From within his concrete pillbox, he spotted a stonechat. Never having seen a stonechat before, he did not recognise it for what it was. His mind reeled, as minds will reel when faced with the unknown. He flapped his arms, and then he calmed himself and consulted his field guide. It was dark in the pillbox, so he took from his satchel his torch and depressed the knob to switch its light on, but the torch was dead. No light shone.

Are those not terrible words? Consider them for a moment. Chew them, as it were, within your mind. No light shone. That is what the world must have been like before the formation of the sun. But the sun did form, and light did shine, but the roof and walls of the concrete pillbox blocked it out and there was only a thin slit through which he was able to spot the thing he knew not, which was a stonechat. The stonechat was outside the pillbox, on the heath, and they were lit up by the sun, heath and stonechat, both of them, but not him, not the interior of the pillbox with its small cement bench and shelf. There was nothing on the shelf.

He rummaged in his satchel, by touch, sure he had some spare batteries for the torch. He did not know that they had fallen out, upon the heath, a mile back, though a rent in the lining at the base of the satchel, a rent he had not noticed, for when he set out it was barely noticeable, but when heading for the heath he passed through a patch of thorn bushes, and the satchel was snagged on a mighty thorn, and the rent was rent further, enlarged, and shortly thereafter the batteries fell to the ground upon the heath, but he did not register the tiny diminution in the weight of his satchel occasioned by the loss of these important objects. He had other claims on his attention at the time, his plodding, for one, the avoidance of puddles in his plodding, for it had rained relentlessly for hour upon hour before he set out for the heath through the thorn bushes.

It was when the rain ceased that he set out. He hoisted his satchel over his shoulder, the satchel with the fateful rent already present in embryonic form. He set great store by a well-packed satchel. “I set great store by a well-packed satchel” was something he had said more than once, much more than once, to members of his family and to friends and even to himself, aloud, as was his habit. On this day he had packed, during the last of the rainfall, a pair of binoculars and a propelling pencil and a notepad and a torch and spare batteries and a field guide and sausage sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper and a flask of hot cocoa. Due to the disposition of the contents within the well-packed satchel only the spare batteries fell through the thorn-enlarged rent, on to the heath, a mile before he reached the concrete pillbox, the interior of which was dark, for the sun could not penetrate its roof and walls. Light cannot penetrate concrete. That is a lesson humankind has learned.

Because the spare batteries lay, ruined, in a puddle on the heath, his rummaging by touch in the dark proved fruitless. We knew it would be so, for we have been told about the rent. We are better informed than him. It is even possible that we would recognise a stonechat when we saw one, were we sat in a concrete pillbox on the heath after the rain, peering out, peering out into the light, through binoculars. That is a moot point, and can remain so without consequences of any kind. It hardly matters, in the run of things. But it does matter to him, because had he recognised the stonechat for what it was, a stonechat, he would not have sought recourse to his field guide, he would not have tried in vain to switch on his torch, he would not have rummaged in the satchel for the spare batteries, and he would not have discovered the rent in the lining. At least, not then. He would have discovered it sooner or later, but in different circumstances, back at home, for example, where he would have needle and thread and thus the means to mend the rent. “Damn damn damn” he said to himself, aloud, and the words were followed by the silent thought that he ought to have packed needle and thread in his satchel, followed by a further silent thought that, depending on whereabouts within the satchel he had packed the needle and thread they too might have fallen out upon the heath, into a puddle. There were all sorts of possibilities, the more he thought about them, and he did, for a while, think of them, in a rush, as sometimes thoughts will come in a rush, tumbling one after another through our heads, unstoppable, often irrational, especially in the dark, where there is little or no light to distract us, by making visible things to turn our attention from the innards of our own brains.

But he was mindful of the dangers of the darkness, if “dangers” is not too strong a word, and so he hefted his satchel and emerged from the concrete pillbox into the light, on to the heath. His sudden bustling alarmed the stonechat, and it flew away. He watched it, silhouetted against the sky, growing tinier as it grew more distant, until it was a mere speck, until it vanished completely. And it occurred to him to sketch it, the memory of the sight of it, while it was fresh in his mind. He placed the satchel on the heath and took from it his propelling pencil and notepad and he shut his eyes to see the stonechat in his mind, as he had seen it minutes before through the slit in the wall of the pillbox, and he drew what he remembered, as best he could. But he was at best a cackhanded sketcher.

Home again, he showed his sketch to his dearest, who knew all there is to know about all the birds of the air.

“What was it I saw?” he said,

His dearest had no clue, for his sketch did not resemble a stonechat in the slightest. We might ask, then, what, if anything, he had achieved, on that day, after the rain, striding out through gorse and thorn bushes to the heath, and the concrete pillbox? There are several answers, and we shall leave them hanging in the air. To ask them is enough.

I am of low birth. If you go back a few generations, my forebears on both my mother’s and father’s sides were peasants, struggling to eke pitiful subsistence crops from the muck of Flanders and Ireland. Though my parents themselves had risen a little higher in the world, they had not risen by much. I grew up on a council estate, and though I too, rose a little, debauch put paid to whatever material gains I made, and now I am mired in poverty. Granted, in comparison with the poverty of my peasant forebears it is the veriest luxury, yet by modern Western standards I teeter on the edge of destitution. In my mind, however, I am a king, or, if not a king, at least a baron or a magnifico.

I am not labouring under the delusion that I am some kind of changeling, a prince switched, at birth, with a pauper. I have not spent my life in fruitless quest of some illusory document that will, if ever found, prove my claim to title, riches, lands and chattels. What I mean, rather, is that my material circumstances are of no account in comparison to what might be called my attitude – and my attitude is that of Scriabin’s nobler being who would emerge after the performance of his, alas unfinished, unperformed, Mysterium.

It has amused me, in recent years, to watch our leaders – worthless gits all of them – attempting to deny or disguise their own elevated backgrounds and to pretend to a woeful fantasy of “ordinariness”. Of course these ploys are based on ruthless political ambition, yet it is laughable to witness Blair’s estuarine glottal stops, Brown’s purported delight in the Arctic Monkeys (does anybody remember them?) and Cameron’s kitchen sink video clips. I take a completely opposite approach to the common people. Our leaders are desperate to be at one with them, whereas I rise above them, and look upon them with contempt. It is not, perhaps, an attractive quality, but it keeps me getting up in the mornings and ploughing my furrow.

Having said that material circumstance is trumped by attitude does not mean that I am averse to the trappings of nobility, or of royalty, if they can be obtained. Such trappings, after all, are merely what I deserve, and would be gifted in a more sensible universe. Thus it is that recently I considered installing my own household cavalry. The monarch has a household cavalry, and I shall have one too! That was the thought sparkling in my brain as I leaped out of bed. My penury being what it is, I live in a flat rather than a house, but I take the word “household” in its broader definition, as used in the census and elsewhere, to mean a separate living unit.

So much for the household element. Next I will require horses. Though I have never been the keenest aficionado of westerns, I have watched enough cowboy films to know that the standard method of obtaining several horses is to rustle them. Generally speaking, I abhor theft as a mortal sin, one to which the lower classes are habitually prone, as indeed are those higher in the social strata, if they think they can get away with it, as, regrettably often, they can. I will therefore have to engage in some fairly tortuous moral justification if I am to rustle horses, but that is not beyond my wit. Weak though the argument is, I can claim that my peasant forebears probably rustled a few horses in their time, and thus I am merely obeying the dictates of my cultural inheritance. It is not an excuse I would entertain for a moment were I a magistrate sitting in judgement over an oiky indigent, but let that pass. I shall have to locate a paddock and set out at dead of night for a spot of rustling.

I have considered the matter of the minimum number of horses required for a cavalry, deciding I need four. They will be somewhat cramped in the flat, which cannot be helped, but I shall keep the windows open. My downstairs neighbours may be disturbed by the clattering of their great iron horseshoes, what Father Hopkins described as the drayhorse’s “bright and battering sandal” because it rhymed with Felix Randal, the eponymous, if dead, hero of his poem. Perhaps when the neighbours hammer upon my door to complain I shall simply fling it open and recite Hopkins at them to befuddle their tiny, barely flickering brains. George Melly, I recall, used the same tactic when set upon by grunting ruffians one dark night outside a pub where he had been singing. As a thug smashed a bottle preparatory to enacting savagery upon the chubby jazzman, Melly took from his pocket the book he was carrying – a volume of Kurt Schwitters – and began to recite a Dadaist sound-poem. The ruffians reeled in cognitive confusion and fell away. (The anecdote is given in Melly’s memoir Owning Up (1965).)

For the feeding of my four horses I shall require an enormous supply of hay. Quite where I might obtain it is something I have yet to settle. Obviously, were I a dweller in some squalid rustic backwater I would have hay coming out of my ears. Instead, I shall have to identify and locate urban hay. I am creating a rod for my own back, but that, perhaps, is one cost I must pay for having rustled the horses in the first place.

A second, more onerous cost, is that I shall require riders for my horses. And not just any riders, but riders dressed from head to toe in livery, livery so gorgeous and ornate and Ruritanian that spectators will be almost blinded by it. The livery is not the problem. But where on earth am I going to keep the riders? I cannot have them cluttering up my flat, gabbling their horsey gabble and quarrelling about their epaulettes and generally being loud and boisterous and hearty, as I suspect members of a household cavalry are when they are off duty. I suppose I could have them break in to the downstairs flat and terrorise the neighbours into fleeing, and then set up home there, but in that case it would be unclear exactly whose household cavalry they were – mine or the downstairs flat’s? Once installed downstairs, they would want the horses with them, so I would be back to square one, the only difference in my circumstances being a daily delivery of huge bales of urban hay.

Thinking it through, it may be an idea to modify my plans. Rather than having my own household cavalry, I could send my four rustled horses sweeping out across the globe, the riders mounted upon them Conquest and War and Famine and Death. That will be tickety-boo!

Here at Hooting Yard we will be providing complete coverage of the Euro 2012 foopball tournament. What this consists of, for the uninitiated, is a few weeks during which men in shorts run around grassy fields, huffing and puffing and occasionally falling over. The focus of their attention is a ball – the foopball – which is about the size of a pig’s head. There are various arcane rules governing their chasing around of the ball, but you do not really need to know them to enjoy the spectacle.

The grassy field is known as a pitch. It has several lines drawn on it with whitewash. These are applied by a chap known as the groundsman, but he is nowhere to be seen while the men are running around. At least, he is not readily identifiable. He may well be among the teeming thousands of spectators, but then again he is just as likely to be sat in his potting shed puffing on a rollup and smearing grease on to his whitewash-applicator, readying it for the next application of whitewash to the grass. He is, in a sense, the unsung hero of the tournament, for without his whitewash application skills, without the markings on the grass, the men running around in pursuit of the foopball would run around in a completely haphazard fashion. Some of them are already haphazard enough, but at least with the whitewashed lines they are given some idea of where they are.

In the potting shed, while smoking a gasper and greasing his whitewashing contraption, the groundsman will probably be listening to a transistor radio. He will have it tuned in to a station broadcasting what is called a “commentary” on the foopball match. This is where a man among the teeming thousands of spectators, in a special box, and armed with a microphone, babbles his observations of what is happening on the pitch. He will say things like: “Here we are in the field of dreams, surrounded by fields of cows” and “For a moment there, he looked like a baby gazelle who’d just plopped out of the womb”. Such aperçus can actually be more entertaining than the foopball game itself, long stretches of which are often pointless and enervating.

If you find your mind wandering and do not have a transistor radio, you can pass the time by counting the persons on the pitch. Generally speaking, there ought to be twenty-one people running around, two standing at either end looking a bit disconsolate, and a further two running up and down the whitewashed lines on either side. Those latter two have whistles and flags. One of the men on the pitch also has a whistle, but no flag. Instead, he carries a couple of cards in his breast pocket. Every now and again he will take one of the cards and brandish it in the air, as if it were some kind of talisman of great import. He will always blow his whistle shortly beforehand. In addition to these… er, let me add the numbers quickly… these twenty-five persons, there is a twenty-sixth, a shadowy figure rarely if ever seen, known as “the fourth official”. You don’t need to worry your little pointy head about him.

Another thing you can do to pass the time is to keep a beady eye on the men in shorts who are nowhere near the foopball. They will occupy themselves in various ways, chief among them being standing with their hands on their hips, kneeling to retie their bootlaces, spitting, and darting about in brief little runs in every direction to no apparent purpose. Sometimes they might punch each other.

If, like Charles Babbage, you are neurasthenically sensitive to noise, you should be warned that the “soundtrack” to a foopball match, apart from dirge-like singing from the teeming thousands of spectators, is the blaring of hooters and klaxons. This blaring appears to be entirely gratuitous, a din for din’s sake. In olden times, before the hooter, spectators liked to hold aloft wooden rattles. They made less of a din, and were only ever seen or heard at foopball matches, unlike the hooter and klaxon which can be deployed in various other contexts. Nobody is quite sure what became of the common wooden rattle, not even the groundsman, who in his time probably collected a fair number of discarded ones from the grounds. One assumes they must have been discarded, otherwise they would still be being rattled, by spectators, in place of the hooting of hooters and the blaring of klaxons.

Certain more unruly spectators like to set off burning flares, as if they were lost at sea. You cannot play foopball in the sea. The nearest thing to it is water polo, and even this is more likely to be played in indoor pools rather than in the vast and pitiless ocean. But whitewash cannot be applied, in straight lines, to water, whether fresh or salt, pool or sea, so there is no role for the groundsman. That is why you will not find him listening, in his potting shed, on his transistor radio, to the commentaries babbled by spectators in special boxes with microphones at water polo matches. He has no personal investment in water polo, whereas with foopball he knows that in every moment of the game his whitewashed lines have significance. His work has heft.

Throughout the Euro 2012 tournament you would be advised to keep a tally of the results. I realise I have not explained the scoring system, but that is something else you need not fret about, as there are big scoreboards next to the pitches which display numbers on them. At the end of each match you can copy the numbers into your Hooting Yard Euro 2012 Foopball Tournament Tally Ledger, With Stickers. Details of how to obtain this treasured souvenir will be revealed in the coming days.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Millennium Feast of Saints Blot & Cugat. It was a very special day, so I wore the least tatty of my vestments. The chasuble is only slightly frayed, the stains on the cincture have faded, the alb, granted, is little better than a rag. I cannot get the grease out of the amice, and the stole is in tatters. The less said about the maniple the better. But by adjusting the lighting so it played through the cobwebs I think only the sharpest-eyed of congregants will have noticed. I did my best to disguise the stink by spraying the chapel with an aerosol can of Essence of Blood of the Lamb. It was decocted, of course, not from the real blood of a real lamb, but from chemical compounds manufactured in the lab by boffins. I have seen pictures of so-called “real” lambs in a codex. They look like tinier versions of sheep, if, that is, they were drawn to scale. Who knows?

It being such a special day, the service went on for much longer than usual. A couple of the faffers keeled over through exhaustion. Why they volunteer for faffing duty when they are clearly not up to it is a mystery. But it is not an ineffable mystery, not like the mystery we were celebrating. Yes, believe it or not it is precisely one thousand years since Saint Blot and Saint Cugat wrought the destruction of the old world and brought into being the Eternal Kingdom of the Hideous Bat-God Fatso. In another codex, I read that neither saint actually realised that that is what they were doing. It’s a moot point. I like to think that one or both of them at least had an inkling. I have seen pictures of so-called “real” inklings on my Windows Vista screen. They look quite shimmery, sort of half way between the stains on the cincture and the light playing through the cobwebs in the bat-chapel.

After the service I gave the crew special permission to play ping pong in the narthex.

I revived the fainted faffers using the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot and got them to mop up the spillages from the service. It is, again, a mystery, though not an ineffable one, why the prescribed form of worship of the Hideous Bat-God Fatso has to be so terribly, terribly messy. But both the codices and the Windows Vista screens are in agreement on this point. Fortunately we have plenty of mops aboard the starship, enough at least until our next scheduled landing, on the planet Willself. Rumours persist that intelligent life is to be found there, but I am not convinced.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Feast of Saint Von Straubenzee. Change of plan. We are now heading for Venus. I received emergency orders on my metal tapping machine to go and investigate the Vinegar Valves. Fatso has spoken.

I looked up the Vinegar Valves of Venus in a codex. Apparently, there are teeming thousands of them, lined up neatly in rows across some kind of Venusian plains or pampas. It will be a risky adventure. In fact I have already donned my helmet, and taken some protein pills. We have to check all the valves to ensure there is no leakage of Venusian vinegar. It is one of several types of Venusian gar, but I cannot find any reliable information about the others. At times like this, I ask myself “What would Cugat do?” Saint Cugat, the one-time Bosun Cugat, was of course a vampire, though the codices and Windows Vista screens give varying accounts of exactly what kind of vampire he was. He gurgled, we know that much. So, in preparation for the landing, I gurgled too, but admittedly without conviction. I am afraid to say I have the collywobbles. What terrors await us on Venus? What fierce fanged spittle-flecked life-forms will bar our way to the Vinegar Valves?

Monsignor’s Log, same stardate, quick update. We have landed on Venus and made our way across an inhospitable wasteland, a wasteland unimagined by T S Eliot. It might possibly have been imagined by Ezra Pound, but I will have to check that when back aboard the starship. As we approached the plains or pampas whereon the teeming thousands of Vinegar Valves of Venus are lined up in serried rows, we discovered our way was barred. As I feared, fierce fanged spittle-flecked life-forms protect the Valves from interplanetary interlopers. Peering at them, from a safe distance, through my space-lorgnette, I had the distinct impression that they were akin to the lambs I had seen pictures of in the codex. White, woolly, four legs, stupid facial expressions – and yet befanged, and fierce, and spittle-flecked. I took a few snapshots and have transmitted them to the boffins in the lab. Now we must wait, pending their report. I set up an altar and we celebrated Mass to pass the time. An indigent faffer keeled over again, but this time it might have something to do with the Venusian atmosphere. There is an overpowering stink of vinegar in the air. I think the Valves are leaking.

Monsignor’s Log, stardate the Feast of Saint Poxhaven. Gosh, what a calamity! Whatever those life-forms were, Venusian versions of the baa-lambs that once bestrode the old Earth or not, they were savage! Perhaps it was an error of judgement on my part to attempt to convert them to Hideous Bat-God Fatsoism. As soon as they saw me mincing towards them armed with the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot, they let out an awful collective keening. I have never heard anything like it, save for one of the more alarming passages in Saint Blot’s Threnody for Piccolo, Cowbell, and Celery Sticks. I dropped the Hot Pincers of Saint Wilmot on to the Venusian dust and slammed my hands over my ears, and ran screaming back to the landing module. The pilot-faffer had keeled over, so I had to take the controls myself. Not having much experience in flying the module, or indeed any experience whatsoever, I completely missed the starship. We are now zooming at warp factor unstoppable into the empty vastness of space. It is empty, and vast. And all I can do is gurgle.

Captain’s Log, stardate the Ides of March, Year Dot plus [redacted]. I am sick of this damned log. Literally sick. Whenever I open it to scribble another entry I am overcome by a wave of nausea. I am convinced I have a palsy and an ague, even though I would be hard pressed to define exactly what a palsy is or an ague is. Were there a medical dictionary aboard the starship I would look them up. But if ever there was a medical dictionary it disappeared along with the doctor, Von Straubenzee, a year ago today. A year or a space-year, I cannot be certain. The Captain and Second Officer Wilmot and that rascal Mister Poxhaven vanished too, leaving me to take command, and to scribble in the Captain’s Log. I was going to cross out the word Captain’s, with a big thick bold indelible black black black black black marker pen, and insert instead Purser’s, me being Purser Blot. I don’t know what gave me pause, unless it was the terrible shaking of my hand occasioned by the palsy. But I could barely lift the pen, so it remains the Captain’s Log rather than the Palsied Purser’s Log. I am using a special lightweight space-biro to do my scribbling. It puts no strain on my quivering white tiny frozen hand.

My hands are as tiny as those of the composer Scriabin. I wanted to compose music, delirious and ecstatic music, but instead I was sent to starship pursers’ training academy. There was no music there, only bleeping and whooshing and buzzing noises. At least it prepared me for the starship itself, where there is a constant din of bleeping and whooshing and buzzing, punctuated only by the strange gurgling sounds made by the ship’s vampire, Bosun Cugat. He claims they are involuntary, his gurglings, and apologises, a little too fulsomely for my liking. I would have him confined to the brig were it not that he would simply melt the metal bars with his basilisk glare and escape. I am not clear precisely what kind of vampire he is, just as I am unclear about palsy and ague. Ach Gott!, I was not cut out for this life. I ought to be sprawled on a divan in a dacha, composing ecstatic music.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus one. At the time of his death in stardate 1915, Scriabin was working on his Mysterium, of which he wrote: “There will not be a single spectator. All will be participants. The work requires special people, special artists and a completely new culture. The cast of performers includes an orchestra, a large mixed choir, an instrument with visual effects, dancers, a procession, incense, and rhythmic textural articulation. The cathedral in which it will take place will not be of one single type of stone but will continually change with the atmosphere and motion of the Mysterium. This will be done with the aid of mists and lights, which will modify the architectural contours.” He intended that the performance of this work, to be given in the foothills of the Himalayas, would last seven days and would be followed by the end of the world, with the human race replaced by “nobler beings”.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus two. Bosun Cugat confronted me at suppertime yesterday and revealed that he had snuck a peek at this Log. He said I ought to be using it to note pertinent details of the starship and its space-voyage, rather than wittering on about Scriabin. He has whiffy oxters. I threw an aerosol can of space-deodorant at him and told him to use it. I am a nobler being than Bosun Cugat. I would like to compose my own Mysterium, but there is far too much faffing about to do on this damned starship. I think we have entered the Belt of Jiffy. I looked out of the starboard window and saw a gas giant.

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus three. Whether or not we were in the Belt of Jiffy yesterday, we are nowhere near it now. Bosun Cugat has seized control of the starship and we are hurtling towards Saturn at warp factor God knows what. He has locked me in the space-janitor’s cupboard, with my biro and the captain’s log and a flask of dandelion and burdock and a few sticks of celery. Every now and then he comes hammering on the door and shouting questions at me, but refuses to let me out. His questions are technical ones, to which I do not always have ready answers. He wants to know if we should pass through the rings of Saturn or try to avoid them. Apparently he is going to land on the planet’s surface and go in search of the Suet Siphons of Saturn. Being a vampire, he will not require a spacesuit. What in heaven’s name he wants with suet I have no idea.

Rummaging around in the cupboard I found a piccolo and a cowbell. I am passing the time composing a piece of delirious and ecstatic music for piccolo, cowbell and celery sticks. Scriabin would be proud of me, at least I like to think so. Hail to thee, blessed Alexander Nikolayevich!

Captain’s Log, stardate Ides of March plus four. A couple of hours after we landed on Saturn, I heard Bosun Cugat’s dainty footsteps padding along the corridor. He stopped outside the space-janitor’s cupboard and the door whooshed open and he moaned and fell, crumpled, into my arms. For hours I cradled him, mussing his filthy hair and making cooing noises into his pointy ear. I know my duty. Eventually he gathered himself, and explained that he had located the suet siphons, teeming thousands of them, all lined up in neat rows on some kind of Saturnine plain or pampas. And every single one was exhausted. Not a spit of suet could be eked from a single siphon.

“Do you not understand what this means?” he shrieked, “Others have been here before us!”

I had to admit that this put something of a damper on our five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

“Should we go in search of the suet?” I asked.

But before Bosun Cugat could reply, he was engulfed in mists and lights which modified his corporeal contours. In front of my eyes, he was transmogrified into a nobler being. I looked out of the starboard window and saw that the universe had vanished. Scriabin’s Mysterium had come to pass. It was the end of the world. I picked up the piccolo and cowbell and celery sticks and played a threnody.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin

Captain’s Log, stardate the Ides of March, Year Dot plus [redacted]. Symmes was right after all! John Cleves Symmes, Jr. (1779-1829), who posited that there were holes at the poles through which one could gain access to the hollow earth! He was absolutely correct in every particular except one. He had the wrong planet! It is not our gorgeous Earth that is hollow, but Neptune! Less gorgeous, certainly, and much, much colder even than our Arctic and Antarctic regions, and lacking penguins, in fact generally unearthly as planets go. But it has holes at its poles, as we have seen during our sweeping orbit of the planet as part of our latest five-year mission. Tomorrow we shall make an emergency landing close to one of the holes at one of the poles and send a team down on rope ladders.

Captain’s Log, next day. A stupid and maddening argument erupted regarding which of the holes at which of Neptune’s poles the landing party should descend on rope ladders. Mister Poxhaven is terrified of penguins, and argued for the Neptunian North Pole. We simply could not drum into his pointy head that there are no penguins on Neptune, in either the south or north polar regions. He stuffed his ears with space-putty so he could not hear us beseeching him. Second Officer Wilmot made equally vociferous claims for making a descent at the Neptunian South Pole. He is fond of penguins, and thinks there may be a colony living just below the surface, in one of the interior spheres of the Hollow Neptune. I lost my temper with both of them and had them slammed in the brig. I decided to postpone the landing until tomorrow, and sought to keep the rest of the crew occupied with games of ping pong and communal reading of interesting articles from back numbers of the Reader’s Digest.

Captain’s Log, the following day. Fool that I am, I entrusted the key to the brig to Purser Blot, who has mislaid it. Regulations forbid carrying a jemmy aboard the starship, so we cannot force the door. Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot are growing increasingly fractious. They rub each other up the wrong way in the best of circumstances, and these are by no means the best of circumstances. We continue to orbit Neptune. Bosun Cugat, the ship’s vampire, has reported some intriguing meteorological and magnetic phenomena. Peas for supper,

Captain’s Log, Ides of March plus three. Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot escaped from the brig by means of top secret technology the details of which are redacted. With inhuman patience I repeated, until I was blue in the face, that there is no such creature as a Neptunian penguin. We drew straws to decide whether to descend the hole at the North or the South Pole. I used the last of our drinking straws. As soon as we leave Neptune’s orbit we shall have to locate and dock at a supply planetoid to replenish the drinking straws and several grocery items. I should not have to fret about such matters when there is a hole at a pole to descend on rope ladders.

Captain’s Log, Ides of March again. Mister Poxhaven, Second Officer Wilmot, Doctor Von Straubenzee, and I are on a platform within the interior of the Hollow Neptune. Our first discovery, after we descended on rope ladders, is that there is no such concept as time down here. According to the bizarre scratchings on the wall, it is, always has been, and always will be the Ides of March. There is no sign of any penguins – Mister Poxhaven is relieved, Second Officer Wilmot tearful. Our breathing apparatus is holding up as well as can be expected. Less so our coathangers, which prove wholly useless in the Neptunian interior. I have asked Doctor Von Straubenzee to analyse the problem using his powerful artificial brain.

Captain’s Log, still the Ides of March. We have moved from the platform into a subterranean arena which appears to be some kind of Neptunian warehouse. The scratchings on the wall here are if anything even more bizarre. Second Officer Wilmot claims to have seen several leafcutter ants, more or less the size of earthly leafcutter ants, but none of them were carrying leaves. Or so he says. We suspect he is hallucinating. I have taken the precaution of placing the [redacted] contraption on his head, just to be on the safe side.

Captain’s Log, the Ides of March. Yesterday, whatever that means down here in the Neptunian interior, Mister Poxhaven discovered the nozzles, thousands upon thousands of them. Every so often they spurt forth some kind of nougat with the consistency of jelly. It is pink and white, ish, thus not unlike earthly nougat. Doctor Von Straubenzee volunteered to ingest some. Before any of us could stop him, he punctured his breathing apparatus with the points of a pair of pinking shears and sucked up nougat straight from a nozzle. When he did not immediately keel over and lie splayed on the floor twitching with convulsive fits, Mister Poxhaven and Second Officer Wilmot followed suit. On my next voyage I must recruit less impetuous crew members. Shortly thereafter the three of them keeled over and lay splayed on the floor twitching with convulsive fits. I put two and two together in my pulsating captainy brain and blamed the nougat from the nozzles.

Captain’s Log, the Ides of March. There is no let up in the twitching and convulsive fits. While I wait for my men either to recover or die, I try to concentrate on straightening out at least one of the coathangers, at least for five minutes. Communications with the ship have deteriorated to meaningless static. Out of the corner of my eye, a little while ago, in the shadows, I think I saw a penguin, or a leafcutter ant. How I wish I had thought to bring a back number of the Reader’s Digest with me. For God’s sake look after our people.

Symmes’ tombstone. All rights reserved by rcoss 2001

If ever you find yourself in Bohemia, there is every likelihood that you will be enmired in a scandal or swept away by a rhapsody. It is even possible that both may occur. Fortunately, there are historical precedents to guide your conduct. For a rhapsodic episode, one can study the case of Farrokh Bulsara and his chums, one of whom, I think not incidentally, was later to become an accredited expert on the starry cosmos, and a friend to badgers. Should, on the other hands, scandal erupt, there is an account of how to deal with it by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no friend of badgers then or later, but a man who did much research into what we might call the psychic and supernatural cosmos.

It is well worth your time to study the relevant texts, by Bulsara and Conan Doyle, before you set out on your journey to Bohemia. By the time you arrive at the border, and present your credentials to the border guard in his Bohemian border hut, you should be ready for absolutely anything the Bohemians can throw at you, be it a rhapsody or a scandal, or – which I have not yet mentioned but is equally likely – a doomed love affair with a consumptive seamstress.

You will be asked to state the purpose of your visit, and to empty out your suitcase upon a rickety wooden table inside the hut. On no account should you take the Bohemian border guard’s grim demeanour as a personal affront. He will have been trained in physiognomic grimness from his very first day at the Bohemian Border Guards’ Academy, an institution which has known its own share of rhapsodies and scandals, both possibly involving consumptive seamstresses. You should remain polite and compliant, and pay no attention to the rifles, revolvers, submachine guns, truncheons, and lead-weighted saps much in evidence inside the hut. Bear in mind that Bohemian border guards have an almost pathological mania for tidiness, so when you empty out your suitcase you should align the contents very very neatly upon the rickety table. Alignment in alphabetical order is recommended, if you can manage it. Do not even think about offering a bribe. Bohemian border guards are absolutely incorruptible, and have been to known to take umbrage at backhanders, umbrage they give vent to by thwacking their potential corrupter on the back of the neck with a sap.

Once you have emptied your suitcase you may be taken into a small connecting room within the border hut. This is where you will be questioned about the purpose of your visit. At this stage, of course, before actually making the physical crossing into Bohemia, you will not have been swept away by a rhapsody, nor enmired in a scandal, and you can therefore deflect any pertinent rhapsody/scandal questions by adopting a gormless facial expression. Most Bohemian border guards consider foreigners stupid, so you will only be reinforcing their existing prejudices. This will put them at their ease. The wilier border guards might slip in a trick question about, say, Irene Adler or Scaramouche, or even frozen tiny hands. Do not take the bait. Have recourse to a tactic such as biting your tongue so forcefully you draw blood, or carrying in your pocket a small device which can deliver an electric shock when squeezed in the palm of your hand. Such distraction should rescue you from the risk of blurting out more than it is advisable for the border guards to know.

At the end of the interrogation, if all has gone well, your papers will be stamped and you will be led back into the main room of the hut. You will find that your suitcase has been repacked with all your belongings, and much more neatly than when you originally packed it earlier that morning at the hotel on Lüneberg Heath. Perhaps if you remain in Bohemia long enough, and can avoid becoming embroiled in rhapsodies and scandals and doomed love affairs with consumptive seamstresses, you will learn to pack your suitcase with fanatical tidiness. This is the kind of thing that can keep you occupied once you have shaken hands with the border guard and trudged across the border proper into Bohemia and found a cheap hotel at which to rest your weary head.

At the hotel, the first thing you should do is to unpack your suitcase and rummage in the lining for the listening device planted therein by the border guard. It is best disabled by being submerged in water. You might want to hurl it into the Vlatava, or another major river or watercourse. Be careful not to do this in the evening, however, for standing on a bridge over a Bohemian river in the twinkling lights of evening has been to known to provoke rhapsodic feelings. It is also a time when scandal might be brewing. After chucking the listening device into water, go straight back to your hotel to do some practice suitcase packing and unpacking, and resist the temptation to visit any garrets where consumptive seamstresses may be languishing. Between the hotel lobby and the safety of your room you might of course scent a whiff of scandal among the potted plants and in the corridors. Wrap your scarf tighter about your neck and pull the brim of your Homburg down to shade your eyes.

As an extra precaution, find, in an insalubrious Bohemian alleyway, a rascal skilled in counterfeiting. Pay this person to provide you with forged papers purporting to show that you are a trusted and long-serving employee of an important asbestos works. Armed with this documentation, you can then guard against any eruption of rhapsody or scandal or doomed love by taking out a policy with the Worker’s Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. Make an appointment with Herr Kafka. Be sure to catch him in the office at a time when he is not out on the river indulging his love of rowing boats. There is a chance he might scoop up, with one of his oars, the listening device you chucked into the river earlier, and you will not want him asking you any hard questions about it. He can be tenacious. And whatever you do, do not accept an invitation to lunch with him. He is a Fletcherist, who chews each mouthful of food one hundred times per minute, and his table manners are disgusting.

Otherwise, enjoy your stay in Bohemia.

I am weary, writing down all this ; so little has my lost one to do with it, which alone could be its interest for me ! I believe I should stop short. The London years are not definite, or fertile in disengaged remembrances, like the Scotch ones : dusty dim, unbeautiful they still seem to me in comparison ; and my poor Jeannie’s ‘problem’… is so mixed with confusing intricacies to me that I cannot sort it out into clear articulation at all, or give the features of it, as before. The general type of it is shiningly clear to me. A noble fight at my side ; a valiant strangling of serpents day after day done gaily by her (for most part), as I had to do it angrily and gloomily ; thus we went on together. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!

Thomas Carlyle, recalling his wife Jane Welsh in Reminiscences (1881)

It was a rainswept gloomy afternoon in Chelsea when the doorbell clanged at the house on Cheyne Walk. Sparky chatterbox and letter-writer Jane Welsh went to answer it herself, for she had given all the servants a day off to enjoy the rain and gloom. She opened the door to reveal, standing on the step, a tall angular dusty creaking tatty bristly fellow, whose eyes were like fathomless whirlpools. He might have been a chimney sweep, had he been dustier and the dust blacker. As it was, she recognised him immediately, not surprisingly, as he called at the house at about this time every single day.

“Old Snakey!” she cried, “You are a tad early.”

“Yes, Mrs Carlyle, so I am, I hope not inconveniently so. I’m afraid my appointment book is absolutely chocker at the moment so I have had to squeeze you in today as best I can.”

“Well I am indebted to you for fitting us in. You know your way to the parlour. Go thither while I fetch Mr Carlyle.”

And while Old Snakey made his way to the parlour, Jane Welsh Carlyle climbed half-way up the stairs towards the attic where her husband sat scribbling away at his interminable biography of Frederick the Great.

“Oh Thomas! Thomas!”, she cried, but it was no use. The attic was soundproofed to blot out the sound of the next door neighbour’s rackety hens, and of train whistles, both of which drove the Scottish sage crackers. Jane climbed further up the stairs until she was at the door of the attic, flung it open, and announced in a bright and cheerful voice,

“Thomas, you must come down at once! I am so happy! The snake charmer is here!”

“Isn’t he a tad early?” growled the irascible polymath.

“Oh don’t get all grumpy, Thomas” pleaded Jane. She was in high spirits, ever since the arrival of Old Snakey.

The pair of them made their way down to the parlour, Jane skipping with glee, Thomas glowering with anger.

“What with all this carry on I am never going to finish my life of Frederick the Great,” he moaned.

“I am sure you will, Thomas, even if it takes you thirteen years of ultimately worthless toil,” said Jane, while humming a happy ditty.

In the parlour, Old Snakey was sitting in an armchair, getting himself into what generations yet to come would call “the zone”.

“You two can make idle chitchat while I fetch the tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets from the cellar,” said Jane, in high frolic.

But the snake charmer and the proto-Fascist sat in silence until Jane returned, lugging the two tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets she had fetched from the cellar.

“Do you have any preferences today?” asked Old Snakey.

“I’d like a boa constrictor, please!” shouted Jane with unrestrained glee, “And what about you, Thomas? A python? A viper? A burrowing asp?”

But Thomas merely grunted.

“Oh, you’re such an old miseryguts!” said giggly Jane, “Give him a surprise then, Old Snakey!” she added.

At which the snake charmer took from his pocket a flute or pipe of mysterious Oriental origin and proceeded to play upon it a mesmerising melody of mysterious Oriental origin. And as he played, so the lids of the tall amphora-shaped wicker baskets were dislodged, from within, and out of each came crawling a serpent, a boa constrictor and a diamondback rattlesnake.

“Ooh, how unbearably thrilling,” cried Jane, “We haven’t had a diamondback rattlesnake before! Isn’t that exciting, Thomas?”

But Thomas Carlyle, his head still stuffed with what he called Prussian blockheadism, was hardly listening.

“Well,” said Old Snakey, replacing his mysterious Oriental flute or pipe in his pocket, “I have much to do, so I shall take your leave. I’ll let myself out. See you tomorrow!”

And he left the room, leaving the Carlyles and the serpents alone together. No sooner had he gone than Jane sprang upon the boa constrictor, laughing her head off, and strangled it with her bare hands.

“Your turn, Thomas. Come on, cheer up!”

But as he loomed above the diamondback rattlesnake with murder in his eyes, there was no lightning of the Craigenputtock savant’s mood. He was angry. He was as gloomy as the Chelsea weather. He fell upon the serpent with all his bottled-up ferocity and gripped its throat in his big hairy fists and squeezed and squeezed until the serpent sank limp and dead upon the carpet.

Beside him, Jane Carlyle clapped her hands like an overexcited child.

“Tip top serpent strangling, Thomas!” she yelled, “Well, that’s that done for another day. You can go back to your attic and write more guff about Frederick the Great. I will throw the corpses of the serpents over the fence into next door’s garden.”

“I expect that is why his damned hens make so much damned noise!” shouted Thomas Carlyle, and he puttered up the stairs.

Outside, it was still rainswept and gloomy. It was another nineteenth-century afternoon in Cheyne Walk. Ay de mi! Ay de mi!

The scene is the deck of a warship. The crew, doughty sailors all, are on battle stations. Klaxons are blaring and bells are clanging. Above, in a clear blue sky, a fleet of enemy dive-bombers comes sweeping into view. The ship is under attack from the air! There is shouting and panic and uproar. In the midst of it all, the captain on the bridge is laughing his head off, telling jokes, being generally puckish and amusing and, perhaps, suggesting they set up the ping pong table for a quick game of whiff whaff.

This, I surmise, is broadly speaking what prompted Captain Hugh Corbett, DSC, DSO, to be mentioned in dispatches for his “conspicuous cheerfulness under air attack”. Not bravery, nor presence of mind, nor true grit, but cheerfulness. There is somehow a hint that, when not under attack, he was a bit mopey and miserable. Then the enemy planes come roaring and swooping and he brightens up.

Captain Corbett has died at the age of 95, and his obituary appeared in the Grauniad in the Other Lives section where readers commemorate the otherwise unknown, uncelebrated and unsung who have passed away. Though the good captain may still be with us, in some ethereal realm, for after his retirement from the Royal Navy, we are told, he became the vice-chairman of the Churches Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies. He might use any psychic powers gained in the post to send eerie messages from beyond the grave. Given his warship experience, however, it is possible that any such messages might be rather disturbing.

“Feeling a bit down in the dumps being dead,” his psychic essence might communicate, “Could do with cheering up. Please arrange to have my grave subjected to aerial bombardment.”

I think it worth noting that Captain Corbett was cited not just for being cheerful but for being conspicuously cheerful. I wonder quite what this means. Perhaps it was simply that he laughed loudly and went around slapping other crew members on the back. Or maybe he dressed up as a clown, in the fashion of Bluebottle (see below). If his ethereal shade is reading this, should there be access to Het Internet in the Elysian Fields, it would be nice if he could psychically communicate with me to give me a bit more detail.

I can imagine that conspicuous cheerfulness could be somewhat irritating, particularly when one is being strafed by a Stuka. A fit of the giggles could also be construed as the verge of hysteria. It would be interesting to learn if any wartime ship’s captains were ever mentioned in dispatches for “conspicuous hysteria under air attack”. Or, indeed, a gamut of other emotions and reactions. Conspicuous grumpiness. Conspicuous irksomeness. Conspicuous desire to listen to Frippertronics. Conspicuous inconspicuousness.

That last would be a difficult one to pull off, but not, I would think, if one displayed psychic powers like Captain Corbett. Using eldritch manipulations of the space time continuum, it would surely be possible to be very much there, on the spot, conspicuous, and yet not there at all, hidden, occult, inconspicuous. In the midst of battle, while being attacked by machine-gun-rattling Stukas and dive-bombers, this could be a highly-prized quality. It would surely confuse the enemy, though of course it might equally confuse one’s own crew. And if one’s own crew became confused, skittering about the decks in haphazard fashion, not knowing their keels from their false keels, their gripes from their strakes, their garboard from their larboard, their bulwark from their cathead, or their orlop from their poop, then soon enough one is going to find oneself the captain of a ship of fools.

At which point I should confess that it has long been my desire to sail aboard a ship of fools. There are plenty of fools on land, of course, but the prospect of being aboard a ship on which every single person is an irredeemable fool has a peculiar attraction. Would my presence on such a ship make a fool of me, too? Well it might, but it is a risk I am willing to take, should any fool-ship see fit to invite me on board and give me a berth in a cabin of fools. Think of the jollity, the hysteria, and indeed the conspicuous cheerfulness to be found on a fool-ship! It would be a Dionysian bacchanal, afloat on the ocean wave.

The only drawback I can think of is that, as we well know, because we have had it drummed into us, worse things happen at sea. But they would only be mildly worse if we remained determinedly and conspicuously cheerful. To that end, it would be a good idea, to have among our complement of fools, a clown or two. Whatever else you might say about clowns, you could never accuse them of being inconspicuous. Take, for example, Bluebottle The Clown, pictured here at a gathering to commemorate Joseph Grimaldi on the one hundred and seventy-fifth anniversary of his death. (And my thanks to Spitalfields Life for the snap.) Bluebottle is both cheerful and conspicuous. But unlike Captain Corbett, I do not think he would have been best pleased had the grave of the legendary clown come under aerial attack. I think we can assume from his cheerful grin that bombardment of the grave did not occur.

Yesterday’s edition of Hooting Yard On The Air on Resonance104.4FM, broadcast, as ever, live, had to be abandoned after ten minutes. I am sorry to say I felt queasy and dizzy and faint, and was unable to continue babbling into a microphone. I think I explained the situation before my dulcet tones were replaced by Erik Satie, but as the one piece I did manage to recite was On A Plague Of Boils it occurred to me that some listeners may have been given to understand that I had to truncate the show because I had broken out in a plague of suppurating boils. I am happy to reassure you that this is not the case. As it was, though I did not faint, I felt very close to doing so, and still today do not feel tiptop. I am bolting clementines as an aid to recovery. Meanwhile, rather than writing about Fainting Mr Key, here is a 2008 piece about a fainting goat.

You would do well to remember, if ever you are out walking in the vicinity of the farmyard at Scroonhoonpooge, that you may come face to face with the fainting goat. If you encounter it on the lane leading out of the farmyard towards the orchard, and as soon as it sees you it topples over in a swoon, you must not be alarmed. You must certainly not think that the goat has fainted because you have caused it fright, by dint of something alarming in your appearance. Even if there is something terrifying about you, such as a twisted-up face or a too-brightly coloured clinker jacket or your being armed with a mail order Mannlicher-Carcano sniper’s rifle, none of these things will be what causes the goat to faint. The goat will faint for the reason it is known as the fainting goat, which is that it is constantly fainting, dozens of times a day, even dozens of times an hour.

This constant swooning is a mystery as far as the local vets are concerned. There are several vets with practices in walking or short bus journey distance of Scroonhoonpooge farmyard, and all of them at one time or another have been called to tend to the fainting goat. They have tried all sorts of treatments, from goat-friendly smelling salts to the deployment of Peruvian whistling vessels to simply shouting very loudly into the goat’s ear, and though such techniques may revive the goat from its faint, none have served to stop it clattering over in a dead swoon again and again as the long countryside day draws on towards dusk and rainfall. When it is conscious, the goat seems hale and hearty, even frisky, and engages in all the normal activities one might expect of a farmyard goat. I would list these activities but I am sure you are thoroughly up to speed with the doings of goats, given the demographic of the Hooting Yard readership.

There has been a certain amount of bickering among the local vets, as each of them grows frustrated at their inability to stop the continual fainting of the fainting goat. When they passed out of their veterinary colleges, they were all brimming with confidence, armed, as they thought, with the knowledge and expertise to handle all sorts of bestial maladies, from the workaday to the exotic. Whether it be a cow with a pox or an ostrich beset by Von Straubenzee’s Gruesomeness, these vets believed they could march into a farmyard or menagerie and win the undying gratitude of farmers and menagerists by weaving their vetty spells. An injection here, a siphoning off of fluid there, and to the gasps of their keepers the cow or ostrich or whatever beast it may be would leap up, restored to vigour, and there would be a round of applause and the discreet passing of banknotes into the pocket of the smug vet.

But the fainting goat goes on fainting, day in day out, and not one of the vets has a clue what to do about it. When they gather of an evening on the balcony of the Café Simon Schama, at first they boast of their breakthroughs, the splint affixed to the leg of the sparrow, the gunk drained from the badger’s boils, the palsied pig unpalsied. But as they sip their fermented slops, tempers fray, and the talk soon turns to the fainting goat, that damned intractable fainting goat, and harsh words are said and there is spitting and chucking and fisticuffs, black eyes and bruises and the odd dagger slash. And so it goes on, night after night.

Now curiously enough, during the night the fainting goat never faints. It remains wide awake all night every night, either in its comfy pen or out in some field, doing goaty things, things other goats do in daylight. Apprised of this singular information, some have posited that the goat’s swoons are not swoons so much as its repeatedly falling asleep from exhaustion. It is indeed a cogent case, but it is nevertheless mistaken, for reasons crystal clear to those, such as some among the vets, who have made studies of the goat’s neurological peculiarities. It sleeps not, yet it faints. The one is understood, and explicable, the other not. There are more curious cases among the goat population, as among other farmyard beasts, but not many, sure enough. That is why the vets fret so.

But you will not fret, will you, as you wander past Scroonhoonpooge farmyard, on your way to the orchard, to pluck persimmons from the trees, illegally, and you come upon the fainting goat upon the path and it faints at your feet? You will pat its little horns and lift it to its feet, and send it tottering off along the lane to its next collapse, for you are wiser than the vets, you are wiser than the farmer. The only thing wiser than you is the fainting goat itself. No goat was ever wiser, nor had so explosive a brain.