Writers of science fiction are fond of the invisible force-field, an unseen barrier which unexpectedly stops a spaceman, or the evil Thargon, in his tracks. Landscape gardeners of the eighteenth century had much the same idea with the invention of the ha-ha. This is a sunken wall, its top at ground level, and bounded on the outer side by a ditch. From even a short distance, then, it cannot be seen, and the sweeping view of the gorgeous grounds is uninterrupted. It is an invisible force-field.

“Ha-ha” would seem to be a variant of the original French “ah-ah”, in which form it first appeared in English. Clearly it expresses the element of surprise, no different for the eighteenth century person strolling in the gardens of a stately home than for the spaceman or the evil Thargon bashing up against an invisible force-field in a distant galaxy in the forty-sixth century.

One such stroller, on an eighteenth century afternoon, was Ned Slop, a factotum in the service of Baron Plunkett of Plunkett Hall. Slop had been instructed to prune a filbert hedge, and was making his way towards it, armed with a pair of shears, when his course took him for a time along one side of the ha-ha. As a factotum of some eighty winters, Slop knew every inch of Plunkett Hall and its magnificent parkland, its ha-has and filbert hedges, so as he reached the ha-ha he had no grounds to be surprised. Nonetheless, on this particular afternoon, he did indeed cry “Ah! Ah!” upon arriving at the ha-ha, and he dropped his shears and hurried at once back to Plunkett Hall.

True hurry was not within Slop’s gifts, however, for he was an ancient and creaking factotum whose movements were akin to those of a Beckettian tramp. Indeed it was almost dusk before he staggered into the library, where he found Baron Plunkett. The baron was a scholarly baron, and on this eighteenth century dusk he had his head buried in a huge leather bound copy of Pontoppidan’s Explanations. He looked up as Slop stood panting in the doorway.

– What is it, Slop? Are the filbert hedges duly pruned?, said the baron.

– Pant pant pant, panted Slop, Not yet sir, if it please your baronial magnificence, for before I was able to prune the filbert hedges I came upon something untoward at the ha-ha.

– Pray be more explicit, good Slop, said the baron.

– I don’t rightly know how to describe it, sir, except to say there was a bit of a brouhaha.

– It is not the first time there has been a brouhaha at the ha-ha, said the baron, I expect it is merely an intoxicated peasant or toppled poacher. Now, pray, leave me to my Pontoppidan.

– ‘Tis neither peasant nor poacher so far as I can descry, said Slop, I know full well the sorts of brouhahas they cause, what with their intoxication and illegal rabbits and so forth. No, sir, this is a brouhaha of quite another kidney and one I feel duty bound as a loyal factotum of some eighty winters to report to you, that you may take whatever steps you deem necessary to address it.

Baron Plunkett sighed and put down his Pontoppidan on a side table and heaved himself to his gout-ridden feet.

– Very well, Slop, fetch my stick, would you?

And so, in the dim dusk, the baron and his factotum went a-hobbling and a-creaking across the majestic lawns towards the ha-ha.

– Christ’s wounds!, cried the baron, when eventually they reached the spot, This is more than a mere brouhaha, Slop! This is an inexplicable calamity! You did well to alert me to it.

For before their eyes, the ha-ha was littered with the dead, distorted bodies of several peasants and poachers and widow-women, each twisted beyond recognition and horribly disembrangulated.

– So inexplicable a calamity, continued the baron, That I dare say not even my revered Pontoppidan could explain it in his Explanations.

– Ought I hie back to the library to fetch your tome, sir?, asked Slop.

– No, no, good Slop, that will not be necessary. For cast your eyes thither!

And Baron Plunkett pointed to the ground some yards away to the left, where, from the ha-ha, a trail of noisome green translucent foul bubbling slime stretched across the lawns towards the filbert hedges.

– Let us follow the trail, Slop, said the baron, And we shall discover who – or what – has wrought such hideous horror and disembrangulation.

– B-b-but will we not suffer the same awful fate as the peasants and poachers and widow-women there sprawled dead in the ha-ha?, wailed Slop.

– Fear not, Slop, said the baron, I am a baron and a gentleman and I am armed with a stick. None durst tangle with me. To do so would be socially unthinkable in this our eighteenth century.

So the baron and his factotum followed the trail, and that is how they came face to face with the evil Thargon, whose time-travelling voyage had suddenly and unexpectedly come clunk! to a halt. The space creature had hit an invisible force-field in the shape of the Plunkett Hall ha-ha.

As Ned Slop cowered and piddled in his pants, the baron strode forward and waved his stick at the vile shapeless jelly-like pulsating green and yellow and mauve monocular repellent many-antennae’d squelchy throbbing sucking and seething blob that was the evil Thargon.

– Get off my land at once, cried the baron, and he whacked the space monster with his stick, whereupon it dissolved in a disgusting belch of vapour.

– Come, Slop, let us return to the Hall. I shall read further in Pontoppidan, and you may spend the rest of the evening scrubbing boots and doing other tasks appropriate to your lowly station.

And far far away, distant in both time and space, the populations of several planetoids rejoiced at the defeat of the evil Thargon.

Ingmar and Hetty are the first fop and fopette we meet in the smash hit musical Seven Fops For Seven Fopettes. Ingmar is standing on a hayrick, whistling, and Hetty enters stage left, carrying a lamb. In most productions the lamb is a mere bundle of cotton wool. There is nothing remotely foppish about either of them. Indeed, they might be mistaken for yokels.

Then Ingmar sings the smash hit number “On Luneberg Heath Did I Lay Down My Submachine Gun”, and Hetty replies with “Gut That Herring!”. By now the audience is utterly confused. Fops, yokels, militia men, fisherfolk? What is going on here?

The action now turns to the barn, from within which comes a cacophony of different noises, including clanking, siphoning, ragtime piano, hooters, the cries of triumphant pole-vaulters, oompah oompah music, and the like. Ingmar and Hetty enter the barn to investigate, and when they emerge, they have become foppish, indubitably so. Hetty sings “I Am A Fopette On Crutches After That Accident In The Barn”. They then become engaged and a Lutheran pastor beckons them from the wings.

The second fop and fopette to be introduced are Gladiolus and Gladiola. They are already wholly foppish as they descend from a balcony on strings. Yes, they are puppets! The orchestra strikes up a puppetty kind of tune, sprightly yet with mordant passages. Gladiolus torments a heron – also a puppet – in a languid manner. Gladiola rescues the heron from his clutches, and with a startling bit of stage trickery it is transformed into a real heron. The fop and the fopette profess their undying love for each other, and a Lutheran pastor beckons them from the wings.

Five other fop and fopette couples appear in turn during the next forty minutes. There are moments of melodrama and terror, bits of slapstick, a Dadaist interlude, and many smash hit songs before the curtain falls.

Act Two begins with the Lutheran pastor centre stage, alone at a lectern. He recites lengthy passages from Pontoppidan’s Explanations, while behind him mute blind love monkeys cavort in cardboard trees. The second half of Act Two is the audience participation section, always an unnerving experience. Usually, the rifles are loaded with blanks, and the piano wire is actually made from thin strands of easily breakable dough.

Act Three, with its famous airship sequence, has always proved a huge challenge to directors. While the orchestra plays Metamorphosen by Strauss, in the happy up-tempo version by Julius Uptempo, the audience has to be convinced that six fops and six fopettes parachute from the airship with seconds to spare before it explodes and is engulfed in flames. Ingmar and Hetty remain on board, and are assumed to have perished until the exciting finale.

Act Four has never been performed in public, for reasons given variously as stupidity and fire regulations.

In the exciting finale, the seven fops and fopettes are married in a ceremony performed by the Lutheran pastor. Ingmar and Hetty explain their escape from the burning airship in mime. Wilted flowers are tossed on to the stage by a stooge in the audience, and there is a rousing chorus of the smash hit “Thin Strands Of Easily Breakable Dough”.

Critics were unanimous in their praise of the musical from the outset. In Unanimous Praise Of Musicals magazine, Volume XVII, No. 7, July 1953, Bengt Bunglawala wrote:

I have often dreamed of seeing a musical featuring fops and fopettes and puppets and a Lutheran pastor and a mysterious barn and a heron and melodrama, terror, slapstick and a Dadaist interlude and audience participation and an exploding airship and mute blind love monkeys, all accompanied by smash hit songs and a happy up-tempo version of something by Strauss. In fact, it has been my recurring dream, from which I have awoken, biting my pillow in a frenzy, five or six nights a week since I was so high. Now it has become a reality, and it does not disappoint. My only cavil is that there was no place for either Jack Hulbert or Cicely Courtneidge in this production.

In Effusive Reviews Of Musicals magazine, the critic Tord Grip (no relation to the football coach) was effusive:

Boy oh boy! What a musical! My critical review of it is particularly effusive regarding the audience participation segment, when I contrived to substitute blanks for live ammunition and shot my great rival Bengt Bunglawala in the kneecaps. That will teach him to question my critical acumen!

A film adaptation of Seven Fops For Seven Fopettes, featuring Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews, is still in the throes of production, several decades after shooting began. No release date has yet been announced.

Tinie Tempah’s cover version of the smash hit from Act Three, “A Fopette Dons Her Parachute”, features on his next album, which may mercifully never be released due to a sudden and unexpected upsurge of good taste in the record-buying public.

Alain de Botton’s squib How I Based My Entire Life On What I Learned From “Seven Fops For Seven Fopettes” is available from all good airports.

See Thog. See Thog run. See Thog shape-shift.

I’m sorry, I was getting Thog mixed up with Spot. Spot we dealt with yesterday, and Thog we shall deal with today. I can only think I got the two confused, between yesterday and today, due to some weird rip in the space-time continuum. It is the kind of thing that happens all too often when having to cope with such as Thog, creatures who occupy the world we might best describe as science fiction or fantasy. Unlike Spot, who is merely an earthy dog, Thog is a being from another dimension, or possibly several other dimensions, most of which you cannot imagine and I would have the devil of a job to explicate. Fortunately for me, I cannot be bothered to do so.

My opening lines were doubly erroneous. Not only did I get Thog and Spot mixed up, but I suggested that one could “see” Thog. Whether this is true is very far from clear. It may be that much of the time Thog is not actually visible to the human eye. The same is true of Spot of course, given that he might be resting in his kennel or hiding behind a splurge of lupins, but generally speaking dogs are incontrovertibly visible. Not so Thog. Being a shape-shifting being from unknown and unimaginable other dimensions, Thog is not so easy to pin down.

Having said that, there is one tale – it is either an Astounding Tale or a Weird Tale, I forget which – where a mad boffin devises a so-called set of “Thog pins” special fantasy science fiction pins expressly designed to pin Thog as one might pin a butterfly, were one a butterfly collector. Duly pinned, Thog effects an escape by deploying “Thog power”. Impressive as this is, it is never coherently defined, so one cannot emulate Thog in one’s everyday life in the way one might emulate one’s other favourite fictional characters. The mad boffin, by the way, comes to a bad end, so one would not want to emulate him, either.

Coherence is not really a quality we are looking for when reading about Thog, and just as well. One of the best stories is also one of the least coherent. This is Thog On The Tyne, a thrilling science fiction adventure set in Newcastle, written entirely in Geordie dialect. For most of us, it is incomprehensible. But it has its special pleasures, and when I have worked out what they are I will tell you.

Because Thog himself – or, I suppose, itself – defeats easy definition, it is no surprise to learn that attempts to film the stories have met with consistent failure. There was a 1967 flick in which Thog arrives, in a spacecraft, at Alexandra Palace in London to take part in the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream. He does a variety of fantastical Thoggish things, and at one point can be spotted just behind John Lennon, but it is all a bit pedestrian. Of more interest, if equally unsuccessful at the box office, was the 1970s series of Thog films directed by Lindsay Anderson. What is noteworthy about them is that all the scenes involving Thog ended up on the cutting room floor. Anderson himself was said to be livid, but then he was reportedly quite a cantankerous chap at the best of times.

Unlike Spot, Thog has never been the protagonist of a children’s television series, though one is long overdue. A cartoon Thog might be quite a hit with the tinies. I am told that someone somewhere is developing a show called Spot And Thog, or possibly Thog And Spot. There are also unconfirmed reports that someone else somewhere else is working on a rival show in which Spot is merely one of the shapes into which Thog shifts, so that Thog and Spot are essentially one and the same.

Alain de Botton has written perceptively about the Spot-Thog dichotomy, if it is indeed a dichotomy, in his book 50 Things You Can Learn From Thog. It is a very thin book indeed. I would like to say deceptively so, but I am not going to. It is just very thin. In my view, for what it’s worth, the things the Swiss brainbox claims can be learned from Thog could equally well be learned by standing in a puddle out on a blasted heath, like Luneberg, in driving rain, on a bank holiday afternoon. I have tried this myself, on more than one occasion, and I learned many, many things, many more than fifty if truth be told. I needed neither Spot nor Thog nor Alain de Botton to help with these lessons. One day I shall impart to you, in resounding prose, exactly what I learned, and you will be by turns appalled, bewildered, cut up, despairing, eggbound, frolicsome, gooey, hysterical, implacable, jinxed, knackered, loopy, and murderous, and that only accounts for the first half of the alphabet. It also summarises only your likely reactions to one of the many things I learned on Luneberg Heath. Imagine, then, the sheer panoply of my emotions you will go through as you learn all the other things, more than fifty of them, and each one more coherent than anything you will read in the astounding and weird and uncanny and unnerving tales of Thog.

See Spot. See Spot run. Hear Spot yap. Yap yap yap, says Spot. What a din Spot makes! Noisy Spot. See the grump. See the grump throw a pebble at Spot. Hear Spot howl. See Spot run.

See the grump put the kettle on. See the grump look for teabags in the cupboard. Hear the grump moan. See the grump don his coat and hat and boots. See the grump go to the corner shop.

See the corner shop. See Spot outside the door. See dozens of other dogs next to Spot. See the dogs slaver. See their fangs. See the grump approach. See the pack set upon the grump. See blood and sinew.

Hear the ambulance bell clanging. See Spot preen.

See Lars. Lars likes tanks. See Lars at the Communist Party meeting. See Lars listen to a very very very very very long speech. Rant might be better than speech. See Lars clap. See Lars agree with the denunciation of imperialist running dogs. See Lars leave the meeting.

See Spot. See Spot run. See Lars see Spot. See Lars put two and two together. See Lars run. See Lars catch up with Spot. See Lars trap Spot in a net. Hear Spot yap. Yap yap yap, says Spot. Noisy Spot. See Lars shove Spot into the back of a van. See Lars drive off.

See Spot’s pack of pals. See them slaver. See their fangs. See them run after the van. See the van disappear over the horizon. See Spot’s pals pant. See Spot’s pals overcome with hopeless canine despair.

See Lars park the van outside a camp. See the sign on the camp fence. “Political Re-education Camp” says the sign. See Lars drag Spot into the camp. See Spot politically re-educated.

*

That is one of the stories from a compendium of tales for infants published by the Unreconstructed Stalinist Press. It is packed with splendid stories, well worth reading aloud to your infant, if you have one, or to the wild wind, if not. The tale of Spot is at a rather advanced level, but some of the stories in the book are aimed at even tinier infants. Among them is a very very very very simple, and simple-minded, Life of Eric Hobsbawm. I have not been able to gain permission to reprint it here, though numerous extracts have been splattered across the pages of the Grauniad over the past week.

*

As readers will know, my annual plan is to bash out a Stakhanovite thousand(ish) words per day, under a heading beginning with the word “On”. One problem with this approach is that certain pieces can outstay their welcome, as I pad them out with needless extra paragraphs just to meet the word-count. I am not going to make that mistake with “On Spot”, which, frankly, has made its point.

Instead, I could witter on about something else, something either significant or insignificant, newsworthy or otherwise. Or, of course, I could just shut up. That might be a blessing, and not a blessing in disguise, merely a blessing.

I recently finished reading Francis Spufford’s new book Unapologetic, with its somewhat unwieldy subtitle Why, despite everything, Christianity can still make surprising emotional sense. In an afterword, Mr Spufford tells us that he wrote most of the book while sitting at a corner table in a Cambridge branch of Costa Coffee. He tells us this for two reasons, one to acknowledge his thanks to the staff, which shows admirable good manners, but also to alert us to the fact that, as he goes on to say, his book is not the product of any research or scholarship, but more a fairly spontaneous outpouring of the thoughts in his head. I have never attempted to write in a public space, in that manner, apart from on very rare occasions. Being a Diogenesian recluse, I always write at home, or home from home. But with the Spufford example before me, I am beginning to wonder if I ought not take my trusty laptop and install myself in a coffee bar or on a park bench, and do my tippy-tapping there.

It further occurs to me that, were I to do so, I could obtain a flat cap as beloved by our beggars, and place it upside down next to me, accompanied by a sign saying something along the lines of “Impoverished Scribbler. Please Give Generously.” Though I suppose a truly impoverished scribbler would not come armed with a laptop. Perhaps I shall have to revert to my practice of the last century, and write by hand, in a mighty ledger. Add a few strands of straw to my hair, and dribble a little, and who knows how many bright coins would be tossed into my cap?

I am still far from my thousand(ish) words goal, but that is quite enough for today. I am going to put the kettle on and make a cup of tea, hoping there are teabags in the cupboard, and I do not have to don coat and hat and boots and go out to the corner shop, there to be set upon by Spot and his slavering pack of pals, and left for dead.

It was shortly after he excavated the tomb of King Memhenhop that the renowned archaeologist Sir Bedsore Peeve realised he had been cursed. Armed as he was with a copy of The Bog People by P. V. Glob – a book and an author I would have had to invent did they not already exist – Peeve was hoping to exhume a bog person, or at the very least a beaker person. The last corpse he expected to find was one that was ancient and Egyptian and kingly and mummified.

“Gosh, chaps!”, he said to the chaps who were helping with the digging, “This doesn’t look like a bog or beaker person to me. It looks like an Egyptian mummy, and a royal one to boot!”

But as he turned his head to look at the chaps to whom he was speaking, he saw that they were all running away very very fast. He could not see their faces, which were stricken with terror. Peeve grunted and let a bit of soil trail through his fingers and lit his pipe. He patted the mummy on its bandaged bonce and then walked back to his hotel, where he spent a pleasant evening on the balcony of the bar, getting sloshed.

While he was getting sloshed, Peeve browsed through a copy of the Reader’s Digest which was lying around, and happened upon an article about King Memhenhop.

Memhenhop, he read, was an exceedingly unpopular king, on account of his unseemly personal habits, disgusting table manners, and pomposity. Added to which, he detested cats, and among his favourite pastimes was the drowning of kittens. This did not go down well with the cat-worshipping Ancient Egyptians. It was the kittens who went down the well, several at a time, tied up in a sack. Eventually his satraps rose up against King Memhenhop, and they tied him into a sack while they debated what to do with him. From within the sack, the King jabbered a stream of curses and imprecations. Though his voice was muffled, one particularly sharp-eared satrap was able to catch the gist of his babbling, and he wrote it down upon an Ancient Egyptian papyrus. This text has become known as the Curse of Memhenhop, and is feared as much as the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

The satraps decided to throw the ensacked King down the well in which he had drowned so many kittens. The next day, however, the new King, Memhophen, decreed that his predecessor should be mummified and buried in a bog. Thus it was that his corpse was hoisted out of the well, taken out of the sack, mummified, and buried in a bog. The location of that bog has never been discovered, and it is thought that if it ever is, the Curse of Memhenhop will fall upon he who exhumes the dead King.

“Oo-er, missus,” said Peeve to himself when he finished reading. As he got up to replace the copy of the Reader’s Digest on a side table, he sprained his ankle. But it was by now very late, and he was very sloshed, and he did not notice.

It was only when he woke up the next morning, and felt the pain in his ankle, and banged his head on the bedpost, and suffered a minor heart attack, and saw in the mirror the plague of boils with which his face was covered, that the archaeologist began to suspect that he had fallen victim to the Curse of Memhenhop. He was confirmed in this view when, staggering as best he was able down to the breakfast parlour, he found the room to be filled with a swarm of locusts which had devoured every last croissant and sausage.

“No wonder the chaps ran away screaming yesterday!” he said, and as he did so he found that his tongue did cleave to the roof of his mouth.

Swatting the locusts away, Peeve made his way to the balcony bar to retrieve the Reader’s Digest. It was the kind of magazine, he thought, that might well contain a helpful article, written perhaps by a qualified doctor or exorcist, on the best way to undo the effects of an Ancient Egyptian curse. Alas, he found the balcony in flames, and the charred pages of the Reader’s Digest flapping in the wind, a wind that grew in force until it became a gale, so terrific that it pitched the hapless archaeologist over the edge of the blazing balcony and into a bog below.

This was a different bog to the one in which he had dug up King Memhenhop. It was a peculiarly stinking bog, seething with hideous slimy blind albino wriggling beings. Poor Peeve wondered if things could possibly get any worse. Then it began to rain, and the soggy bog became even soggier.

It was at this point that a deus ex machina appeared, in the form of one of the chaps. He came running up, and pulled the archaeologist out of the bog. They repaired to a nearby snack bar which had not yet been attacked by the locust swarm.

“You have fallen victim to the Curse of Memhenhop!”, said the chap.

“So it seems,” said Peeve, plucking a hideous slimy blind albino wriggling being out of his majestic archaeologist’s bouffant.

“We have to get you out of here to a place of safety,” said the chap, “Luckily, I have a spare plane ticket. Manchester United are flying back to Blighty following the second leg of their 1958 European Cup tie against Red Star Belgrade. There is just one seat left, and it’s yours.”

“Thank God!”, said Peeve, “I shall be relieved to return to Blighty!”

“I’m sure you will,” said the chap, “Though don’t forget that the plane is stopping off at Munich to refuel.”

“Righty ho!” said Peeve, and he pocketed the plane ticket, and made his way to the airport, pursued by invisible fiends unleashed by the mummy’s curse!

So we have had to put up with Wimbledon and Euro 2012 and the Olympics and the Paralympics and the Ryder Cup and the Lord knows what other so called sporting events over the past few months, when all along there are those of us who have been waiting for the big one. I speak of course of the Vagabonds’ Regatta. By tradition, this takes place annually at roughly the same time as the Picnic For Detectives. And it really is the most splendid of all vagabonds’ regattas. It is not just me who says that. The late Eric Hobsbawm thought so too. In an interview some years ago, he is reported to have said:

I think twenty million deaths, give or take the odd million, was a price worth paying to usher in the glorious utopia of Soviet communism. But I must dash now, because I have my complimentary Hampstead intellectual’s ticket for the Vagabonds’ Regatta, and I wouldn’t miss it for the world! It really is the most splendid of all vagabonds’ regattas!

Of course, Hobsbawm was living in lala land when he claimed to be in possession of a complimentary Hampstead intellectual’s ticket. The organisers of the Vagabonds’ Regatta do not, and I repeat, do not hand out free tickets to elderly north London leftie academics living in book-lined houses who have never met an actual working class person in their lives. No, they have to get their tickets the way everybody else does, by scrabbling in a bran tub in an often violent free for all. Indeed, the acquisition of tickets can be every bit as exciting as the regatta itself. Up and down the land, farmers are paid to throw open their barns, outside which queues form at dawn. Inside each barn is a bran tub, filled with bran and straw and slurry and muck, and somewhere within the filth, one or two tickets for the Vagabonds’ Regatta. Some people pay just to watch the unseemly scramble, the punchings and kickings and gougings and stabbings of the desperate aspirant spectators. I think I would have paid to see Eric Hobsbawm get a good kicking, had I known which barn to attend, though if he did have a ticket it would not surprise me to learn that he hired a proxy prole to enter the melée on his behalf. We know that was the ruse employed by that other elderly north London leftie academic living in a book-lined house who never met an actual working class person in his life, Ralph Miliband. Happily, he was barred from the Vagabonds’ Regatta when the ticket his proxy obtained was found to be counterfeit.

If you are lucky enough to get a non-counterfeit ticket and still be in possession of all your limbs, you are certainly in for a treat! Down to the riverside you go, past the field where the Picnic For Detectives is in full swing. The spectators’ area on the riverbank is muddy and sloshy and the stink of unnameable effluence wafts through the foul air. There are the rowing boats! They are empty, of course, at this stage, just before dawn on the day of the regatta. You tuck in to your official regatta snack of compressed reconstituted meat ‘n’ gristle slices on a bed of contaminated lettuce leaves in a basket. Headphones jammed into your ears, you listen to your iFry, tuned in to Stephen Fry’s pre-regatta commentary. In recent years there have been moves to replace Fry with someone less ubiquitous, but, as so many others have learned, resistance is futile. You slurp your can of Squelcho! You leaf through the official programme, sponsored by Dignitas, casting your eye over the beautifully-executed mezzotints of the vagabonds, reading up on their form.

“Ned Grimes”, for example, “No fixed address. Toothless, brain-blasted, pronounced limp. Rags and tatters. Noxious pong. Vermin in bouffant. Never been anywhere near a boat. Utters shrill cries when confronted by stretches of water.”

Then, when night is almost done, and sunrise grows so near that we can touch the spaces, it’s time to smooth the hair and get the dimples ready, for here come the vagabonds! Driven down to the riverbank by the official Regatta Brutes, they are shoved one by one through the mud into the water, and must make it as best they can to midstream, and clamber each aboard the boat smeared with a decoction of his own particular stench. Then the hooter is sounded, and as if by magic the vagabonds grasp the oars and begin to row! It is not magic, of course, but the result of long weeks of Pavlovian conditioning. And so they row, chaotically, bumping into each other, getting their oars entangled in thickets of water weed, going round in circles eerily akin to the closing scene of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, but without the monkeys. One or two of the vagabonds might somehow manage to make it as far as the lethal high-voltage cable strung across the river upstream, and then the sparks fly!

After several hours of this fun and frolic, the hooter sounds again. This is the signal for the snipers perched in trees to riddle the rowing boats with bullet holes. Yes, it’s Sieve Time! It’s well worth shoving the earphones back into your lugholes to listen to Stephen Fry again, as he keeps a tally of which vagabonds go down courageously with their boats and which splosh in ungainly fashion back to the riverbank mud.

After that, there is a communal singsong, and the surviving vagabonds, if any, are given a penny. By tradition, this is an old penny, a 1d. rather than a 1p. coin, and thus not legal tender, so utterly worthless. But you should see their shattered faces light up with glee! It is a sight that encapsulates all that is glorious about the Vagabonds’ Regatta, more glorious even than the utopia of Soviet communism.