I didn’t have a dog in the fight. I didn’t have a dog full stop. And there wasn’t a fight, exactly. It was more of a skirmish. One gang of warriors armed with swords charged, screaming, at another gang of warriors, also armed with swords. There were one or two clangs of blade against blade, but then the second gang ran away, back to their bivouac, and the first gang, still screaming their heads off, took possession of the area of land on which the skirmish had taken place. It was not quite land, being more accurately described as sodden marsh, but the warriors were well pleased with themselves. Their bloodcurdling screams turned to chanting, and they chanted their victory song, which went something like this:

We have vanquished our foes
Our swords are caked with their blood
Truly they have been ripped to shreds
And the sodden marshland is ours

That is a translation. In the original, the lines rhyme and have a pleasing rhythmic flow. You will note, however, that it is not strictly accurate. The foes ran away before they could be ripped to shreds, and not a drop of blood was spilled. It remains true, however, that I didn’t have a dog in the fight. It doesn’t matter that I had no dog, that there was no fight as such. The statement has its own inner coherence and logic.

Would things have been any different if I did have a dog, and there had been a fight? Let’s imagine that, instead of running away, the second gang of warriors, sploshing about in the sodden marsh, were determined to keep possession of it. When the first gang came charging at them, screaming, the second gang were not cowed, and instead started hacking wildly at their attackers, who hacked back. Swords clashed, stabbings occurred, limbs were lopped. There was much bloodshed. By the time they finished fighting, most of the warriors on either side were either dead or splayed upon the sodden marsh, groaning. Those who could still walk upright retreated. The sodden marsh remained disputed territory. Which gang of warriors took possession of it would depend upon further fighting, perhaps tomorrow, after each side had had the chance to replenish their numbers.

Meanwhile, what about me and my putative dog? For the purposes of vividness, let us bestow upon it a breed and a name. It is a Jack Russell terrier and its name is Skippy. For even more vividness, let us posit that Skippy is celebrated in song, by a chorus of tinies. They sing:

Skippy the terrier, o! what a hound!
Watch him scamper across the ground!
Be it sodden marsh or meadow
Skippy’s a jolly good fellow!

That is not a translation, as you can probably tell by the rhyme in the first couplet and the half-rhyme in the second. By the way, do not fret that the tinies assembled to sing Skippy’s praises are in any danger from the screaming, sword-wielding warriors. We shall place the tinies off to one side, safe behind some kind of barricade. In fact, that is where Skippy, my putative dog, is, and I am too. That explains why I don’t have a dog (Skippy) in the fight. I would not want him to come to any harm, if he existed, that is, not out of any overwhelming love for dogs, for in actual fact I detest and fear them, but because I like to think that if I did have a dog, as a pet, I would do my best to protect it from bloodthirsty screaming warriors armed with swords. I would not be much of a dog owner, would I, if I picked Skippy up and chucked him over the barricade, and commanded him to go and fetch a stick I threw into the clashing melée of warriors? Dogs can be very trusting, and the likelihood is that Skippy would gaze at me adoringly and scamper unquestioningly into the sodden marsh, there to be torn to bits by the razor-sharp blades of the fighting men. They might not stab Skippy purposely, but if he were caught up in the violence, by going to retrieve the thrown stick, he would almost certainly fall victim to what is known as collateral damage. So, if I did have a dog in the fight, even peripherally or circumstantially, he would probably come to a bad end.

I would have to placate the grieving tinies, too, whose hearts were filled to bursting with love and admiration for Skippy, as attested by their song. Though his violent death was caused by the chaotic hacking of swords in a battle which was nothing to do with him, nor with me, whose only action was to throw a stick for him to fetch, the tinies might well blame me. They would cease singing and turn on me, with looks of reproach and accusation. I am not sure how I would go about placating them. I suppose I could produce another putative dog, another Jack Russell terrier, also called Skippy, and by sleight of hand and misdirection pretend it was the same dog, unbloodied and in one piece and alive. But where would I get such a dog, quickly enough to convince the tinies?

All in all, I am thankful that I did not have a dog in the fight. Without the dog, there would be no call for a chorus of tinies to sing its praises from behind a barricade, nor for me to throw a stick into the midst of a mad tangle of clashing screaming blood-drenched warriors for the putative dog to fetch. And with no dead dog, the tinies would not turn on me, with a rage and wildness more terrible than an army with banners.

Gew and Weg, the palindromic chums, went on many exciting adventures. In one such adventure they took a spaceship to Pluto and planted tulips. This was about as close as they ever got to having a palindromic adventure. Had there been a planet Pilut, they would no doubt have gone there instead, but they had to make do with Pluto.

On their way back from Pluto, Gew and Weg discovered they still had a couple of tulip bulbs, forgotten at the bottom of their burlap bag. So peckish on the long journey and far, far from any canteen or cafeteria, they ate them. Soon enough they had flowers sprouting from their ears. It was a look they liked, so they did not cut them.

Interviewed by press hounds when they landed back at the spaceship station on Earth, Gew and Weg had to fend off questions about the tulips in their ears. Would all visitors to that distant planet become human flowerpots?, they were asked. Are those normal tulips or are they some sort of weird Plutonian tulip?, they were asked. Their replies were drowned out by the eager babbling of other newshounds and the sudden blaring of hooters warning of a calamity.

Gew and Weg always liked to intervene in cases of imminent calamity, so they cut the press conference short and scampered off to the hooter control hut. They were mightily disconcerted to discover that whoever had pressed the control knob that set the hooters blaring had already fled. Thus they had no way of finding out the nature of the impending calamity. Whatever it might be, they agreed that the hut was a safe place to be, so they slammed the door shut and flung themselves into a pair of armchairs. They copied this flinging movement from Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer.

Outside the hut all was pandaemonium. But the hut was windowless and soundproofed with cork panels. There is not much chance of a palindromic adventure involving cork panels, observed Gew. Hmm, responded Weg, Kroc le nap? That means nothing. Was Kroc not the surname of the man who started McDonald’s?, said Gew. Yes, said Weg, or rather Yar. Ray Kroc, though he was not the founder of the company, he merely built it into today’s behemoth. Well then, mused Gew, we might have an adventure revolving around Kroc taking a snooze in France, le nap Kroc. Too late for that!, rapped Weg, he died in 1984. Weg copied his rapping intonation from Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer.

After a while Gew creaked the door of the hut open to peek outside. There had been some sort of cataclysm, that was for sure. Come and look at this, he said to Weg. Gosh!, said Weg, when he too peeked outside and saw the results of the terrible cataclysm, No wonder the hooters were blaring! I suppose we can depress the control knob to cease the hooters now, said Gew. Yes, I suppose we can, said Weg.

But as they went back into the interior of the hut and past the pair of armchairs towards the hooter control console wherein the knob was set, the hut door slammed shut by dint of a sudden galey gust, and they found they were unable to open it. We seem to be trapped in the hut, said Gew. Lawks-a-mercy!, said Weg. This was not a phrase that was ever used by Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu books by Sax Rohmer. He must have picked it up somewhere else, from a cockney street urchin, perhaps, or a costermonger.

There is not much opportunity for adventure confined to a hut, observed Gew. No, agreed Weg, but we can console ourselves that “tuh” would in any case provide no palindromic excitements. Though the thought occurs to me, he added, that we might embark on an anagrammatic adventure if there are any containers of UHT milk in this hut. Have you taken leave of your senses?, rapped Gew, What possible kind of adventure could we have, trapped in a hut with a carton of UHT milk? Alright, alright, keep your hair on, said Weg, I was merely musing.

Gew and Weg flung themselves back into the armchairs. There was a bit of a fug in the hut because the man who manned the hooter control console was a chain smoker. Though he had fled he had left his fug behind. Both Gew and Weg feared their tulips might wilt in the stifling atmosphere.

I liked Pluto, said Gew, It had a certain something. Agreed, agreed Weg, I found it agreeably Plutonian. Mind you, this hut would be equally agreeable were it not so fuggy. Yes, said Gew, I could quite happily slump in this armchair for a considerable period of time. My only concern is the wilting of our tulips. Well, that and the fact that we are trapped. Now there’s a thought, said Weg. What?, said Gew. Well, said Weg, what with the windowlessness and the soundproofing by cork panels, one wonders if the hut is completely sealed. And if it is so sealed…?, asked Gew, allowing his question to peter out as the penny dropped. If the hut is so sealed, said Weg, then not only will our tulips wilt, but we will wilt too, fatally, as the supply of oxygen is gradually depleted.

Lawks-a-mercy!, said Gew, Then it seems we are to have an adventure after all! A daring escape from a sealed hut! Yes, said Weg, And an anagrammatic adventure, for look!, over on that shelf I spy a carton of UHT milk! How is that going to be germane to our escape?, asked Gew. I don’t know yet, said Weg, But I will hatch a plan.

Next week in The Thrilling Escapades Of Gew And Weg, find out how the derring-do duo escape from the sealed hut using a carton of UHT milk!

In his fascinating new book, beardy intellectual gadfly Slobodan Gadfly posits a world in which the game of ping pong does not exist. He then proceeds to “invent” it through the power of imagination. It would be easy to dismiss the work as pointless pseudointellectual twaddle, and many critics have adopted precisely that line. Here, for example, is Rolf Gutentag, writing in The Pingpongist:

Seldom have I read such a blithering farrago of drivel. My cat could write a more sensible book than this. In fact, he has done. Meat In Jelly, Daytime Naps, And The Torture Of Birds is available now from all good bookshops. But I digress. Even if we accept Mr Gadfly’s preposterous premise of a ping pong-less universe, must we be subjected to page after page of his strenuous mental groping towards some sort of fully-imagined tabletop-based indoor sport played with bats and lightweight balls? As if that were not piffling enough, there is further piffle in store, in the shape of an entire chapter devoted to a wholly imaginary scoring system which turns out, on close inspection, to be identical to the actual scoring system used in actual games of ping pong in the actual world.

Gutentag is positively enthusiastic in comparison to Seebohm “Not Susan” Sontag, writing in The New Pingpongist:

Never, ever, in all my days, have I read such a blithering farrago of drivel. As soon as I finished reading it, I burned it. Then I went out to the bookshop where I had bought it and burned all the copies they had in stock. Then, for good measure, I burned down the bookshop. As the flames licked the sky, I held in one hand a ping pong bat and in the other hand a ping pong ball, and when the fire brigade arrived, with bells clanging, I challenged every man jack of them to a game of ping pong. Look!, I was saying, the game exists! Why pretend it doesn’t and then try to imagine it? The fire brigade could only nod in agreement, thus proving the utter futility of Gadfly’s thesis.

I cannot help but think that Messrs Gutentag and Sontag are missing the point of the book. Quite what that point is I am not sure myself, but I have neither the time nor the inclination to worry my little head about such niceties. And it is indeed a little head, not much bigger than a ping pong ball, on account of certain mishaps in the maternity ward where I was born. I am often asked if life has presented me with insurmountable difficulties due to my tiny, white, and almost spherical head, and my invariable answer is “no, it has not”, for I carry myself with aplomb and meet the astonished gazes of those I encounter with a steely gaze of my own. If they continue to gaze, or to prod me with their fingers as if I were a circus freak, I take from my pocket the ping pong bat I always carry about my person and I thump them smartly on the head with it, several times.

I do not think it is necessary to understand the point of Mr Gadfly’s book to enjoy it. I would go further, and say it is not necessary to understand the point of any book to enjoy it. What, after all, is the point of Rolf Gutentag’s cat’s book? Does it give us new insights into feline life? It does not. Does it, more importantly, tell us of a cat’s approach to the game of ping pong? It does not. Indeed, save for one passage in which the cat-narrator chases a ping pong ball around a confined space, in a state of frenzy, there is no mention of ping pong at all. This absence, or lacuna, makes it a highly unusual book, at least in my experience. And that, perhaps, is the point.

And as much as I enjoyed the cat’s book, so I enjoyed Slobodan Gadfly’s. The opening chapter, in which he paints a vivid picture of a universe in which ping pong does not exist, and never has existed, is a tour de force. It is a world very much like our own, in almost every particular. It even has a few people in it like myself, with ping pong ball-size heads, though of course we are not described as such, for in this alternative universe without ping pong, there are of necessity no ping pong balls. Gadfly has to invent them, just as he has to invent the bat and the net and the rules and the scoring system. And invent them he does, each in turn.

He does not spare us the details of his mental agony. There are false starts, wrong turnings, red herrings, and mind-bogglingly stupid decisions. In chapter four, for example, Gadfly recounts his struggle to imagine a ping pong ball. As yet, he has no concept of either the bat or the net or the rules or the scoring system. He has not even arrived at the idea that the game might be an indoor one played on a tabletop. Indeed, he has not even thought of the game. At this stage, his only concern is the ball – in his parallel universe, a wholly new type of ball which he challenges himself to bring into existence. Laughably, the first ping pong ball he conceives is the size and shape and texture of a medicine ball. It is not absolutely identical to a medicine ball, of course, for they already exist in his ping pong-less world.

While I was reading this chapter, with its tragic undertone, I could not help but become engulfed by my own imaginings. I wondered what my life would be like if, instead of having a ping pong ball head, I had a medicine ball head? It was easy enough to posit a slightly different maternity ward mishap that could have had such an outcome for my head. But I found it far more difficult to picture how different things would have been for me. Would I still go about with a ping pong bat in my pocket, ready to strike the impolite? And if I did not, how would I deal with such people? Trying to fathom the answers to these questions made me all the more admiring of Slobodan Gadfly’s great act of imagination, in inventing, from nothing, the game of ping pong.

Hooting Yard Rating : Seventeen stars.

You may also enjoy : Ping Pong For Cats by Rolf Gutentag, The Fantastic Architecture Of The Burning Cities by Seebohm “Not Susan” Sontag, Ipsy Dipsy Doo Dah by Jeanette Winterson & Will Self.

I am delighted to post another article from Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest. This one is from her invaluable series “The Expectorations Of Various Quadruped Beasts”. Permission to reproduce it here was granted after I made a donation to Miss Blossom Partridge’s Lovely Bucolic Donkey Sanctuary. Though small, the donation exacted was double the amount paid for permission to post Miss Blossom Partridge’s piece on giant albino kangaroos. I have decided to set up a fund to meet what I fear may be ever-increasing costs demanded by the mysterious Dr Grimes, who claims to be Miss Blossom Partridge’s accountant. If you would like to contribute, and so guarantee the opportunity to read more of her excellent work, please whack that PayPal button over on the right of the screen and give generously.

Last week in Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest we considered the sputum of giraffes, so this week, following the extremely complicated scheme devised for this series, we turn inevitably to the spittle of donkeys. We looked at giraffe sputum in a necessarily abstract, theoretical manner, but when it comes to the spittle of donkeys we are going to take a more practical approach, so roll up your sleeves, wash your hands with swarfega, and let’s get down to business!

The first thing you need to do is to find some donkeys. Do not for one minute think you can come a-trespassing in my Lovely Bucolic Donkey Sanctuary, however! It is surrounded by an electrified fence and every hundred yards or so there is a watchtower in which is perched one of my sentries armed with a high-velocity sniper’s rifle. Step over the whitewashed line parallel to the fence and you will be shot in the centre of your forehead. I do not bandy about the word “sanctuary” loosely.

Far better that you go to the seaside, where donkeys are often to be found giving rides along the beach to overexcited tinies. The seaside donkeymaster may not take kindly to you collecting spittle from one of his donkeys, so what you will need to do is to lure one away from the pack. Pick a donkey that is not, at the time, laden with a squealing infant on its back. A small bale of straw ought to be sufficient temptation for the donkey, but you will need to ensure the donkeymaster’s attention is distracted. This can be accomplished by, for example, setting fire to an ice cream kiosk elsewhere on the beach. While the donkeymaster is gazing, open-mouthed at the conflagration, wave the small bale of straw in the face of your chosen donkey and lure it away until you are concealed by sand dunes or some similar seaside beach feature.

Do not fret your little head about being charged with donkey abduction. Once you have collected its spittle, you are going to return the donkey whence you found it, no harm done. Before so returning it, you will again need to divert the donkeymaster’s attention. For this purpose, it can be useful to have an accomplice, a stooge who swims out to sea and then pretends to be drowning, frantically waving their arms and shouting. But we are leaping ahead of ourselves.

Duly hidden behind dunes, or similar, you can begin to feed handfuls of straw to the donkey. As it munches, spittle will be produced from various glands in its mouth. I will not go into the precise physiological details. Just bear with me. Now, while with one hand you tear off portions of straw from the bale and stuff them into the donkey’s mouth, with your other hand you should be holding a bowl under its chin to collect such spittle as it dribbles and drools. Remember that some donkeys slobber while eating more than others, and do not hit any panic buttons. Provided the donkey munches straw for about ten minutes, it should almost certainly produce sufficient spittle to fill your bowl, if not to the brim then as near as dammit.

When you are happy with the amount of donkey spittle in your bowl, transfer it to a flask by means of a siphon and funnel. Pat the donkey on its head to show your appreciation. Then use your walkie-talkie to alert your accomplice, who should come scampering out of a chalet in his swimming costume and hare across the beach and plunge into the sea and swim out and then pretend to be drowning and wave and scream. Peering out from behind the dunes, make sure the donkeymaster is distracted, and lead the donkey back, inserting it among the other donkeys as if it had never been away. If an infant is loitering nearby, pick it up and plop it on to the donkey’s back. Thus, when the donkeymaster turns around to scan his donkeys, he will be even less likely to think one of them has been lured away behind the sand dunes to have its spittle collected. You can now go home.

In your kitchenette, pour the donkey spittle out of the flask into a container. There will almost certainly be a few strands of munched straw intermingled with the spittle, so pick them out with a pair of tweezers and discard them in your bin. Do the same with any other foreign bodies that have found their way into the container until you have one hundred percent pure donkey spittle. This can then be used for a vast range of different purposes, most of which hark back centuries and have come down to us through rustic lore and wisdom.

While you ponder to precisely what purpose you intend to put the spittle of the donkey, take a moment to thank your lucky stars that you live in an enlightened age. Had you been found poring over a container of donkey spittle at virtually any time in those past centuries, you would have been burned as a witch.

I bet you lot would be impressed if I wrote a learned article about stoats.

“Gosh!” you’d say, “We must admit to our suspicion that half the time Mr Key hasn’t got a clue what he’s blathering on about. But with this piece about the small scurrying mammal known as the stoat he has demonstrated extraordinary erudition and a breadth of learning with regard to the natural world which knocks us for six. Never again will we question the fact that he is the greatest writer of the age apart from Jeanette Winterson!”

That is the kind of thing I like to hear, and to make sure you say it I turn my attention today to the stoat, and a learned article thereupon. To bruit my erudition from the outset, I shall begin by giving the Latin name of the stoat – Mustela erminea – and immediately chuck in a literary quotation which makes mention of stoats:

Weasels – and stoats – and foxes – and so on. They’re all right in a way . . . but they break out sometimes, there’s no denying it, and then . . . well, you can’t really trust them, and that’s the fact.

You will note that by employing this quote from Ratty in The Wind In The Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) I am also hinting at my knowledge of weasels and foxes as well as of stoats. You may already be feeling vaguely intimidated, which is all to the good. “Clearly Mr Key’s learning covers a wider and vaster array of subject matter than that to which he is confining himself on this occasion!” you are thinking, “Today he chooses to enlighten us about stoats, but it may equally well have been weasels or foxes, or the Lord knows what else! Truly we must ask what we have done to deserve the privilege of living at the same time as this most versatile of writers apart from La Winterson!”

Pausing briefly to allow you to get your breath back, to prostrate yourselves in the muck before my shrine, or indeed to get out your chequebooks and donate goodly sums of money to me, I then proceed to throw in another quotation, from another eminent writer, to show that my stoat-reading has not been limited to bestial fiction:

Stoats, though not as numerous as weasels, probably do quite as much injury, being larger, swifter, stronger, and very bold sometimes entering sheds close to dwelling houses. The labouring elder folk declare that they have been known to suck the blood of infants left asleep in a cradle on the floor, biting the child behind the ear.

That is from The Gamekeeper At Home. Sketches Of Natural History And Rural Life by Richard Jefferies (1878). Now, if I started wittering on about vampire stoats sucking the blood of peasant infants asleep in their cradles, the likelihood is that you would throw up your hands and cry, “Lord love a duck! There goes Mr Key, wittering on about vampire stoats sucking the blood of peasant infants asleep in their cradles, painting an unnecessarily gruesome picture of rustic life when it is quite obvious that he has never lived in the countryside and knows little or nothing of its bucolic charms! Why we ever gave him the benefit of the doubt is inexplicable! Let us cast him aside and turn instead to the manifold genius of Saint Jeanette!”

And you would stand up from your prostrate grovelment, tip over the Key Shrine with a contemptuous kick, and tear up the cheque you had just written in my favour. That is what you would do had I not mustered the authority of Richard Jefferies to bolster my picture of rustic gruesomeness. As it is, you can only scratch your heads in wonder, acknowledge that my stoat-learning is greater than your own, and grovel more, grovel better. You probably also feel compelled to double the amount of money for which the cheque is made out. You do that, in a shaking hand, as you await further stoat-revelations from the keyboard of Mr Key. I do not disappoint.

Most people’s encounters with a live Stoat are limited to a glimpse of a sleek, sinuous, brown creature dashing across the road in front of a car to disappear among the roadside vegetation. Seen at close quarters, Stoats are chestnut-brown above, with a sharp demarcation line to pure white underparts. There is always a black tip to the tail. Should you ever have the opportunity to examine a Stoat closely, do not be tempted to look too closely at their teeth: a Stoat bite is unforgettable.

It is safe to say you are overwhelmed. “Mr Key is really pulling out all the stops!” you say, “Not only does he give us a vivid picture of the stoat’s colouring, such that we might draw one with crayons, but he demonstrates his care and concern for us by his warning to avoid the stoat’s vicious fangs! We cannot recall the last time Jeanette Winterson sounded the tocsin to alert us to the biting of small sleek mammals!”

But therein, dammit!, lies my undoing. I have prompted you to cast your minds back – to the view of a dashing stoat through a car window, to remember if or when Winterson ever showed she cared about you as much as Mr Key does. Worse, I have reminded you that some things are unforgettable. Not just the bite of a stoat, but, you now realise, that precise combination of the Latin tag and the Grahame and Jefferies quotations and the paragraph that follows. They seem strangely familiar, the more so when you consider the idiosyncratic capitalisation of “Stoat”. In a flash, you remember that you have read them before, word for word, at the beginning of the entry for Stoat in Stefan Buczacki’s Fauna Britannica (2002).

“Can it be?” you wail, “Can it possibly be that Mr Key knows nothing whatsoever about the stoat and has merely been copying passages wholesale from a truly erudite author?”

At which point I might try to claim a case of unconscious plagiarism, or coincidence, or haunting by the spirit of an (albeit still-living) author. None of which would be remotely convincing, would they?

Panjandrum, The Great. The term applied to a country worthy who fills every public office available in a village. It was a word invented by Samuel Foote in a string of rigmarole as a test for the memory of Macklin, the actor. Macklin had boasted that he could remember anything he had read once. Foote wrote this:

“So she went into the garden to cut a cabbage leaf to make an apple pie, and at the same time a great she-bear came running up the street and popped its head into the shop. ‘What! No soup?’ So he died, and she – very imprudently – married the barber. And there were present the Picninnies, the Joblilies, the Guryulies, and the Great Panjandrum himself, with the little Red Button a’top and they all fell to playing the game of catch-catch-can till the gunpowder ran out of the heels of their boots.”

Macklin, in a fury, refused to repeat a word of it.

– from Encyclopaedia Of Phrases And Origins by Edwin Radford, Editor, “Live Letters” of the Daily Mirror , Eighth & Cheap Impression, 1950.

Frankly, it is difficult to see what Macklin, the actor, was getting in a tizzy about. Perhaps he was just having a thespian moment. He was, after all, a tempestuous character who killed a fellow actor, Thomas Hallam, by thrusting a cane through his eye during an argument about a wig. The cane went straight though Hallam’s eye into his brain. Accused of murder, Macklin defended himself at his trial and was convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter, for which he ought to have had his hand branded with the letter ‘M’, though it is unclear if the penalty was carried out. When he died at the age of 98 in 1797, his memorial tablet in St Paul’s Church, Covent Garden, included a relief of a dagger piercing the eye of a theatrical mask. Next time you are in London, you might want to dress up as the Great Panjandrum, with the little Red Button a’top, and go and take a look at it. I have not paid such a visit myself, partly because I do not think ill-tempered roister-doister Irish thespians ought to be encouraged. Lord knows there are enough of them, from Macklin in the eighteenth century to such as Richard Harris in the twentieth.

Had I been presented with Foote’s rigmarole, I would not have fallen into a fury, nor been tempted to pierce his brain with a cane through the eye. Instead, I would have questioned him closely about the sources of his story. You see, having done a certain amount of research into this kind of rigmarole, I think Foote was actually reporting a real historical episode.

The difficulty lies in pinning down the identities of the unnamed “she”, the fleeting, fugitive “he” who dies, and of course the Picninnies, the Joblilies, and the Guryulies. The Great Panjandrum, we can assume, is Celtic hothead Macklin. As for the barber, I have cobbled together a theory that this was one Punchkin Lampwick, a murderous barber, well-known to members of the eighteenth century theatrical profession, whose locks he chopped, and who was the real life model for that Victorian bogeyman barber Sweeney Todd.

Unfortunately for us, Lampwick appears to have been bigamous as well as murderous. He had several wives and more than several paramours, thus making identification of the “she” who – very imprudently – married him a matter of conjecture. Could we trace all those three hundred-year-old women, and say with certainty which one used a cabbage leaf in their apple pie recipe, we would be on firmer ground. It may be, of course, that a cabbage leaf was an essential ingredient in one particular type of eighteenth century apple pie, in which case that firm ground would crumble beneath us, leaving us dangling over a precipice. Such are the risks of historical research.

Further and more intractable problems occur when we try to work out who in heaven’s name Foote was talking about when he refers to the Picninnies, the Joblilies, and the Guryulies. Picninny – more commonly given as Picaninny – is a word one deploys at one’s peril these days, as Boris Johnson found to his cost. Although a plain reading of his original text makes clear that the object of his amused scorn was Tony Blair, nobody actually bothers with plain readings of original texts when certain hand-grenade words are used. There will probably be some righteous airheads who would prefer that I rendered it as P********, or as ‘the P-word’. In whatever form we put it, we are unclear to whom precisely Foote was referring.

At least that word, with its added ‘a’, has survived, along with Panjandrum. The same cannot be said for either Joblilies or Guryulies, neither of which I have come across before. They would seem to have been born and died with Samuel Foote and his rigmarole, no doubt leading to the misunderstanding that he was writing nonsense. Of course, the idea of writing deliberate nonsense simply to irritate an Irish thespian is an appealing one. Clearly it has inspired those charged with writing scripts to be performed by Liam Neeson, for example.

So I am afraid my theory regarding the factual basis of Foote’s rigmarole is but a fledgling. There is as yet so much I don’t know. I don’t know who these characters are. I don’t know what they want. If they are looking for fictional immortality, I can tell them I don’t have that gift. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills; skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for characters like them. If they let me cease this prattling now, that’ll be the end of it. I will not go on about them, I will not pursue my theory. But if they don’t, I will look for them, I will find them, and I will kill them.

NOTE : The photograph of Macklin’s memorial is by Kieran Smith, via findagrave.

I have been watching, with something akin to hysterical overexcitement, reruns of the long-running television game show Guns Before Butter. It really is the most fantastic example of Bismarckian light entertainment ever devised. As is often the case with these things, the basic format is very, very simple, one might almost say simple-minded. A contestant, plucked from the studio audience, is faced with two small tables. On one table is a stack of guns, on the other a packet of butter. All they have to do is choose. If they choose correctly, they win a souvenir propelling pencil and a spiked helmet. If they choose incorrectly, the studio audience hisses and boos, and the shamed contestant is bundled backstage to face who knows what godawful fate. The simplicity of the game lies in the fact that, of course, the guns are always the correct choice. That much is evident from the show’s title.

One might think that the format drains any possible dramatic tension from the show. Nothing could be further from the truth. As each new contestant is hustled on to the stage to be embraced in a bear hug by the smarmy host, one never knows if they will have sufficient wit to chose guns before butter. I have been unable to gain clearance to show a clip here, so I have done the next best thing and made a partial transcript of a typical episode.

Smarmy Host : And let’s have a big and deafening round of applause for our next contestant!

[Big, deafening, round of applause. Hooters, klaxons, screaming.]

Smarmy Host : And your name is?

Contestant : Horst.

Smarmy Host : And where are you from, Horst?

Contestant : Obergrumpelschwittenzollern, Trevor.

Smarmy Host : Fantastic! And what do you do for a living in Obergrumpelschwittenzollern, Horst?

Contestant : I have a small business manufacturing cowbells.

Smarmy Host : Fantastic! And I believe your lovely wife and lovely children are with you here tonight, is that right?

Contestant : That’s right, Brian

[Camera shot of lovely wife and lovely children in audience.]

Smarmy Host : Well let’s hope you do them proud, Horst. Are you ready to play . . .

[Dramatic drumroll.]

Smarmy Host : . . . Guns Before Butter!?

Contestant : [Swallowing nervously] Yes I am, Alan.

[Smarmy Host ushers Contestant towards a curtain, which sweeps back to reveal two small tables. On one is a stack of guns, on the other a packet of butter.]

Smarmy Host : Okay, Horst. I’m sure you know the rules, but let’s just run through them again for the viewers at home. There are two tables. On one is a stack of guns, and on the other is a packet of butter. All you have to do is to choose, either the guns or the butter. You’ve got that?

Contestant : Yes, I think so.

Smarmy Host : Remember, guns or butter. You can only choose one.

Contestant : Yes.

Smarmy Host : Okay. Let’s play . . . Guns Before Butter! Horst, you have one minute, starting . . . now!

[Big clock starts to tock noisily. Contestant looks solemn, gazing from one table to another.]

Smarmy Host : It’s your choice, Horst. Take your time. You still have fifty seconds.

[Contestant dithers.]

Smarmy Host : It looks so easy when you’re watching at home, doesn’t it?

Contestant : Phew! Yes, Ted, that’s right.

Smarmy Host : Forty seconds, Horst.

[Contestant looks as if he is about to choose, then dithers a bit more.]

Contestant : There’s part of me that wants to go for the guns, but . . .

Smarmy Host : Thirty seconds, Horst. Half way to the bell. It’s louder and more resonant than one of your cowbells, I expect.

Contestant : [Chuckling] I expect so, Dax.

Smarmy Host : What do you think the good folk of Obergrumpelschwittenzollern are yelling at their television screens right now, Horst?

Contestant : I wish I knew, Graham!

Smarmy Host : Fifteen seconds.

Contestant : Okay, okay. I think I’m going to go for . . .[Dithers again]

Smarmy Host : Ten seconds.

Contestant : Um . . .

Smarmy Host : Nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .

Contestant : Okay! I’m going to choose butter, Bob.

Smarmy Host : You choose butter? Is that your final decision?

Contestant : Yes . . . butter!

[Loud, resonant bell clangs. Audience silent as the grave.]

Smarmy Host : That’s your time up, Horst. You chose butter. Well I can tell you now . . . butter was the . . . [extends pause to wring as much tension from the situation as conceivably possible, then pauses a bit more] . . . wrong answer, Horst!

[Audience groans, then starts to hiss and boo.]

Smarmy Host : I’m sorry, Horst. The correct choice was guns, as it always is on Guns Before Butter. But you weren’t to know that. Well, actually, you were, so you must just be incredibly, incredibly stupid.

Contestant : I suppose so, Rolf.

Smarmy Host : You’ve been a great contestant, Horst. Let’s have a bloodcurdling din of hisses and boos for Horst!

[Brutes appear onstage and bustle Horst away, to face who knows what godawful fate.]

I have written to dozens of television light entertainment commissioning editors pleading with them to revive the show, thus far without success.

STOP PRESS : One of my letters might have paid off! It was apparently retrieved from a waste paper bin by Stephen Fry on one of his regular night-time prowls around commissioning editors’ offices. He is reportedly planning a dumbed-down version of Guns Before Butter for BBC Radio Four. Marcus Brigstocke, David Mitchell, and Alan Titchmarsh have already been lined up as contestants.