Over the weekend I watched a modicum of Olympickery on the box. One thing that struck me was that I counted no fewer than three separate competitors, in three separate disciplines, each of whom, the commentators informed me, was nicknamed “The Beast”. Clearly when you are an aspiring athlete determined to strike fear into your rivals, giving yourself an air of bestiality is a popular option. Yet none of these self-styled Beasts seemed to me as bestial as one particular Hungarian hammer-thrower, not nicknamed The Beast, who made great savage roaring noises. What was impressive was that he was perfectly silent while spinning around readying himself to launch the hammer on its flight, and only when he had let go and launched it did he stand and roar. And what a roar! I thought I was listening to the Grunty Man, that monster of legend who terrifies the tinies.

It made me wonder if there is not something a little pathetic about these far less bestial athletes calling themselves The Beast, as if they are trying desperately to compensate for the fact that, after all, they just run or jump or swim or whatever it is they were doing. I was reminded of Aleister Crowley, another man who liked to be known as The Beast, though the reality was somewhat less impressive. As Phil Baker tells us in his 2011 biography of Austin Osman Spare,

If the press notices [of Spare’s first West End gallery show] were calculated to put many visitors off, there was something about them that would prove positively attractive to a few. Among them was the so-called Wickedest Man in the World, the self-styled Beast 666; and so it was that Aleister Crowley came striding through the door of number 13 Bruton Street, grandly announcing himself to the shy and awkward artist as the “Vicegerent of God upon Earth” . . . Spare thought he looked more like “an Italian ponce out of work”, or so he told a friend years later. Perhaps with the benefit of four decades of hindsight, he said this was what he had told Crowley at the time.

In fairness, as far as I recall none of the Olympic Beasts looked like out-of-work Italian ponces, though I wasn’t paying complete attention. I was listening more than I was watching, my ears pricked up for the ever more baroque turns of phrase of the commentators. There are the ones seeking to explain to the dimwit the less familiar sports, and those trying to find new or different superlatives. What I found most intriguing were the experts seeking to tell us, before an event, what a particular athlete needed to do to win a gold medal. At no point did they ever say of a runner that “he needs to run faster than anyone else”, or of a thrower that “she needs to throw it further than anyone else”, which would have been my understanding. Apparently it is all much more complicated than that.

The commentators have certainly been excelling themselves, and I really ought to have had pen and paper at hand to jot down some of their more memorable utterances, though at one point all I could hear was the word “unbelievable” being bandied about by all and sundry. I do think it is a pity that the BBC did not think to engage Boris Johnson as a sort of roving commentator on all events. His line that the women beach volleyball players were “glistening like wet otters” is unlikely to be bettered by any of the experts.

Speaking of otters, I was interested to learn that otter-chasing was one of the planned events at the first modern Olympiad in 1896, and that the Grunty Man was going to be one of the competitors. The idea was that he would be lured out of his filthy dark dank lair with nuts and biscuits, and then turned loose in riverbank vegetation to scurry and splash in pursuit of several otters. It is not entirely clear who the Grunty Man would have been competing against, and this may be one reason why the event was dropped at the last minute. It is also likely that Baron de Coubertin, instigator of the modern Games, was worried about what would happen to the otters if the Grunty Man managed to catch up with them and grab them with his great hairy paws. The sight of otters ripped to pieces by the Grunty Man’s fierce razor-sharp claws was not, apparently, the sort of image the Baron wanted the Olympics to project. I must say that was a bit namby-pamby of him, especially as, back in 1896, any photographs would have been in black and white, and rather grainy, so it is not as if the newspapers would have been filled with full colour snapshots of bright red otters’ blood. In any case, there was no guarantee that the Grunty Man would actually catch them, as he may well have been diverted by some other claim on his attention, such as a nest of birds or a boy scout encampment or a hydroelectric power station.

I wrote to Sebastian Coe a few months ago to ask him if the Grunty Man chasing otters could be a feature of London 2012. If not an official event, I thought it could be part of – or even replace entirely – the Opening Ceremony. I got a reply from his fixer telling me Coe was too busy with his bouts of Graeco-Roman wrestling with William Hague in the gymnasium at the Houses of Parliament to attend to my query. I am surprised that Coe and Hague engaged in a naked wrestling match, perhaps by firelight, like Alan Bates and Oliver Reed in Women In Love (Ken Russell, 1969), has played no part in the Olympics. Perhaps it will be the centrepiece of the Closing Ceremony. With added otters. And there, in the shadows, grunting and bestial, the Grunty Man!

An Italian ponce out of work

I used to know a man who, like Sloppy in Our Mutual Friend, could do the Police in different voices. It began as a party trick, for which he always received thunderous rounds of applause, upon which he eventually became dependent. There came a time when he no longer used his normal speaking voice at all. He couched every single utterance in one of his different Police voices, but the novelty wore off, and people no longer clapped, and he grew sour and disillusioned and rancorous, and ended his days drunk to high heaven sprawled on the floor of a hotel lobby at a seaside resort. It is a cautionary tale, then, his life.

But that ruinous end cannot dim the joy of his early forays into doing the Police in different voices. I remember as if it were yesterday the first time I came across him. I was attending a sophisticated cocktail party in a sophisticated house in a sophisticated part of town, and, being myself deeply and ineradicably unsophisticated, was having a rather hard time mingling. I was leaning against a mantelpiece, trying my best to look insouciant, but the only people who deigned to speak to me were those who challenged my very presence, accusing me of being some kind of valet or factotum or, worse, an interloper. I grew increasingly cantankerous, losing any sheen of sophistication I might have hoped to assume. I spat at people and pointedly ground out my cigarette butts on the expensive carpet. Across the room I saw a couple of genuine factotae approaching, huge burly monobrowed fellows, like minatory bears, bent, I supposed, on chucking me out into the street. Before they reached me, however, the hubbub of sophisticated chitchat suddenly ceased, and one voice was ringing out solo.

“On the fifteenth inst at eight forty-six pee em I was proceeding along Letsby Avenue in a northerly direction when I spotted the accused taunting a kitten. I apprehended him in the course of this bestial enormity and – “ and then, without missing a beat, he quoted that twit-and-jug bit from The Waste Land, “ – Twit twit twit, Jug jug jug jug jug jug, So rudely forc’d, Tereu”. Then he continued, in so deep and grave and sonorous a voice we might have been listening to T S Eliot himself, “And I dragged him down to the nick for a mild roughing-up by some of Inspector Cargpan’s boys.” It was marvellous, and we all applauded, and my lack of sophistication was forgotten as all eyes turned to the owner of the voice.

Or, as I learned soon enough, voices. A couple of weeks later I went to another sophisticated cocktail party. This time I took the precaution of wearing spats and a dressing gown, to give myself airs. I was leaning against a mantelpiece when once again, there was a hush a single voice made itself heard:

“On the sixteenth inst at six fourteen pee em I was proceeding along Letsby Avenue in a westerly direction when I spotted the accused engaged in a hate crime against a sparrow. No! Oo-er, missus. Really! Nay, nay and thrice may! Titter ye not! Oo-er. I dragged him down to the nick and handed him over to Inspector Cargpan’s boys for a roughing-up in the basement.”

It was extraordinary. There was no hint of T S Eliot. This time it was is if Frankie Howerd had come back to life. Again there was a round of applause. I left my mantelpiece and made my way across the room to congratulate the speaker personally, but before I could reach him he had flitted away, possibly with some of the silverware tucked in his pocket.

Over the next few years, during my inveterate partygoing, I came upon the fellow, who I had dubbed “Sloppy” after his Dickensian inspiration, on numerous occasions. Every time I heard him he do the Police in different voices. Some of them were recognisable. As with his Eliot and Howerd, he could do pitch perfect impersonations of Enoch Powell and Bernard Levin, both Mike and Bernie Winters, and the Irish one-time hostage Brian Keenan. I even heard him do Yoko Ono. He had other voices which seemed to spring from his repertoire of invented characters, a chuckling Quaker, for example, and a breathless bike wanker. He never repeated himself.

The last time I saw, or rather heard, Sloppy, was at a sophisticated cocktail party at an art gallery private view. I was leaning against a mantelpiece staring vacantly at a splattery daub when a voice rose above the arty babbling. And this time it was not a speaking voice. Sloppy was singing! Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was caterwauling, in an ear-splitting high-pitched screech. I recognised that sound immediately, and did not need to wait for the words “Roxanne, you don’t have to put on the red light” to know he was doing the Police in the voice of Gordon Sumner.

That, at least, was what I thought. But on my way home that night, through certain half-deserted streets, the muttering retreats of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels and sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells, I picked up the Evening Rag, and reading it on the unsophisticated top deck of the unsophisticated bus which took me to my unsophisticated home, I read that the man I knew as Sloppy had been buried that day in a seaside resort graveyard, having died drunk to high heaven sprawled on the floor of a hotel lobby earlier in the week. I realised, with a shock, that the screeching caterwauler at the private view must have been Sumner himself, and I wept. I could connect Nothing with nothing. The broken finger-nails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning.

The other day I was leafing through a pile of back numbers of Modern Picnics magazine when I came upon an article that I thought would appeal to a Hooting Yard readership. I have therefore copied it out, painstakingly, for your edification and enlightenment. No author is given, though I suspect the hand of Modern Picnics editrix Poppy Nisbet, based on textual analysis and other arcane techniques best left under wraps. The article appeared in the November 1963 issue, and then again in July 1968.

It has lately become fashionable to have what is known as a “big picnic”, to which more people than you can shake a stick at are invited. The British picnic authorities have made an attempt to codify big picnics, and the appropriate number of picnickers has been set at five thousand. That does not include the organiser, or so-called “picnic host” or “big picnic host”, to whom the present article is addressed. We get letters all the time from persons who are keen to put on a big picnic but do not know quite how to go about it. Well, read on, and you will need have no fear of making a picnic fool of yourself!

The first thing you must do, before sending out your invitations, is to choose a good picnic location. Modern Picnics recommends a remote place, at which multitudes may gather, but do not forget that those multitudes must not number more than five thousand – nor, indeed, fewer than five thousand. Any other number and your picnic will not count as a proper “big picnic” and you will have some explaining to do to the authorities. The remote place may well be a desert place accessible only by boat. Do not worry that your five thousand guests will find it difficult to get there. The point about a big picnic is that the great multitude is so avid to attend that they will run thither on foot out of all the cities in order to attend. How this squares with your own boat travel is not something you need dwell on.

Clearly the most important preparation, as with all picnics, big or small, is the contents of the picnic hamper. This is where would-be big picnic hosts get themselves into a tizzy. It is not uncommon for ditsy-brained hosts to cover page after page of their picnic notebooks with sums, trying to calculate numbers of sausages, say, or cans of Squelcho!, necessary for five thousand people. Well, if that is what you have been doing, tear those pages to smithereens and cast them unto the winds. And throw your pencil away while you are at it. All you will need in your hamper is five loaves and two fishes.

Let us attend to the loaves first. Plain white sliced loaves with minimum nutritional value are the cheapest option, and may be the best bet if your multitude is drawn almost entirely from among the lower orders. On the other hand, you do not want any sniffy middle-class picnickers turning up their noses at your choice of loaf. Those kind of people will insist on brown bread packed with grains and seeds they have never actually heard of before. They may even prefer the loaves to be unsliced. With five thousand people to please, you should opt for a middle way, some sort of mid-price browny-whitey loaf. It doesn’t much matter whether it is ready sliced or not, as you are going to be crumbling the whole lot into crumb-sized crumbs in any case.

That is the next step in your preparations, and I trust you will not need to scribble any sums in your picnic notebook in order to make the calculations. Anyway, if you are following the instructions carefully you will have torn up the notebook and thrown your pencil away. You have five loaves and five thousand picnickers. You therefore need to disintegrate each loaf into a thousand crumbs. Try to make the crumbs of roughly equal size, or the sniffy middle-class people will start preaching about “fairness” and the lower orders will get into fist-fights. Such shenanigans can ruin the jolly atmosphere of your picnic.

Things are a little bit more complicated when it comes to the fishes. Remember you only have two. Though there is a myriad of different fishes in the sea you could choose, here at Modern Picnics we would recommend a dab and a blenny. If you do not know what they are, or what they look like, go to the library and consult an encyclopaedia, or just ask the most helpful of your local fishmongers. That fine fellow should also be able to advise you regarding purchase of an incredibly sharp fish-slicing knife. You will need one of these items, its blade gleaming in the sunlight, in order to cut up the dab and the blenny. As with the loaves, I am hoping you can use mental arithmetic to work out the numbers. You are going to have to chop each of the fishes into two-and-a-half thousand bits. That is why you need a very sharp slicer. Working methodically, starting at the fishhead end, make a series of lateral cuts, then, holding the resulting slices of dab or blenny together, follow with a series of lengthwise cuts. You should end up with a collection of more or less cuboid fish fragments. Count them. If they number under two-and-a-half thousand, use the incredibly sharp fishmonger-recommended knife to cleave each cube in twain. Continue this process until you have the required number, then, if that was the dab, repeat with the blenny, or, if the blenny, the dab.

I spoke earlier of the picnic hamper. Actually, you should have two hampers with you at the remote desert place accessible by boat. Into one hamper, toss the breadcrumbs, and into the other, the fish-fragments. There should be room enough in each hamper for you to add paper plates. When the multitudes arrive, panting and ravenous and overexcited, simply place on each paper plate a breadcrumb and a speck of chopped-up dab or blenny, and voila! the success of your big picnic is assured.

In the next issue of Modern Picnics we will look at several ways of turning water into wine, some of which are legal (-ish).

Here comes the Krummhorn Man.
He’s had a palaver.
He has to solve acrostics for his mother.
She is blind, and so is her dog.
The dog’s name is Spinach.
Spinach is a good name for a dog.
That’s what mother thinks.
She is ninety now, and every domestic pet she has ever had since she was a tiny tot she has called Spinach.
The donkey, the hamster, a kitten, several goldfish, certain other types of fish, rabbits and budgerigars, all Spinaches.
This might be called monomania.
The Krummhorn Man looks kindly upon his mother.
He is a good son.

Take a look at him now, a shopping list scrunched in his fist, prancing up the street.
He is on his way to the butcher’s.
The butcher is a caution.
He’s Cyclopean and bears duelling scars.
Lit by the moon, he howls, a proper butcher’s howl.
He keeps a vase of peonies on his mantel.
Oh for campions and oxlips!
Today it is sausages for the Krummhorn Man.
The sausages have the name of an English county.
The butcher, the butcher, the butcher with his meat-cleaver.
How sharp it is, and fearsome.
He whets the blade on a whetstone behind his kiosk.
You can hear the scree scree scree before dawn.
He wakes the town.

Sausages bought, on goes the Krummhorn Man, past the haberdasher and the aquarium.
Past all things.
Out into the gorse and nettles, followed by geese.
Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
But he is not pied and he has no pipe and it is not Hamelin.
It is an English county with the same name as the sausages.
Or it might be, if things fit neatly together.
He pops a boiled sweet into his mouth.
It is a spangle.
Invisible threads bind him to the past.
He smacks his lips.
The sound alerts an otter.
The Krummhorn Man shook off the geese and now he has an otter.
He sits down by the river.
He has to solve acrostics for his mother.

The wind is fair, the wind is foul.
The Krummhorn Man throws in the towel.
It is carried downstream towards the sea.
The otter follows him back to mother.
Dog and otter in mother’s parlour.
The one blind, the other not.
What a palaver.

Umbilically linked as once he was he makes a pot of tea.
He ties a knot in a dishcloth and chucks it out of the window.
And here comes Mister Snippage, toiling along the lane.
He is lame and pale and valiant.
What ho, what ho.
And tally tally ho too.
Then the Krummhorn Man makes himself scarce.
He takes himself to a place of defeat.
He leaves the sausages on the kitchen counter.

Where would he be if he were not here?
Over the sea and in a capital city loud with life.
Churning up the churnable, sparks and pangs, wearing a hat at a jaunty angle, getting into tangles, bumping things.
He peers into the distance through the mist.
The glue factory has closed down.
He keeps one arm in a sling for old time’s sake.
He was once the invalids’ invalid, just as the butcher is the butchers’ butcher.
It says so on a sign on his wall.
There is a red wax seal embossed on it of heraldic significance.
Red wax too in the Krummhorn Man’s hair.
A barber put it there for a prank.
Little gobbets, tiny orbs.
He is a very peculiar barber, shunned by many, and that is no surprise.
The barber is down a way from the butcher and the haberdasher and the aquarium, and around a corner, ever in shadow.
It is where they hold table-rapping meetings, with ectoplasm.
The Krummhorn Man sought his father there.
He is a good son.

Hedges flank the abandoned glue factory.
They have not been snipped for many a spring.
It is a place to pine.
There are still nozzles to be seen among the ruins.
The Krummhorn Man has his favourites.
He has snapped thousands of photographs with a long lens.
He used to use a Polaroid.
Polaroids and polar bears and polar wastes, he kept them together in his head.
It was a nice head, mother said.
It was the colour of curd.
The otter was gone from the parlour when he went back, bent on his sausages.
The fat sizzled in the pan.

Just then Mister Snippage came toiling back along the lane and began to pound on the door with his great hairy fists.
Spinach dragged his ancient canine bones to the doormat and dribbled.
At the same time the telephone rang and an alarm sounded.
It was pandaemonium.
The hospital helicopter was circling overhead.
There was gunfire coming from the hills.
It turned out to be a mock emergency, staged by actors.
Even Mister Snippage was not really Mister Snippage at all.
His part was played by an elfin amateur caked in makeup.
The sausages were burned black.

See, see, the Krummhorn Man has set out again, in the rain, in the rain.
This time he has taken a pipe.
Its bowl is in the lee of the brim of his hat so the rain does not douse it.
But the shutters are down at the butcher’s shop.
The butcher is gone for the day.
Where is he gone to?
That is what everyone is asking, in a huddle at his door.
Then the band strikes up that old traditional air “Butcher, Butcher, Where Have You Been?”
But until he comes back they will be in the dark.

Butcher, butcher, where have you been?
Until I come back you will be in the dark.
Butcher, butcher, what have you seen?
I have seen a swan in a pond in the park.
Butcher, butcher, why is it dark?
Because the shutters are down on my shop on the street.
Butcher, butcher, will you ever come back?
I shall return with contaminated meat.

The Krummhorn Man goes home sausageless in the downpour.
He must solve acrostics for his mother.
Spinach is asleep in front of the fire.
He is dreaming a dog dream of triumph and vinegar.

We can go over now to our reporter on the ground, Praxiteles Hubbard . . .  Prax, what is the situation there on the ground?

Well, Ulf, what the people on the ground here are telling me is that the situation is very fluid. That’s something you might expect of the sea, rather than the ground, but there it is. What I’ve been able to see here on the ground is soil, some mud, a certain amount of silt, sparse bits of lawn, sand, then large swathes of scrubland covered in gorse and bracken and nettles until you come into more built-up areas, where you’ll find grit and gravel and then great big paving slabs and flagstones, asphalt and tarmac and concrete. Also on the ground is a teeming myriad of insect life, tiny little ants and beetles, and all sorts of things that creep and slither and scuttle. You have to be very careful not to crush them underfoot. Obviously my boots are here on the ground, too, for the time being. Apart from in the very muddy parts where there has been heavy rainfall, it’s pretty solid, despite the situation being fluid, as I pointed out. Gradients vary. Parts of the ground are flat but then there are steeper bits, and in the urban areas you will find steps and stairs. I have yet to come upon any quicksand, but what people on the ground here are telling me is that there are patches of it, so one has to tread carefully.

And what are the people on the ground saying about the situation?

It depends who you speak to, Ulf, and whereabouts on the ground they are. Earlier I was on the ground just south of here, on an outcrop of limestone. There, I was told, the situation was very much what you’d expect, a real sense of limestone, no sign of quicksand, and certainly no paving slabs or flagstones. But come further north, travelling across scrub and moorland, and you can find yourself in marshland, which is barely ground at all. In fact it’s sopping wet, as I found out to my cost. Luckily I have a pair of wellington boots. What the people on the ground there told me is that it has always been marshy and boggy, so the situation is always fluid. And it gets even more fluid during the rainy season, if you can believe that. There’s a great deal of anxiety among the people on the ground, looking up for signs of clouds.

But clouds are in the sky, not on the ground, is that right, Prax?

That is absolutely right, Ulf. As a person on the ground here told me earlier, the sky is not the ground. But, interestingly, just as the ground is scattered with that teeming myriad of life-forms I was telling you about, so is the sky. It’s just that the life-forms tend to be different, things with wings, for example, and as well as tiny insects you get birds, some of which can be huge in comparison.

We know about the people on the ground, but are there people in the sky too?

Yes there are. Most of them tend to be in aeroplanes or helicopters, but you occasionally find a so-called bird-man, a chap with a pair of balsa wood wings attached by a kind of harness, flinging himself off a clifftop or promontory. What’s interesting is that they tend to become people on the ground pretty quickly, usually within minutes. There is one faction among the people on the ground who claim there are other people in the sky, what we might call ethereal beings, or angels, also with wings, but not balsa wood ones. They seem to have their wings already attached, and don’t need harnesses. They can also remain airborne, so I suppose we could say they really are people in the sky, unlike the bird-men.

And have you managed to talk to any of these people in the sky, Prax?

Not yet, Ulf, though I have been putting out feelers.

Feelers? Like the tendrils and antennae of certain insects and plant-forms?

That’s right, Ulf. I’ve been putting out my feelers trying to arrange to talk to representatives of the sky-people. They of course will have a different perspective to the people on the ground, and it will be interesting to find out what they make of the situation, whether they also think it is fluid. Much depends, I think, on whether it rains.

This rain, Prax, I understand it begins in the sky and comes down to the ground?

Not exactly. It actually begins in the sea, goes up into the sky, and then it comes down to the ground.

What are the people on the ground saying about that?

Well, again it depends very much on who you talk to. Some people put their collars up and unfurl umbrellas and say things like “Mustn’t grumble”. Others slosh about in puddles and they do grumble. And I’ve spoken with a few people here on the ground who dance strange jigs hoping to attract the rain.

Were they the people on the limestone outcrop?

No, Ulf, they weren’t. I think it’s important to note that there are all sorts of different people on the ground, depending on what patch of ground you’re talking about.

I’ll have to cut you short there, Prax, but before you go, you’ve told us about the people on the ground and the people in the sky, but are there any people under the ground?

There are. Some of them are miners or pot-holers, some are international women of mystery like Primrose Dent in her sinister subterranean HQ, and some are weird blind albino troglodyte beings who are really rather frightening.

Fascinating stuff. That was Praxiteles Hubbard there, our reporter on the ground. [Pause] To Jaywick now, where cows have wandered down the main street in the early morning dawn . . .