last breath, blow him a smoochy kiss.

He had a spook’s briefcase. Asked to present his credentials, he said “Fang past tern”, as if telling the time. Wristwatch, wristwatch. There was a complete lack of potable water. He had the eyes of a baby gazelle and the heart of a crocodile. There was a detector screen to be walked through, and fierce buzzing to be endured, heart in mouth, walkie-talkies. Rags of satin. Cobalt haze.

They used to say of opopanax that it is the noblest of incense gums.

Wading was one way through. Briefcase clutched to chest. Thumping headache. Why do we say a thirst rages? The glint of his glasses a reminder of past glories. The Scheveningen dilemma. When lightning strikes, hide under the table, like Joyce. There are no such things as ghosts. There are no such things as pampocrats. It is all a question of linkage, coinage, chains of reasoning, copper. He was ferried across the Styx, remember.

Ferry, ferried. There are too many buttons on his coat. An owl hoots somewhere in the night. He heard it call his name. A leak in the dinghy and your best bet is to hide your light under a bushel. They have lit the lanterns, so many of them, and now you can see the canaries in their cages. Oh God our help in ages past. But come Tuesday there will be drinking water again, and what then?, what then? The taps will be turned and the sergeant, in his mess, cloven of hoof, goat-eyed, will he give a fig?

It was a rainy night in Georgia.

Holed up in a bunker, he made an inventory of the contents of the spook’s briefcase. He mopped his brow. Something had to be done about the moles. Confluence of rivers on the plain, compass points uncertain, navy blue colour code. Broken transmissions. Broken bread, on this holy night. In his cups. It had to be Formby.

Spud bashing with his band of brothers. He had dozens of cousins. The scar tissue was livid. Reciting the names of the seven dwarves over and over again until he fell asleep. Pallid on the pillow, wan under the counterpane, milky white, magnesium flares, so so many lilies and love lies bleeding. The hot salt tears of ruin. Snake’s head fritillaries always excite attention. He would have to be careful.

A treasury of Biblical quotations. Smoke on the water. Poison in the well. How many times must he replace the paperclips on the files, and what will become of the files anyway? To whom must he send them? He awaits revelation, a sign, a signal. Tappings on the windscreen. The swish of the wipers. High dudgeon. Sucking on a fruit pastille. Villages he should never have visited. It came upon a midnight clear.

The sleight of hand necessary to transfer everything to the satchel. A web of deceit. Pansies, phlox, and hollyhocks. He takes the binoculars out of their casing. A second helping of noodles. The strains of the harp and the euphonium from far far away across the dismal plain. All a pother. A glum witch and a glummer scryer. The signs are ominous. Clouds that should not be there, sky the wrong colour, far too many stars. Breathing in strange new gases. Sudden rearrangement of atoms.

Tar pits.

Crane flies and dragonflies. Black pudding. Now there are pangs and cravings and he loses his footing, tumbles, kim kam and distraught, in shock, chance would be a fine thing, not at the dinner table, his whole life flashes before him, blurred, phantom, insignificant in all but one respect, Terence, Horace, Terence or Horace? Kick the pebble. Shake the branches. There are monkeys high in the trees. He knew there would be. He put on his hat and stepped away, lost in wonder.

Jogging bottoms. A circuit of the reservoir. Then another. Mousse in his hair. Pecked at by ravens, but only in his nightmares. There are no birds upon the sill. He said grace. Twice, now, he has had to have an injection, in the same vein, before swooning. Mud cakes his boots. He can barely tie his laces. Memory floods, the Russian prison, the chicken coop, the empty stadium. International intrigue, jet fighters, dossiers and ciphers. Gin and bitters in the colonies. A game of spillikins that degenerated into riot. Flames licking the ceiling. Discarded buttons. Saint Anselm. A pair of gloves.

Sand in the mechanism, it rasps to a halt.

There is silence at the other end. It is like being back in Chappaquiddick. Adopt the correct posture. Straighten your tie. Lips pursed, eyes dull. Fling a pot of paint in the face of the public. Anything to distract the attention. See how the crow flies, the land lies, the spies scheme. Holes punched in a newspaper. There are thousands upon thousands of hotel lobbies. Some of them are in Venice. Peering through the fronds of the fern in the pot. Piano tinkling. Lapdogs sniffle. He clutches at his windpipe, a window shatters, a vase topples. He had one too many.

Now comes the reckoning. Will he leave a tip? How will he calculate it? They murdered Marlowe in a dingy room down by the docks. Outflow of sewage into the river. Scavenger birds, shriek, shriek. Grey sky overcast. Goose pimples. Egg stains on the blazer. He can no longer remember the motto. Look, a couple of blokes are lugging a hamper towards the jetty.

She waited on the jetty like the bride of Frankenstein.