Hooba Nooba Hoo! Bent Cronje!
He forded the Ack and he slew our foes!
He lopped off their heads and stuck them on spikes!
With his bevelled sword he slew and slew!
Now we carry his bones to their resting-place
In the palace on the hill under a cloud of crows!
But the mighty Bent Cronje will never die!
He is reborn daily as a bird!

This is a translation – and not a very good one – of the so-called Bent Cronje Song, commemorating Bent Cronje, the ancient hero who saved the town of Scroonhoonpooge from attack by the forces of Git, the “King-across-the-Ack”. Its chief interest, for historians, is the mention of the palace on the hill. Where in the name of heaven was this palace? There are no hills anywhere near Scroonhoonpooge. The land thereabouts is flat for as far as the eye can see, and indeed much of it is boggy and marshy and empuddled.

If the site could be located, it would be possible to have a dig, with spades, to see if there are any bones buried there. The presence of bones would not necessarily prove the historical existence of Bent Cronje himself, of course, but it would give scholars something to mull over. As things stand, all we know of Bent Cronje is his song and a shield – much battered and dented and rusty – kept in a glass case in the vestibule of Scroonhoonpooge Almshouse. It is said, according to the hand-written card stuck next to it, to be Bent Cronje’s shield, which he carried with him as he forded the Ack and lopped the heads off Git’s army. The provenance of the adjacent piece of cardboard is dubious, with some claiming it only appeared in the glass case last Thursday. If that is true, Bent Cronje’s shield might be any old scrap of battered and dented and rusty metal dug out of a pit somewhere in the vicinity. It might not even be a shield.

Whereas the historians are stymied until such time as they can find the location of the palace, not so the ornithologists. Unsurprisingly, quite a number of bird experts get in a flap about the idea that Bent Cronje is “reborn daily” as a bird. There are competing theories. One strand of thought is that the soul or essence of Bent Cronje is present in a new hatchling every day, implying that over the centuries untold thousands of birds have actually been Bent Cronje simultaneously. Against this, some argue that there is but a single soul or essence which somehow flits from bird to bird by a process we puny humans cannot hope to comprehend.

There was a fad, a few years ago, for Bent Cronje bird seances. A bird would be trapped and encaged and brought to a darkened room and the cage placed in the centre of a round table, Various spiritually-minded ornithologists would be seated around the table, and they would attempt to elicit from the bird some indication that it was the living embodiment, for that day at least, of the legendary hero. The process usually involved rapping noises, sudden chills in the room temperature, and the spewing of ectoplasm. No definitive Bent Cronje bird was ever identified, which is hardly surprising when one considers the foolishness of such behaviour.

My own view is that someone ought to study very carefully that translation of the song. I suspect it is woefully inaccurate, and that the words Bent and Cronje and Ack and foes and lopped and heads and stuck and spikes and bevelled and sword and slew and bones and resting-place and palace and hill and crows and reborn and daily and bird are all wrong. It would be immeasurably helpful if we knew from what language it has been translated.

On the seafront in the town of Scroonhoonpooge stands the Hotel Splendido! (That exclamation mark, by the way, is part of its name, not my own excitable interjection.) To the local Scroonhoonpoogers, however, it is invariably known as “the mysterious hotel”.

The mystery of the mysterious hotel is that nobody seems to know the nature of its mystery. Like any other hotel, it has seen its share of puzzling incidents – a vanished sock in the laundry, intermittent hissing noises on the intercom, the face of Stalin on a slice of toast – but these are mundane and ephemeral. What is the overarching mystery of the mysterious hotel?

One man who was unable to prise this question out of his head was Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb. When he was tiny, he regularly stayed at the Hotel Splendido! for a summer fortnight, for Scroonhoonpooge was his parents’ favoured holiday destination. Early, then, he learned the locals’ term, and badgered his ma and his pa and other adults to reveal the mystery to him. But of course nobody did, for nobody knew.

Through the passing years, and during his career as a tiptop detective captain, he never quite stopped thinking about the mystery of the mysterious hotel. He no longer visited the seaside resort, for his dear wife was terrified of the sea, and all their holidays together were taken at inland spots, forests and dingles and coppices.

But there came a time when that good woman perished in a tobogganing accident, and, the next summer, the widower Unstrebnodtalb determined to return to the scene of his youth. Armed, now, with many years’ experience of tiptop detective work, he felt confident that he could solve the mystery that had perplexed him for so long.

He arrived at Scroonhoonpooge Parkway railway station on a blisteringly hot July afternoon. He was astonished to note that the porter, who took his suitcase from him and carried it the length of the platform, all the way to the station gate, was the very same porter he remembered from childhood. Yet the man had not aged, at all. Nor had the station itself changed.

“I feel I am stepping back into the past,” he said to the porter.

“I’m afraid I have no idea what you are talking about, sir,” said the porter.

They were now at the gate, and Unstrebnodtalb gazed at the town square, and across to the seafront, and the back of the Hotel Splendido! Everything seemed utterly unchanged from when he had last seen it forty years before.

“I have not been here since I was a child,” he said, “And it seems utterly unchanged.”

The porter gave him an odd look, as if he were a dangerous lunatic, and hurried away to carry another suitcase for another disembarked railway passenger.

Looking about him in wonderment, Unstrebnodtalb made his way to the seafront. Everything was as he remembered it – the brass band in the square playing oompah music, the pie and pastry shop, the creaking tram with its vampiric conductor, the stone statue of Ringo Starr. Bewildered and unnerved, he stepped into the hotel lobby.

Here, at least, things had changed. If anything, the interior of the Hotel Splendido! looked like a vision of the future, the distant future. He marched up to the reception desk, which was more like a space age console.

“I have a reservation,” he said, “Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb.”

“Ah yes,” said the receptionist, peering at the screen of a superdupercomputer. Then, “Oh, I’m sorry. Your room has already been re-reserved by another guest.”

“What do you mean, re-reserved”

“Well, it is all hustle and bustle in the hotel business, you know. We can’t let time stand still.”

And he looked up, and Detective Captain Unstrebnodtalb realised that the receptionist was a hyperintelligent monkey, at an advanced stage of evolution.

Generations of tinies have grown up learning the nursery rhyme with the Roud Folk Song Index number 21143, to wit:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes.

In a recent earth-shattering research paper, published in The Weekly Earth-Shattering Research Papers Digest, boffins at the Centre For Banbury Cross Studies make a convincing argument that the third line of the rhyme is wrong. Using state of the art techniques involving a big magnetic robot, they claim that it ought to read

Wrinkles on her fingers and boils on her toes.

The lady may indeed be fine, but she is also a crone, or a hag. It is thought that she is related by sisterhood to both the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman and the Woman of Twigs, and Shakespeare probably had the trio in mind when he was writing The Tragedie Of Macbeth.

In a related development, other boffins at a different Centre, for other Studies, have been using state of the art techniques involving a tiny rubber nozzle to identify the music that the lady with wrinkles on her fingers and boils on her toes was listening to wherever she went. Their unarguable case is that the music was some particularly argumentative German improv racket, made with dustbin lids and hammers and hideous electronic buzzing noises.

Together, these two studies shed an entirely new light on the nursery rhyme. It is a light that the present day inhabitants of Banbury Cross find unwelcome, and there have been mutterings in the streets, and dark deeds plotted in the taverns, and pebbles thrown at boffins. Excitingly, the latter hoo-hah has given rise to the creation of a brand new nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross
To see all the citizens get very cross
Let’s all throw pebbles at the boffins
Until they end up in their coffins.

Call me slow-witted, if you will, but it took me an extraordinary length of time to realise that the manger, away in which the little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head, was in fact a barnyard animal feeding trough. Yes, yes, I know that the carol is quite explicit on this matter, pointing out that the holy infant had “no crib for his bed”, but somehow in my mind I have always associated a manger with a newborn’s sleep facility, rather than as what the OED calls “a long open box or trough in a stable, barn, etc., out of which horses and cattle can eat fodder”. You see what I mean about being slow-witted?

Anyway, what occurs to me are the immense repercussions had some roaming ravenous barnyard omnivore fallen upon the manger and, understandably assuming its contents to be dinner, gobbled up the little Lord Jesus. Two thousand and thirteen years of Christian civilization would have been as naught. Imagine that, if you can.

Though we might further consider the possibility that the barnyard omnivore, having ingested the Messiah, could itself have become the focus of religious yearnings. Let us assume that Joseph and Mary, fine, responsible parents as they were, were distracted by the arrival of shepherds and wise men and kings, and took their eyes off their mewling infant just long enough for the ravenous beast to come clattering into the farmyard building and guzzle the baby down.

Incidentally, just as I was confused about the precise nature of a manger, I was equally muddleheaded about the provenance of the kings. I thought they were “we three kings of Orion-Tar”. I had no idea where Orion-Tar might be – though it sounded vaguely like a region of outer space – nor why it had three kings rather than, as is usual, just the one, unless one is in Westeros, which has several. But the kings of Westeros are continually at each other’s throats, whereas the three kings of Orion-Tar seem like boon companions, travelling together across the desert (or possibly the Red Waste) following a star.

Anyway, if we assume that Joseph and Mary and the shepherds and the Magi and the three kings of Orion-Tar suddenly hear a great gulping and belching sound from the ravenous omnivore, and turn to look, they might very well want to make sure that the beast does not go running off. It might be too late to save the little Lord Almighty, but the barnyard beast itself is now clearly sacred. It contains within it the light of heaven and the hope of all mankind.

Goats are omnivorous, as far as I know, so let us say that it is a goat that has swallowed the baby Jesus. It seems likely that, over the succeeding two thousand and thirteen years, we would have devised a culture based upon a goat-god. How different would our history be? It might be interesting to run the permutations through a superdupercomputer, as long range weather forecasters and climate change persons do. Or, more cheaply, one could create a board game, to while away the starlit evenings, snuggled down in heaps of straw, in barnyards far away.