ONE LOT : A SINGLE TUSK
ONE LOT : TWO TUSKS
ONE LOT : THREE TUSKS
ONE LOT : FOUR TUSKS
ONE LOT : TWO TUSKS

To the Director

Dear Sir
I have come to enquire if I have anything left on account with you. I wish to change today my booking on this ship whose name I don’t even know, but anyway it must be the ship from Aphinar. There are shipping lines going all over the place, but helpless and unhappy as I am, I can’t find a single one – the first dog you meet in the street will tell you this. Send me the prices of the ship from Aphinar to Suez. I am completely paralysed, so I wish to embark in good time. Please let me know when I should be carried aboard…

Thus Arthur Rimbaud’s last recorded words, dictated in a delirium to his sister Isabelle from his Marseille hospital bed on the eve of his death on 10 November 1891. As Charles Nicholl notes in Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 188-1891 (1997),

Where or what Aphinar is no one is sure. The phrase he uses is le service d’Aphinar, which seems to mean ‘the ship from Aphinar’ but could equally mean ‘the Aphinar shipping line’, so one cannot be quite sure if Aphinar is a place or a company, or even a particular captain. One cannot even be sure that ‘Aphinar’ is what Rimbaud said: it is only Isabelle’s transcription. Was it rather Al Finar, the Arab word for ‘lighthouse’, and was this phantom ship which he wished to board ‘in good time’ the one that would carry him away from the light and into darkness?

But we must begin somewhere, so, in the teeth of uncertainty, we dismiss the shipping line, the captain, the lighthouse, and we say Aphinar is a place, a city, a distant city across the sea, and we set out to find it. We pack twelve tusks, divided into five lots, into a pippy bag and we sling it over our shoulder. Mindful that Rimbaud had lost his right leg to the surgeon’s saw on 27 May, we hobble our own right leg by less drastic means – twine and cord, perhaps, or a tight burlap sack. And so on crutches we make our way to the docks. It may be that we are setting out on a journey from which there will be no return, a hopeless and pointless journey, like the one undertaken by the Japanese student who left her homeland in search of the fictional loot hidden under snow by the criminal robber and kidnapper Carl Showalter in Fargo (Joel & Ethan Coen, 1996). The poor girl perished on her quest, and we too may face death before we reach Aphinar.

At the docks, we lean upon our crutches and we cast an eye over the ships. We did not get a chance, on the way here, to ask questions about shipping of a dog in the street. The street was empty of dogs, as if Rimbaud had been here ahead of us and poisoned all the dogs, just as he poisoned thousands of dogs in Harar, after a cur pissed on his animal hides hung out to dry in the hot dusty Ethiopian air. The air here is neither hot nor dusty. It is bitter cold, even icy, and a glance at the sky reveals the near certainty of snow. And so we gaze from ship to ship. Look, there is the Herzogin Cecilie, magically restored from its wrecking off the Devonshire coast! It gleams and glistens, even shimmers. We haul ourselves on to the gangplank, and it seems scarcely solid beneath our foot. A phantom ship, perhaps, for a phantom voyage, to the distant city of Aphinar.

Aboard, the captain greets us. What have you in that pippy bag?, he asks. We have twelve tusks in five lots, we reply. For like Rimbaud, we are honest, capable, and courageous. I have cargo of grain and nitrate in the hold, says the captain, Your tusks may be stored there for the duration of the voyage. We thank the captain and are glad to relinquish the pippy bag of tusks to a sailor, who carries it below. We do not know if ever we will see the bag, the tusks, again, but something tells us we will need the tusks to parlay our way through the massive wrought iron gates of the city of Aphinar, where the sentries must be bribed.

Shown, by another sailor, to our cabin, we collapse upon our berth. We wait, with the impatience of Rimbaud, for the ship to sail. At rest, flat out on the hard bunk, we are soon asleep, and dreaming. And such dreams! Of Appenzeller and Ilg and Zimmermann. Of two thousand poisoned dogs. Of a season in hell. Of our right leg, amputated and dumped in a Marseille incinerator.

We awake and are relieved to see our right leg present and correct, though numbed. Would it destroy the purpose of our journey to free it from twine and cord, from the tight burlap sack, to shake the life back into it, and go walking on the deck of the Herzogin Cecilie, unencrutched? Rimbaud had not that option, at the end. But nor, so far as we know, did he ever reach Aphinar. It will surely do us no harm to walk on two legs, as Rimbaud did, for untold miles, in Europe and Africa, until his final monopod months.

And so we free the numbed leg and leap from the bunk and cut two or three brisk capers around the room, like Boswell in the morning. But it is not morning. When we leave our cabin, and go out on deck, we see it is night, vast, illimitable, and starless. There is no sign of the captain nor his crew. There is no sign of a living soul. Yet the ship, the ship! It is riding the waves, fast and steady and straight, sails billowing. Nothing can stop us. We are on our way to Aphinar!

In Brain Men, his splendid book about the British obsession with pub quizzes, Marcus Berkmann refers to the Gleam of Certainty. If, upon hearing a question, one of your team-mates exhibits the Gleam of Certainty, there is no need to debate possible alternative answers. Your team-mate knows the correct answer, beyond all doubt. Even if you think you know different, you must defer to the Gleam of Certainty.

I don’t much go to pub quizzes these days, but when I did, I waited in vain for one particular question which, had it been posed, I could have met with the Gleam of Certainty. But oddly enough no quizmaster ever asked it.

“Who,” I dreamed of hearing, “designed both the waterworks and the cupola of the Observatory in Berne, Switzerland, made a pair of shoes and a rifle for Haile Selassie’s uncle, sported Ruritanian tinpot attire, and was a pal of Arthur Rimbaud?” While everyone else scratched their heads and dribbled, I would have the Gleam of Certainty. For I know that the answer to the question is Alfred Ilg.

Ilg (1854-1916) – or rather, his surname – first struck me because I thought it sounded just like the kind of surname I would have devised for a Hooting Yard character, particularly in stories written in the pre-Wilderness Years of the past century. Ilg would have fitted in very well among Bewg and Ack and Vug and Fig and Mat and Nat and Bam and Lip and Obb and Pew and all those other curt monosyllabic names of which I was so fond. When one considers, too, that he created, from scratch, a functioning postal system, including the design of the stamps, it becomes apparent that, had Ilg not existed, I might have had to invent him.

Though he was born and died in Switzerland, Ilg spent many years in Ethiopia, working directly for King Menelik, the uncle of Ras Tafari, later Haile Selassie. It was the Ethiopian postal system he created, as well as its unified currency. He is considered to be the most important European in Ethiopian history, a sort of right hand man or, we might now say, chief of staff to the King. Arriving in what was then Shawa with his alphabetically extreme Swiss colleagues Appenzeller and Zimmermann in 1878, the first task he was given by Menelik was to make a pair of shoes. So delighted was the King with the result that he next asked Ilg to make him a rifle. Ilg protested that he knew not a jot about the manufacture of firearms and, perhaps with an eye to his later dealings with the gun-runner Rimbaud, suggested that imported weaponry would be far more efficient than anything he could cobble together. Menelik, being a big tough omnipotent king, swatted these objections aside and insisted that the Swiss shoemaker make him a damned rifle, pronto. Ilg, who clearly knew a lot more about rifle-making than he let on, duly made what has been described as a “passable rifle”. Perhaps Menelik tested it by taking potshots at passing Ethiopian wildlife. What we do know is that the King was so pleased with his new, lethal, toy that he gave it pride of place in his armoury and ever after considered Ilg indispensable. Indeed, some years later the Swiss with “the cuboid head and the scrubbing-brush hair” was given the splendidly uncertain title of Counsellor In The Range Of An Excellency, before eventually, from 1897 to 1907, becoming the rather more clear-cut Ethiopian Minister Of Foreign Affairs.

Though I am fond of his postal system innovations, Ilg was more celebrated in his adopted country for his civil engineering projects, including a major railway line, the electrification of the royal palace, and the design and construction of the piped water supply to the brand new capital of Addis Ababa. The latter has been described by Richard Pankhurst (son of Sylvia and great-nephew of Emily) as follows:

In 1894, Ilg installed the water installations for the Emperor’s palace at Addis Ababa. This created something of a sensation, as the water, obtained from a spring in high Entoto, had to flow down to the Addis Ababa plain beneath it, and then make its way up again to the Palace compound, which was located on a smallish hill. People in the capital had never seen anything like this, and could not believe that water could ever, under any circumstances, flow upward. Menelik, however, was a great believer in innovation, and insisted that Ilg should proceed with his project, if only to see whether it would work. When the great day for inauguration arrived, the tap was turned on – but nothing happened. A European “friend” had secretly stuffed cotton into the pipe, as Ilg later discovered. This obstruction was duly removed, after which Ilg – and his project – were widely acclaimed. At least two Amharic poems were composed in honour of the event.

One declared:

“We have seen wonders in Addis Ababa.
Water worships Emperor Menelik.
O Danyew [i.e. Menelik] what more wisdom will you bring?
You already make water soar in the air!”

And the other ran as follows:

“King Abba Danyew, how great is he becoming!
He makes the water rise into the air through a window.
While the dirty can be washed, and the thirsty drink.
See what wonders have already come in our times.
No wonder that some day he will even outdo the Ferenje {i.e. Europeans].”

Neither of these poems was the work of Ilg’s friend Arthur Rimbaud, who by the time of their acquaintanceship had long abandoned poetry and was, in the final few years of his life, bitter and disillusioned. In 1888, he wrote:

I’m always very bored, in fact I’ve never known anyone be more bored than I am. And isn’t this indeed a miserable existence, without any family, without any intellectual activity, lost in the midst of these negroes whose lot one would like to improve, and who themselves seek to exploit you and to prevent you from realizing any money without long delays? Obliged to speak their gibberish, to eat their dirty food, to endure a thousand frustrations on account of their laziness, their treachery, and their stupidity. But that’s not the saddest thing. What’s worse is the fear of becoming brutalized oneself, little by little, isolated as one is, and so far away from any intelligent society.

It was not a view shared by Alfred Ilg himself, who thrived in Ethiopian society. As he wrote to Rimbaud in 1889:

It seems the delights of doing business here have driven away completely the little bit of good humour you had left. Look, my dear Monsieur Rimbaud, you only live once, so make the most of it and to hell with your heirs.

Ilg eventually returned to Switzerland, to Zurich, in 1907. He died there, of a heart attack, in 1916, on the seventh of January, which Pankhurst tells us was Christmas Day in Ethiopia.

NOTE : The quotations from letters by Rimbaud and Ilg are taken from Somebody Else : Arthur Rimbaud In Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl (1997).

Few problems in the history of human activity on earth have proved as intractable as the placement of the apostrophe in the title of the Reader’s Digest magazine. Indeed, running it close as a question which befuddles the heads of the best and brightest is whether the title includes the definite article or not. As if to demonstrate that I know precisely what I am talking about, we have seen two variants, Reader’s Digest and The Readers’ Digest, right here at Hooting Yard in the past few days.

Hooting Yard itself does not contain an apostrophe, thank heavens, but occasionally it has been referred to as The Hooting Yard. I have no idea where on earth those who deploy this usage get that The from. Mr Key has certainly never used it himself. Let us be clear. There is not now, nor has there ever been, nor will there ever be, in any conceivable future, a prefixed definite article in Hooting Yard. If any doubt remains, the best idea would be for those who cannot grasp this simple fact to have the previous sentence tattooed, in mirror writing, upon their foreheads.

If only things were so plain and straightforward in Reader’s Digest land. But they are not. Let us get that definite article out of the way to begin with, before we concentrate our pulsating brains upon the knotty problem of the apostrophe. The issue is clouded by the fact that Reader’s Digest (without the The) is published by The Reader’s Digest Association (with the The). Easy enough, then, for a person who is not necessarily a dimwit or a clodpoll to carry over the definite article from the name of the publisher to the publication it publishes. There is a certain logic to doing so. But therein lie the perils of granting too high a status to logic. Yes, human beings have developed the powers of logic over millennia, and they have proved a boon in many fields of endeavour, from agriculture to zoology. But logic only gets us so far, and ought not be applied in those areas where it is a drawback. I am thinking of such areas as politics and magazine nomenclature. In politics, logic, or at least the illusion of logic, leads to the utopian barbarities of Lenin or Pol Pot. In magazine nomenclature, it leads to calling Reader’s Digest The Reader’s Digest. Granted, in the latter case the human consequences are negligible, even nonexistent, but we must always beware of slippery slopes. That is the lesson an elderly relative taught me after an Alpine to-do. Recounting the details of the to-do might provide this piece with some much needed colour and vim and grit, but lord love a duck!, another time… another time…

Lesson One, then. The title of the magazine is Reader’s Digest, without a The.

Having honed our wits on that one, we can turn to the infinitely more pernickety problem of the apostrophe. Curiously enough, logic, or the absence of logic, will be of no help to us here. One of the reasons the placement of the apostrophe in the title has proved so maddening for so many for so many decades is that an argument can be made, and a compelling argument to boot, for both Reader’s and Readers’. Neither is, in and of itself, in context, right or wrong. Let us recall what was in the minds of the founders, De Witt Wallace (1889-1981), and his ever-loving wife Lila Bell Wallace née Acheson (1889-1984). Their bright idea was to gather a sample of articles on many subjects from various monthly magazines and journals, sometimes condensing and rewriting them, and to combine them into a single publication – a digest. A bit like Hooting Yard, in other words. Well, not really. Not at all in fact. I don’t know why I wrote that, unless perhaps I was brain-bedizened at the thought of the millions of readers the Wallaces attracted, almost from the start in 1922. Let me take a deep breath and becalm my pounding brainpans and continue.

Having concocted the idea of a Digest for Magazine Readers, it must have been a simple enough matter for De Witt and Lila Bell to plump for Reader’s Digest – or Readers’ Digest – as the name of their publication. A few months ago, in discussing Skippy The Bush Kangaroo, I imagined its creator John McCallum sitting at the breakfast table with his wife Googie Withers, as he struggled to come up with the name of the bush kangaroo heroine of his television series. We might similarly imagine the Wallaces at breakfast, not of course in Sydney, Australia, but in their modest yet beautifully-appointed home in Minneapolis St Paul. De Witt, you may recall, was recovering from shrapnel wounds received in Flanders fields during the Great War, so in this scene we might picture him still enbandaged, whey-faced and peaky.

Lila Bell : Given your shrapnel wounds, sweet darling, are you sure you are able to spread that Lurpak on your toast, or would you like me to help?

De Witt : I think I can manage, oh poppet. I am just thinking how lucky we are to have this Danish proprietary brand of butter available, here in Minnesota in the early nineteen-twenties.

Lila Bell : It is undoubtedly one of the benefits of the capitalist system, light of my life. But let us try to reach a final decision on the placement of the apostrophe in the title of the magazine we hope to publish soon.

De Witt : [Unintelligible response due to mouth crammed with toast ‘n’ Lurpak.]

Lila Bell : I did not quite catch that, honeybun. Remember, it pays to refine your table manners.

De Witt : [Swallowing, and wiping his mouth with a napkin.] I apologise, dear heart. That was most remiss of me. Let me repeat what I said, this time with a mouth free of toast ‘n’ Lurpak. I think the best place for the apostrophe is – – –

De Witt Wallace is interrupted by a sudden and insistent hammering at the door. Lila Bell goes to answer it, to find a person from Porlock on the doorstep.

Having researched the matter thoroughly, I am able to reconstruct what De Witt Wallace was about to say, to wit:

De Witt : – – – between the R and the S rather than after the S.

And I like to think that, given the chance, he would have continued as follows:

De Witt : The apostrophe placed after the S suggests our magazine is a digest for readers, plural. Which, of course, is what we desire, if we are not to be cast into penury, fire of my loins. We will scarcely be able to build a global publishing empire without a multitude of readers, whose digest we will provide.

Lila Bell : Then I fail to see the logic of your pronouncement, popsy.

De Witt : Ah, pumpkin, but by placing the apostrophe to suggest it is a digest for just one reader, we cleverly instil in each and every reader’s mind that the magazine is for them, and them alone. Even though it isn’t. We are saying, “You are the reader, and this digest is just for you”.

Lila Bell : Gosh!

Thus, Lesson Two : The apostrophe in Reader’s Digest appears between the R and the S, not after the S.

His frostbitten limbs. Sappho in the doldrums. Bad gas and forts. If these phrases do not stir you, you are clearly not a devotee of Urbane Geistige Geist, who was born one hundred years ago today. If, on the other hand, your brain lit up like a beacon on reading those words, you will be one of that little band who rightly acknowledge Geist as a key figure in twentieth century popular music.

‘Popular’ is perhaps not the most appropriate word. Although he worked within such fields as jazz, folk, rock, hootcha, pop, and swing, Geist’s music never won mass acceptance. He was only ever a cult figure, but it is to be hoped that, with the celebration of his centenary, the ears of the world can be opened to his extraordinary accomplishment. Who would have thought that an obscure cadet in the Bolivian army would become – in the words of one perceptive commentator – a cross between Yoko Ono, Xavier Cugat, and Mark E Smith?

We need not dwell here on Geist’s military career, except to note that he learned to play his first instrument – the glockenspiel – when he came under the wing of the legendary Bolivian army glockenspiel instructor, Captain Enrique Finisterre Belbacqau, a man of whom it has been said that if he did not exist, the staff of the Bolivian Army Glockenspiel Training School would have had to invent him. (One body of opinion attests that that is precisely what they did, creating a fictional character not unlike the supposed agent George Kaplan in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, for whom the Cary Grant character Roger Thornhill is mistaken. This theory has never satisfactorily answered the obvious question: if Belbacqua did not exist, who exactly did teach Geist his formidable glockenspiel technique?)

After being thrown out of the Bolivian army because of his flawed cadetship and shape-shifting, Geist hitch-hiked to Paraguay, where he soon fell in with a criminal gang who, when they weren’t cutting throats and pushing widows into the paths of oncoming trains, toted their piccolos and banjos around the market squares of provincial towns, playing an infectious combination of bluegrass and light opera. This raggle-taggle peasant band became, improbably enough, the first incarnation of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity.

There has been much speculation regarding Geist’s lifelong insistence that the groups he led, no matter how often he changed personnel, must always go by the same appellation, sometimes as just The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, and sometimes as Bolivian Army Cadet Urbane Geistige Geist And The Crooked Timber Of Humanity. He took the name from Immanuel Kant’s observation that “out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made”, and it is tempting to see this as a less than subtle comment on that very first line-up of evil-hearted robbers and violent thugs. (Incidentally, Dobson wrote an out of print pamphlet entitled Nomenclature of Paraguayan Bandit Musicians & Soviet Collective Farm Administrators Compared, in which he proposed that Geist arrived at the name during a tarot reading. This is piffle.)

Sadly, no recording exists of that very first group. By the time the LP Pelf And Cant was released, with its magnificent trumpet-driven melodies, all but one of the original band were either dead, imprisoned, or hiding in the hills. Geist was supremely unconcerned at the almost total loss of his group, demonstrating for the first time the ruthlessness which was to make him so feared. As Dave Pod puts it in his Oral History Of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity, “You could always tell when someone had done their time with Geist’s band. Their hair was prematurely white, most of their teeth had fallen out, and they walked, if they were able to walk at all, on spavined legs. They trembled uncontrollably, burst into tears every five minutes, and were unable to achieve closure on their issues despite extensive, and expensive, therapy”. Pod’s own band became a sort of rest home for ejected Crooked Timber, though artistically he is not fit to lick Geist’s boots. Nonetheless, one should not overlook the fact that by throwing in their lot with Pod, the wrecked survivors of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity were given a chance to play at the Eurovision Song Contest, something that was unlikely to happen under Geist’s iron rule. (He did, notoriously, attempt to enter the competition when he kidnapped Kathy Kirby, but an international police operation foiled his reprehensible, if entertaining, scheme. Many of us would have given our eye teeth to witness that superb twenty-six strong line-up of the band, all accordions, trombones and pounding drums, backing the British songstress in the specially-written song Black Rubber Beelzebub.)

His Frostbitten Limbs. Sappho In The Doldrums. Bad Gas And Forts. This was the trio of LPs that, for many of us, cemented Geist’s reputation. Released within the space of a single month, containing between them no fewer than one hundred songs, shanties and pop-madrigals, they still stand as one of the commanding achievements of twentieth century music in any genre, vibrant, vivacious, vivid and even, at times, deceptively cloth-eared. The story of those fractious recording sessions has been told many times, notably in the memoir by lutenist Julian Beam, one of the few band members who managed to remain in favour with Geist and appear on all three LPs, although his contribution to Bad Gas And Forts consists of a single string-pluck in the middle eight of The Gregory Peck Protein Imbalance Song. By the time The Crooked Timber Of Humanity appeared on the television show Pop Fabulousness! to promote its release as a single, Beam had been “consigned to the outer darkness” as Geist always put it, and was hawking his lute-playing skills at a variety of seaside resorts in exchange for the price of a cake or bun for his dinner. By the time he came to write his book, his arm was withered, his prematurely white hair was infested with beetles, and he had all the telltale signs of an ex-Geistist.

When we recorded the songs on side one of His Frostbitten Limbs, wrote Beam, Geist had devised some new ideas. He made us sleep in tents on the sloping roof of the studio, wear bells on lanyards around our necks, and force fed us a grey, tasteless paste of his own recipe. Every member of the band ballooned in weight and the constant clanging of those bells sorely tried the engineer, who had to erase their clamour from the tapes. The tents could not be properly secured to the concrete roof, and there were violent gales throughout the month, so we got little sleep. Only the hammer and tongs players, all six of them, were exempt from this regime. They were put up in a luxury hotel and taken to exciting sporting events during breaks. Geist himself spent most of the sessions smoking his pipe and making lascivious phone calls to a floozie.

Elsewhere, Beam declared that no recording session had given him such great joy, and he continued to idolise Geist for the remainder of his life, until the day his pitiful wasted body collapsed in a heap in a post office near the Blister Lane Bypass, and he was pronounced dead. Reportedly, his dying words were “Urbane Geistige Geist is a profound and matchless genius and everyone should devote their lives to his work, as I have been honoured to do, despite the feeble and broken carcass you see expiring before your eyes on this post office floor near the Blister Lane Bypa…..”

Geist himself was to die within a week. He had recorded over one hundred and twenty LPs, played concerts in almost every country on earth, won the esteem of a dedicated troop of followers, and been appointed as a Chevalier De Leo Sayer In Perpetuity. Countless times it had been foretold that he would meet his end at the hands of a vengeful, dismissed member of The Crooked Timber Of Humanity. Fingers were pointed, even while the bandleader was still alive, at bassoonist Ned Nightshade, the man who had played such a wonderful solo on a reworking of The Snapping Turtles Of Old Cadiz, yet whose heart had shrivelled and rotted when Geist sent him packing. Suspicions were raised, too, about Hetty and Ingmar, the Norwegian teenagers who sang on over a dozen LPs but were sacked from the band when Geist got himself into a flap about something or other.

In the event, the maestro was not murdered. One damp Sunday he was wheeling a barrow of nettles over bracken, whistling the showstopper from his stage musical version of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, when a bee landed on his hat. Geist had always worn bee-proof hats until this fateful day, when a mix-up at the dry-cleaners’ found him for once in his life unprotected from bees. In a panic, he stopped whistling and flew into convulsions. His head flushed purple, he gasped for breath, and his tongue became puffy. He did not remove his hat, the fool. He became snagged in the bracken, miles from civilisation, and by the time the bee flew back to its hive, Geist had become hopelessly entangled. Unable to free himself, he lay on his back, staring at the sky, and sang Roll Along Covered Wagon, over and over again, until his last breath.

Roll along covered wagon, roll along, to the turn of your wheels I sing a song, city ladies may be fine, but give me that girl of mine, roll along covered wagon, roll along. Going home covered wagon going home, for this cowboy was never born to roam, ‘long the road that doesn’t change, to that old bar twenty range, roll along covered wagon, roll along. Yipee-teeyi, old timers, heading for your ranch house door, yipee-teeyi, old timers, corral me so I’ll never stray no more. Roll along covered wagon, roll along. Come along old pal, let’s get going. Roll along.

[This piece first appeared on 21 March 2006.]

There was a period, in my early teenperson years, when I became an avid reader of the Reader’s Digest. As far as I recall, the younger of my two elder sisters brought a copy into the house. I suppose I must have seen it before, in doctors’ or dentists’ waiting rooms, but this was the first opportunity I had to pay it proper attention. I was immediately impressed with it as a physical object. It seemed to me like a book rather than a magazine, smaller in size and with a spine. As I write that, I realise that the shape and texture and ‘feel’ of printed matter was always important to me, particularly when I was younger. Anyway, I think I pored over this copy of the Reader’s Digest with such enthusiasm that I somehow convinced my parents to take out a subscription. Copies were then delivered to the door every month for the next couple of years, until I grew bored with it and moved on to other things. I haven’t bought a copy since, and can barely remember the last time I even saw one, so I have no idea if today’s Reader’s Digest (if it still exists?) bears any relation to the magazine I read so keenly.

I used to enjoy doing the word quiz It Pays To Increase Your Word Power, I liked the potted biographies and historical articles, and I was amused by the inevitable monthly piece warning of the evil godless Communist threat to our freedoms. (It would be interesting to re-read those now, when I would probably find my older reactionary self nodding in agreement rather than laughing.) But my favourite feature was the regular series on the human body, invariably with the title formation I Am John’s Spleen or I Am Jane’s Pancreas. Not being of a scientific bent, I don’t think I can have paid much attention to the actual texts. But the titles I found vastly amusing, and still do. Somewhere in the Hooting Yard archive I refer to a supposed Reader’s Digest article entitled I Am John’s Head. It made me laugh when I thought of it and it does so still.

All by way of preamble to the point that my idea for today’s thousandish words was I Am Frank’s Brain, though of course I would have to rejig the words in the title so it began with “On”. But then I thought, oh dear, that is so stultifying dull and self-referential. As any sensible person would, I have a horror of turning into Rachel Cusk, endlessly bashing out solipsistic drivel. Luckily, I stopped myself in time, and took a break to make a cup of tea. As I stared out of the window at crows and clouds while waiting for the kettle to boil, I thought, Aha!, instead of I Am Frank’s Brain I shall write I Am Rachel Cusk’s Brain.

You will be relieved to learn that I soon thought better than to embark on that particular piece of foolishness. It struck me that to enter imaginatively into Rachel Cusk’s brain would be to court invincible inanity, a risk I was unwilling to take. Rimbaud wrote of the “white pointlessness” of the Alps, and I suspect that the vista opened up to me by Rachel Cusk’s brain would be a greyish, off-white pointlessness.

Still, I liked the idea of writing a piece based on somebody else’s brain. I Am Oliver Letwin’s Brain? I Am Heliogabalus’s Brain? I Am Gwyneth Paltrow’s Brain? The possibilities were endless. It would be the devil of a job to pick the most apt brain to pretend to be. And then, of course, other people’s brains can be quite unfathomable. I don’t know about you, but I can’t begin to imagine what strange and unruly shenanigans snap between the synapses in the brain of Julian Assange. How does someone like that manage to get out of bed in the morning? Easier by far, surely, if you are Julian, to just turn over and go back to sleep. Having such a brain might be manageable if it was permanently unconscious.

Spoilt for choice, and having discounted the obvious attractions of I Am Yoko Ono’s Brain and I Am Krishnan Guru-Murthy’s Brain, I wondered if the piece might work if I chose, instead of a real, or indeed fictional, person, a generic type. I Am A Peasant’s Brain. I Am An ‘Occupy’ Protester’s Brain. Both of those would have the advantage of being decisively limited, so there would not be a great deal of material to marshal. On the other hand, neither might make for particularly interesting reading. There may be a few more depths to plumb in the brain of a peasant, what with responses to the changing seasons and perhaps some crumbs of rustic wisdom, but you would probably be better off reading a few passages of Lork Roise To Candleford, or better still, watching an episode of the television adaptation.

At this point I dallied briefly with imagining myself into the collective “brain” of Lork Roise, positing the rustic hamlet as a sort of organic sentient being, but that way madness lies. It would be even more baffling than being the brain of Rachel Cusk, I fear.

When all is said and done, probably the easiest article to write would be I Am A Crow’s Brain. If their raucous cawing is anything to go by, and I hope it is, then crows spend their entire lives being mightily pissed off, at anything and everything. If you don’t believe me, just listen to them. I do, daily, and I have to say I find it very rewarding to do so. No matter how foul my mood, I can listen to that cawing and think to myself that at least I am not as fed up and angry and misanthropic and irredeemably bad-tempered as the crow is.

So we seem to have gone on a little tour of brains, for what it’s worth. This is the kind of thing that would fit quite snugly into the Reader’s Digest. I must find out if it still exists, and, if so, submit this piece to the editor. A whole new career might be opening up before me.

One day long long ago, in the bloom of youth, I was at the seaside, tarrying on a pier, fresh from a game of crazy golf and sucking an ice lolly. The sky was overcast and seabirds were screeching. I had decided, when once I was done with my lolly, to return to the dilapidated boarding house where I was staying with my parents and siblings, to fetch my swimming trunks and a towel, and then to go a-splashing in the sea. But as I leaned against the railings on the pier, sucking away, I was accosted by an elderly gent. He gave off a stink of kippers and brine and his huge hairy beard was riddled with fishbones. He leaned against the railings next to me, and pointed out to sea.

“Look, sonny,” he said, “What do you see?”

I looked in the direction of his pointing finger and could just make out, in the sea-mist, the shape of a ship, half way to the horizon.

“I see a ship,” I said.

“Aye, ’tis a ship indeed,” said the old sea dog, “And can you tell me the basic constituent parts of, say, a wooden ship?”

“I’ll try my best,” I said, for I was biddable and eager to please, “Sternpost, keel, false keel or shoe, fore foot or gripe, stem, headpiece, garboard strake, bottom planking, side planking, wale, sheer strake, covering board, bulwark, rough-tree rail, topgallant bulwark, rudder, counter, stern, chain plates, cathead, figurehead, mizzenmast, mainmast, foremast, and… oh… there’s one part on the tip of my tongue.”

The old tar stuffed a gobbet of salt taffy into his mouth and chewed on it, looking at me with a twinkle in his eye.

“Bowsprit!”, I cried, triumphantly.

“Good lad,” he said, “But what if I asked you to name three different types of parrel and their constituent parts?”

“Golly!”, I said, and after a moment’s thought, babbling, I listed what I could recall. “Well, first, a parrel with cleats on a wooden yard, you’d have topmast, yard, wooden cleats, a half-iron hoop served with leather, pins forming hinges to open the parrel, an iron band to take the tie, and iron straps and bolts securing the parrel to the yard. But if you had a tub parrel for an iron yard, then there would be topmast, yard, tub divided in halves, iron binding for same, gooseneck bolt, iron bands to take parrel and tie, yoke for the parrel, yoke for the tie, and eye bolt for the quarterblock. Thereagain, with a parrel sliding on a T-bar in a big ship, I would say topmast, topsail yard, T-bar, slide, two-way coupling, tie, connecting chain keeping slide in place, and last but by no means least, eye bolts for quarterblocks, captain. Should I call you captain?”

“It is many a long year since I served as a captain, my boy,” he said, “But tell me, if you cobbled together a topsail yard, parrel, rolling spar, iron drum end of the rolling spar, yardarm hoop, arm carrying the reefing halliard block, cheek block for topgallant sheet, parrel crutch with lignum vitae rollers, lignum vitae rollers, topsail, lead block for reefing halliards, and topsail yardarm, what would you have?”

I rubbed my chin to demonstrate that I was thinking carefully, as Darbyshire does, in imitation of Mr Carter, in the books by Anthony Buckeridge.

“I think,” I said, “No, I know… you’d have Colling’s and Pinkney’s patent self-reefing topsail, would you not?”

“You would indeed,” said the ancient mariner, and he spat his salt taffy into the sea.

I waited for his next question.

“I wonder if you can tell me,” he said, “About a four-masted barque.”

“Easy peasy,” I said, but too quickly, because with a glint of impatience, he snapped:

“Not just any four-masted barque, lad, but a particular one! Tell me everything you know about the Herzogin Cecilie!”

I gulped, and took a last suck on what was left of my ice lolly.

“Well,” I began, haltingly, “The Herzogin Cecilie, the Herzogin Cecilie… Ah, I think that was a four-masted barque built in 1902 by Rickmers shipyard at Bremerhaven for the Norddeutscher Lloyd at Bremen. It was a big sailing vessel of three thousand, two hundred and forty-two gross tons or four thousand, three hundred and fifty dw. She was a good sailer and made many excellent voyages. During World War One she was interned at Coquimbo in Chile. After the war, she brought a cargo of bauxite to Ostend, and… no, not bauxite, it was a cargo of nitrate. At Ostend she was allocated to the French government. In November 1921 she was purchased by Gustaf Erikson, Mariehamn, Finland, and under his flag was employed chiefly in the Australian grain trade. She foundered on 25 April 1936 off Salcombe in Devonshire, after running aground in heavy fog.”

“Tiptop Herzogin Cecilie information,” said the sea dog, beaming at me, “Now, just one more question. How many jibs did she have?”

“I would say three,” I replied, “An inner jib, an outer jib, and a flying jib.”

“And you would be right to say so,” he said, “But now our conversation is at an end.”

“Oh,” I said, a little downcast, “I think that must be the first time I have had a ship-related conversation with no mention at all of poop or orlop decks.”

“Don’t you worry,” he said, “You will be having plenty more ship-related conversations in the decades to come, for you have passed my rigorous tests and I am going to press-gang you into the service of the king’s navy.”

And so saying, he suddenly gave me a great shove and pushed me over the railings and I splashed into the sea. I was picked up by a rowing boat sent from the wooden ship he had pointed out to me, in the distance, now wholly enshrouded in sea-mist. And into that mist I was rowed, by a crew of hefty silent rowers, until the ship loomed huge ahead, and looking back I could no longer see any trace of the the pier, and the shore, and the dilapidated boarding house where my parents and siblings waited for me.

What is it with these clergymen and their phantasms? The other day we had the Bishop of Bergen, Erik Pontoppidan, babbling on about sea monsters, and now we find that rustic Victorian, the Reverend Francis Kilvert, writing in his diary, on this day in 1872:

This morning I conceived the idea of a poem in the style of Tam o’ Shanter – the scene to be laid in the ruined church of Llanbedr Painscastle. Two lovers who had made an assignation in the church-yard to be terrified by seeing through the windows an assembly of devils, ghosts, lawless lovers and murdered children.

Until I read that, I thought Kilvert’s Diary was akin to Gilbert White’s Natural History Of Selborne, a series of observations on rural life and the natural world, gentle and rather winsome. I did not expect lawless lovers and murdered children in ruined churches. But then, I have never read Kilvert’s Diary, and came upon the above entry in The Assassin’s Cloak : An Anthology Of The World’s Greatest Diarists, edited by Irene and Alan Taylor (2000).

Since 1977, Peter Blegvad has had an ongoing project called “Imagined, Observed, Remembered”, best summarised by Mr B. himself:

I began drawing sundry items thrice – first as I imagined them to be, then as I actually observed them to be, and lastly, after a suitable interval, as I remembered them to have been.

It occurred to me that I could apply this idea – at least, the Imagined and Observed elements – in prose rather than drawings, to the Reverend Kilvert. After all, though I have never read the diary, I have heard of it. Where or when it first swam into my ken I have no idea, but I would have come upon stray references to it in my reading from as long ago as my teenperson years. My Imagined Kilvert, and his diary, would be along these lines:

A nineteenth-century country parson, somewhere in England, elderly, with a long white Victorian beard. Daily, he records the passing of the seasons in his rural idyll, concentrating his attention on flowers and hedgerows and birds. Unlike Pontoppidan, he does not include the peasantry in his natural history, though occasionally a peasant might have a walk-on part in a diary entry, for example to impart a piece of rustic lore or wisdom to the absent-minded vicar. We learn little or nothing of Kilvert’s inner life, nor much of his everyday clergyman’s duties. The diary, which has never been out of print since first published, shortly after his death, is still read because he is a superb observer and recorder of the natural world, and evokes a vision of the quiet English countryside that makes it seem a very paradise.

Hence my surprise at the devils and ghosts and lawless lovers and murdered children. Time now for a cup of tea, and then I shall find out what I can about the Reverend, “Observed”, in Peter Blegvad’s sense, by way of reference materials.

I am delighted to announce that I was right about the beard. Well, sort of. (Has anybody ever written a book-length study entitled The Victorian Beard? I would read it.) Sadly, Kilvert (1840-1879) did not live long enough for it to grow white, for he died – of peritonitis – at the age of thirty-eight, shortly after returning from his honeymoon. I was correct, too, to imagine him as a country vicar. After studying at Oxford, he served a number of parishes in Wiltshire and on the Welsh Borders. Other than that, my Imagined Kilvert is a partial and inaccurate picture of the real one, particularly where the diary is concerned.

Though there is much observation of nature, the diary is far more comprehensive in its concerns – as much social history as natural history. It includes comic scenes such as a funeral at Worcester cathedral where the pallbearers stagger under the weight of a “crushingly heavy” coffin, an account of Kilvert bathing naked and disporting himself upon the beach, and a lengthy discussion of venereal disease conducted at a ruridecanal conference. (Now there’s a useful word – ruridecanal: pertaining to a rural dean and his jurisdiction.) The rustic rev also devotes over forty-four passages to descriptions of women and girls, frankly confessing his “susceptibility to female beauty”. His writing has been compared to Hardy, Hopkins, and even to Proust. “For some time,” he wrote in 1874, “I have been trying to find the right word for the shimmering, glancing, tumbling movement of the poplar leaves in the sun and wind. It was ‘dazzle’. The dazzle of the poplars.”

Far from being “never out of print since first published, shortly after his death”, as I imagined, the diary’s history is much more chequered. For one thing, much of the original manuscript has been lost or (deliberately) destroyed. Kilvert’s widow, who never remarried, lived until 1911 and seems to have removed entire sequences recounting “wild sad sweet trysts” with an earlier paramour. The standard selection we think of as Kilvert’s Diary was made by William Plomer and first published in three volumes between 1938 and 1940. Other editions have followed, but as far as I know it has gone in and out of print.

One thing I could not have imagined was the name of Kilvert’s mother – Thermuthis Ashe. It’s not every day you meet a Thermuthis.

As for the poem he was planning, one hundred and forty years ago today, about two lovers who had made an assignation in the church-yard at Llanbedr Painscastle, I have not been able to ascertain if Kilvert ever wrote it. He did write a number of poems, but none were published in his lifetime. The ruined church, incidentally, was restored in the year of Kilvert’s death. I append a photograph of it, no longer ruinous, below. If you peer at it very very carefully, you might just be able to see an assembly of devils, ghosts, lawless lovers and murdered children.

Drive to the forest in a Japanese car. When it begins to rain, and it will, it will, turn on the windscreen wipers. They will swish swoosh swish back and forth across the windscreen of the Japanese car, just like they do across the windscreen of Marion Crane’s car in Psycho, to ensure that, however heavy and pelting the rain becomes, and it will pelt, it will, you will still be able to see the road ahead clearly enough to drive, in the dark and the rain, past Box Hill, towards the forest, in a Japanese car.

Sometimes the rain pelts down so relentlessly that even the swishiest and swooshiest of windscreen wipers, set to their most rapid swishing and swooshing, are barely able to wipe the raindrops from the windscreen, so hard and fast does the rain pelt down, and in the dark of an earthly night it can be the devil of a job to keep a clear view of the road ahead. Such were the circumstances that led Marion Crane to stop at the Bates Motel. Her car was not a Japanese one. She was not on her way to the forest.

I’ve got binoculars on top of Box Hill. I am protected from the relentless pelting rain by an anorak, a sou’wester, and the roof of a bird-spotter’s hideyhole. Because my shelter is dry, more or less, and my vision is acute, I can see clearly through the lenses of my binoculars. I would not need wipers even were the binoculars fitted with them, which of course they are not. I have trained my binoculars on the road below, and now you come sweeping into view, driving to the forest in a Japanese car. I slowly adjust the angle of the binoculars so I can follow your progress.

It is not clear whether there was a hill, like Box Hill, in the vicinity of the Bates Motel, but had there been, then Arbogast might have been stood atop it, with binoculars, watching Marion Crane pull in and park. The private detective would have had plenty of time to scamper down the hillside and jump into his car and rev the engine and tear across to the Bates Motel and forestall the horror. Arbogast was not there, on some putative hill, with binoculars. But I am.

The windscreen wipers of your Japanese car are swishing and swooshing back and forth as rapidly as it is possible for them to do, but now the relentlessness of the pelting rain redoubles, and it is almost impossible for you to see clearly the road ahead, towards the forest. You are driving more and more slowly, and with increasing difficulty, and a voice in your head tells you to pull over and stop in a layby. The voice is a sober and sensible one and not at all like the voice Norman Bates hears in his head, when Marion Crane comes to the Bates Motel.

Through my binoculars, on top of Box Hill, I can see you have pulled in to a layby and come to a stop in your Japanese car. I tuck the binoculars into the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and I scamper down Box Hill to where my own car is parked. It is not a Japanese car. Its windscreen wipers are no more, nor less, efficient than yours, but my vision is acute and I am a fantastic driver, so for me it is child’s play to rev the engine and tear across to the layby where you are parked.

I pull up behind your Japanese car and stop the engine and get out of my car and slam the door shut behind me and splosh through the puddles towards your car. I am wearing waterproof boots. I draw level with the window on the driver’s side of your Japanese car and, peering in, I am disconcerted to see that you are not sitting in the driver’s seat. Nor have you shifted to the passenger seat, nor to either of the back seats. You are not in the car. You must have gone somewhere on foot, through the puddles, in the dark, in the pelting rain, while I was making my way to the layby from the top of Box Hill.

I stand next to your Japanese car and take the binoculars out of the pochette on a lanyard around my neck and peer through them. So relentless is the pelting rain that I wish O I wish I had wipers fitted to my binoculars. I cannot see a thing in any direction. I can only assume that for some reason you have sploshed through the puddles to the forest, the edge of which is about half a mile away. I decide to follow you, in my waterproof boots.

This is ancient and dense forest and no felling has taken place to make a clearing in which a motel might be erected. It would not, in any case, make an apt site for a motel. A sinister house like that adjoining the Bates Motel might be apt, were there a clearing, but there is not. So to find you I have to seek signs, like a tracker. Soon enough, I come upon you, squatting by a fallen log, upon which you have set a camping gaz stove. You are preparing tea, and sausages. Along the log from the stove you have placed a cassette player.

“Hold it right there!” I cry.

You spin around, astonished.

“Picnic police!” I cry, “Don’t move!”

“Dammit!” you mutter.

There are some people who praise picnicking in the British countryside. I do whatever it takes to eradicate it. I place you under arrest. The cassette plays poptones.