There was a programme on the box last night called Gas Rig Strip-Down. According to the listings, “Tom Wrigglesworth and Rob Bell watch as a gas platform is pulled from the North Sea and taken to Newcastle to be disassembled”. This sounded quite exciting, but I didn’t watch it for two reasons. First, because from that description I feared that we would learn a lot about the, er, “personalities” of Messrs Wrigglesworth and Bell, at the expense of just watching a gas rig being dismantled. Second, because I would have preferred a programme in which, without the intercession of the presenters, we watch a gas platform being pulled from the North Sea and taken to Newcastle to be disassembled by monkeys. Actually, it would be even better if the gas rig was left where it was in the middle of the North Sea and monkeys ‘coptered out to it, to dismantle it in situ.

Alan Partridge was on to something with his idea for monkey tennis. Monkeys taking apart large pieces of infrastructure would make splendid television. I would place watching monkeys dismantling a gas rig pretty high on a list of things I’d like to see before I die, up there in the dismantling section with seeing a life dismantled of muffins.

Generally speaking, I think any large-scale sea-based construction such as a gas rig or an oil rig or even a huge rusting container ship is best taken to bits by animals. This is not without precedent. Years ago, at a time when the Chitty And Fagg coach company was still plying the coast roads of Kent, from Dover to Margate, there was an occasion when hundreds, or possibly thousands, of warthogs were let loose on a dilapidated and decommissioned hospital ship. The din of grunting was incredible, and drowned out the sound of foghorns. But there wasn’t much left of the ship by the time the hogs were ferried back to shore in a flotilla of motorboats. Wild animals will just get on with the job, in a frenzied manner.

Insects, too, can be utilised for dismantling purposes. Ants and beetles and other tiny scurrying things can overrun the largest gas rig in a matter of minutes, and can destroy it with surprising speed.

Monkey demolition was pioneered by Chitty And Fagg. When one of their charabancs or pantechnicons was ready for the scrap heap, they would drive it out to the seaside and park it by the shore, then go and collect some monkeys. They had one or two menagerists in their pockets. Left to their own devices, the monkeys made short work of the clapped-out coaches. A few elderly people in those parts can remember being taken down to the beach to watch monkeys dismantling charabancs, and will tell you all about it over a cup of cocoa, but their “carers” always think they are raving and delirious. Some of us know better.

The beach-based dismantlings were Chitty’s idea. Fagg, the visionary, wanted to have their redundant vehicles towed out to sea, and deposited on a specially-built platform, out of sight of land. Once in place, it was his intention to test out various beasts and birds and insects to see which would do the most efficient job. He had a curious mania about leafcutter ants, for example, and also otters. Chitty, who held the purse strings, vetoed the idea, on grounds both of expense and sheer common sense. Fagg went ahead and had the platform built anyway, using money provided by one of his uncles, a rascally blackguard with a suspicious moustache and a gap in his teeth, the spit and image of Terry-Thomas. But the menagerists who provided the animals were loyal to Chitty, who knew how to wrap them round his fingers with promises of Chitty And Fagg shares, debentures, and other financial inducements. The coach company founders fell out. Chitty had his monkeys and his beach dismantlements; Fagg had a useless platform rusting away in the sea, and no animals to tow out to it even if he had a means to get one of the old charabancs to it, which he did not, for his uncle had fled to Bolivia with the police in pursuit. I would like to say “hot pursuit”, but quite frankly Fagg’s uncle was small fry as far as the coppers were concerned, and they sent only one detective to Bolivia to run him to ground, a semi-retired and muddle-headed fellow called Simpkins.

Intriguingly, Simpkins came from a family of monkey trainers on one side and infrastructure disassembling experts on the other. I have not been able to find out which side was which, whether it was his father’s lot who trained monkeys and his mother’s kin who demolished large constructions, or whether it was the other way round. Nor do the extant records tell us why Simpkins himself followed neither trade, and became a copper instead. He did write his Memoirs, but they are so unutterably tedious that nobody has ever managed to get past page ten, by which point the future detective has not yet been born.

In spite of their differences, Chitty and Fagg kept the coach company going. Monkeys continued to ravage their unwanted vehicles, to the delight of parties of children taken to the beach to watch. As for Fagg’s sea platform, some say it is still there, a rusted hulk serving as a rest stop for auks and guillemots and skuas and terns and gulls and other seabirds. But no one is quite sure where exactly it is. What we do know is that, according to Fagg’s notes, it is as enormous as the most enormous of gas rigs, as yet undismantled by monkeys, out in the sea.

Above is a photograph of the pier at Deal, on the coast of Kent. It is the last pier built in England, opened in 1954, replacing a derelict nineteenth-century predecessor. At its far end, it terminates in a large platform, lower than the main pier, and from this platform, on either side, a set of metal steps lead down into the sea. I think I am right in saying this is an unusual construction for a pier. It is a feature that sparked an idea in the brain of the writer Rayner Heppenstall (1911-1981), who spent the last few years of his life as a resident of Deal.

Early one morning in the late nineteen-seventies, Heppenstall disembarked from a boat and clambered up the steps at the end of the pier. He had come from France, brought across the channel by a somewhat rascally French sailor, who would collect him from the same spot on the evening of the same day. Heppenstall walked along the pier to shore, and through Deal’s dawn deserted streets to his house. He was careful to ensure he was not seen. As far as friends and neighbours were concerned, he was on holiday in France. He spent the day, very quietly, at home, reading over his diaries of the last few years. Heppenstall was a diligent diarist all his life, and often used them as raw material for his fiction, after which he would destroy the originals. He had brought a packed lunch with him, so he would not need to prepare anything and thus create cooking smells. Similarly, when he smoked during the day he dispersed the fumes and removed the evidence from his ashtray. When the cleaner came, in the next few days, she would find no sign that Heppenstall had been there.

When evening came, and his neighbours had all returned home, Heppenstall took a loaded revolver, fitted with a silencer, and went next door, where he slaughtered the entire family. He then made his way back to the pier, where he was picked up from the steps at the end, and taken back to France.

Or rather, that is what he wished he had done. Many of the entries in his diaries of the time consisted of accounts of his neighbours’ behaviour. They were noisy. They were rambunctious. They were foul-mouthed. They were working class, or “common”. Beneath the cold forensic prose lies Heppenstall’s exasperation, his seething rage, his murderousness. These are the diary entries he transformed into his last, posthumously-published, novel, The Pier (1986). I suppose it is unlikely that the noisy rambunctious working class family in Deal ever read the book.

When The Pier appeared, it was taken as further evidence that Heppenstall had “gone mad”. Certainly what we read is the lethal fantasy of a man driven crackers by little more than whistling, games of kickabout football, loud conversation, and noisy bouts of DIY. One of the reasons he and his wife – who becomes his sister in the novel – moved to Deal was that their last home in London was a flat above a launderette, the din of which he found unbearable. Yet I suspect the real reason he was considered to have gone bonkers was the turn his politics took.

Originally from Yorkshire, Heppenstall had always been a tribal Labour voter, a “progressive”. Since the end of the Second World War, he had worked as a talks producer for BBC Radio. He lived in a literary intellectual milieu. In the nineteen-thirties he shared a flat with George Orwell. He was a regular drinking companion of Dylan Thomas’. He made the first translation into English of Raymond Roussel (with his daughter, Lindy Foord). He published several experimental novels and, in the nineteen-sixties was considered a sort of godfather by younger writers such as Ann Quin and B S Johnson. Both Quin and Johnson, incidentally, committed suicide in 1973. Heppenstall didn’t, but considered doing so. For more than three decades he kept concealed behind his bookshelves a phial of crushed pink pills diluted in water, which he regularly refreshed to maintain its potency. It was his guarantee that death was always in his reach. In the end, he never took it. He died of a stroke.

It was around the time of his retirement from the BBC, in 1973, and his move to Deal the following year, that Heppenstall began to describe himself as a “freelance reactionary”. Come 1979, he even considered voting Conservative, though he very probably did not vote at all. But the break from the world and the mindset he had inhabited is all too clear in some of his diary entries. It is unlikely his colleagues in the BBC canteen or the London drinking clubs would have taken kindly to his analysis of the Middle East, that “the Jews are a civilised race, whereas the Arabs are basically savages”. He came increasingly to loathe the modern world.

Was this madness? The reactionary views, the suicide phial, the murderous fantasy? Perhaps it was something in the air in Deal, home to other London exiles such as the alcoholic Charles Hawtrey (thrown out of every pub in town at one time or another) and Simon Raven. Hawtrey’s house bears a blue plaque, but there is no commemoration of Rayner Heppenstall. His neighbours, the annoying children now adults, may still be living in the same house, all unaware that the elderly, withdrawn, ill-tempered writer who once lived next door plotted to kill them all.

I walked along the pier at Deal yesterday, to the steps where ghost-Heppenstall came and went on his fantasy killing spree. I passed some loud, foul-mouthed, working class people, and also a few well-dressed elderly gents taking an afternoon stroll. I wondered if I might see a small French motorboat tied up at the end of the pier. But the steps were empty, descending into the sloshing sea.

Those of us old enough to recall the days when the Osmonds were titans of pop have probably blocked from our memories most of the mawkish drivel with which they assaulted the charts. One song, however, remains indelibly lodged in our brains. I speak of course of “Crazy Horses”, an unhinged classic unlike anything else they ever recorded. The circumstances of its composition make for an intriguing story, the details of which I have been able to exhume through a process which I am afraid I really should not tell you about.

It is New Year’s Day 1972. In the White House, President Nixon is having breakfast with the First Lady, the saintly Pat. In New York, the ex-Nazi officer Kurt Waldheim is preparing to take the reins of the United Nations, succeeding U Thant as the new Secretary General. Also in New York, a gang of half a dozen ne’er-do-wells is making final preparations for the Pierre Hotel Heist, which will net them approximately four million dollars from the hotel’s safety deposit boxes. Across the Atlantic Ocean, in Paris, the capital city of France, the entertainer Maurice Chevalier is facing his last hours. He will not see the morrow.

Meanwhile, at the Osmond family homestead, the Osmond family is gathered around in a conclave. Pa and Ma Osmond are sitting at either end of the table. On one side sit Alan, 22, Wayne, 20, and Merrill, 18. Facing them on the other side are Jay, 16, Donny, 14, and Marie, 12. The runt of the litter, Little Jimmy, 8, is squashed in at a corner between Marie and Ma Osmond. All the males are wearing their Mormon underpants, as you would expect. Pa Osmond has just finished reciting aloud a sensible and inspiring passage from The Book Of Mormon. The mood around the table is equally sensible and inspiring, yet also solemn.

“Well titans of pop,” says Pa Osmond, “What are your plans for today?”

Alan pipes up.

“Well sir, I was thinking it would be fun if I took Wayne and Merrill and Jay and Donny and Marie and Little Jimmy over to the paddock.”

“What is this paddock of which you speak, son?” asks Pa.

“Well sir, I have heard tell that over beyond the salt flats past the temple there is a paddock. It might be fun for us to go and investigate, to see what the paddockist keeps in his paddock.”

Pa Osmond rubs his chin thoughtfully.

“This paddockist, who is he?”

“That I don’t rightly know, sir,” says Alan, blushing slightly, “But perhaps while Wayne and Merrill and Jay and I look into the paddock, Donny and Marie and Little Jimmy can question the paddockist as to his bona fides.”

At this, Ma Osmond interjects.

“I would have thought it more appropriate that you older boys interrogate the paddockist and let the younger ones frolic in the paddock.”

“If you say so, Ma,” says Alan.

Pa Osmond thumps his fist on the table.

“No,” he says, like the forceful patriarch he is, “You should all interrogate the paddockist together, each firing at him one judicious question chosen to winkle out of him his bona fides. Then you can all go to the paddock together, to see what is in there.”

“Yes sir!” says Alan.

But Ma Osmond throws a spanner in the works.

“I like the plan as far as it goes,” she says, “But what if, upon their arrival, Alan and Wayne and Merrill and Jay and Donny and Marie and Little Jimmy find that the paddockist is already in the paddock? Then they will not be able to separate out the questioning from the seeing. And I would aver that he is very likely to be in the paddock. If I had a paddock out beyond the salt flats past the temple, that’s where I would be, and no mistake.”

“Good point, Ma,” says Pa Osmond, “This is something of a pickle.”

“I have an idea,” says Alan, his brow furrowing as he thinks, “What if… what if we lured the paddockist out of the paddock? Then we could fire our questions at him, establish his bona fides, and, having done so, we could enter the paddock to see what he keeps in it.”

Ma and Pa Osmond look at each other from either end of the table. Long years of Mormon marriage mean they are able to communicate without speaking. Gazing into each other’s eyes, they agree that Alan’s suggestion is flawless.

“Off you go then,” says Pa, “And we shall gather in conclave around this table upon your return, so you can tell Ma and I who the paddockist is and what is in his paddock.”

Later that evening, the Osmonds regather just as Pa decreed. This time Little Jimmy sits scrunched in a corner between Pa and Jay. All the males are still wearing their Mormon underpants, as you would expect.

“Tell me first of the paddockist’s bona fides,” says Pa.

“Well sir,” says Alan, “On our way to the paddock out beyond the salt flats past the temple we devised the questions we would ask the paddockist. Shall we run through them, each asking his, or in Marie’s case, her, question?”

“I think that would be a fine idea,” says Pa. Ma nods her assent too.

“OK, me first then,” says Alan, “Hello there, paddockist, what is your name?”

“Are you a Mormon?” says Wayne.

“Are you aware we are titans of pop?” says Merrill.

“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” says Jay.

“What brings you to these parts, stranger?” says Donny.

“Are you mad and bad and dangerous to know?” says Marie.

“What is that unholy and terrifying whinnying and snorting we can hear from within the paddock?” says Little Jimmy.

“A well-chosen set of questions designed to elicit replies sure to establish his bona fides,” says Pa Osmond, “What were those replies?”

“We could not hear them sir,” says Alan, “For he was a soft-spoken paddockist and was drowned out by the unholy and terrifying whinnying and snorting we could hear from within the paddock.”

“And did you enter the paddock to find out what it was that was making such a deafening din” asks Ma Osmond.

“No, Ma,” says Alan, “We ran away as fast as our feet could carry us.”

“All well and good,” says Pa, “Well, that’s New Year’s Day over and done with. It is bedtime. Don’t forget to include President Nixon and the saintly Pat in your prayers.”

And the Osmonds troop upstairs one by one to bed. And in the night, while Ma and Pa sleep soundly, Alan and Wayne and Merrill and Jay and Donny and Marie and Little Jimmy toss and turn in the grip of terrible dreams, dreams that will surely do cataclysmic and irreparable damage to their fragile young psyches . . . unless, when they wake the next morning, they can parlay those terrors into a pop song.

Last week I had reason to mention the German secret agent Weems. Since then, further information has come to light, which I shall share with you in the interests of robust transparency and transparent robustness. The first tranche of information concerns his mop and his patter and his flip-top lids and his submarine and his fixation and his ink and his piccolo and his other mop and his secrets.

His mop. Weems had a blond mop, sometimes tousled, sometimes flattened and primped and slathered in hair oil. Which “look” he chose depended on the mission he was undertaking. Where a mission called for a tousled mop, he tousled his mop. If it was thought prudent to have his mop flattened and primped and slathered in hair oil, he flattened and primped it and slathered it in hair oil. There were occasions where no clear guidance was available, with regard to his mop. Weems would agonise, up to the very last minute before embarking on the mission. Then he would either tousle or flatten and primp and slather in hair oil according to what he described as his “gut feelings”. These feelings were not truly in his gut, but in his head, directly below his mop. They were cogitations of the brain rather than feelings.

His patter. Weems was a polyglot, and could deliver his patter in the tongues of many lands. The patter was designed to disguise his true identity as a German secret agent. If he unleashed his patter on you, you would think he was a chocolate swiss roll sales rep, or a trainer of budgerigars, or a snippy man, depending on which patter he deployed. Those three were by no means his only patters, there were others, but they are given as a sample.

His flip-top lids. For ease of access and retrieval of the things he kept in containers, Weems insisted on those containers having flip-top lids. He argued that the time it would take him to unscrew a screw-top lid could prove critical, and he would be better occupied doing something germane to his mission rather than unscrewing a screw-top lid. Several containers had to be modified by lid boffins in the secret agency atelier. Weems liked to personally test the modified lids when possible, but if he was engaged on a secret mission and thus unable to visit the atelier he delegated the lid testing to a trusted minion.

His submarine. Weems travelled from place to place in a submarine. It was his HQ, his centre of operations, and he was the captain. Weems knew every inch of its piping and every individual valve. He could move about the submarine blindfold, and sometimes did, just to show off. He had a hand-picked crew who idolised him. He also kept a budgerigar in a cage hanging from one of the overhead pipes. The budgerigar’s name was Simon. Weems once blindfolded Simon, as a prank, but the bird panicked and suffered heart palpitations and the prank was never repeated.

His fixation. Dangerously for a secret agent, Weems had a Gwyneth Paltrow fixation. He did not go so far as to stalk the actress, but he had a compulsion to hack into her website, Goop, from the on-board computer on the submarine. For a long time he managed to keep his fixation and his hacking hidden from his handlers, until one day a keystroke mishap betrayed him. Hauled before a hastily empanelled panel, Weems tried patter. It worked, and he pulled wool over the eyes of the panel, ten eyes in all, one of glass. La Paltrow then subjected the on-board submarine computer to a viral attack, which seems to have sobered Weems up.

His ink. As a secret agent, Weems wrote all his communiqués in invisible ink. He kept the ink in small storage jars with flip-top lids (see above). The ink being invisible, it was impossible to tell which jars contained ink and which were empty. Weems could have solved this problem by feeling the heft of each jar in his hand, but the ink was weightless as well as invisible. He devised a method of injecting the ink with dye, made from crushed raspberries. This caused the ink to turn raspberry-coloured, and thus visible, so before writing a communiqué Weems poured the ink from its small storage jar into a bigger storage jar, also with a flip-top lid, and diluted it with sufficient water to render the raspberry dye so pale that to the unaided eye it was as good as invisible. The water he obtained by surfacing in the submarine, clambering out on deck, and scooping up seawater with a ladle.

His piccolo. Weems was an accomplished piccolo player, but had a limited repertoire. His playing becalmed Simon the budgerigar (see above), who seemed to enter a trance-like state when listening. Note, “trance-like”, so not quite a full trance.

His other mop. In addition to the mop of blond hair on his head, Weems kept in reserve another mop, one affixed to the end of a wooden pole such as might be used by a janitor. Curiously, a janitor was not one of the disguised identities he assumed, backed up by patter (see above). Weems had tried and failed and tried again and failed again to master the art of janitorial patter. Eventually he had given up the ghost. An unconvincing janitor was too risky a role, and if unmasked Weems’ usefulness to his handlers would be at an end. He would be put out to pasture, or executed. He kept the mop, however, in a cubby on the submarine, and sometimes mopped the decks with it, while blindfolded (see above). There were lowly submariners among the crew whose duties included mopping, but Weems was willing to muck in with menial tasks. This willingness was born of his sheer love of the submarine, a love that was boundless. It was sometimes said of Weems that a team of psychiatrists could have a field day with him, but he was too canny an operator ever to allow even a single psychiatrist anywhere near him.

His secrets. Never divulged. His Memoirs reveal nothing.

There are circumstances in which you may find yourself standing in a field alongside a Scandinavian peasant, staring at the sky. The peasant may turn to you and say:

Morgenrode gir dage blode,
Kveldsrode gir dage sode.

What is an appropriate response? You could, of course, remain silent, while moulding your countenance into an expression of sagacity. A slight furrowing of the brow, a pursing of the lips, an intense look in the eyes, perhaps an almost imperceptible nod of the head. You could even rub your chin thoughtfully, as Mr Carter does in the Jennings & Darbyshire books by Anthony Buckeridge. The Scandinavian peasant will almost certainly take this as due acknowledgement. This is the safest course of action if you have no idea what he is babbling on about.

But it may be that you have a smattering of some Scandinavian languages, or are wearing a hidden earpiece which provides you with a simultaneous translation. Both are possibilities if you are, for example, a diplomat, or a special rapporteur of the United Nations. There may be other reasons why one or both is the case, such as family background or the habit of international jet-setting for either business or leisure purposes. Your knowledge, or earpiece, will thus apprise you of the meaning of the peasant’s utterance, which can be given as:

Morning red gives wet days,
Evening red gives sweet days.

Armed, then, with the knowledge that the peasant is spouting rustic wisdom, or weather lore, you may wish to consider a verbal response. You can still do the whole business with the brow and the lips and the eyes and the head and the chin, but this time as a preliminary gambit. Then you might counter with a countryside adage of your own, for example:

Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight,
Red sky in morning, fisherman’s warning.

or, if the field in which you are standing alongside the Scandinavian peasant is within the vicinity of the sea, or of a fjord, you might say:

Red sky at night, sailor’s delight,
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.

The problem with this approach is that the Scandinavian peasant may be prompted to bat back a further piece of his own rustic wisdom, to which you will feel compelled to supply a rejoinder. You will swiftly find yourself embroiled in an escalating exchange of countryside proverbs which you cannot win. He is a peasant, and you are not. He will always be able to top your saw with something more abstruse, born of generations of experience tilling the Scandinavian fields. You should therefore deploy a different tactic. Instead of following the brow and the lips and the eyes and the head and the chin business with a couplet of weather lore, you should allow a significant pause, and then say:

And in the morning, It will be foul weather to-day: for the sky is red and lowring. O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

This is a Biblical quotation, from the Gospel of Matthew, 16:3. Assuming for one moment that the Scandinavian peasant does not take it personally, it is likely that he will be stunned into silence, like a dumb ox. You then have the advantage. But bear in mind the possibility that he does take it personally, and thinks you are accusing him, wildly, of hypocrisy. He may be a violent peasant, and lift up his spade to bash you about the head. If you are wearing a hidden earpiece, a bash will dislodge it, and you will no longer have the simultaneous translation to let you know what he is saying. To prevent this happening, you should have in your pocket some kind of treat with which to placate him. A piece of smoked and dried herring will usually suffice. You should keep it wrapped in greaseproof paper to avoid sullying the lining of your pocket.

There is, however, the possibility that he may be a Bible-thumping Scandinavian peasant, as familiar with the Old and New Testaments as he is with weather lore. If this is the case, he may respond to your Matthew 16:3 with, say, his Isaiah 36:16-17:

Drick var och en vatten i sin brunn, tills jag kommer och tar dig bort.

This will put you in something of a pickle. Unless you have the measure of his Bible-learning, and how could you?, you have no guarantee that you will be able to match him quote for quote. Remember he may well be a Lutheran. You will need to be pretty damn confident of your own store of memorised Biblical verses to embark upon a tit-for-tat. Weighing things in the balance, your best option is to reply:

Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away.

By merely echoing back at him the Authorised Version version of his own sally, you may well succeed in bringing the exchange to a close. Neither of you has outwitted the other, neither of you has lost face. He can take up his spade and go off to till his fields in a peasanty way, and you can wander off in the opposite direction, to your holiday chalet, or special rapporteur’s concrete pillbox, or wherever it is you are staying. When both of you have walked about twenty paces, you might turn and wave to each other, in amicable farewell. The next morning, or evening, when you encounter each other again in the field, you will both be better prepared, and companionable silence will almost certainly be appropriate.

Next week, in our series on conversational gambits with Scandinavian peasants, we will look at the best approach should you find yourself talking of the varying merits of agricultural implements. For your homework, make a list of farm implements mentioned in the Bible, using as your sources both the Authorised Version and a Scandinavian-language Lutheran edition.

When John Foxe published Actes And Monuments, popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, in 1563, he unaccountably neglected to mention St Spivack. This is a great pity, as St Spivack was one of the holiest and most pious of men, whose life we would do well to study. I have studied it in excessive detail, and as a result I am holier and more pious than I was before, though nowhere near as holy and pious as St Spivack himself of course. Nor have I been martyred by being poked at with burning pincers and plunged into a barrel of boiling tar. I fervently hope that will not be my fate, but if things turn out that way, I shall have the example of St Spivack to cling to, and I will do my best to sing rousing hymns in a strong, resounding falsetto, as St Spivack did, winning the grudging admiration of his unholy and impious tormentors.

He was born in rustic squalor in a barn in some sordid backwater during the Dark Ages. His parents were simple peasants. Actually, the word “simple” does not suffice. Let us rephrase that sentence. His parents were profoundly ignorant peasants. No, that is still not enough. Again. His parents were profoundly ignorant, staggeringly stupid peasants. I think to drive the point home we need to have one more go. His parents were profoundly ignorant, staggeringly stupid, breathtakingly dimwitted peasants. That will do. They were so ignorant and stupid and dimwitted that one Dark Ages day, when he was but a year old, they mislaid their infant in the woods, and completely forgot about his existence. Poor little St Spivack!

He was raised by squirrels. Ever after, those he met were struck, not just by his holiness and his piety, but by a certain squirrely something in his demeanour. He had an extremely high metabolic rate and ate a lot of nuts.

At the age of ten, he was discovered in the woods by a sycamore-climbing monk from the nearby monastery of St Dippy’s. This monk took the holy and pious child with him, and at the monastery he astounded the abbot by reciting from memory the entire book of Ecclesiastes, first in the original Hebrew, then in Greek, then in Latin, then in the language of squirrels. He took holy orders on his eleventh birthday.

When he was twelve St Spivack left the monastery and set off on a pilgrimage. Wherever he stopped, he preached, and his sermons converted many an ignorant and stupid and dimwitted peasant to the faith. Most of his sermons consisted of glosses on passages from Ecclesiastes, though on occasion he would describe visions.

It was in the village of Vig, hard by the banks of the Vug, that St Spivack was describing a vision one day when he was arrested by the henchmen of a baron. This baron was an unholy and impious wretch, and he tossed St Spivack into an oubliette in his castle. There were many ants and beetles in the dungeon, and St Spivack befriended them. He passed the horrible days and weeks by making little sets of rosary beads for the ants and beetles from grains of unspeakable matter found upon the oubliette floor.

On Easter Sunday one year in the Dark Ages, the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to St Spivack in the gloom of the oubliette. She handed him a pair of spectral gleaming holy tweezers with which he was able to effect his escape. It was at this time that light began to pour out from St Spivack. This was the light that blinded the evil baron and his henchmen as they tried to recapture their holy and pious prisoner.

St Spivack continued on his pilgrimage through the benighted lands of the Dark Ages. In his train there followed squirrels and ants and beetles. One day he performed the miracle that guaranteed his sainthood, though in all honesty it should never have been in doubt. (It is said that when the Congregation for the Causes of Saints met to decide on his canonisation, the priest taking the part of the Devil’s Advocate, to argue against, suffered an attack of the withers just as he was about to speak. This was rightly taken as another sign of St Spivack’s saintliness.) The miracle took place in the village of Vug, hard by the banks of the Vig. St Spivack produced out of thin air a bouquet of lupins and rhododendrons, and by waving it in significant passing movements over a crone, cured the crone of a foul and sickening malady, a debilitating palsy or ague to which Dark Ages crones were forever falling prey.

On St Bibblybibdib’s Day one year, later in the Dark Ages, St Spivack arrived in Pointy Town at the end of his pilgrimage. He was enthroned as bishop in the pointiest church in Pointy Town. He continued to pour forth an unearthly blinding light. Squirrels and ants and beetles had the run of the episcopal palace, pointier than the pointiest church in Pointy Town. St Spivack by now could recite from memory several other books of the Bible, in several languages, and often did so in everyday conversation. A Dark Ages scribe copied down many of his after-dinner monologues to create what we now know as the Codex of St Spivack.

One year in the Dark Ages, on St Dippy’s Day, into Pointy Town came galloping the blind baron and his blind henchmen, astride their seeing horses. They laid siege to the bishop’s palace and slaughtered all the squirrels and ants and beetles and they dragged St Spivack from his dinner table, where he was eating nuts. Then they had at him with burning pincers and they plunged him into a barrel of boiling tar. St Spivack sang rousing hymns in a strong, resounding falsetto, and then he died. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared and carried him up to heaven.

His tarry bones were buried in a tar pit, which is today the site of the Blister Lane Bypass.

That is the life of the holy and pious martyr St Spivack.

There is a land, remote and lovely, where the first three things likely to strike the visitor are butter and clatter and taxis. You will ask, why those three things, rather than, say, soap and watercress and canals, or toffee and rainfall and pig iron? All I can say in return is that travellers to that land, upon their return, eyes bright, buttonhole the stay-at-home and babble excitedly about butter and clatter and taxis.

Being unreasonably obsessed with the Kennedy assassination, I have just begun reading Stephen King’s new Pebblehead-like big fat bestseller 11.22.63. (I do wish it had been renamed 22.11.63 on our shores.) The conceit of the book is that the narrator travels back in time to before that date, and attempts to prevent the killing of the Potus. I mention this because one must travel through time in order to visit the land of butter and clatter and taxis. What is not clear to me is the direction of travel. Is this land plunged in the past, or is it a future state? And how will I ever know, short of going there myself?

In 11.22.63. as in many another time-travel narrative, the past is reached via a portal, in this case the pantry of a diner. When I have questioned travellers returning from the remote and lovely land of butter and clatter and taxis, they invariably refuse to divulge the location of the portal, or indeed whether one needs to pass through a portal to get there. There are, after all, other means, like the eponymous contraption in H G Wells’s The Time Machine. But nobody is willing to tell me how I might get from here to there, wherever “there” is. For the time being, I remain stuck in the here and now. That is not such a bad thing, of course. It’s what I am used to.

Yet I cannot help hankering. “Oh, the butter!”, the returned visitors cry, “It is golden! Oh, the clatter! It is curiously mellifluous! Oh, the taxis! How they careen along the wide important boulevards of that remote and lovely land!” It is all a far cry from the margarine and din and traffic congestion of my own time.

It is decidedly odd that the visitors are so keen to extol the virtues of that past or future land, yet remain so reticent about how they came and went. Odd, too, now I come to think of it, that the only virtues they extol are the butter and clatter and taxis. I have asked them about other features, about soap and watercress and canals and toffee and rainfall and pig iron, among other things, but they purse their lips and look at me quizzically as if they have no idea what I am talking about. “Oh, forget about those things,” they say, “Let me tell you about the butter and clatter and taxis!” And they are off again, breathless with enthusiasm.

I have poked and prodded about the city in search of a likely portal, without quite knowing what I am looking for. Qua King, I haunt pantries, particularly but not exclusively those in diners and cafes and restaurants. Cooks and chefs and maitre d’s are none too pleased with me, and I am often escorted off the premises in a ruffianly manner. Pantry does not equal portal, of course, and I try other points of access, such as mysterious doorways and archways and gates and wickets. More of these have a mysterious character than you might imagine. It has also occurred to me that perhaps I need to catch some sort of magic bus, or coach, or a strangely unscheduled train, and I have spent more hours than I care to count lolling about at bus stops and railway stations, trying to spot telltale signs, ever in vain.

One day, my frustration at boiling point, I went out and bought a packet of butter, and I hailed a taxi, and directed the driver to take me to somewhere I might hear a lot of clatter. He took me – grindingly slowly through the congested streets! – to a lane alongside a railway shunting yard. The sound was more akin to din than to mellifluous clatter, but he had done his best, and I gave him a generous tip. There was a low wall on the lane, bordering a flowerbed violent with lupins, and I sat upon it, clutching the butter, content to pass the time. I suppose there was a nagging hope that a portal would open up before me, or an emissary from that remote and lovely land suddenly materialise before me, or spring out from behind the lupins, and take my hand and guide me. But nothing whatsoever happened, save that along the lane came passing an off-duty maitre d’, one who had expelled me from his pantry a few days before, and he recognised me, and cursed me as he passed, and threatened to call the police, though I was doing nothing wrong. I made a gift to him of the packet of butter, as a peace offering, and he relented, and sat down on the wall next to me, and we fell into amicable conversation.

“Have you heard tell,” I asked, “Of a remote and lovely land, in another time, whether past or future I do not know, where the butter is golden and the clatter is mellifluous and the taxis careen along the wide important boulevards?”

“Why yes!” he cried, “Only the other evening in the restaurant there was a group at one of the tables who spoke of such things.”

“Did you ask them how they got there, via a portal perhaps, or by magic bus etcetera?”

“I did not. As maitre d’, I spoke to them only of food and drink and service standards. In any case, I did not need to ask, for I already know the answer. It is a land I have visited many times myself. In fact I am on my way there now.”

My eyes popped out of my head.

“Gosh!” I said, “I knew I would be on to something by buying a packet of butter and taking a taxi to a place of clatter! Can I come with you?”

“Of course you cannot,” he replied, and he stood up and turned about, twice, thrice, and vanished behind the lupins. I sprang after him, and tripped over, and lay sprawled in the flowerbed with my mouth full of mud. And then a wind came in from the west, a roaring wind so loud that it drowned out the clatter from the shunting yard. I had given my butter away, and the taxi was gone. I got up and dusted myself down and trudged home. The evening newspaper was on the doormat. A huge headline shrieked the news that, far away in Dallas, Texas, President Oswald had been shot.