On Bugloss And Vipers

There is a patch of ground I often pass, when I am walking from the chalet to the bins, and it is rife with bugloss and vipers. I composed, in my head, a little song about it. The lyrics were as follows:

There is a patch of ground I pass
It’s rife with bugloss ‘n’ vipers
Bugloss is a rough-haired herb, it is akin to borage
Just in case you didn’t know, the latter rhymes with ‘courage’
The viper, like an asp, crawls the earth upon its belly
If you have not courage, your legs will turn to jelly
Vipers and bugloss in that patch
Let us sing our jolly catch
Bugloss and vipers ‘twixt chalet and bins
Let us confess our several sins
Lust! Envy! Pride! Wrath!
Gluttony! Greed! And! Sloth!

I devised a simple tune to which the words could be sung, but let’s face it, I do not have a musical bone in my body. What I heard in my head was pleasing enough, and made my little potters between chalet and bins a highlight of my otherwise soul-sickening days. But I knew that if my song were ever to be professionally recorded, and become a smash hit single, and be performed in packed stadia to adoring crowds waving the flames of their lit cigarette lighters, it would need a better singer than me, and a better tune than the one I had given it. And so I went in search of a collaborator.

One evening I left the chalet and passed the patch of ground rife with bugloss and vipers, but I did not stop when I reached the bins. No! I pressed on, indefatigably, until I arrived, about an hour later, at the folk club. Here, I thought, I was likely to find a person with musical talent who could set my words to a memorable and globally-adored tune. I sat down on a wooden chair near the back and listened to various folk sing various folk songs. There was much fol de rol and rusticism, repeated references to abstruse agricultural implements, and a smattering of disaster in mineshaft and on the sea.

During the interval, I approached one or two persons whose songs had brought tears to my eyes. I wanted to ascertain that my future collaborator had a “feel” for both bugloss and vipers. I cannot put it more precisely than that. It was not that they needed to be obsessive, maniacal, about the herb and the snake, more that they harboured due appreciation of both, knew a sprig of bugloss when they saw it, could tell a viper from an asp or a boa constrictor. To winkle out of my putative collaborators whether or not they met my requirements, I had prepared a couple of questions.

“What do you know of bugloss?” I said to the first folkie I buttonholed. He was an hairy man with a lairy eye, who had earlier sung a lengthy dirge about hedging and ditching.

“The herb related to comfrey and hounds-tongue and borage?” he rapped back. I noted that he pronounced the latter to rhyme with ‘porridge’, and my heart sank.

“Yes, that bugloss, none other,” I said.

“Not much,” he said, “Other than that there is a type of bugloss called viper’s bugloss, also known as blueweed.”

This was news to me. My jaw dropped and my heart began to beat very fast.

“What about vipers?” I babbled, “What know you of vipers?”

“Funny you should ask that,” he said, “For when I am not strumming my banjo and wailing mournful dirges in folk clubs up and down the land I am often to be found haunting the bottomless viper pits of both Gaar and Shoeburyness. I have kiosks at both viper pits, selling a variety of souvenirs and knick-knacks.”

I fainted.

When I came to, it was to find a jet of ice cold water being sprayed into my face. I was lying on the sawdusty floor of the folk club, a gaggle of concerned folkies gathered about me. My collar had been loosed, my hair mussed, my forehead rubbed. None of the faces gazing at me was that of the hairy man with the lairy eye.

“That man I was talking to . . .” I managed to mumble, “Where is he?”

But nobody seemed to know who I was talking about. I began to wonder if he had been a figment of my pre-swoon imagination. I staggered to my feet and charged about the folk club in search of him, and then outside, in the pitch dark, in the middle of nowhere. Not knowing his name, I cried “Hairy man! Hairy man!” repeatedly, into the night, in vain.

At dawn I returned to the chalet. Almost there, I passed by the bins, and then the patch of ground rife with bugloss and vipers. In my mind’s eye I saw the swaying crowds in the stadium, lighters held aloft, hypnotised. And I heard, in my head, a melody so beautiful, and one that fit my words so perfectly, that I burst into tears, and sank to my knees. Unfortunately I sank slap bang in the middle of the patch, and an enraged viper uncoiled itself and stabbed its fangs right through the tweed of my trousers and into my soft soft flesh, just above the knee.

“Ouch!” I cried.

As the venom coursed through my veins, and I began to lose consciousness, a vision of an hairy man with a lairy eye swam before my eyes. He had a banjo, upon which he began to strum a beauteous melody, and then he began to sing . . .

On The Autobiography Of A Leafcutter Ant

Call me Tzipi. I am a leafcutter ant. I was born to a queen in a colony in an area of Central America rich in vegetation. I do not know who my father was, exactly, because like most winged female ants my mother the queen had hundreds of mates to collect the three hundred million or so sperm she needed during her revuada.

When my mother lost her wings she settled on a patch of rich vegetation near a citrus plantation to found the colony. She had a little store of mycelium from the parental fungus garden in her infrabuccal pocket, and that got us started.

I am a leafcutter ant of the type known as a media, a general forager. Among my siblings are other mediae, and minims, minors and majors. Shortly after I came into the world I set about doing my bit for the colony. In a column of other mediae, I marched from our little fungus garden towards the citrus plantation. It was an arduous journey, as we had to negotiate treacherous terrain and at the same time fend off attacks by phorid flies which, given half the chance, would lay their parasitic eggs in the crevices of our heads. When we got to the citrus plantation we lined up and took it in turns to cut a little section of leaf from the foliage, not so small that it was barely worth the bother, but not so big that we would become exhausted from carrying it. Then we made our way back the way we had come, marching across treacherous terrain and fending off the phorid flies with the help of our little minims sitting on our backs. When we got back to the colony we deposited our leaf-fragments in the fungus garden, and turned around, and then again we marched from our little fungus garden towards the citrus plantation. It was an arduous journey, as we had to negotiate treacherous terrain and at the same time fend off attacks by phorid flies which, given half the chance, would lay their parasitic eggs in the crevices of our heads. When we got to the citrus plantation we lined up and took it in turns to cut a little section of leaf from the foliage, not so small that it was barely worth the bother, but not so big that we would become exhausted from carrying it. Then we made our way back the way we had come, marching across treacherous terrain and fending off the phorid flies with the help of our little minims sitting on our backs. When we got back to the colony we deposited our leaf-fragments in the fungus garden, and turned around, and then again we marched from our little fungus garden towards the citrus plantation. It was an arduous journey, as we had to negotiate treacherous terrain and at the same time fend off attacks by phorid flies which, given half the chance, would lay their parasitic eggs in the crevices of our heads. When we got to the citrus plantation we lined up and took it in turns to cut a little section of leaf from the foliage, not so small that it was barely worth the bother, but not so big that we would become exhausted from carrying it. Then we made our way back the way we had come, marching across treacherous terrain and fending off the phorid flies with the help of our little minims sitting on our backs. When we got back to the colony we deposited our leaf-fragments in the fungus garden, and turned around, and then again we marched from our little fungus garden towards the citrus plantation.

After about twenty-four hours we had managed to completely defoliate an entire citrus tree, so on our next visit to the plantation we veered off from our previous course and began cutting bits of leaves from a new tree. Unfortunately, the Central American citrus fruit farmer whose plantation we were trespassing upon, and gradually destroying, had noticed our depredations. He was livid. He stomped off back to his casa, presumably to fetch some form of leafcutter ant slaughtering device. We quickly took a bit of leaf each from the new tree and marched back to the colony.

There we found chaos, in the form of a virulent strain of Escovopsis, a necrotic parasite. It threatened our food source and, thus, the colony itself. Luckily, just in the nick of time, we were all able to secrete Actinobacteria, genus Pseudonocardia from our metapleural glands, and that protected us. Given that this Actinobacteria is the source of virtually all antibiotics used by humans, it struck me that the citrus fruit farmer was being a bit ungrateful.

Anyway, after all this marching and carrying and secreting we were quite tired, so we sat about munching on stuff from the fungal garden. Mother looked on contentedly. It grew dark, and we heard all sorts of nocturnal birds and beasts screeching and howling.

The next morning, we decided to avoid the plantation of the livid citrus fruit farmer. The splendid thing about this part of the world is that there is such a sheer profusion of vegetation. We headed off to a neighbouring citrus plantation. It was an arduous journey, as we had to negotiate treacherous terrain and at the same time fend off attacks by phorid flies which, given half the chance, would lay their parasitic eggs in the crevices of our heads. When we got to the new citrus plantation we lined up and took it in turns to cut a little section of leaf from the foliage, not so small that it was barely worth the bother, but not so big that we would become exhausted from carrying it. Then we made our way back the way we had come, marching across treacherous terrain and fending off the phorid flies with the help of our little minims sitting on our backs. When we got back to the colony we deposited our leaf-fragments in the fungus garden. Such is life.

On The Bark And The Sap

One of the simplest concepts to grasp, when embarking on the study of trees, is the difference between the bark and the sap. Indeed it is so simple that I am not going to bother explaining it to you. You almost certainly know the difference yourself, and have known it for so long that I strongly suspect you cannot remember when first you learned it. Cast your mind back. Can you honestly say, with any precision, when your conscious mind became aware that bark was bark and sap was sap? No, you cannot. I told you so.

This does leave me with something of a quandary, however. In keeping with the abstruse yet brilliant method I have devised to select a daily topic for these essays, today, October the nineteenth, was always going to be devoted to the bark and the sap of trees. I could have chucked out my scheme, of course, and chosen a completely different topic at random, such as the Merovingian kings or the Munich Air Disaster or Peter, Paul, and Mary or the Oxford comma. But I was, I am, very reluctant to do so, for fear of inviting the blind toads of mental havoc into my head. Sticking with the method keeps those fearsome creatures at bay. Through the constraint imposed on me by the method, not only do I not have to think for a second what I am going to write about, but my brain remains in a state of sweet and lovely calm. If once I allow those blind toads in, God and all his angels help me, that’s all I can say.

So first thing this morning I got the bucket and the pliers and the tarpaulin and the pebble, and I did the thing with the dainty teaspoon, and then I ran my finger along the row and down the column, and scribbled the number in my jotter, and checked the number against the print-out, and returned the bucket and the pliers and the tarpaulin and the pebble to their respective places, and gazed into the frosted glass, and after a few further procedures I arrived at the bark and the sap as today’s topic. So far so good.

But then I thought, everybody knows the difference between the bark and the sap, don’t they? I can’t tell them anything they don’t know already. So closely interknit are the lives of human beings and trees, at least in this land, green and pleasant, that we learn to know bark as bark and sap as sap, and bark from sap and sap from bark, very early, so early that we cannot remember when it lodged within our brains. I suppose it might well be different for people who grow up in treeless landscapes, deserts for example, or ice-girt polar wastelands. They might find out about trees at a comparatively later stage in their development, late enough to recall. But even those people still know, so me banging on about the subject would still be pointless.

I briefly amused myself by inserting a hidden ‘bark’ into my opening sentence, within the word ’embarking’, and pondered doing the same with ‘sap’ before realising that such tomfoolery might open a door or slit or vent or duct through which the blind toads of mental havoc could come hopping into my head. That I must avoid at all costs.

The topic determined through the method, though, made no mention of trees. The bark and the sap may not be tree bark and tree sap but quite other barks and saps entirely. The bark, for instance, might be the barking of a dog, and the sap might be the lead-weighted leather thumping instrument with which malefactors fell innocents in certain episodes of criminality in alleyways in the night-time. Such saps are often deployed in the film noir genre. Thinking of crime, and more precisely of crime fiction, we might posit that a malefactor is sapping an innocent in a night-time alleyway while, just a few yards away, a dog is not barking. This is of course a reference to the Conan Doyle story “Silver Blaze” (1892), in which Sherlock Holmes alludes to “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time”.

We might make the malefactor Babinsky, the lumbering, walrus-moustached, psychopathic serial killer. He usually goes rampaging about with an axe or a big slicing thing rather than a sap, but we can assume on this occasion he is varying his modus operandi to throw the coppers off the scent. Who should we choose for our innocent? It could be anybody from Ned Slop – newly installed with an alien brain from outer space – to Tiny Enid, though it is unlikely that the plucky fascist tot would ever allow herself to be outwitted by Babinsky. Still, we are getting somewhere.

The dog, though, remains something of a problem. It is only here because it is a beast that barks, and if it does not bark then, according to the method, we have failed to address the topic. One can sense the blind toads gathering at the edges of our reason.

In the circumstances, it might be best to ditch Babinsky and the innocent and the silent dog, the dark alleyway in the night-time, and to return to daylight, and trees, tree bark and tree sap, a copse, a spinney, a forest, or a lone pine or plane tall upon a promontory, silhouetted against a blazing sky, windswept and forlorn. We would have to concede the near-impossibility of bashing out a thousandish words on the bark and the sap, but we could rest easier knowing that the blind toads of mental havoc had been banished from our head, on today of all days, Friday the nineteenth of October in the year of Our Lord MMXII.

Dream

I had a large shallow pan of “milk cake” on a cooker. The cooker was in the form of a basic four-legged table. The pan had overheated, and underneath the table ethereal blue flames flickered. Crawling under the table, I extinguished the flames by waving a dainty teaspoon.

What can it all mean?

On Breakfast

Dear Mr Key, writes Poppy Nisbet, I like to think I am the world’s leading authority on Hooting Yard. I spend at least four hours a day reading and rereading – and rerereading! – your work, and try to fit in a further two hours listening, or relistening, (or rerelistening!) to a few of the hundreds of podcasts available from Resonance104.4FM. A couple of years ago I made the wise decision not to bother ever reading anybody else, and tossed on to a bonfire various books I had accumulated, including all my signed first editions of Jeanette Winterson. I have never regretted that decision, and indeed I took several snapshots of the flames consuming the La Winterson tomes, and made a tape recording of the crackling blaze. These are intended as mementoes for my grandchildren, to teach them a valuable lesson about life and literature.

I will shortly be appearing on the television quiz show Socially Inept Brainbox Challenge, where of course I shall be taking Hooting Yard as my special subject. I have every confidence that I will achieve the top score of 92 out of 92, but to be on the safe side I am poring over your works with even greater diligence and concentration than ever, making many notes in my jotter pad. Incidentally, this jotter pad I will also be bequeathing to my grandchildren. They do not know how lucky they are.

All this is by way of preamble to explain my consternation upon reading your piece yesterday on cornflakes. For round six of Socially Inept Brainbox Challenge I have chosen as my intensive grilling topic Breakfast At Hooting Yard. I am all too aware that breakfast is almost the only meal of the day ever mentioned in your work. Nobody seems to have luncheon or dinner or supper, at least not with any regularity. But you harp on about breakfast all the time, and a quick search elicits over one hundred separate pieces in which it is mentioned in greater or lesser detail. The thing is, these multitudinous breakfasts are almost always eggy, and when they are not they often involve smokers’ poptarts or some sort of fish-based preparation. While we read occasionally of breakfast cereal cartons, said cartons have usually been torn up and the cardboard used for scribbling upon, or for the construction of toy squirrels, etcetera. We rarely find anyone actually eating breakfast cereal, and when they do it is as likely as not Special K.

I was therefore not merely in a state of consternation but actively flabbergasted to read a piece in which cornflakes were an all-consuming passion. It seems to me that this is without precedent in your work. Now, we can take this in a number of ways. It may signal a bold new direction, and a not unwelcome one. Those of us whose lives beat to a Hooting Yard pulse are always ready to learn a new rhythm. At least, I think so, though I suppose I can only speak for myself. Conversely it may be that a sudden shift from eggy breakfasts to cornflakes leaves certain readers feeling unmoored, bewildered by a tangle of unfamiliar signposts. I admit this was my own initial response. I found myself having to reread all your breakfast-related babblings to tally up the eggs and smokers’ poptarts and kippers and so on, wondering if I had lost my wits. It certainly put me off my stride in terms of my prep for Socially Inept Brainbox Challenge, so bear in mind that if my score is less than the highest possible 92 I am going to hold you personally responsible, Mr Key.

What I need to know, before the charabanc arrives to take me to the television studios for the recording of the quiz, is whether the cornflakes mania to which you devoted yesterday’s piece is an anomaly, or whether we ought to prepare ourselves for further breakfast unhingements. Or are we to find that cornflakes are now on the standard Hooting Yard breakfast menu? If the latter, I think you owe it to your readers to make a compelling case for cornflakes over Special K, an alternative cereal which, I would aver, fits more snugly into the glorious and only semi-fictional world of Hooting Yard.

I await your considered response with bated breath. Not that I am aware quite how I might bate my breath. I am gravely disappointed that nowhere in the entire Hooting Yard canon can I find any guidance on the matter. As I never read anything else, I suppose I must remain in a state of dire ignorance (and unbated breath) until such time as you choose to address the topic. And while you are about it, you might also turn your attention to giraffes, of which you have had very little to say, and that little not particularly enlightening.

I remain, yours etc.

Poppy Nisbet

By way of reply, I would direct Ms Nisbet to World Wide Words, which gives as concise and informative an explanation of bated breath as one could wish for. As for cornflakes, I don’t know what to say. Yesterday I was merely reporting what I had heard on the grapevine about Pepinstow. I may have misheard, or it might have been garbled, and it may well be that Pepinstow’s mania was indeed for Special K rather than cornflakes. But in order to find out, I would have to track down my informant, and that would be no easy matter. Pepinstow’s tale was told to me by a very elderly gent I met down at the quayside. He was, by his own description, an ancient mariner, and I noted that he had an albatross – not, sadly, a giraffe – slung around his neck, like a necklace. He jabbered the Pepinstow business at me before embarking on a boat, bound for distant shores the whereabouts of which I know not. That is the thing with albatross-disporting ancient mariners, in my experience you cannot always rely on them, more’s the pity.

On The World Of Cornflakes

The world of cornflakes is a world of cartons. It is hard to imagine one without the other. Pepinstow tried and failed. That was his tragedy. It was less tragic than some other tragedies that could have befallen him, but even so, even so. It did for him. They found him slumped on the cold hard floor of a pantry, weeping. He had made a cackhanded stab at cutting his own hair with a pair of garden shears. With a big black bold indelible marker pen he had scrawled a word on his forearm, an amateur tattoo that would, eventually, oh eventually, with enough soap and water, be washed away. The word was CORNFLAKES.

Pepinstow could not recall when first he became wholly, hopelessly immersed in the world of that particular breakfast cereal. He did know that there had been a time when he had other interests. He had been a keen stamp collector. On Saturdays he often took a pair of binoculars and went out to peer at birds. He was on his way to becoming a leading authority on Ford Madox Ford, or Ford Madox Brown, one of the Ford Madoxes in any case. He was a dab hand with a badminton racquet.

Then one day he was staying in an insalubrious hotel at a seaside resort. Early in the morning, shortly after sunrise, he crept down to the breakfast parlour. All his thoughts were concentrated on kippers. He was a kippers-for-breakfast man, was Pepinstow, through thick and thin. And thin times he had had, with a vengeance, yet always managed to procure at least a kipper, or in extremis half a kipper, for his breakfast. But at that seaside resort in that insalubrious hotel in that breakfast parlour on that day, around the time of the Tet Offensive, Pepinstow’s world changed.

– Good morning, sir, I trust you had a restful night?, said the hotelier.

He was a lanky man with a walrus moustache and crumpled clothing,

– I did indeed, thank you, said Pepinstow, the bed was suitably hard, the walls did not shake, and I was lulled to sleep by the sound of the sea sucking on the pebble-strewn beach. Now I am ready for my kippers!

The hotelier’s moustache drooped, and he adopted an expression of hopeless grief.

– I am sorry to say, sir, that toxin specialists from a nearby facility called before dawn, and pronounced our kippers poisonous. It seems a madcap serial killer is on the loose hereabouts. He must have broken in to the hotel at dead of night, when you and I and all God’s children were in the land of Nod. He appears to have injected every single kipper in the hotel with a lethal toxin.

Pepinstow’s legs turned to jelly and he tottered towards the mantelpiece to hold himself upright.

– I’m afraid all I can offer you for breakfast this morning is a bowl of cornflakes, said the hotelier.

Things were never the same for Pepinstow. Reluctantly, but then with increasing relish, he tucked in to the cornflakes. What a breakfast!, he thought, What have I been missing all these years, stuffing my gob with kippers? He was a man transformed. Later, sitting on the pier, staring at the sea, he found his thoughts turning again and again to cornflakes,

Soon enough it was time to leave the seaside resort and to head for an inland bailiwick, a rustic place of cows and wheat, and a shabby guest-house in a shabbier village. Here he was delighted to find cornflakes on the breakfast menu. By the time he moved on again, to a mountainous region of thin crisp air and yodelling goatherds, he was a lost cause. He was a man in thrall to cornflakes, mad with them. He neglected his stamp collection, gave up peering at birds, forgot all he knew of Ford Madox Ford or Ford Madox Brown, and no longer whacked a shuttlecock with his badminton racquet. His brain was utterly consumed by cornflakes.

For years, Pepinstow only ever saw cornflakes in a bowl, served and ready for the addition of milk from a jug. Where they sprung from he knew not, though he spent much time and mental effort in wild conjecture. Were they caught in nets in the sea, like kippers? Were they laid in coops by hens, like eggs? Did they come fully-formed into the world, in their bowls, by an Act of God?

Then one day during John Major’s first term of office, Pepinstow found himself in a huge urban sprawl, in a massive hotel. When he crept down to breakfast, he was alarmed – it would be better to say he was unhinged – to discover that he had to serve himself, from a buffet. He gazed along the tables at the panoply of breakfast items, but could see no cornflakes. He jabbered frantically at another guest, who pointed out the carton. And so poor Pepinstow lost his wits.

From that day on, cornflakes and cartons became horribly entangled in his brain. That is why they found him, slumped on the cold hard floor of a pantry, weeping. He had made a cackhanded stab at cutting his own hair with a pair of garden shears. With a big black bold indelible marker pen he had scrawled a word on his forearm, an amateur tattoo that would, eventually, oh eventually, with enough soap and water, be washed away. The word was CORNFLAKES.

La Yenka

I am indebted to Outa_Spaceman for drawing to my attention this paragraph of majestic sweeping prose:

Since the emergence of the twist, inventing new dances proliferated: limbo, madison, whiskey, bycicle, Hully Gully, shake and an endless etcetera. In Spain also arise about native dances like the twist or when they, however, is the Yenka will be victorious in the making. A dance based on hopping on one foot to finish jumping with both feet together. The musical part of the case is a mere excuse to cause this kind of fun gymnastic jumping in guiding their activity. The four tracks on the album are quite similar and all are composed Kurt Charley. The instrumentation is a Franciscan poverty and is chaired by an instrument, which by the way, it became fashionable: the melodic. Was a smash hit and was one of the biggest selling records in 1965 and compulsory piece around or party shindig worth his salt. It sparked a fever Yenka nationwide, because it was an innocuous family dance and athletic. Other groups and soloists were ready to record songs to the rhythm of Yenka, so Hispavox was careful to place in all partner disks labeled: “The Yenka by its creators Johnny and Charley”

Hie over here to see a snap of Johnny and Charley discussing Franciscan poverty.

On The Infernal Gazebo

I was interested to note, when solving today’s cryptic crossword in the Grauniad, a felicitous conjunction of words. The column containing 7 and 19 down, third in from the right, reads INFERNAL GAZEBO. Indeed it was both felicitous and a jaw-dropping coincidence, for it had long been my intention to write today about the infernal gazebo at Plunkett Hall.

On our last visit to that grand baronial edifice, we learned how, one afternoon in the eighteenth century, Baron Plunkett confronted the Evil Thargon. It was several weeks later when the events historians call “the strange events in the infernal gazebo at Plunkett Hall” took place. There are a number of books and pamphlets and tracts and hysterical blood-stained ravings on the topic, all of which are worth reading, if you have the time and inclination. I have neither, to be quite honest, what with all the other calls on my attention, birds, ponds, smokers’ poptarts and what have you, so what follows is frankly ill-researched and possibly wrong, wrong, wrong in all particulars. But bear with me, because I think you will find it rewarding, in a Radio 4 Thought For The Dayish kind of way.

The gazebo in the grounds of Plunkett Hall was plonked upon one of the magnificent lawns not far from the ha-ha. Architecturally, it was an unremarkable gazebo, having been designed by the unremarkable architect Baffles Chippy, and built by a gaggle of snaggle-toothed and sullen labourers hired for a pittance from the derelict godforsaken villages thereabouts. None of these men of peasant stock had an inner life, which was just as well, or they might have been haunted forever after by the gazebo they built. Baffles Chippy did have an inner life, and a monstrous one, riddled with imps and demons and incubi and succubi and all sorts of other awful phantoms of hell that don’t bear thinking about. But think of them the architect did, constantly, to the point of phrenzy. And so, whenever he was commissioned to design a building, be it a gazebo or a folly or a seaside chalet, he strived to make it, in his words, “a home fit for heebie-jeebies”, the latter a catch-all term he used for the fiends throbbing in his demented brain. Unfortunately – or perhaps fortunately – Chippy was a somewhat cackhanded architect, and the buildings he designed rarely if ever reflected his intentions. They might be twee, or gingerbread, or stumpy, or base and brickish, but seldom did they look like the ghastly horrors he had in mind.

So it was with the Plunkett Hall gazebo, which, when finished, looked pretty much like any other eighteenth century gazebo in the grounds of a stately home. In spite of this, Chippy insisted it be called the infernal gazebo, and so it was, by all and sundry.

One afternoon in the eighteenth century, the ancient factotum Ned Slop came panting and staggering into the library of Plunkett Hall.

– Lawks-a-mercy!, baron, he croaked, There’s a right to-do over in the infernal gazebo by the ha-ha.

Baron Plunkett looked up from his book.

– Must you pester me, Slop, when you can see I am making a series of learned annotations in my leather-bound Pontoppidan?, snapped the baron.

– I beg pardon, baron, b-b-but…, said the factotum.

– Whatever the to-do is, I am sure you, with your untold decades of service and drudgery and fawning and drainage ditch draining can cope with it, Slop. Now be off with you, before I ring for the pincers-man to come and have at you with his terrible pincers!

And so Ned Slop bowed and staggered out of the library and along the corridors and through the great baronial hall and out into the magnificent grounds. He tottered slowly across the lawns towards the infernal gazebo. He was shaking more than usual, and dribbling with fear. But then he remembered he had seen the baron shake a stick at the Evil Thargon, just a few weeks ago, and that had seemed to do the trick. So he veered off towards a mighty yew and picked from the ground a fallen stick. Waving it in front of him, emboldened, he entered the infernal gazebo.

It was infested with bats and owls and moles and otters. And there, in their midst, stood the unremarkable figure of Baffles Chippy. Only now there was something remarkable about him. He was wearing a cape and a pointy hat and had sprouted horns and a tail and his feet were naked and cloven as those of a goat and his eyes were black black black globules of fathomless doom.

Poor Ned Slop waved his stick, but Chippy, or the thing Chippy had become, roared. It was an awful, deafening roar, and the stick burst into flames in Ned Slop’s wrinkled and cadaverous hand.

– Lawks-a-mercy!, he cried, not for the first time that day.

In his moth-eaten armchair in the library, Baron Plunkett scrawled a learned annotation in the margin of his leather-bound Pontoppidan. Had he not been as deaf as a post, he would have heard distant rumbling. A to-do of cosmic proportions was taking place at that very moment in the infernal gazebo. When it was over, there would be nothing left but a few owl-feathers and an otter’s shrivelled head and the charred remains of Ned Slop’s stick and a yawning crater, full of fire and vapours and shrieking, black and bottomless, the maw of hell.

The next day, apprised of the pit, Baron Plunkett ordered that the area be surrounded by another ha-ha, and a filbert hedge planted all around it. A gaggle of snaggle-toothed and sullen labourers hired for a pittance from the derelict godforsaken villages thereabouts toiled and dug, with only a smattering of them toppling into the pit. And when they were done, the second of the so-called “strange events in the infernal gazebo at Plunkett Hall” occurred. The gazebo, blackened and burned but intact, rose up out of the pit, and hovered awhile in the air, and then it shot upwards, at inexplicable speed, and vanished in the aether. And ten minutes later, dressed in a spacesuit like Felix Baumgartner’s, the ancient factotum Ned Slop fell to earth, bumping down in a drainage ditch, quite unharmed, but with a brand new and alien brain pulsating inside his skull….

On The Consequences Of The War

There have been many studies of the consequences of the war, so on the face of it yet another one would seem unnecessary. I feel compelled to add my own for two reasons. First, that the extant studies are uniformly mistaken, foolish, and sprawling. Secondly, this one is by me and is therefore fantastic. It is also considerably shorter than those sprawling studies, so you will be all clued up on the consequences of the war, and able to spout intelligently about them at cocktail parties, having spent only a fraction of the time needed to digest the mistaken foolish sprawls.

Well, you will not be able to spout at cocktail parties, of course, because one of the consequences of the war is that cocktail parties are a thing of the past. It is difficult to host a halfway decent cocktail party in a landscape that had been reduced to crumbling ruins. I have no idea what Beamish is going on about in his mistaken and foolish and sprawling study, Some Notes On The Consequences Of The War Vis A Vis Fashionable Cocktail Parties. He claims to have personally attended no fewer than five such elegant social occasions in the six weeks immediately after the cessation of hostilities, though I note he is very cagey, very cagey indeed, about where these events are supposed to have taken place. He only gives one definite postal address – 14b Hysteria Mews – and it did not take much research for me to discover that this is now the site of a foetid swamp bubbling with hazardous chemicals. The only standing structure for miles around is the old coastguard’s hut. Thinking that perhaps some brainsick noddies had snuck past the barbed wire to hold a cocktail party there, I donned protective clothing and made my way in, only to discover that the roof and the ceiling and the floor had all collapsed, and that the pit thus formed below ground was home to a family of savage mutant otters. By all means go hither and try sipping a cocktail while engaged in elegant chitchat if you dare. But don’t blame me if you emerge bitten and clawed and bloody and wishing for a quick death.

Beamish is also the author of Some Notes On The Consequences Of The War Vis A Vis The Fixture List For The Domestic Pole-Vaulting League. It astonishes me that this book sprawls over nine hundred pages, excluding the index and appendices. I would have only one “note” on the subject, and it would read as follows: “In the aftermath of the war, there are no fixtures”. Yes, one could expand upon that by recalling the heady days of the prewar pole-vaulting team meetings, and the contrast with the postwar scene, but there is only so much one can say. Beamish, poor deluded Beamish, seems to be under the impression that pole-vaulting events are still taking place on Saturday afternoons, all across the land. Perhaps he is hallucinating. Certainly a population of stunted beggars with withered limbs is in no fit state to pole-vault over even a tiny pile of pebbles, if, that is, one could find anywhere a pole-vaulting pole that had not been reduced to ashes and dust, or been commandeered to prop up something that would otherwise collapse, like an old coastguard’s hut.

But Beamish is hardly the worst offender. More mistaken, more foolish, and more sprawling is An A To Z Of The Consequences Of The War by Alonzo Zumbag. This weighs in at over two thousand closely-printed pages, with more than six hundred entries under the letter A alone. And what a lot of bosh it is! If we are to believe Mr Zumbag, the following things have improved considerably since the end of the war: apples, apricots, alabaster, amnesiacs, aircraft (both real and model), ants, aniseed, aspirin, the month of April (but not, curiously, August), antiques, art, aglets, air, and antimony. Not a shred of evidence is offered in support of such blithering claptrap as “One of the consequences of the war is that Airfix modelling glue for model aeroplanes is now hundreds of times more gluey and sticky than it was before the war. Truly it is the king of adhesive pastes!”

This is patently untrue. Last week, for example, I was foraging around in a waterlogged bomb crater hoping to find a sprig of nettles to keep me alive until teatime, when I came upon an almost intact Airfix model kit. It was a seventy-six piece miniature of a Swordfish 109 Plasmatron Fighter Jet, complete with a tube of modelling glue. To pass the time, and to distract myself from the pangs of hunger and thirst and from the hideous suppurations of my many and various sores and boils, I squatted in a puddle and put the model together. But when it came time to apply the glue, the stuff that squirted out of the tube was neither gluey nor sticky. What it was was highly acidic, like the blood of the alien in Alien, and it burned holes in my arms and legs and torso which ache like billy-o. If that is better than prewar Airfix modelling glue, then I am a Swiss cheese. Actually, I am beginning to resemble a Swiss cheese, what with all these burning acid holes.

So if you take my advice you will throw away any of those Consequences Of The War studies you have bought, and stick with this one. I will not pretend I have been going to elegant cocktail parties. I will not claim to have attended a pole-vaulting league match. And I will have nothing good to say about anything beginning with A, let alone with B or with the other letters of the alphabet, not all of which I can remember. I was such a butterfingers with that tube of so-called “king of adhesive pastes” that I managed to squirt a goodly dollop on to my head. It ate its way through the flesh and bone right into my brain and out the other side, and I must admit to feeling not quite myself ever since. I have even begun wondering if there actually was a war, before which this land was a sort of paradise. Maybe it is all a phantasm, and I have always, for my entire life, squatted in a puddle under a foul black sky, half blind from gas, and starving and withered of limb, scrubbling in the muck for a sprig of poisonous nettle, happy as a warlord.

On The Saints

Glory glory hallelujah! Glory glory hallelujah!

This is the appropriate verbal response when you see saints go marching in. It is not, admittedly, something you see very often, but it is best to be prepared, just in case, and to have the double “glory” and the “hallelujah” ready on your lips. You can even practise, in the absence of marching saints, to be on the safe side.

“Does it matter,” I have been asked, “into what the saints are marching?” Actually it is surprising how often I am asked this question. Only the other day I was buttonholed in the boulevard by not one, not two, but by three separate persons – a boy scout, a widow-woman, and an art wanker – each asking me, in varying tones of urgency and desperation, if they ought to concern themselves with the eventual destination of marching saints. In each case my answer was the same. “No,” I said, plainly and simply, hoping that would put an end to the matter and I could continue on my way, sashaying along towards the pie shop, or the pastry kiosk, or wherever it was I was going.

But neither the boy scout, the widow-woman, nor the art wanker was satisfied by my reply and they each had a supplementary question. These I felt duty bound to deal with. When one is the sort of person whose advice is sought in the matter of marching saints, one cannot merely shrug and dismiss those by whom one is importuned. To do so would be snippy, and I am not a snippy man.

Now, I am not going to relate to you precisely what those three supplementary questions were. We haven’t got time to get bogged down in minutiae, have we? What I will do is try to make some general points about marching saints, or more precisely the destinations into which we might find them marching. You will then be able to judge if your own questions on the matter have been answered. If not, you can either put your question in writing and send it to me c/o the Marching Saints Investigation Bureau, or you can smack yourself hard in the centre of your forehead and go about some other business, such as garden maintenance or changing the fuse in one of your electrical plugs.

There are innumerable situations into which saints might march. For instance, I have seen saints go marching in to mysterious remote storage facilities out in arid wastelands. I have seen them go marching in to certain death in the face of enemy machine gun fire. And I have seen them go marching in to the pie shop. In the latter case, I think they were intent not on buying pies but on making a complaint about pies bought the previous day, which turned out to be contaminated pies and gave them all a proper bellyache.

The thing is that saints tend to go marching about, in groups, rather than keeping themselves to themselves in isolated hermitages, convents, monasteries, and the like. Nobody is quite sure why that is. Obviously there is the issue of strength in numbers, but any saint worth their salt is brimful of inner strength. It is one of their saintly features. No matter what brickbats are thrown, nor perils confronted, a saint will cope with them due to their strength and sanctity. This much is true even of weedy or puny saints, of whom there are more than you might expect.

Still, for whatever reason, they like to gather together into a pack, like wolves, and go marching, usually with banners and drums and pipes to toot. I suppose it beats sitting around in a hermitage gazing at the bracken and gorse growing in the doorway. Once they are marching, they like to have somewhere to march to, something to march into. Otherwise they would just march and march and march, until they dropped from exhaustion or until they reached the limit of the land, and arrived at cliffs or a beach, and saw the sea. In a sense, then, it doesn’t matter into what they march. What is important is that, as they pass, those who see them doff their hats and lift their voices to heaven and cry “Glory glory hallelujah!”

The double “glory” is significant. Where only a single “glory” is cried, I have seen marching saints totter and stagger and in some cases fall flat on their faces. If the fallen saint is near the front of the pack, those behind can trip over them, and come clattering down themselves, dropping their drum or tooting pipe, causing a bigger obstacle to those further behind, and resulting in a chaotic heap of limb-flailing saints. Though this can be amusing to watch, it would be sinful to laugh, as I am sure you know. I once chuckled when I saw a collapsed pack of marching saints, and not long afterwards I was visited in the night by a horrible black swooping bat of penitence. I did not forget that in a hurry.

As with the double “glory” so with the “hallelujah”. You might want to practise your pronunciation of this cry. That ‘j’ can be treacherous. Remember that it is only Rastafarians who give it the common ‘j’ sound, as when they are babbling on about Jah and the sufferation in Babylon. As a consequence, “hallelujah” is sometimes spelled “halleluiah”, for the benefit of dimwits. As you can imagine, missing out “hallelujah” after “glory glory” can be even more calamitous than a single “glory”. As I explained, with inhuman patience, to the boy scout and the widow-woman and the art wanker, a night-time visit from a horrible black swooping bat of penitence would be the very least of your worries if you omitted the “hallelujah”. Take my word for it, you don’t want to know the awful details.

In our next article on marching saints, we will look in some detail at chronology. When exactly is the “when” when the saints go marching in? Before then, your homework is to list three such occasions, backed up by documentary evidence. To avoid confusion, give your times using the twenty-four hour clock.

On The Tosspot

I have been asked to compile a report on the Tosspot. It is a great honour and I hope to acquit myself with really fantastic splendour. That would be a feather in my cap. I decided the best way to approach the Tosspot is to tackle him fruit by fruit. It is not that fruit looms large in his tosspottery, but dimpus dempus, as they say in Latin, they being the Tosspot’s acolytes.

Before proceeding, with I hope fantastic splendour, it is meet to say a few words about those acolytes. Not every (lower case) tosspot has acolytes, but the definitively upper case Tosspot does. That goes without saying. So why did I say it? Aha! For the same reason that we are going to tackle him fruit by fruit. The Tosspot’s acolytes come in a variety of caps and colours, but what they all have in common is possession of a key to the hillside sanctum. It is as fine a sanctum as anybody in search of a sanctum could wish for. Set halfway up a hillside, concealed by serried beds of hollyhocks, it is both stony and capacious. There is a joke going the rounds that the Tosspot is himself stony and capacious, and the acolytes guffaw, though it is unclear what, if anything, it means. I guffawed myself, when I first heard it, to seem one of the in-crowd, but so many and various were my slips and fumbles in other respects that I was always marked as an outsider. That is perhaps why I have been entrusted to write this report. An acolyte would just witter adoringly, like a moonstruck calf.

With the fruit by fruit approach, it is essential to get the fruits in the correct order, otherwise even the most fantastically splendid report writer can get into all sorts of pickles. I know that to my cost. A while ago I was asked to write a report about bike wankers. You might think that is a topic that does not lend itself to the fruit by fruit approach, but you would be wrong, very very wrong. But I made the fatal mistake of starting off with plums, then bananas, and quite frankly after that I was done for. The report was binned, and justifiably so.

I am not going to make the same mistake again, which is why for my Tosspot report I decided to place the fruits in a very specific order, one derived from a close reading of certain obscure texts by Madame Blavatsky. HPB herself does not actually refer to any fruits in the passages I consulted, but that is the point of my close reading, to eke from her words meanings which may not have been apparent even to her. You cannot read just any old writer using this method and expect results. I have tried it, for example, with H. Rider Haggard, Marie Corelli, and Dennis Wheatley, and in each case I ended up in a perfect flap. Either my fruits were in a blithering chaotic order or there was no hint of fruit or, come to that, of order. I ended up having to visit a greengrocer and buy one of each fruit and align them by hand across the table, which took hours, and even then I had no idea if the order was appropriate to my purposes. But I know I can trust Madame Blavatsky, at least in this regard.

The order of fruits is one thing, however, while the broader ramifications of a report on the Tosspot are something else again. Quibbles aside, there is the question of tone. Though come to think of it, having mentioned quibbles, casting them to one side is easier said than done. My bike wankers report suffered from a surfeit of quibbles, quite apart from the fruit order debacle. Try as I might to shove them out of sight and out of mind, they kept rearing their heads, and snorting, sometimes deafeningly. I plugged my ears with cotton wool to no avail. Eventually I had to go out to a park bench to write my report, thinking that the sight of ducks in a duckpond across a lawn punctuated by beds of lupins would help me settle to the right frame of mind. It did, to some extent, but then it began to rain, and I do not recommend writing in the rain. Ink gets smudged.

Tone, though. Tone for the Tosspot. What should it be? Valedictory? Captious? Smitten? It would be easy enough to adopt a tosspottish tone, if one had a gift for such, but to do so would I think lack a certain dignity. And it would not sit well with the fruit by fruit approach which is, if it is anything, the pinnacle of dignity. I would defy anyone to write a report, on any subject under the sun, adopting a fruit by fruit approach, and not thereby impart to one’s text a measure of dignity unsurpassed. And let’s face it, the Tosspot himself presents a pretty undignified figure at the best of times. Those trousers alone are enough to turn the strongest of stomachs. I will not even begin to describe the socks. In fact, I am not going to mention the socks in my report. I shall go straight from undignified trousers to undignified boots, and it will be as if the socks never existed. That is the best way, believe me. I know whereof I speak.

Having given the matter much thought, and prodded that thought by gazing for several hours at Madame Blavatsky’s milky grey eyes in a photograph, I have concluded that the tone of my report ought to be set by what we call the fruit test. The idea with this technique is to get “inside” the fruit, as it were, and then to allow the fruit to dictate the tone of one’s text. It is absolutely critical, of course, that one selects the proper fruit for the task. Putting the fruits in the correct order is child’s play by comparison. Somewhat surprisingly, the very worst thing one can do is to use real items of fruit, bought from a greengrocer, lined up along the table, to make one’s selection. That is what a naïve young reporter would do. After all, it seems to make sense. But as my mentor said to me, from within the dark interior of his booth, in his booming voice, “Beware! Beware of real fruit!” The import of what he said was not clear to me then, but by heaven it is now, in spades, with brass knobs on.

And so I don my special gloves, and I cut some capers, and I prepare myself to pick the most important fruit I shall ever pick.

On Fig Newton

Of all the people named after biscuits, we ought to consider first Fig Newton. We should begin, candidly, with his head, that head of his, the peculiar Fig Newton head. But before we do, I think it is important to dispel the myth that has accreted around him, that his given name, Fig, was short for something longer, something like Figworth or Figgleton or Figland. It was not. It is telling, in this context, that there is rarely any agreement on what this longer Fig- word was. One would expect, if he had been named Figstrand or Figgleby or Figlop, that those bandying about the suggestion would be able to prove it one way or another, and there would be no doubting the matter. Here, they would say, brandishing some sort of certificate or registration coupon, look!, this is the evidence. But there is never any evidence, due to the simple fact that Fig Newton’s given name was just Fig. That was the simple three-letter word which his parents, with biscuits in mind, chose for him, and by which he was known to all and sundry throughout his pointless life.

I will be charged by some with pejorative intent in saying his life was pointless. But there is a sense in which all lives are pointless, at least in the grand scheme of things. It is on the scale of grandeur that I tend to operate, for better or worse, so you need read nothing more into it.

The same goes for my hint, just now, of his peculiar head. By this I did not mean that there was anything strange or remarkable about that head of his, Fig Newton’s head. I did not mean that it was akin to Neville Chamberlain’s head, which Lloyd George said was a “wrong-shaped head”. I meant merely that Fig Newton’s head was peculiar to him, it was his head and nobody else’s. That may seem obvious, as obvious as the pointlessness of all lives in the grand scheme of things, but I must speak plain, for words are treacherous things. They are as treacherous as ice.

An ice-head of Fig Newton’s head was made by an ice carver, once, and lodged for posterity in an industrial refrigeration facility. It is still there, reportedly, as cold and solid as the day it was carved, when Fig Newton himself was still alive and his brain still throbbed inside his head. Redolent as his name is of a type of biscuit, the head, whether flesh and bone or ice, is not. It could not look less like a biscuit. And I know, because I have studied biscuits, and I have studied heads, and I have studied ice. Not all at the same time, of course, that would be too much of a stretch. One can spread oneself too thin, when engaged in study, if one is not careful. Then the brain can become overheated, and a lethal casualness creep into one’s studies, so edges are blurred and details lost. A discrete fact about biscuits can get mixed up with one about heads or ice, or one about heads with one about biscuits or ice, or one about ice with one about biscuits or heads. And then all hope is lost, through cross-contamination. That is something else I know much about.

When I say I have studied heads I would not want it to be taken as a claim that I have studied Fig Newton’s head in particular. I have not. Nor have I studied the ice-head carved from the likeness of his head. Indeed, I confess I have never even clapped eyes on the ice-head, though not for want of trying. For several years, in between my other studies, I tried to track down the location of the industrial refrigeration facility where it is said to be kept. My search proved fruitless.

Now, while all lives are ultimately pointless in the grand scheme of things, it does not follow that all searches are fruitless. Grandeur of scale is an irrelevance. A simple example will suffice. Only the other day, I went looking for a plum, and I found one. It was a Carlsbad plum. I let out a yelp of triumph when I found it. I knew I had it somewhere, but could not remember where I had put it. In the normal run of things I would place a plum in my fruit bowl, but this particular plum I had put somewhere else, God knows why. When the signal impetus of my being was to lay my hands on that damnable plum, I went straight to the fruit bowl. I had completely forgotten that I had put the plum elsewhere. I could not then rest until I found it. But find it I did, in the fullness of time, after turning the house upside down until it looked as if it had been at the centre of a whirlwind. That was how desperately I wanted the plum, at the time. How easy it is to become so fixated. All thoughts of Fig Newton and biscuits and heads and ice and cross-contamination and other matters I have studied, or dabbled in, were expunged. Plum, plum, plum. The word tolled in my head like a cemetery bell. The tolling ceased only when I found the plum, in a basin in a cupboard under the sink, where I had put it for reasons I am still unable to fathom. The point I am making is that my search succeeded, it was not fruitless, though my life be pointless.

The plum is pertinent, too, because there were times when Fig Newton’s head, that head of his, was roughly the colour of a plum. In size it was of course bigger than a plum, much bigger, but in colour it could almost match the colour of a plum, when he was enraged. He was often enraged. He was an angry man, Fig Newton. It is one of the things everybody says about him. “He would fly off the handle at the merest provocation.” “He seethed with fury from the moment he woke up in the morning to the moment his head hit the pillow at bedtime.” “He was a hothead.” Those are three quotations taken from the archival records.

We might ponder the fact that a man named after a biscuit who is called a hothead has a copy of his head, stone cold, carved from ice, preserved for posterity in an industrial refrigeration facility. It certainly gives us something to think about. And it is always well to have things to think about while we winnow away our pointless lives.