Ned Mossop sat in his office nursing the last dregs of a bottle of hooch and smoking his umpteenth cigarette of the day. He stared out of the window into the gloaming, at the mean fields, like mean streets but without paving and with fewer, if any, buildings, and what buildings there were were ramshackle and dilapidated. This was a godforsaken rustic backwater, and Ned Mossop adored it.

Nothing much ever happened here, which suited Ned, but not his bank manager. He hadn’t had a case for weeks. Every day he sat in the office glugging hooch and smoking and occasionally picking a bit of straw or hay out of his hair. Sometimes, through the window, he would watch muck being spread or bonfires lit. But nobody seemed to need him. He liked it that way.

Then suddenly the buzzer on his desk buzzed. It was Velma, from the outer office.

“Ned? There’s a woman here to see you.”

“OK, pumpkin, show her in.”

Ned took his feet off his desk, knocked back the last of the hooch and shoved the empty tumbler in his drawer. And then she came in, and his eyes popped out. She was dressed in black, wearing a bippety boppety hat with a veil drawn over her face, and her figure was the kind of figure that Raymond Chandler would have enjoyed describing with a startling simile.

“Thank you for seeing me, Mr Mossop,” she breathed, in a husky voice that almost made Mossop faint with desire. He managed a peasant-like grunt.

“I had better tell you straight out why I’ve come,” she said, “It’s about my husband.”

Mossop raised an eyebrow. He had tagged her as a widow, what with the black dress and the veil.

“Or rather. . .”, she added, her voice trembling, “It’s about my husband’s cows.”

“Quit stalling, honeybunch, just lay it on the line,” snarled Mossop, curling his lip. She had not actually been stalling, but Mossop said that to all the girls.

“Please, Mr Mossop, be patient with me!” she pleaded, “You see. . . yesterday morning my husband’s herdsman discovered seventy-nine of his cows locked in a churchyard. They had somehow got in, but then the gate must have slammed shut, trapping them there. My husband thinks the cause was that gale that blew in the night. Anyway, when the herdsman released them two cows were already dead and during the day a further nine cows perished. Why? Why? Why?”

She collapsed in quivering helplessness. Mossop took a fresh bottle of hooch from his drawer, filled a pair of tumblers, and handed her one.

“Looks like you could do with a stiff drink, sister,” he growled, “And I suppose you want me to find out what happened?”

The woman drank the hooch in one gulp and said, “Well, yes, Mr Mossop. On your office door it says ‘Ned Mossop, Cow Detective’. Was it silly of me to think you could help?”

Mossop grinned a wolfish grin.

“Not at all, cherrypie. Twenty groats a day plus expenses, and I’ll see what I can do.”

She delved into her reticule and took out a handful of bent and dented and filthy coinage. Mossop took it and counted it out.

“Velma!” he called, “Get the lady a peasant with a cart to trundle her home.”

*

Later that night, Mossop walked the mean fields, all the way to the churchyard. The gate was swinging loose. He gave it a kick, and made his way among the gravestones. The grasses unloaded their griefs on his feet as if he were God, prickling his ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy, spiritous mists inhabited this place. The moon was no door. It was a face in its own right, white as a knuckle and terribly upset. It dragged the sea after it like a dark crime; it was quiet with the O-gape of complete despair. The yew tree pointed up, it had a Gothic shape. His eyes lifted after it and found the moon. The moon was his mother. She was not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloosed small bats and owls. Inside the church, the saints were all blue, floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews, their hands and faces stiff with holiness. The moon saw nothing of this. She was bald and wild. And the message of the yew tree was blackness – blackness and silence. Satisfied, Ned Mossop lit a cigarette and walked out of the churchyard, across the mean fields, as a gale began to blow. He did not shut the gate behind him.

*

“Oh, Mr Mossop! You startled me, trudging uninvited into the cowshed while I am faffing about with mops and pails!”

She was wearing the same black dress and bippety boppety hat and veil.

“Save the dramatics for your husband, sugarplum. I knew all along it was yew.”

“Me? Why, that’s ridiculous!”

“Not you, yew. Yew trees. Your husband’s cows died from yew poisoning. The cows got into the churchyard because the gate was left open. And who left it open? Joel Cairo! But you knew that, didn’t you, pineapple chunk, because you paid him. Only not with this filthy coinage you gave me, which I am throwing into the muck at your feet in a gesture of contempt. No, you paid him in contaminated milk from your husband’s herd. You’re taking the fall.”

And as he spoke, a police car screeched to a halt outside the cowshed.

*

From The Last Englishman : The Life Of J. L. Carr by Byron Rogers (2003):

On 27 October [1967] the Archdeacon wrote again, this time enclosing a letter from Maxwell Elliott, a local farmer. “We have 80 dairy cows grazing regularly in the fields adjoining the church, and we have a continued problem of keeping the churchyard gates closed. On Monday night, Oct 16, one of the gates had been opened some time after 6 pm, and every cow except one spent the night in the graveyard. Our herdsman found them at 6 am with the gate closed on them, presumably by the gale which blew in the night. Two cows were already dead, and altogether 9 died in the course of the day, all proved to be by yew poisoning. There are 3 yew trees in the churchyard.”

Suspicion is a beast with a thousand eyes, but most of them are blind, or colour-blind, or askew, or rolling, or yellow. There is too little respect paid to the good resolutions which are so popular a feature of the New Year. It is a pleasure to see a modern clergyman expressing his horror of the dancing of the moment as Canon Newbolt did in St Paul’s. It is not easy to decide what is the dullest feature in the Tango Teas upon which Londoners are now wasting their afternoons and their silver.

Almost everyone who has committed a murder knows that the business has its tragic side. It is significant of the change that has come over the religious imagination that a number of representative clergymen have issued a manifesto of disbelief in Hell and no heresy-hunt has begun. There has been an increasing demand lately for cheerful books.

There has been a delightful correspondence going on in the Times about Mdlle Gaby Deslys. Surely honest men may thank God they belong to ‘the Stupid Party’! When Mr Churchill referred in Manchester to the piling up of armaments as so much misdirected human energy, he said something with which men of all parties will agree, except those few romantic souls who believe that it is a bracing thing to shed the blood of a foreigner every now and then. There is a cant of Christmas, and there is a cant of anti-Christmas.

It is still the custom in civilised countries for the politicians to call each other names. An amazing story of coincidences appears in the Westminster Gazette. There is nothing in which the newspapers deal more generously than indignation. Mr Galsworthy has been writing to the Times on “the heartlessness of Parliament.” In spite of the progress of civilisation, there are still women to whom the returning Spring is mainly a festival of dresses.

It is easy to imagine the enthusiasm of the audience at Manchester when a black cat walked on to the platform at a meeting of Sir Edward Carson’s. Being shocked is evidently still one of the favourite pastimes of the British people. Father Hugh Benson has been praised for his courage in confessing that he could not read Sir Walter Scott. There is a good deal to be said for Mr Lloyd George’s complaint against the world for its treatment of politicians. It is a remarkable thing that human beings have never yet got reconciled to disaster.

Mr Justice Darling, before passing a sentence of seven years’ penal servitude on Julia Decies for wounding her lover with intent to kill him, made a remark which must interest all students of the morals of murder. It was only the other day that Mr G. A. Birmingham gave us a play about a hoax at the expense of an Irish village, in course of which a statue was erected to an imaginary Irish-American General, the aide-de-camp of the Lord-Lieutenant coming down from Dublin to perform the unveiling ceremony. There does not at first glance seem to be any great similarity between Mr Thomas Hardy and M. Anatole France, the latter of whom has come to London to see how enthusiastically Englishmen can dine when they wish to express their feelings about literature.

It is only now and then, when some great disaster like the sinking of the Empress of Ireland occurs, that man recovers his ancient dread of the sea. The appearance of the first number of Blast ought to put an end to the Futurist movement in England. Mr E. F. Benson has been attacking the critics, and reviving against them the old accusation that they are merely men who have failed in the arts. One of the most unexpected pages in Sir Edward Cook’s Life of Florence Nightingale, is that in which he describes Miss Nightingale, in a phrase Lord Goschen once used about himself, as a “passionate statistician.”

You see? This and that, as promised by my title. There’s never a dull moment at Hooting Yard, is there? Well, I grant that not every one of the above sentences is scintillating, but you never quite knew what was coming next, and if you were yawning your head off at one thing, you likely snapped back to attention soon enough. And think how educative it has been, the this and that. You will have learned several things I bet you did not know before. Next time you are invited to a sophisticated cocktail party and there is a discomfiting lull in the blather, you can pipe up with a titbit about Canon Newbolt’s views on modern dance or the tragic side of murder or black cats or Florence Nightingale the passionate statistician.

This is where I fear I have been going astray in my daily thousandish-word essays. There has been far too much airy persiflage (to borrow a phrase from Mister Nizz) and witterings of questionable or indeed no consequence. Instead I ought to have been writing on superstition, on good resolutions, on the sin of dancing, on thoughts at a tango tea, on the humours of murder, on stupidity and waste and demagogues and coincidences and disasters and the sea and all the other subjects addressed in The Book Of This And That by Robert Lynd, published by Mills & Boon in 1915. What I have given you is the opening sentence from each of the twenty-eight essays in the book, all of which first appeared in the New Statesman. Hard to imagine that clapped-out husk of a magazine being even half-way readable, but that was the past.

We are nearly two thirds of the way through the year and I have managed to keep up my daily quota, but I think as we approach the final few months I need to get my noggin screwed on tight. The time has come for more this and further that, and much, much less of whatever isn’t this and that. Hold on to your hats!

In a piece the other day entitled On Snitby, I mentioned in passing the computer game Demented Virtual Needlework. Several readers have contacted me to ask for further particulars. “Further particulars” indeed. Well, I mean to say! The absolute bloody nerve of some people! Some even demanded that I “furnish further and better particulars” (my italics).

The sheer impertinence of some of my readers is astonishing to behold. I get the impression that they think I sit here, day in day out, tippy-tapping these teeming thousands of words because I have nothing better to do, as if it’s all the same to me whether I prattle on about demented virtual needlework or Snitby or snags or jam tomorrow or a thing of beauty or God or an impromptu dinner party recipe or fubbed pannicles or Tinie Tempah or tin squirrels or an atoll or whatever else springs to mind, so they need merely snap their fingers and say “demented virtual needlework” and I’ll jump to attention and salute and say “Righty ho!” and immediately buckle down to bashing out a thousand words just to keep them happy. Well, it doesn’t quite work like that, buster. There’s a method, and I stick to it, and I shall not be swayed, so put that in your pipe and smoke it, as my father used to say, though he was not a pipe smoker himself. As I recall he favoured Player’s No, 6, a particularly acrid cigarette to the best of my knowledge.

By which I do not mean to suggest that all my readers are importunate rascals. Far from it. Many of you, I know, would never dream of writing to demand that I provide further and better particulars of anything under the sun. Even if you wished it so, you would not have the gall to ask. You would rather sit sprawled in your hovels patiently waiting to learn what is writ upon the tablets borne down from the Hooting Yard mountain, pathetically grateful, like kicked dogs whimpering for crumbs from the master’s table.

I need hardly add that there is not actually a Hooting Yard mountain. I use the term figuratively. But if there were such a mountain, as in an ideal world there would be, then it would be a mighty Alpine peak, snow-dazzled, its summit invisible, lost in the clouds. And most importantly, I would be the only one ever to set foot on that summit. You lot would be huddled in your flimsy tents somewhere on the slopes, cooking sausages over a stove, melting handfuls of snow into tin cups, tossing bones to the huskies. It may be that I have muddled polar exploration with mountaineering in that happy image, but that is my prerogative and you know better than to carp or cavil. At least I hope you do. And I do not want to be asked to give further and better particulars of that Antarctic or Alpine scene, or my wrath will be as terrible as an army with banners. I would be like Benaiah in Samuel II, chapter 23, verse 20: “And Benaiah the son of Jehoidah, the son of a valiant man, of Kabzeel, who had done many acts, he slew two lionlike men of Moab; he went down also and slew a lion in the midst of a pit in time of snow”. Don’t think I wouldn’t.

Having said all that, I am aware that there are among my readers a few poor souls who think it perfectly acceptable to spend their leisure time playing so-called “computer games”. Personally, I think they would be better off familiarising themselves with the Old Testament or, if that is too much to ask, then they could at the very least devote themselves to rereading the Hooting Yard Archives, over and over and over again, until they can recite my complete works by heart, word perfect, with every last nuance given its proper weight. That is a practical use of anybody’s time.

But I am, as you know, nothing if not a realist, so I accept that some of you will want to muck about with your bleeping and buzzing hand-held digital brain-sapping gewgaws, your iFads and whatnot. If you are determined to shrivel your brain in such a fashion, then you might as well do so with the absolutely tiptop game Demented Virtual Needlework. The basic idea is that you can do frenzied embroidery without any risk whatsoever of pricking yourself with small pointy metal things like needles and pins. How great is that?

When you start the game, by pressing some sort of knob on your device, or tapping the screen, or whatever the latest thing is, you are presented with a virtual “piece of cloth”, blank and featureless and whatever colour you like, though the default setting is beige. Down one side of the screen are various virtual metal pointy things, and on the other side various virtual skeins of thread. You can mix and match these in numberless combinations, and then the fun begins. You can make the most fantastic and insane needlework designs and you will never need a thimble to protect your dainty fingertips!

We got one of our unpaid and half-starved interns to test it out, and within a few minutes the little orphan had “stitched” a design that looked as if a dog had been sick in a wind tunnel. We snatched the device away from the intern, took a screen-shot, and were then able to use this as a pattern from which real needleworkers, unpaid and half-starved and orphaned like the tester, were forced to create some real embroidery, down in the dimly-lit and fetid cellar. Naturally this was the occasion for much pin-pricking and droplets of blood and weeping, but the end results were superb, and we were able to sell them at extortionate prices at an unregulated bazaar. I think that is what they call, in the lamentable parlance of the day, a “win-win situation”.

It is very close to inevitable, when you are problem-solving, that at some point you will hit a snag. Indeed, if you do not hit a snag, that calls into question whether what you are doing is actually solving a problem, rather than merely going about something you ought to be able to do blindfolded and with your hands tied behind your back. I do not mean that literally. I am trying to suggest an activity that is so familiar and comes so easily that to call it a problem is to do violence to the language. Going out to the newsagent to buy a copy of the Daily Hoo-Hah and a pint of milk, for example, ought not be a problem for most of us. So if that is your idea of problem-solving I think I would laugh in your face, or shove you aside, out of my sight.

Having said that, I suppose it is true that even so simple and unproblematic an activity could be booby-trapped with a snag. You might trip over a clump of tough intractable weeds on your way to the newsagent, for example, and sprain your ankle, forcing you to hobble. Or you might arrive at the newsagent only to discover a hole in your pocket through which your coinage has fallen, and you have no money to pay for the newspaper and the milk. Or who knows what else? But these are properly accidents rather than snags, the kind of snags we bump up against when solving problems.

The snag is, as it were, inherent in the problem. If there were no snag to negotiate, the matter might not be a problem at all, and we could just get on with it, and now I am repeating myself so I had better shut up about non-problems and concentrate on problems.

To illustrate what I am talking about, or trying to talk about, let us take two different problems and consider what sort of snags might crop up.

First, we could say that the most basic type of problem is a simple sum, 1 + 1, for example. This is the kind of problem with which we might be faced when attending infant school. We have to add 1 to 1 and come up with the correct answer. Simple as it is, this little sum might be dubbed the fons et origo of every other sum we might ever attempt, up to and including stupendously complicated calculations in the higher mathematics. It is, in a sense, the ur-sum. Not too many snags there, you might think. But hold on! What if, as an infant, sitting on the infant school bench with your slate and your pointy scraping tool, it is somehow vouchsafed to you that 1 + 1 is indeed the very basis of every other sum you might ever try to solve for as long as you live? That is a dizzying mental prospect! It is enough to befuddle the head of the more sensitive and imaginative infant. Hence the snag. The profound implications of 1 + 1, of all that it might later lead to, could provoke a sort of seizing up of the cranial integuments, a gibbering havoc of the brain. In other words, a snag.

For our second example of a problem let us take something more concrete. Let us say you have embarked upon a project of building a tiny hydroelectric power station using balsa wood and glue and nanotechnology. Everything is going swimmingly, until you realise there is a mismatch between the diagrams on your blueprint and the amount of balsa wood in your box. You are at a loss to see how you might complete the construction until this anomaly is resolved. This, then, is the snag.

It is clear, I hope, from these examples that neither problem is going to be solved successfully until the snags have been addressed. By addressed, I suppose I mean solved. So we can consider each snag like a little problem in itself. It is part of a bigger, overall problem, but the solution to that uber-problem depends entirely on the solution to the mini-problem. How, then, should one go about tackling the mini-problem, or snag? Here are some handy tips.

1. Do not panic. (Actually, there are certain snags where panic is, if not the most sensible response, then certainly an understandable one. Imagine you have hit a snag in disarming a lethal explosive device, and the timer is ticking down to the last few precious seconds. In these circumstances, you might be better off panicking and running away as fast as your little legs will carry you.)

2. Take several deep breaths.

3. Scratch your head and furrow your brow. (Some people also like to let their tongue loll out.)

4. Try to relax your overheated brain. (There are several ways of doing this. President Nixon mashed potatoes. Baruch Spinoza set a pair of spiders to fight each other in mortal combat.)

5. Consider whether you really care enough to solve the problem at all. (This might sound defeatist, and it is, but you would be surprised at how often people get all hot and bothered about things that, in the long term, do not matter one jot.)

6. Smack your forehead with your open palm and press on regardless. (This is the reckless option. Sometimes it works out for the best, sometimes it brings in its wake unparalleled disaster.)

7. Consult an expert. (Somewhere in the world there is an expert in everything. The expert is the kind of person who will take one look at your snag, give a wry chuckle, and solve it, possibly while blindfolded and with their hands tied behind their back. Tracking down the right expert can of course become a problem, or snag, in itself, so what you should do as you make your progress through the world is to buttonhole every person you meet and interrogate them regarding their field(s) of expertise. Keep a note in your jotter, including their contact details. Later, at home, transfer the details from your jotter to a magnificent alphabetical and cross-referenced card index system.)

Next week, we will take a look at pitfalls.

Snitby blubbing on the causeway. A death in the family. The priest is on his way, astride his elegant horse, along the clifftop path. Candles lit in the cottage, and blood on the pillow. The dog is being sick in the gutter. Snitby’s dog, with its corkscrew tail like a pig’s. Call My Bluff on the wireless. Nobody wants to turn it off. Robert Robinson says: cagmag. Nobody is listening. Birds are shrieking in the sky, an impossible blue, not a hint of cloud. Snitby’s tears extinguish his gasper. It is too wet to be relit so he tosses it into the sea. A gull swoops to examine it. The sound of hooves, but it is not the priest, not yet. It will not be the priest at all, today, for the telegram was mistranscribed and he has set off in entirely the wrong direction. He will arrive at Taddy at nightfall and have to be put up at an inn. Here comes the crone with the winding sheet. She has a goitre and clogs. The winding sheet is filthy. Snitby stares at the sea. The gull has flown away into the far distance. It is now a speck. In the cottage, Robert Robinson says: pannicles. There is nobody to hear him, for they have all come out to greet the crone, to kick the dog, to rub its snout in its vomit. It whimpers and scampers to the causeway. Snitby pats its head. A tiny white cloud appears in the sky. A police car screeches to a halt outside the cottage. Snitby scarpers.

Snitby listening to Plastic Ono Band on his iPod.

Snitby sobbing on the jetty. Undone by art. A seaside exhibition of oils by Tarleton. Oil paintings of oily subjects, rigs and slicks and sumps. A terrible beauty. His dog tied to a post outside the galeria. Really an underused seaside civic hall. Snitby overcome with emotion. Here in Taddy where the priest is still holed up in the inn, one or more limbs paralysed. He fell from his elegant horse as it cantered to a halt. A hopeful crone came clutching a winding sheet but he let out a groan and she was sent away. Salt stains on the jetty. Salt in Snitby’s tears. He holds his gasper at arm’s length. Sea sloshes against the wooden posts. Onions on Snitby’s breath. Tarleton dead these many years but still remembered and beloved in Taddy. He was a local boy. Blond and breathless. One leg shorter than the other. Collector of cakestands. Auctioned off. Snitby wanted one but had no cash to speak of. In exile here now and for the future, where the police have no remit. Ancient laws, woolly and medieval, like Snitby himself, after a fashion. In his attic room, the priest’s shutters are shut.

Snitby reading Ruskin’s numbered paragraphs on his Kobo.

Snitby bawling on the pier. The handcuffs chafe. The sergeant has a florid face and a massive moustache. His socks are unwashed and give off a whiff. Klaxons blaring. A pier ventriloquist stuffing his gob with steak and kidney pie while his dummy prates. It is reciting a list of over six hundred birds. Snitby’s face in the sawdust. A couple of teeth loose. Police brutality, but then the sergeant does not suffer fools gladly. Kicks Snitby as an afterthought. Fills out a form with the stub of a pencil. Ten miles along the coast from Taddy, twenty from the causeway. Geographical precision. Pins on a map. The priest an invaluable source of intelligence. One arm now working perfectly, or as near as dammit. Grace abounding. Gruel for his breakfast during Lent. Fish abounding in this resort, but he pushes his plate away with his good hand. The diocese is paying his bill at the inn. Totted up in the innkeeper’s head and nowhere else. Snitby turning to prayer. Mouth full of blood and sawdust. O Lord O Lord why hast Thou forsaken me?

Snitby playing Demented Virtual Needlework on his iPad.

Snitby weeping on the quayside. Tears blurring his vision. He cannot make out the horizon, simply a blank grey blue expanse. Fussing with rosary beads in his pocket. Given up the gaspers for now. Cries of gulls and clanks of tugboats. Foghorns on a clear day. A marching Salvation Army band. Catholicism versus muscular Christianity. It’s an endless battle with no winners. Snitby asked for a nun. He was sure this seaside resort had a convent, right on the harbour. He had his resorts all mixed up. Fifty miles from the causeway on the other side from Taddy. At high speed in a Japanese car with blinking lights and a siren. And motorbike outriders. And two helicopters. Promised a nun on arrival. Not in writing. Snitby’s dog still tied to its post in Taddy. Fawned over by passing widow-women. One will untie it and take it home to a cottage in the woods. It will run away and perish on a railway line beneath a thundering locomotive. The nun will hear about the accident on a nun’s grapevine but decide not to tell Snitby, Snitby in extremis.

Snitby scraping his serial number on his iSlate.

Transportation to shores afar
But the gates of heaven are left ajar
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

O’er the sea to a distant shore
To see your homeland nevermore
Repent while you can
Repent while you can
O you base and wretched man

Snitby jumping overboard.

There will be jam tomorrow. The announcement was made on the front page of The Tinderbox. I was absolutely sure, in my own head, that we had been promised jam today, but I can only conclude that I was wrong. Perhaps this is the first flickering sign of a descent into madness.

The announcement, signed by the Regional Captain of the New Peasant Army, is unequivocal. There will be jam tomorrow, he says, and he goes on to give the locations of kiosks where we can form orderly queues to exchange our coupons for jam. Several different flavours are promised, including raspberry and strawberry and quince. Marmalade will have to wait for another day. Isn’t that always the way?

I decided to reconnoitre the site of my nearest kiosk, on the corner of the square. Shortly after dawn, the square was empty save for birds pecking orts and scantlings. There was no sign of a kiosk of any description. I checked all four corners, even though the announcement in The Tinderbox was clear that it was the north-west corner, where stands the big stone statue of Charles Hawtrey, miraculously undefiled by the roving goon squads of the New Peasant Army. The sculptor omitted the eyes, choosing to have two blank stone discs for the lenses of Hawtrey’s specs. It grants him a weird, blind authority, and I think it may be this that deters the thugs. After all, they lost no time in smashing to smithereens the statue of Eric Sykes in another square in another part of town.

That there was no kiosk did not of course mean there would not be one, on that very spot, tomorrow. It takes no time at all to put up a kiosk, and to pack it with jars of jam. It is likely that the erection of the kiosk will take place in the small hours of the night, when all good citizens are tucked in their beds and their windows shuttered and their radios silenced. Then, at dawn, when the hooters blare, or shortly thereafter, we can make our way to the square and form an orderly queue, those of us who have the necessary coupons.

I am fortunate to have coupons for jam and coupons for marmalade. For safety, I keep them in a concealed cubby locked with several different padlocks, the keys of which I keep on a string tied around my left leg just above the knee. I have a tale at the ready in case I am patted down by one of the patrols. It is not that my coupons are forgeries, and I have every right to them, but in the present climate they are like gold dust, especially the marmalade coupons.

I was there when they smashed up the Eric Sykes statue. I just happened to be passing, and thought it prudent to stop and clap. The wreckers were a gaggle of new recruits, the newest of the New Peasants in the New Peasant Army. I have turned the phrase over and over in my mind, this idea of the “New Peasant”. How does he differ from an Old Peasant, except in his fanaticism? Not that one sees many, or any, old peasants nowadays. Where have they all gone?

When they had finished smashing the statue, I watched them depart, on their way to a rally. They passed close by me, so close I could have touched them, and I was sure I saw, on their moustaches, smears of jam. But how could that be? There was no jam that day, nor the next, nor indeed will there be any jam until tomorrow. So I must have been suffering from a hallucination, another sign of incipient madness.

I have learned to cope with jamless picnics. At first it was hard, so hard, to pack the hamper and to realise that, yes, one had done packing, that was it, there was no jar of jam to cram in at the last minute. Out, then, heaving the hamper along the lane towards the grassy splendour of Hattie Jacques Memorial Field, still there were jam pangs, for the first few picnics at least. Plopping the hamper on the grass I would find myself somehow expecting a jar of jam to appear, miraculously, when I lifted the lid. It took several picnics for this hope to die in me. But die it did.

And now it has been revived. As I said, I thought there was going to be jam today. I am sure that was what was announced in yesterday’s Tinderbox. In my mind’s eye I can still see it, big bold black block capitals, accompanied by a cut-out-‘n’-keep mezzotint of the Regional Captain, his face grim yet puckish, his specs glinting, his moustache fabulous. Was that merely another hallucination? I would be tempted to go to the clinic, had the clinic not been burned to the ground by a gang of Old Peasants.

The gang was still at large, and we were warned to be on our guard. In a further depredation, they had stolen a consignment of jam destined for our kiosks. At a rally, I bawled my undying hatred of them along with everyone else. But truthfully, there was no real hatred in my heart. They were welcome to the jam, as far as I was concerned. By then I had grown so used to my jamless picnics that I could barely imagine a picnic with jam.

But then came the announcements in The Tinderbox. Not every day, but often enough to raise my hopes, to have me salivating. Once more it became a trial to pack the hamper. Once more my mind played tricks as I headed along the lane towards the field. The stone statue of Hattie Jacques gazed kindly upon me as I chewed my dry husks of bread and slurped my brackish water, as if she too were saying, “Buck up! Buck up! For there will be jam tomorrow!”

First, to be comparatively small. Secondly, to be smooth. Thirdly, to have a variety in the direction of the parts; but fourthly, to have those parts not angular, but melted as it were into each other. Fifthly, to be of a delicate frame, without any remarkable appearance of strength. Sixthly, to have its colours clear and bright; but not very strong and glaring. Seventhly, or if it should have any glaring colour, to have it diversified with others.

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757)

First, it was small. In fact it was tiny. And I made it seem even tinier than it actually was by placing it next to some pretty big things. If I had surrounded it with, say, lemons or pin-cushions, it would still have been tiny but it would hold its own, as it were, among such fruit ‘n’ cloth. So in order to emphasise, even to exaggerate, its tininess, I swept away all the scattered lemons and pin-cushions and in their place I put a couple of life-size papier maché models of cows and an industrial washing machine. I could of course have left the lemons and pin-cushions where they were, and simply removed the tiny thing and found a new home for it. That would have saved time. But I had time on my hands, since the fall of the regime. Also, I could now squeeze all the lemons and stick pins in all the pin-cushions, in other words, make use of them, instead of leaving them scattered about, pointlessly. Heaving the papier maché cows and the washing machine into place took the wind out of me, so I went to have a lie down. I turned the volume down on the radio, which was playing stirring and patriotic anthems, and I dozed.

Secondly, it was smooth. It was not smooth to begin with, but when I woke from my nap I fetched some sandpaper from my sandpaper-crammed desk drawer and rubbed away at the thing, smoothing all the rough edges. Offhand, I cannot recall what grade of sandpaper I used, but I made a note of it at the time, in my jotter, with my propelling-pencil, in case it ever cropped up as a matter of concern during an interrogation. But it never did, and eventually I cast the jotter into a furnace. I suspect I shall regret having done so, one of these days, but not yet, not yet, fingers crossed.

Thirdly, it had variety in the direction of the parts. Some parts of it pointed one way, some another, and some in still other directions. That makes it sound complicated, but it wasn’t. And to say the parts “pointed” might suggest they were pointy parts, but they weren’t, at least not after I had sanded them down with the grade [whatever] sandpaper. I say they “pointed” in a direction when I suppose what I ought more correctly say is that the different parts “faced” in different directions, or that, depending on where you were when you cast your eyes upon it, you would see different aspects of it. Much like any other solid object, really, in this solid world.

Fourthly, on that mistaken idea of pointiness, I should stress that not only was it not at all pointy but that its various parts looked as if they were melted into each other. This is hardly surprising. After my nap, and my bout of sandpapering, I fetched a blowtorch from the janitor’s cupboard and lit it and aimed it at the tiny thing. The heat was terrific, much as I believe in my heart of hearts the fires of hell to be, and it took less than a minute for parts of the thing to melt pleasingly into one another. Unfortunately, my blowtorch technique was somewhat slapdash, and I inadvertently set fire to one of the papier maché cows. The resulting blaze brought a goon squad galumphing through my door, but fortunately my papers were in order. I have to acknowledge their help in extinguishing the cow before it was too badly damaged.

Fifthly, it was very delicate, particularly after all that sanding and blasting with a blowtorch. In fact I became worried that it would fall to bits. That is why I put the industrial washing machine between it and the window where the draught gets in. Even a mild sudden gust might shatter it, it was so delicate! I resolved to obtain one of those draught excluder sausages when next I had the necessary coupons and pass. I suppose I could have run one up myself, possibly by stitching all the pin-cushions end to end to form a sausage, but quite frankly the prospect unnerved me. I am too timid to risk illegal needlework under the current regime.

Sixthly, its colours were clear and bright without being strong and glaring. Initially it was a sort of dull dun beige, but after my nap and the sanding and the blasting with a blowtorch and the visit from the goon squad and the extinguishing of the papier maché cow I gave it a lick of paint. A dab of yellow and a dab of red and a sort of wash of lilac or lavender. The colours had a very pleasing effect. Because it was such a tiny thing I used a very small paintbrush, and painted with care. After the hullabaloo with the blowtorch, I did not want to risk splattering paint all over the place, over the cows and the industrial washing machine. So I devoted several hours to that, until the pips on the radio indicated it was time for the night rally in the field behind the viaduct.

Seventhly, because the red and yellow dabs stood out in a vaguely glaring way from the overall lilac or lavender wash, I got a damp cloth from the janitor’s cupboard and smudged them a bit, so the colours sort of shaded one into another. But that had to wait until I got home from the night rally, dog tired and hoarse from shouting my undying hatred of the previous regime.

It was only after reading Edmund Burke I realised that there, between the papier maché cows and the industrial washing machine, I had a tiny [illegible] of unsurpassed beauty. I pray that it will not be confiscated by the peasant army.

In ages past, God was our help. He was also thought to be our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home. More recently, we were told that He was a concept by which we measure our pain. I’ll say that again. We were told that God was a concept by which we measure our pain. We were told this, however, by a drug-bedizened whiny-voiced Liverpudlian who told us many other things, such as that he was a walrus sitting on a cornflake. I think we can safely discard his witterings.

In Russian, God is known as Bog. It is well worth knowing this preparatory to reading any abstruse theological texts you may be tempted to tackle. For example, you might pluck from the shelf a fat tome the title of which promises to tell you all about God, when in fact it is a geographical survey of certain bogs. Conversely, if it so happens that you want to read up on bogs, you may become brain-dizzy trying to plough your way through the ineffable. Very few, if any, bogs are ineffable. They are, rather, a brute reality, an assertion you can easily test by donning a pair of wellington boots and trudging into one.

Can one, similarly, trudge into God? The answer to that, surprisingly, is “Yes!”, at least if we accept the argument of Digby Thew’s new paperback Trudging Into God. The esteemed geographer claims he did just that, a couple of years ago, while out on a hike. Though I have just noticed that the copy of the book sent to me for review is a translation from the Russian, and it may be one of those slapdash translations we hear so much about in the online journal Slapdash Translations & Confusion Regarding Theology And Geography. Incidentally, if you have never visited the site, I recommend it highly, though I know how difficult it can be to tear yourself away from Hooting Yard. I must say I wondered what Digby Thew was doing writing a book about God, when all his previously published works have been on the subject of bogs, ditches, puddles, marshes, mires, swamps, and other muddy wet places dotted about the earth.

God is to be found in such places, of course, for He is ubiquitous. Or almost ubiquitous. Let us not forget that there are quite a few so-called godforsaken places, certain dilapidated and ill-starred seaside resorts, from which God has fled. The poet Dennis Beerpint has been called the laureate of godforsaken seaside resorts, deservedly so, for penning lines such as:

I stood, at dawn, upon the collapsing pier
And I gave Lord God a flea in his ear
I shouted wild blasphemies at the sky
Upon the collapsing pier at Exe-on-Wye

Exe-on-Wye is a sort of generic dilapidated and godforsaken seaside resort invented by Beerpint, or possibly nicked from Vivian Darkbloom. It is based on the real resort of Innsmouth, which, oddly, is a town of no fewer than eleven churches. All of them are of course in various states of ruin, populated by bats and owls and crows rather than by the pious faithful.

Neither bats nor owls nor crows have need of God, save for their creation, but God Himself often assumes the corporeal form of a bat or an owl or a crow. One of my favourite Gods is the crow-God Cark! (always spelled with an exclamation mark), worshipped by the tinies at Pang Hill Orphanage. Some would hold that Cark! himself is a blasphemy, and in no way related to the real God Almighty, Lord of Hosts, but if ever you have witnessed the orphanage tinies trembling and bowing down in veneration of him you will almost certainly have trembled and bowed down in veneration on your own account, for truly he is fearsome and his fury is as the sort of stormy blast that God our help in ages past provides shelter from. I am tying myself in theological knots.

That is the thing with theology, it is so difficult to get a proper grasp of it. No doubt Digby Thew considered this when deciding whether to devote himself to the study of God or the study of bogs.

“What is it to be, young Digby?” asked his pedagogue when Digby Thew was young, “God or bogs?”

Luckily, young Digby did not know Russian, or he might have become hopelessly confused. As it was, he was uncertain which choice to make, and so he spent forty days and nights in the wilderness wrestling with his soul. It was the sort of outdoor activity encouraged by the institution where he received his education. Legend has it that God appeared to Digby Thew on his thirty-ninth night in the wilderness, though what passed between them is unknown. It is surely pertinent that the part of the wilderness where Digby Thew spent his time was a bog-riddled wilderness, though it was also rife with bats and owls and crows. It was also near the seaside.

As John Lydon among others has pointed out, God spelled backwards is dog. It is hard to think of a being less like God than a dog, especially one of those small yappy ones. Thereagain, we have it on good authority that God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, so who knows if that dismal little dog yapping at one’s heels as one trudges o’er the moors towards the marshes and the bogs is not God Himself? There might be a divine message in the yapping, if only one could decipher it. On the other hand, if one did devote time and energy and one’s very sanity to translating the yaps into coherent sentences, and the dog turned out to be just a dog, and no God at all, one would be a benighted fool.

Being a fool is of course no barrier to approaching God. Quite the opposite, if we are to believe some theologians. And of course the Holy Fool, the idiot peasant of mysterious sanctity, is a staple character of Mother Russia. Which brings us back to Bog, which, spelled backwards, is not dog but gob. Do you know what I am going to do now? I am going to shut my gob.