So that is another year at Hooting Yard done and dusted. Many thanks to my readers and listeners, particularly to those who help me keep the wolf from the door by sending donations, subscribing, and/or buying my paperbacks from Lulu.

I was going to list here a few personal favourites from the Year of Our Lord MMXII, but then it occurred to me that, really, the best thing you can do is to reread the entire year’s worth of postages, all 550 of them (not including this one), at one prolonged sitting, your brow furrowed in concentration, while outside the wind howls and the rain pours down. After all, “the proper study of Mankind is Hooting Yard”, as Alexander Pope said (attrib.). The attrib., by the by, was made by me, just a moment ago.

I began the year with the demented plan to write a thousandish-word essay every day, and persisted until mid-November, when the scheme ganged agley due to my (alas, temporary) membership of the international jetset. For the Year of Our Lord MMXIII, I have devised a different project, still somewhat blurry in my bonce, the first fruits of which will, I hope, appear here tomorrow.

Meanwhile, at the turning of the year it is time to take stock, so here is a snap of the actor Nigel Stock (1919-1986), who played Dr Watson in the BBC’s 1960s Sherlock Holmes adaptations, as well as popping up in Brighton Rock (John Boulting, 1947) and The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963), among many other films.

I strode out shortly after daybreak to check my traps. I had set them up, two of them, on the edge of the woods, and as I approached in the milky morning light I was pleased to see that in each I had ensnared a monster of duplicity.

The duplicity of the first monster consisted of its having two heads, where you would expect to find only the one. Almost all beings with heads have just a single head, perched on a single neck. This trapped monster did indeed have a single neck, but at a certain point it bifurcated in order to support a pair of heads. Adding to the monster’s monstrosity was the remarkable, even nauseating, disparity in the heads. The one on the left was a smooth and baldy head, almost egg-like. When I was close enough to study its features I saw that it had a pair of tiny piggy eyes and a minuscule snub of a nose and thin pinched lips. I saw no sign of ears. But the other head! It was misshapen and hairy and disgusting, with several eyes and noses and more than one mouth and numerous ears, and it emitted a godawful grunting noise that sent shivers down its own spine, or rather, the spine it shared with its other head. I watched those shivers snaking up and down the protruding spine with cold, emotionless fascination. I knew I was going to kill the monster, sooner or later.

But first I turned my attention to my second trap, and the second monster. Its duplicity was not a simple matter of having two heads, for it had just one, and that not a particularly monstrous head. If anything, it was a rather handsome head, a head one might easily imagine topping the beautiful body of a young Apollo. Quite what kind of body the monster had was, however, a matter of conjecture. Evidently when my trap snapped shut it did so precisely upon the monster’s neck, detaching the head from the body. Judging by the pawprints in the mud, the headless body had then fled, leaving the head lolling helpless, the severed neck caught in the fangs of the trap. Its duplicity, then, was that head and body could continue to exist, even to thrive, separately. I pondered whether to follow the pawprints, but saw that they terminated nearby, where the body of the monster had plunged into the marsh, the better to make its escape.

I popped the handsome head into my pippy bag and slung it over my shoulder. Then I bashed the heads of the other monster with my spade, rendering it unconscious. I freed it from the trap and tied it up with butchers’ string and shoved it on to my cart. Before leaving the edge of the woods, I reset both traps. Other monsters roamed these parts, and though I could trap only two at a time, I would never stint in my efforts.

We bundled our picnic things into gunny sacks and set out upon the road to Poxhaven. It is a long straight track, some say a ley line, pitted with many puddles, the road to Poxhaven. “Oh where are you going?” asked passing peasants, and we replied, “We are heading for Poxhaven.” And soon enough through mist and rain we saw a signpost and on the signpost, scratched it seemed by the claws of a werewolf, were the words “To Poxhaven”.

In centuries past, when town and city and countryside were ravaged by the pox, teeming thousands fled to safety along this road, to find a haven from the pox in the seaside resort of Poxhaven. Now it is for picnics we go to Poxhaven. Even in mist and rain you will find no better picnicking spot than among the many many picnic spots of Poxhaven.

There are werewolves too, werewolves that roam the streets and alleys and mews of Poxhaven. In centuries past they fed upon the pox-riddled escapees from town and city and countryside who made it as far as Poxhaven. Now the werewolves howl in hunger when dusk descends upon Poxhaven. It is a custom, and one we follow, when our picnic is done, to leave for the starving werewolves a few leftover picnic sausages, injected with the pox, upon a seaside picnic spot in Poxhaven.

As we trudge home, along the old straight track, in the dusk, we hear the grateful howling of the sausage-gobbling werewolves of Poxhaven.

The first time I flew in an aeroplane was almost forty years ago, on an Aeroflot flight to the Soviet Union. My abiding memory is of the many flies buzzing around within the plane. Perhaps it was an Aeroflot thing. I mention this because, having flown to and from Maryland a few weeks ago, I am still debilitated and twitching and shattered by whatever hideous germs were aboard the planes I sat slumped in for hours. That is why the unaccustomed silence at Hooting Yard has persisted, for longer than I would have thought possible.

Yet there is a certain appeal in being an invalid. One gets the opportunity to emit tremulous and woebegone sighs, for example, like unto a dying swan. Having said that, I do not think I have ever witnessed the death of a swan. Perhaps they do not sigh, but shriek or whoop. I could slaughter a swan to find out, when I am better, but, if caught in the act, I would no doubt be arrested and roughed up by Inspector Cargpan and his goons down in the basement of the local nick.

My local nick, incidentally, which is now closed down and shuttered, is the very same one where Alfred Hitchcock was once locked up. His father, who was a pal of the local coppers, took the young Alfred to the station and had him chucked in a cell for a while, not because he had done anything amiss, but to show him what would happen to him if ever he did do something amiss. It is not difficult to see the germ of many a later Hitchcock hero’s predicament in that childhood incident. It would be interesting to discover if an icy blonde and an egg were somehow involved, and then we would have the key to the adult Hitchcock’s obsessions. Some say swans are among my own obsessions, and they may well be correct. I cannot, however, recall any childhood traumas in which a swan played a significant part.

Another thing about the invalid state is that my dreams seem particularly vivid. Last night, for example, I dreamed that my mother was still alive at eighty-seven, had become a keen aficionado of Het Internet, and had, for the past few years, been engaged in a daily exchange of emails with Keith Richards, for whom she had become a sort of ancient Muse. When I awoke, I found it very very difficult to acknowledge that this was merely a figment of my fuming brainpans.

Keith Richards’ ancient Muse, before she was ancient

I have to say this not writing lark is curiously seductive. My trip abroad, followed by a period of feeling like death warmed up, has led to a sort of unplanned holiday from Hooting Yard and indeed from Het Internet generally. After bashing out three hundred and twenty essays in three hundred and twenty days, not to mention a myriad of other postages, it is with some relief that I have refrained from tippy-tapping sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose.

However, this does mean that I have failed to impart to you much decisive information, without which you are probably wandering the earth lost, twitching and shattered. I am thinking, for example, of a recent dream, in the course of which I attended a party at a retirement home for outrageous old thespians of the Donald Sinden stripe. One of these ageing hams was swaddled from head to foot in cloth of the deepest crimson, bemoaning that he had devoted his life to interpreting a minor character in a minor work by a minor dramatist. We then gathered for a screening of In Search Of The Most Pious Man : A Life Of Jesus, a film directed by Carrington Holmes.

I have tried, in my waking hours, to discover more about the dream film and the dream film director, to no avail. It seems neither of them actually exists. They ought to.