The world-famous food-splattered Jesuit was one of the best loved and most successful variety acts of the interwar years. It is believed that he appeared at every single seaside resort in the land, the grandiose and the dilapidated, in and out of season, and always to rapturous applause. Key to his appeal was sheer simplicity. The curtains would open and there, on stage, world-famous and splattered with food, stood a Jesuit. He would extend his arms, almost in crucifixion pose, and gaze at a point slightly above the heads of the audience. There were no frills, no “business” with props. After a few minutes, the curtains would close, and – barring the inevitable encore – that was that. It was a winning formula, but one which, alas, could not transfer to radio, where so many of the stars of variety theatre went on to find fame and fortune.

Throughout the years of his greatest popularity, roughly the decade from 1925 to 1935, the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit managed, miraculously, to preserve his anonymity. We still do not know for certain who he was. We do know, in spite of rumours put about to the contrary, that he was a single, particular individual, and not a series of different Jesuits. This charge was first levelled in a scurrilous newspaper story. In the Daily Voodoo Dolly for the sixth of September 1929, a hack named only as “Our Seaside Resort Reporter” claimed that the original world-famous food-splattered Jesuit had been killed in an accident (picnic, lightning) and replaced by at least seven other Jesuits, who took it in turns to appear at the end of piers, splattered with food. This farrago of nonsense was comprehensively demolished by investigative variety theatre reporter John Pilge, a man who knew his onions.

But even Pilge was not perfect, and it seems he was the source of a common misapprehension of the nature of the Jesuit’s performances. Oft repeated by nincompoop wannabe historians of the seaside variety theatre, this is the idea that the Jesuit stood on stage, initially pristine in his soutane, and that he was splattered with food by members of the audience pelting him with eggs, fruit, cuts of meat, soup, ketchup, ad nauseam. So let me be crystal clear – there is not a shred of evidence that this was ever so. More than that, it belies a fundamental misunderstanding of the entire point of the act, and the reason it was so wildly popular, to wit, that the Jesuit simply stood there, stock still, arms outstretched, faintly holy, world-famous, and food-splattered.

There was an art to these performances which we lose sight of in our modern fast-moving age of pap ‘n’ twaddle. It would be a mistake to think that the Jesuit was nothing more than a messy eater with the table manners of Kafka, who simply allowed various stains and spillages to accumulate upon his soutane. Anybody could achieve that, with persistence, determination, slapdash eating habits, and the shunning of laundry. In fact, there was for a time a rival act known as the world-famous bacon-and-egg-besmirched nun. Though a woman of fine manners and terrific personal hygiene, she was bedizened by the lure of the end of the pier limelight, and dedicated herself to allowing much of her fried breakfast to fall upon her habit. It was an effort of will not to send it straight to the laundry, but she gritted her teeth and prayed, and took to the stage. In itself hers was a fairly enchanting act, as she knelt in an attitude of devotion, clutching her rosary beads, displaying her stains of egg yolk and bacon grease. But she was viewed, with justification, as a copycat, and audiences failed to warm to her. She later achieved a measure of success with a completely different act, involving tea-strainers, coat-hangers, and performing monkeys.

The genius of the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit, on the other hand, was that the splattering was carried out, backstage, immediately before each performance. He would remove his soutane, lay it out flat on the floor, and proceed to splatter it with whatever foodstuffs came to hand. He would chuck eggs or fruit at it from across the room, drizzle it with soup and broth and slops and sauces, and shower it with bread- and biscuit-crumbs. Although there is no evidence that Jackson Pollock ever witnessed these preparations, it seems inconceivable to me that he could ever have arrived at his action painting technique without first having watched the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit.

Though there is common agreement that he was, beyond all reasonable doubt, a Jesuit, and food-splattered, several latterday commentators have wondered about that “world-famous” bit. Given that he is not known ever to have performed outside the seaside resorts of his own country, they ask, is there any truth in the claim that he was famed around the world? This was the interwar years, remember, when communications were technologically primitive compared to our own era. How would a variety theatre aficionado in far flung foreign parts ever hear tell of the goings on at the end of a rickety pier in an out of season seaside resort in our blessed land? It is a pertinent question. But it ignores the decisive role played in the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit’s career by his manager.

“Colonel” Tom Emersonlakeandparker was a rogue and a rascal, and an impresario of genius. It was he who first saw the potential of that pristine black soutane, saw it as a blank slate upon which food could be splattered, and then displayed, as in a tableau vivant, to an adoring public. All he had to do, he realised, was to find the perfect Jesuit, first to do the food-splattering, then to stand still with outstretched arms for ten minutes or so upon a seaside stage. By all accounts, he searched for over six years before finding his man – a man whose name still remains a secret. At the first few appearances, billed as the Food-Splattered Jesuit, the act was a flop. But rather than ditch his choice of Jesuit, which he might easily have done, the “Colonel” instead appended “World-Famous” to his stage name. It was a stroke of genius. Crowds thronged to see a figure who was already – they thought – a legend. They were not disappointed, as who could be? Certainly, in today’s entertainment-saturated world, we fail to register just how impoverished we are. In the era of multi-channel television and YouTube and a populace with the attention span of a gnat, we ought to be crying out, in our millions, for a variety act as spiritually enriching as the world-famous food-splattered Jesuit. Perhaps a young tyro Jesuit with a burning desire to entertain the masses is reading this. He will know what to do.

[A slightly shorter version of this piece appeared in June 2006.]

There is, or may have been, an old superstition that every farmyard has its own fiend. It is said that Beelzebub personally allotted each fiend to its farmyard, and ratcheted up the fiendishness of his dastardly plan by making the fiends extremely hard to identify. So, for example, neighbouring farmyards may have very, very different resident fiends – a pig here, an old rusty iron pail there, a one-legged hen in one farmyard and a big bright red tractor belching smoke in another. Exorcising a farmyard of its fiend is thus fraught with difficulty, for the average countryside exorcist, stepping through the gate of a farmyard for the first time, does not know where to begin to look.

There is great disparity in the fiendishness of farmyard fiends, and some diabolists have argued that Beelzebub treated the whole matter with an uncharacteristic lack of diabolic concentration. For every farmyard that is stricken by an energetic fiend, there are many more that can pass for years, even decades, in untroubled bucolic peace. But of course it is the former that gain attention. Who can forget the ruination visited upon Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard in the 1930s, all those crop failures, diseases, fires, murders, contaminations and inexplicable barn collapses, which ceased only when a marauding night-time squirrel was captured in a net by Father Dermot Boggis and subjected to the full rigour of his holy wrath? It took six months for the exorcist to expel every last vestige of fiendishness from the squirrel, leaving the poor bushy-tailed mammal thin and shrivelled and exhausted and close to death. And yet, as it was slowly revived by the coddling of Old Ma Purgative at her verdant squirrel sanctuary, so too did the farmyard flourish anew, with majestic fields of golden wheat, gleaming new buckets replacing the old rusty pails, and happy, happy pigs.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the taxonomy of farmyard fiends is precisely the kind of subject to which Dobson would have devoted a pamphlet or two. Indeed, Marigold Chew often pressed him to tackle the topic, supplying the out of print pamphleteer with a constant stream of newspaper cuttings about hideous devastations of an agricultural kidney. She was a subscriber to the once popular monthly magazine Glimpses Of Farmyard Ruin, and wrote many letters to the editor, some of which were published and one of which (October 1954) was selected as ‘Letter of the Month’, for which Marigold received a prize. Unfortunately, the prize was a very large hog with a brain disease which went on wild rampages through the house. Mischievously, the editor of the magazine, who had his own farmyard, regularly used the monthly prize to rid himself of his farmyard fiends.

Ah yes, note the plural. What happens, you will ask, when a fiend of the farmyard is identified and destroyed, whether by slaughter, exorcism, or being given away as a prize in a raffle, tombola, or by some other means, as happened with Marigold Chew? Did Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard stay fiend-free once its sinister squirrel had its demons cast out? How attentive was Beelzebub to the welfare of those he had sent to wreak havoc in our bosky rural domains? Were new fiends recruited and trained to carry out various infernal farmyard acts of fiendishness? These and other questions were answered by Father Dermot Boggis himself, in his deathbed ravings, carefully transcribed by his wrinkled old helpmeet, the widow Popsicle. Among the thousands of pages she scribbled, we find this startling passage:

Gaaaa… gaaaa… inexplicable torment of the devil’s long poking fork… his ladle… cataclysm of shuddering abasement in the pit… and when did you last see your potatoes?… gaaaa…. have the fields been hoed?…. I see hundreds of cows… thousands of cows… millions of cows… brutes… the flames of the fiery furnace… a crow on the branch of a dead tree… blasts of lightning… no diesel for the tractor… blight!… blight!… worms eating the flesh of resurrected horses… never resurrect a horse… never… pass me that feeble lamp… puddles of sludge and slop and constant rainfall… forty days and forty nights… flooded fields… the wheat ruined… ergot poisoning… a gruesome figure in the shroud of death… find me a lonely cave… remote from human kind… dark as the midnight grave… and dismal as my mind… gaaaa…

And with that last brief flash of lucidity, the remembered words of John Eccles (c.1688-1735), Father Boggis relapsed into inanity, the verbatim record covering four hundred pages’ worth of the widow Popsicle’s palsied pencil-scrawl. The clue to the farmyard fiends’ damnable resilience is, I think, in that reference to the crow perched on the branch of a dead tree. Think about it. But don’t think too hard, for then all you will see in your mind’s eye is the bird and the branch. You need to let the thought of the crow on the branch of a dead tree flit into your brain, like a swooping bat, and then out again. You need to think of it with the mental equivalent of peripheral vision. You need to try not to think about it, just as Gordon Zellaby tries not to think about the bomb he has planted to kill the Midwich Cuckoos in John Wyndham’s novel of 1957, filmed as Village Of The Damned in 1960, directed by Wolf Rilla and starring George Sanders as the heroic, academic, and terminally ill Zellaby. Wyndham’s fiends are not specifically farmyard fiends, but close enough, close enough. Close enough, too, to little Martin Amis, as can be seen by comparing these two pictures, one of little Mart when tiny, the other a still from the film.

But now the dawn is near. The sun will soon be lighting your path to the far flung fields. Go and till and plough and harrow, feed your horses and your cows and your happy, happy pigs. You may spit upon your farmyard fiend. It will pester you no more. It was only ever a superstition, or it might have been.

Let us nip back to the seventeenth century, to the village of Britling, and watch Fly Debate Roberts in action. Roberts, you will recall from your assiduous reading of Hooting Yard postages yesterday, was a screamer in a preaching-barrel. At least, that is how he was portrayed in the pamphlet A Word To Fanatics, Puritans and Sectaries; or, New Preachers New (1641).

Though he took naturally to screaming, especially when it was his turn in the barrel, Roberts won his nickname by dint of his great skill in debate, specifically in debate with flies. Every Thursday, he would commandeer a big barn in Britling, and coax and cajole the villagers to gather therein. Given the squalor and misery and sheer drudgery of life in Britling at that time, most people were only too willing to attend. There was certainly no lack of flies to challenge in debate, for what with all the rustic filth and muck and rot Britling was rife with flies. Roberts was particularly given to debating with blow-flies, and, once the villagers had settled and the hubbub had died down, he would select one particular blow-fly among those infesting the barn. The topic of debate was invariably an abstruse point of theology, of which the following is a typical example:

That this barn agrees with the motion that Man is made in the image of God, whereas the blow-fly is an emissary of Beelzebub.

Roberts would then harangue the fly for more than an hour, his voice rising to screaming pitch so that the dimwits and noodleheads in the audience, of whom of course there were many, could be forgiven for thinking they were attending, not a debate, but one of his screamings from the preaching-barrel. Wiser heads noted the absence of the barrel, and the presence of the fly. At the end of his tirade, Roberts invited the fly to respond. Being a fly, of course, and incapable of human speech, it remained silent, save for the irritating buzzing noise it made as it darted hither and thither, haphazardly, within the barn. Roberts claimed this as a victory and proposed that the fly be put to death, as the loser in the debate and as a representative of the Devil. The villagers, provoked into a frenzy by his words, formed a fearsome throng, leaping and cavorting around the barn armed with sticks and pebbles and rolled-up pamphlets, trying to swat and slaughter the fly. Often they were too stupid to recognise the individual fly Roberts had selected for debate, and swiped at the nearest tiny airborne speck.

Seventeenth century flies, including the blow-fly, were almost identical to modern flies, and it would take an extremely learned entomologist to spot the minimal differences between them. I’m not an entomologist myself, so I am unable to pinpoint what tiny evolutionary changes may have occurred in the past four hundred years, if any. But one thing we all know about flies is that they move much, much faster than humans. If we can for a moment imagine ourselves inside a fly’s head, it is easy to picture that a crowd of seventeenth century peasants, bent on our murder, and pursuing us within the confines of a barn, will appear as if in slow motion. We have plenty of time, as we watch a villager lumbering towards us, armed with a small agricultural hand-tool, simply to flit out of the danger zone. Even as the peasant is swinging his arm with deadly intent, we have zoomed over to the other end of the barn and are happily regurgitating viscous goo onto a toothsome rotting morsel. If you have difficulty seeing this in your mind’s eye, I recommend you watch The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) in which Jeff Goldblum illustrates precisely what I am talking about.

Fly Debate Roberts himself, apparently, declined to take part in the attempted fly-slaughter. He was, as a preacher, a man of words, or rather screams, not a man of action. It was enough for him to know that he had provoked the villagers into a murderous, and Godly, frenzy. He slipped out of a side door of the barn and spent the rest of Thursday with his fellow Britlingite screamer, Be Faithful Joiner, probably engaged in a bit of cooperage. Those preaching-barrels were subject to much wear and tear, and needed proper care and maintenance.

At some point it must have struck Roberts that Thursday after Thursday, the number of flies in the barn never seemed to get any smaller. We do not know if he actually bothered to do a count, and he was never on hand to witness the peasants’ killing frenzy, so he had no idea of their success or lack of it. What was plain, however, was that the emissaries of Beelzebub were far from being eradicated. It was then that he devised his fly-tether.

The Roberts Fly-Tether was basically little more than a thin piece of string, looped at both ends. One loop was attached to a nail hammered into an upright post in the barn. Shortly before the start of the Thursday debate, Be Faithful Joiner, who was quick with his hands, would pluck a blow-fly out of the air, and tie the other loop around one of its tiny legs. The fly would then have to squat on the post, unable to go buzzing and darting around the barn. This made the debates far more exciting, as even the densest and most brainless of the villagers could work out exactly which fly Roberts was challenging. They no longer had to cast their eyes around, foolishly, causing giddiness. Use of the fly-tether also changed the manner in which the debates ended. The fly’s silence was no longer met with a scene of violent if pointless havoc. Instead, Fly Debate Roberts himself, having called for the death of the fly, would take a huge iron hammer and crush his opponent beneath it with a single mighty, righteous, Godly blow.

In the next part of this series we shall take a look at More Fruit Fowler of East Hadley. Fowler accumulated more fruit than anyone before or since. But what did he do with it all? That is the question we hope to answer.

A blow-fly, losing a debate with Fly Debate Roberts

[The following piece, one of my own favourites, first appeared in Hooting Yard in September 2005. I find myself somewhat alarmed to think that is almost seven years ago. Where, where does the time go? Seven years is the length of time the Jesuits need to claim a child’s soul for life. It is longer than the Second World War. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!, as Carlyle would say. For this reappearance, I have added some useful notes.]

In certain parts of the world, people still sit around their fires at dusk and tell each other stories. In the wretched village where Marigold Chew grew up, there was one tale in particular that was told over and over again. This was the story of Tadeusz Kapisko and his ears of wheat. It was told so often – sometimes three or four times in a single evening – that it was embedded in Marigold’s brain, and years later, she could recount it word for word, barely pausing for breath. Dobson always knew when she was about to launch into the yarn, because she sucked in her cheeks and puckered her lips in what he thought of as “that Kapisko way”.

Curiously, the tale of Tadeusz Kapisko and his ears of wheat was never written down, but if Marigold Chew’s memory is accurate, there was a record of sorts. She remembered, as an infant, seeing pictorial representations of the main points of the story, richly painted in crimson, cerulean blue and orpiment. Later in life, she tried to describe them.

I recall that the first picture was of Tadeusz Kapisko half hidden behind a cow. It was, decisively, a French cow, une vache. I remember thinking how significant this was, even as a tiny tot. The second picture was the shape of a medallion. The painter overdid the orpiment, but what I loved about this one was that it showed the exact moment of a hen’s cluck. Tadeusz Kapisko is absent. I think we were meant to infer that he had already gone off to war. Certainly that is the import of the third picture, in which the Kapisko parents are shown filling rusty farmyard pails with their tears. I could almost taste the salt of their sobbing, as they waited for the wheat.

Picture four was missing, it had been torn out, you could still see the ghost shade of its adhesive. Some brute or vandal had scribbled over the fifth picture with an indelible black marker pen, and the sixth had been chewed by squirrels. So it was always a joy to look at the seventh, in which we see Tadeusz Kapisko with his ears of wheat at last, returned from the trenches minus one eye, leaning against the shed in which all the rusty farmyard pails full of his parents’ tears are kept. He is smoking a cheroot and looks the spit and image of Josef Starling, though his hair has been painted in cerulean blue with flecks of orpiment which may be accidental.

The eighth picture is like a child’s drawing. It shows the helicopters on the helipad, the burning cities, and the pit of doom, making the next picture all the more alluring, the delightful wash of colours showing meadows dotted with teasel, spurge, gentians, camellias, columbine, bedstraw and edelweiss, honeysuckle, lupins and phlox. And hollyhocks, hollyhocks.

“Oooh, mama! Papa!” I used to pipe, as I turned to picture number ten, “Where are Tadeusz Kapisko’s ears of wheat?” And my parents would always smile conspiratorially and place their fingers over their mouths, and I adored the anticipation of seeing the eleventh and last picture, all crimson and cerulean blue and orpiment, King’s yellow, the frying pan and the hunchback, the countless pigs wallowing in their muck, the detective with his buttons and the unshelled peas still snug in their pods, the glockenspiel and the fire extinguisher, the tiny glittering ships afloat on the soaking wet sea, and there, if you looked ever so closely, on the poop deck of the tiniest ship of all, triumphant in his galoshes, with his ears of wheat, Tadeusz Kapisko, brave and strong!

NOTES

In certain parts of the world, people still sit around their fires at dusk and tell each other stories. One such part of the world, I have learned, is a house on Jethro Tull Gardens, a cul-de-sac in a village in Oxfordshire. There, night after night after night, folk gather around a fire to tell each other stories based on Jethro Tull song lyrics. They transform Mr Anderson’s rhymes into prose, creating afresh tales of minstrels in galleries, heavy horses, Jeffrey going to Leicester Square, and other marvels.

Tadeusz Kapisko. This appears to be a Polish spelling. It has been given elsewhere as Thaddeus Capisco. Without knowing the precise location of the wretched village where Marigold Chew grew up, we cannot plump for one spelling or the other. One thing we can be fairly sure of, however, is that Marigold Chew did not grow up in Jethro Tull Gardens. I think we would know, if she had. Or do I mean if she did? Had? Did? Do? Be? Doobedoobedoo.

a French cow. I have long wondered if this French cow is related to the laughing cow, a red cow usually spotted on the paper element of the packaging of foil-wrapped processed cheese triangles. For certain children, brought up in blasted urban wastelands far from the bosky charms of a rustic idyll, this is the first, and possibly only, cow they have ever seen.

Mention of the cow reminds me to draw your attention to the latest media report of a cow attack, which I am pleased to note refers in passing to David Blunkett. It also includes the immortal line: “It’s hard to comprehend just how big a cow is until you’re underneath one, looking up at it.”

Josef Starling. Paranoid, pock-marked Georgian, dictator of the Soviet Union, died in 1953. Often confused with Clarice Stalin, heroine of The Silence Of The Cows Lambs, a potboiler by Thomas Harris.

the burning cities. Possibly the same burning cities alluded to in Nine Funerals Of A Citizen King by Henry Cow. I have searched in vain on maps for a cul-de-sac called Henry Cow Gardens.

Last night I watched the pilot episode of the flagship new television crime drama Wattle And Daub. Whoever commissioned this has a touch of genius. Set in prehistoric Britain, the series follows Jemima Wattle and Trixie Daub, a pair of female amateur sleuths, as they solve prehistoric British crimes in a gentle amateur sleuthy way. In this opening episode, for example, a body is discovered in a burial mound, a druid is crushed to death by a menhir, a blind pig is found wandering in the woods, and there are spooky goings-on in an important cave. I spotted many actors I am sure I have seen before in Holby City, Heartbeat, and Lork Roise To Candleford, barely recognisable as the costume designers had them dressed in animal pelts and covered in muck. Wattle and Daub themselves, being ladies of a certain age, and impeccably middle class, wear stout walking shoes and sun hats. The sun hats seem rather gratuitous, as the meteorological advisers have done their work and show, correctly in my view, that prehistoric Britain was a land of incessant wind and rain and fog and mist.

This fidelity to weather conditions occasionally made the action hard to follow. A lengthy scene involving Wattle falling into the hands of a band of roaming grunty men and being dragged off into the woods, was marred by taking place in a particularly thick swirling mist. It was not entirely clear to me how her rescue was eventually effected by Daub, armed only with a very modern-looking gardening trowel and a mosquito net.

I am given to understand that Het Internet has been alive this morning with twits and witterers complaining about other perceived anachronisms. The grunting of the grunty men seems unarguably authentic, but several people pointed out that a prehistoric British druid is unlikely to have used such verbal constructions as “thinking outside the box”, “pushing the envelope”, and “oi, leave it out, you numpty!”. I must admit I could never quite work out whether we were in the Stone Age, the Iron Age, or the Bronze Age. I will take a more careful look at that trowel should Trixie Daub be wielding it in a future episode.

This being the BBC, however, you will be pleased to learn that the show is properly inclusive. There are several black and Asian characters, though admittedly it is difficult to tell under the caking of mud, and a sympathetic gay couple. The chief Druid, who looks not unlike the Archbishop of Canterbury, is portrayed as a faintly ridiculous figure, and there is an explicit condemnation of capitalism, even though it did not exist at the time. At one point I think I spotted some of the more likeable grunty men going into a sort of prehistoric British mosque for morning prayers.

But Wattle and Daub are the stars of the show, mildly eccentric, occasionally acid of tongue, both dotty yet as sharp as tacks. Though neither of them has any training in detective work, their insatiable curiosity and ability to stumble upon clues is deeply charming. The scene where they go blackberry picking, only to unearth a body in a burial mound, was brilliantly handled. Similarly, when they decide to pop into the woods to scrape bark off a tree trunk and are confronted by the blind pig, the scene is at once heart-warming, gently comedic, and emotionally wrenching. I did not know whether to chuckle or weep, so I wept through my chuckles. Later, when the blind pig escapes from the pen they have built for it, I sobbed through my guffaws.

Which brings me to yesterday’s other drama premiere, Sob And Guffaw. Geoff Sob and Poppy Guffaw are a mismatched pair of detectives in Gritnorth, a fictional gritty town up north. Sob is an alcoholic widower, estranged from his teenage daughter, a maverick forever at odds with the police hierarchy. Guffaw is an alcoholic widow, estranged from her teenage son, a maverick forever at odds with the police hierarchy. But there the similarities end, for they are completely mismatched, both chafing at being sent on cases together, both sunk in brooding silences punctuated by occasional grunts, not dissimilar to the grunts of the grunty men in Wattle And Daub.

My only cavil with this show is that all the crimes in Gritnorth are committed by villains based in abandoned warehouses in an industrial wasteland. I would think that, if Sob and Guffaw had their detective heads screwed on, they would simply park their car outside the warehouses and wait to nab the malefactors, rather than speeding around the dismal rainswept streets of Gritnorth and leaping out of the car now and then to bustle, shouting, into hair salons or betting shops.

That said, the scene in which they bustle, shouting, into a hair salon and Guffaw realises, too late, that she is brandishing a gardening trowel rather than her gun, was matchless. I think it may well have been the same gardening trowel brandished by Daub in Wattle And Daub, but will have to watch both shows again to be sure.

Also on television last night, though I missed it, was Trowel, a new detective drama about a gritty northern gardener who moonlights as a sleuth. I am also looking forward to Sleuth With Trowel, in which a time-travelling gritty northern sleuth goes back to the Stone Age to solve prehistoric British gardening crimes.

I am often accosted in the streets by wild-eyed maniacs who block my path and jab me on the shoulder with bony fingers, demanding to be told how I arrive, each day, at a topic to write about. As I am reluctant to divulge the true nature of the Hooting Yard creative process, I usually babble sufficient nonsense to satisfy my assailant, who allows me on my way. This morning, however, on my way back from a circuit of Nameless Pond, I felt curiously impelled to tell the truth. Let me reproduce the dialogue verbatim, or as verbatim as I can recall it, to give you a glimpse into the travails of your favourite penniless scribbler.

Me – (sashaying along, humming The Final Countdown (Tempest), by the European band Sweden… sorry, I mean the Swedish band Europe).

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Oi! Mr Key!

Me – Yes, my good fellow, how may I be of assistance on this rain-drenched morn?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – (blocking my path and jabbing me on the shoulder with bony fingers) What are you going to write about today and how did you decide upon the topic? Answer me that!

Me – You mean “answer me those”.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Quit stalling, buster, and spill the beans!

Me – Have you been reading decades-old American pulp fiction, perchance?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Of course not! Like any sensible wild-eyed maniac, I read only the dispatches from Hooting Yard, to the exclusion of all else!

Me – Very astute, if I may say so.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – You may. But now answer my question. I mean, questions.

Me – Although I am usually reluctant to divulge the true nature of the Hooting Yard creative process, for some inexplicable reason I feel impelled to tell you how I arrived at today’s topic. Be warned, however, that my reply is only applicable to this particular day in the middle of June in the year of Our Lord MMXII.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Bob’s your uncle.

Me – In spite of the song I chose to be humming when you accosted me, I am, as you are probably well aware, curiously obsessed with Jethro Tull. God knows why. That being the case, my very first thought, on waking, before I even plunged my head into a pail of icy water, was of the early albums of Jethro Tull, and how perhaps Ian Anderson could be said to have lost his mojo circa 1974. Some would say even earlier, perhaps in 1972. Whichever date one chooses, I suspect there is general agreement that the band’s best work, and the work for which it will be remembered, yea unto every generation, appears on those first few releases. Of those, however, the debut album This Was (1968) is sometimes overlooked, possibly because of the strong blues influence and the presence of Mick Abrahams as a creative rival to Anderson – two things which are of course connected. In that sense, it is atypical of early Tull. Not having listened to it for a long long time, I tried to recall some of the songs, and the one that jumped to the surface of my brain was Beggar’s Farm. It was but a short step from there to making the decision to write about a beggar’s farm today. Not, I hasten to add, to write about the song, but instead to appropriate the title, and write some majestic sweeping paragraphs about a farm populated entirely by beggars.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – Gosh!

Me – Before I could concentrate on the ineffable glory of my prose, however, I found myself fretting away about the apostrophe in Beggar’s.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – This is absolutely fascinating, and it reminds me why you are surely the greatest living writer of English prose apart from Jeanette Winterson.

Me – You see, Anderson and Abrahams, as co-writers, seem to have had just one beggar in mind, placing the apostrophe between the R and the S. But my farm, the one gradually taking shape in my head, populated by beggars and indigents and tramps and drunks and wretches, would demand the apostrophe after the S, to reflect the plurality of beggars. Thus I was in a quandary. Should I entitle the essay On Beggar’s Farm, to reflect its fons et origo, or On Beggars’ Farm, to more accurately signal to the panting and overexcited reader what to expect?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – How on earth did you know that we Hooting Yard readers pant with overexcitement as our Windows Vista computer screens are lit up each day by your latest scribblings?

Me – I have my spies. But tell me, what would you advise regarding the placement of that pesky apostrophe?

Wild-Eyed Maniac – It’s a tricksy one, make no mistake.

Me – I think it is important that I give due credit to the monopod flautist and the founder of Blodwyn Pig. The idea of the beggar’s farm is theirs, and theirs alone, and I am merely plodding in their footsteps – or, in Anderson’s case, footstep. I have always assumed he got from place to place by hopping, at least while playing the flute.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – I have heard that is indeed the case.

Me – At the same time, I do not wish my title to be grammatically incorrect, nor to lead the panting and overexcited readers into thinking they will be reading about a farm with only a single beggar in situ. I envisage dozens, if not hundreds, of beggars, sprawled or lolloping about the farm, surrounded by rusty abandoned farm implements and machinery, growing nothing on fields reduced to scrub and gorse and bracken, rattling their tin cups at passers-by, moaning and keening and displaying a variety of unsightly sores and scars and stumps resulting from the amputation of one or more limbs. If the setting is shortly after a war, several of the beggars may have been gassed in the trenches.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – I can’t wait to read it!

Me – But wait you shall, until I am able to work out where to put the damned apostrophe.

Wild-Eyed Maniac – (his attention suddenly diverted, pointing at the sky) Oh look, a flock of swooping feathered beings with wings!

Me – They are called birds.

And so we went our separate ways, I returning to my escritoire to struggle with an apostrophe placement crisis.

Let Huz bless with the Polypus – lively subtlety is acceptable to the Lord.

Let Buz bless with the Jackall – but the Lord is the Lion’s provider.

– Christopher Smart, Jubilate Agno, Fragment A.

I wondered what ever became of Huz and Buz, the stout companions of my childhood. On the long summer afternoons we three played together in the shadow of the old viaduct out by Pang Hill. We played foopball and hockey and we polevaulted over ditches and we set fire to buttercups and we pretended to be Prussians or Russians or monsters from the far Carpathians. And always Huz had his polypus puppet of wool and wire, and Buz his cardboard jackal. And in the gloaming at the end of those endless days, Huz and Buz would trot back to Pang Hill Orphanage and sneak in through the hidden wicket, and I would trudge home, along the canal towpath rife with phlox and lupins, to the enormous mansion where Ma and Pa lay on separate ottomans in separate chambers in separate wings, both of them neurasthenic and medicated and moaning. I ate my dinner with Crouch, the impossibly tall and gangling servant, in the baronial hall, tenebrous and chill, where bats swooped in the rafters, and the rafters rotted, and sometimes shards of rafter dropped into my soup. And I thought of Huz and Buz, shivering in their attic room in the orphanage, going hungry to their iron cots.

Sometimes, in the night, I would slip out of bed and pad along the corridor to Ma’s wireless room to transmit coded messages, buzzes and clicks and bleeps, to my pals. Either Huz, or Buz, I forget which, had smuggled a portable metal tapping machine into the orphanage and kept it hidden under the sandbag that served as his pillow. It was a hazardous business, for there was always the risk he might be caught by the beadle. If that happened, Huz or Buz would be made to put a saucepan on his head and spend a week on the orphanage roof, among the crows and ravens, without shelter, slaking his thirst with rainwater from the gutters. It was hazardous for me too. The wireless room was thick with dust and cobwebs, spiders and beetles and gnats. Ma had abandoned it long ago, before I was born. Once it had been her sanctum, when she was young and lively and the recipient of mountaineering trophies. Crouch still polished the trophies, devotedly, day after day, with his special rags.

The messages we exchanged in the night were couched in a private language Huz and Buz and I had devised. I still have some of the transcripts, musty and dog-eared, the ink fading, in a filing cabinet in what was once Pa’s smoking room. I do not know why I keep them, for I long ago forgot the language, and can wring no sense from them. Perhaps it is that they are the sole remaining tangible reminders of my childhood friends. The orphanage, at the railings of which I often stood and wept, burned down last year. The beadle’s grandson was arrested, but I do not know the outcome of the case. The local police officers do not speak to me any more.

As a child, I was barely aware that the police existed. Certainly, on those long afternoons by the old viaduct, Huz and Buz and I never once saw a police officer. The only person we ever saw in uniform was the tally man with his dog, on his patrols, and we would always hide from him. We used to make up stories in which he and his dog were involved in alarming hazchem episodes. Once I think Huz or Buz devised a plan to kidnap the dog and take it back to Pang Hill Orphanage to attack the beadle, until I pointed out that it was old and lame and almost blind, and could not attack one of the gnats in the wireless room. Then one day we saw the tally man alone and dogless, and we assumed the dog had died. We decided to make an excursion to the pet cemetery, to leave a bunch of lupins on its grave. The pet cemetery was out beyond the orchard and the railway tracks and the decoy airfield, but none of us was clear precisely where it was, and we got lost. The sun was sinking in the west when we came to an army camp. I was worried about Crouch, who would be cooking our soup and herrings and would be wondering where I had got to. Huz and Buz were fearful of the beadle, who would no doubt be pulling a couple of saucepans from their hooks and clearing the staircase up to the roof. Though it was summer, there was a chill in the air at dusk, and we shivered as we sank exhausted to the ground at the perimeter fence. We were far from home, far from the mansion and the orphanage, and we had no idea what to do.

When the sky grew darker, searchlights flashed on, and we were caught in the bright beam of one. A sentry spotted us, and took us into the camp. He put us in a tent and told us to wait. We were, I think, so awestruck by his uniform, so much more resplendent than that of the tally man, that we could hardly think. We made no attempt to escape. About half an hour passed before a captain entered. His uniform was even more impressive, all crimson and gold, with epaulettes and medals, and he carried a sword. He rapped a few questions at us, which we answered truthfully, in shaky little squeaks, for we were tired and hungry and terrified. Then he left. Huz and Buz and I rummaged in our pockets for playthings, and improvised a game with a button, a rubber band, and a boiled sweet wrapper.

It kept us occupied until we heard the spluttering of an engine, followed by the parp of a hooter. It was Crouch! He had been summoned to collect us. At least, that is what we thought. When he came into the tent, accompanied by the captain, we burst into tears of relief. For Huz and Buz, alas, the relief was short-lived. The captain announced that Crouch had come to take me home.

“As for you orphans,” he said, “War was declared earlier today, and we need every recruit we can lay our hands on. You will be shipped overseas at the break of dawn, to fight the good fight.”

I clutched Crouch’s hand and he led me away towards his jalopy. As we went out through the tent flap, I looked back at Huz and Buz, my childhood friends. I never saw them again.

Facecloth, which some people continue to insist on calling Facebook in spite of my cajoling, grows ever more ubiquitous. At times it really does seem to have taken over the world. Efforts by others to supplant it – Google+ for example – have only limited success, and I think this may be because the alternatives so far are too similar to Facecloth. There is also the fact that Zuckerberg and his minions adapt their monolith to ape the best features of their competitors. What this suggests to me is that if there is to be a social networking site that can consign Facecloth to the dustbin of history, it will have to be so far in advance of the original that little Mark will take one look at it, burst into tears, dismantle his entire operation, and retire from the fray. I think I have now come up with the goods, daddy-o.

My insight was granted by going back to basics, and considering the original name, Facecloth. Sorry, Facebook. As far as I am aware, this refers to the practice of American higher education colleges of issuing yearbooks containing snapshots and potted biographies of their students. Little Mark took that very simple format as the building block for world domination. But therein – I realised – lie the seeds of his destruction. Break the word in two. Face. Book. It is all so damned two-dimensional. Photographs of faces, gathered in a book of flat pages with printed words. It is just not good enough, even when modified and complicated and transformed into a global phenomenon on Het Internet. It seems clear to me that the whole thing needs to be shifted up into three dimensions. And that is the beauty of Headbag!

Just think. Why be satisfied with the face when you could have the whole head? And what kind of nincompoop would be happy with a book of flat paper pages when they could have a bag packed with solid objects? It is so blindingly obvious I am surprised nobody has thought of it before.

But perhaps they have, and have raised objections. After all, if you are going to stuff a bag full of heads, where are you going to get the heads from? We do not want to encourage those Islamist nutcases whose greatest joy in life, when not persecuting women, is to chop off the heads of infidels. But, using the kind of lateral thinking espoused by geniuses like Edward “Six Hats” De Bono, we need not cram our bag with human heads. Instead, we can use cabbages as a substitute. Carefully picked, cabbage heads are about the weight, size, and shape of human heads, and if you are pernickety you can always draw facial features on the cabbage with a magic marker, and apply a variety of superb and exciting hairstyles with cotton wool and glue. It is then a simple case of shoving, say, half a dozen or even a baker’s dozen of cabbages into a burlap sack of the appropriate size, and voila!, you have signed up to Headbag. You will receive a confirmatory metal tapping machine message, to which you should respond using a special code to demonstrate that you are a real person, toting a real bag, filled with real cabbages. Once that is received and processed and filed away in a filing cabinet drawer at Headbag HQ, you are off and away!

What we found, in our preliminary research, was that the best way to network with other Headbag users was to find a suitable three-dimensional real-world location and to gather there, each of you with your burlap sack of cabbages. Caves, particularly caves by the seaside, proved to be the best spots of all. A particular advantage is that they tend not to be haunted by anybody else. Vagrants, drunks, and riff-raff are all more likely to be found slumped in municipal parks and on the outskirts of leisure and retail facilities, whereas the caves we reconnoitred were empty. Occasionally there might be a small creeping creature of dubious provenance scuttling about, but they can always be stamped on or, if of a somewhat larger bulk, sprayed with a canister of some death-delivering chemical compound. When the cave is properly vacant, it makes for a splendid meeting-place for Headbag users. You might want to take along a torch or a Tilly lamp, and a packed lunch.

There are all sorts of rewarding ways that a group of persons each with a bag full of cabbages can interact. You probably don’t need me to tell you what they are. In fact, doing so would fatally undermine the sheer beauty of the Headbag experience, which is posited on giving users full control. There is none of that sneaky shenanigans going on in the background that you get with Facecloth. None of your details will be passed to sinister multinational corporations. You will not find a data trail linking you to unseemly or criminal activities. No, with Headbag, you can be sure your privacy is safe. You sit in a cave, by the sea, with other users, clutching your sack of cabbages, and do whatever you want to do, without Headbag HQ interfering in any way. All we ask is that you be very careful to scarper before the tide comes in, flooding the cave, as tides tend to do.

One question that often crops up at our marketing seminars is how we will make sufficient money from Headbag to reduce little Mark Zuckerberg to comparative penury and have him come grovelling to our door with a begging bowl. In the interests of robust transparency, I should point out that your burlap sack will carry advertising, stencilled on using luminous ink or paint which will be visible in the dank darkness of your cave. That is our only concession to the commercial realm. Please do not believe any stories you read in the press that we have plans to force users to rent their cabbages from us. You are free to buy them from your local greengrocer’s or hypermarket, or even to grow them yourself on your allotment, out beyond the viaduct by the railway tracks. That is the Headbag way, like it or lump it.

Onward to world domination!

Let us imagine you are sitting at home, in an armchair, with your feet up, listening to Scriabin on the radio perhaps, or reading Martin Amis’s very sensible new novel Lionel Asbo : State Of England, or simply gazing vacantly into space, like a dimwit or a simpleton, though you need not actually be a dimwit or a simpleton, merely dozing, half-asleep, at the border of the Land of Nod. Then imagine that your poppet rushes into the room, from the front garden, crying “Dennis! Dennis! Come and see!”

Whatever you have been doing, or not doing, you sit bolt upright and ask “What is it?”

“Come and see the shoveller!” cries your poppet.

It is important to note, and indeed it is the very crux of my argument, that, while still sat in your armchair, before following your poppet out to the front garden, you do not know what she is talking about. Note, too, that I did not write, you have no idea what she is talking about. There is a difference, and a critical one. It is not the case that, at this stage, you have no idea. On the contrary, you have a very good idea. You know that, once you are in the front garden, in response to your poppet’s urgent beckoning, you will see one of two things. But because you do not know which, it is fair to say that you do not know what she is talking about. Thus may we calibrate the efficacy of human communication through words.

Let us leave you in your armchair for a moment, and examine what you know. You know that, from the vantage point of your front garden, a shoveller can be seen. But what kind of shoveller? There are, as I have indicated, two types. The shoveller may be a person with a shovel, or it may be a duck. Before hoisting yourself out of the armchair and making your slow, creaking, exhausted way into the front garden, you might want to ascertain the type of shoveller your poppet is eager for you to see. You can ask, “Is it a person with a shovel or a duck?” But it may be that your poppet has already rushed back out, and is out of earshot, in which case you might make an educated guess.

For example, which type of shoveller is likely to spark your poppet’s excitement, and spark it sufficiently that she wishes to share it with you? If you, or she, or both, are fanatical ornithologists, it is a near certainty that she is talking about a duck. But what if ornithology plays no important part in either of your lives? Astonishingly, such people do exist! In that case, guesswork will avail you little. Conversely, your home might be slap bang next to important roadworks on the Blister Lane Bypass, the racket of which has been causing you grief while listening to Scriabin or reading Martin Amis or dropping off to sleep. In that case, in all likelihood your poppet has seen a person with a shovel. But why would that spark her excitement, so much so that she rushes in, to tell you about it, and rushes out again, to see? Even if we grant the possibility that you, or she, or both, are fanatical civil engineers, there will be shovellers – that is, persons with shovels – aplenty to be seen for the duration of the roadworks which, being important, will be a period of weeks or even months. On balance, and irrespective of your fanaticism or lack of it in the field of civil engineering, you might decide that the duck is the more probable shoveller, based on the information thus far available. Even if neither you nor your poppet are fanatical ornithologists, she may have been struck by a sense of wonder, out of the blue, as sometimes people are, at sight of a bird. There is literature on such epiphanies.

With you still in your armchair, we have been able to weigh the likelihood of the type of shoveller your poppet wants you to see. We cannot say for certain it is a duck, but the chances are that it is. Narrowing it further, to a Red shoveller, Cape shoveller, Australasian shoveller, or Northern shoveller, will have to wait until you make it to the front garden and see for yourself, unless, impatient, your poppet rushes back in to implore you to hurry, in which case you can ask: “Of the four types of dabbling ducks with long broad spatula-shaped beaks known as shovellers, which is it?” Beware, however, that you will only get a sensible answer to this question if (a) your poppet is a fanatical ornithologist, and (b) if the shoveller she has seen is indeed a duck, and not a person with a shovel.

For let us not forget that the type of shoveller is not yet settled beyond all doubt. By deciding, on the balance of probabilities, that your poppet is talking about a duck does not mean we can airily dismiss the possibility – and it is no more than that – that she is talking about a person with a shovel. We can briefly examine the circumstances which make that actually more likely than the duck.

What if?, we ask, and it is often the prefix to a question which can yield significant if unexpected results, what if the shoveller your poppet spotted was a person with a shovel who was not engaged in important roadworks on the Blister Lane Bypass, but was a gravedigger? The sight of a person with a shovel digging a grave just outwith your front garden would be cause for surprise, and alarm, would it not? It could be considered a portent, even a supernatural vision. Key to deciding if this could be the cause of your poppet’s excited rushing in would be her tone of voice and her countenance. Innocent excitement, as occasioned by a bird epiphany, can easily be confused with fright, or terror. It may be that your poppet is on the verge of hysteria and nervous collapse, having seen a sinister figure digging a grave just outside your front garden, a grave thus intended, as in a vision, for you, or your poppet, or both. We might argue that she would have said “gravedigger”, not “shoveller”, but it is worth remembering that when on the verge of hysteria or nervous collapse language can become skewed or fractured or otherwise dislodged from the norm.

To know, beyond all doubt, what your poppet is talking about, language itself is not enough. You are going to have to hoist yourself out of your armchair and see for yourself. That is the basis of all science.

Shoveller

Shoveller

Once upon a time there was a knock-knee’d ingrate. He was slumped outwith the palace gates, clutching a begging bowl. No matter how many times he was chased away by the princeling’s henchmen, he returned to his patch and whimpered at passers by, hoping they would fill his bowl with slops.

Before we go any further, it would be helpful to consider the different characters, both individual and collective, we have encountered thus far. We have met two individuals, the INGRATE and the PRINCELING. We have also been introduced to two collectives, or groupuscules, in the persons of the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY. We might like to draw a diagram to get these all clear in our heads, using say, a triangle for the PRINCELING, a square for the INGRATE, and a couple of amorphous blobs for the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY, one blob filled in in black ink and the other blob left blank, that is, white, assuming our diagram is drawn on white paper. Next, we may wish, with pinking shears, to cut out each of our four shapes, the triangle and the square and the black blob and the white blob, separating them, so we have four bits of paper, which we can thus manoeuvre on a green baize tabletop as we follow the action. Doing so will be an enormous help in visualising the drama about to unfold.

Let us assume it is Thursday afternoon. The sun is shining, or it might be raining, or perhaps it is merely overcast and threatening imminent rain from louring clouds. Or, if it is the depths of winter, perhaps the palace and its environs are carpeted in snow. There is a howling wind, or a balmy breeze, or it is one of those hot unbearable humid days when the air is thick and still and suffocating. We might posit all sorts of weather for this Thursday afternoon, but we need not try to cut shapes out of a second sheet of paper in order to add a suggestion of weather to our diagram. We could, but we do not need to. While I am on the subject of the diagram again, briefly, I should point out that the green baize of the tabletop on which we have posed our representations of the INGRATE and the PRINCELING and the HENCHMEN and the PASSERS BY ought not be taken as an indication of verdant lawns or greensward. Christ almighty!, nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing whatsoever grows in the vicinity of the palace, for miles around, not grass nor bracken nor vetch nor brambles nor weeds nor nettles. It is a blasted landscape, as if visited by hellfire. Why this is so need not concern us.

On this Thursday afternoon, the knock-knee’d ingrate has returned to his patch outwith the palace gates following his most recent chasing away by the henchmen. His begging bowl is empty. It is that time of afternoon when passers by are few and far between, what with early closing and curfews and roving banditti and, possibly, inclement weather, but see above. The princeling, in his chamber, pokes his head out of the window and sees the knock-knee’d ingrate and flies into a temper. He summons his henchmen, those that are on duty. Other henchmen are taking naps in their little hench-cubbies. We do not need a separate blob for them, for our diagram. They are, as it were, breathtakingly irrelevant. I mention them merely because, having referred to the henchmen who are on duty, you might start wondering about the henchmen who are off duty, and become distracted from the main business, fretting about where the off duty henchmen might be, and what antics they might be up to. Well, now you know.

Turn for a moment to the green baize tabletop and align your cut-outs accordingly, the PRINCELING triangle and the black HENCHMEN blob right next to one another, the INGRATE square at some distance away, and the white PASSERS BY blob tucked away in your pocket, out of sight.

We ought to have a spot of dialogue here, with the princeling shouting his head off at the henchmen demanding that they chase the knock-knee’d ingrate away from the palace gates, and the henchmen protesting that they have already done so, several times today alone, and every time we chase him away he comes lurching back, sire, no matter how fiercely we screech, how violently we poke at him with pointy implements, how fast we chase! To which the princeling responds by shouting even louder, even more fiercely, and telling the henchmen he will have their guts for garters if they do not rid him of this infernal knock-knee’d ingrate!

The having of guts for garters is a common exclamation of princelings, though how often or regularly the threat was carried out, by this princeling or others, is by no means clear. Let us assume that these henchmen are sufficiently alarmed at the prospect that, clattering away along the corridor after their interview with the princeling, they mutter among themselves, trying to come up with a plan that will prevent the knock-knee’d ingrate ever returning to his patch.

Move the black HENCHMEN blob a little further away from the PRINCELING triangle, to reflect this latest development.

There are so many corridors in the palace, and so many staircases, and so many lobbies, that the henchmen have plenty of time, on their way from the princeling’s chamber to the palace gates, to devise a stupendous number of plans. Much as I would like to tell you about each and every one, I am not going to. Instead, I will reveal, as a magician does at the climax of a conjuring trick, the plan that won favour with the henchmen, as being the most effective. They decided to kill the knock-knee’d ingrate and bury him, with his begging bowl, in an unmarked grave.

Now place the black HENCHMEN blob slap bang next to the INGRATE square. And, unexpectedly, take the white PASSERS BY blob out of your pocket and place it on the green baize tabletop slap bang next to the other blob and the square!

For cor blimey!, it is rush hour, and all of a sudden there are dozens if not hundreds of passers by passing by the palace gates. Several of them stop to pour slops into the knock-knee’d ingrate’s begging bowl. Being an ingrate, he does not say thank you, nor even acknowledge the receipt of charitable slops with a nod, as he might do were he not an ingrate. One would think, with such ill manners, he deserves to be killed. But the henchmen are very wary of carrying out a killing in front of witnesses. It is not their way. So instead they stand around puffing on cigarettes and pretending to be interested in flocks of birds in the sky.

What this means is that at the end, we still have all four cut-out paper shapes, and have not scrunched up the INGRATE square and chucked it in the bin, which is what we would do had he been killed and buried, with his begging bowl, by the henchmen. Tomorrow, we will play the game again, but next time we will swap the INGRATE square and the PRINCELING triangle. We will turn the world topsy-turvy, by installing the ingrate in the chamber and having the princeling begging outside his own palace gates. That should prove quite a lark.