It is high time I wrote something profound. To do so has always been within my gift, of course, it is just that I have neglected it. Oh, every single day I am beset by thoughts of great profundity, though admittedly these may oft be mistaken for platitudes, truisms, or mad ravings.

This morning, for example, as I awoke with the sunrise, at approximately half past four, the first thing that came into my head was the phrase “All roads lead to Rome”. How profound that is. We could, if we wished, worry away at it for hours and hours, like a cat with a strand of wool, and, unlike the cat, we would forever find new insights, new angles, unfathomable depths of wisdom and, yes, profundity. The cat, by contrast, being ineradicably stupid, would forget whatever it had learned about the strand of wool thirty seconds ago. I am sometimes envious of cats. Imagine how exciting life must be, to be so stupid!

Unfortunately, with my pea-sized yet pulsating brain, I am able to fret and fiddick about the five words “All roads lead to Rome” for hour after hour. I can draw from them profound insights about history and geography and the nature of what it means to be human, and much else besides. I can become lost in profundity.

By the way, I made up that word “fiddick”. Or at least, I commandeered the surname of the last editor of the much-lamented The Listener, Peter Fiddick, to serve as a verb meaning something along the lines of fretting at and worrying at something, as a cat might fret and worry at a strand of wool, as a fool might fret at an old adage. But you knew what I meant, didn’t you?

Last time I bumped into a ragged-trousered philanthropist in the street, I berated him for his dishevelment. Would it not be meet, I suggested, were he to pay more attention to his toilet? I held before his eyes the image of Beau Brummell, as an exemplar of attention to detail in masculine dress. Do you think for one minute, I keened, that Brummell would ever have stepped out of doors wearing ragged trousers?

But Brummell was not a philanthropist, countered the ragged-trousered philanthropist, and he pressed a coin into my palm. I realised he had mistaken me for a mendicant. It is true that my own apparel was somewhat raggedy, but I can admire Beau Brummell without attempting to emulate him.

Here, have your coinage back, I said, I have no need of it.

Ungrateful swine!, shouted the philanthropist, and he slapped my face. The slap was done with his bare hand. Had it been a glove, I would have taken it as a challenge to engage in a duel. As he refused to take back his coin, I tossed it into the gutter.

Let a guttersnipe profit from your philanthropy, I said, rubbing my cheek, and away I pranced, in the bitter sunshine.

At the corner, I paused, and turned, and waited until the ragged-trousered philanthropist was out of sight. Then I hastened back to retrieve the coin from the gutter. Before I could do so, however, an eagle-eyed guttersnipe, attracted by its silvery glint, appeared from nowhere and scooped it up.

I brandished my stick and beat the urchin insensible. I prised the coin from his grasp and then rifled through his filthy pockets to find what treasures lay therein. String, elastic bands, paper clips, a boiled sweet, but no more coinage. I left the guttersnipe, battered and bloody, in the gutter, and went on my way, in the bitter sunshine.

Exercise : The narrator is clearly wallowing in a moral sewer. Describe this sewer, as vividly as you are able, and populate it with other figures, both historical and fictional, who you think are likely to be found there.

I met my antagonist in vegetation and in awe. The vegetation was a patch of scrub and gorse and bracken and furze and phlox and lupins and stunted hollyhocks, behind the towpath that goes along beside the canal, leading to the sea, which in turn leads on to all the major oceans, Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, I can’t remember the names of the others offhand. I was in awe because my antagonist, too, was in awe, and awe has a way of feeding off itself, and increasing exponentially. We made a handshake last for hours.

The stunting of the hollyhocks looked natural, organic, or so it seemed to me. They did not appear to have been pollarded, like the willows by the canal just before the level crossing. The patch of vegetation was equidistant, I would guess, from the level crossing, along the canal in one direction, and the sea, in the other. I could draw you a map, if you wanted me to. I do not think I would have been able to then, in the immediate aftermath of our meeting. My antagonist had a very firm handshake, intimidatingly so, and I was not to be intimidated, so I grasped his hand all the more firmly. I think we were bent on crushing each other’s bones. Neither of us was willing to relinquish the hand of the other. That is why we stood there, in vegetation and awe, like a pair of ninnies, shaking hands for hours.

I had come from the level crossing, he from the sea. His shoes and trouser-cuffs were still wet. It was a humid day. The stunted hollyhocks drooped. The air was thick with flies. In the distance, we could hear the sound of violins. I remember the sense of awe as if it were yesterday, though it was the day before yesterday. I wanted to smoke, and I managed to extricate a cigarette from the packet in my pocket and put it between my lips and take my lighter and ignite the cigarette with deft movements of my left hand. My right was still clutching the right hand of my antagonist in that long, long handshake. For a moment I thought he was going to mirror my actions, for he put his left hand in his pocket, but when he took it out he was holding a boiled sweet. As deft as I, he unwrapped it from its twisted cellophane wrapper and popped it into his mouth. He let fall the wrapper, and it landed upon a lupin. I was disconcerted – I had not had my antagonist down as a litterbug.

He took advantage of my momentary disconcertment to tighten his grip on my hand. I puffed a mouthful of smoke into his face. He blinked once or twice but marshalled himself, but his grip relaxed just a little. We both adjusted our footing, me in my Tyrolean postman’s boots and he in his wet shoes and socks. I think they were quite expensive shoes, though I am no great judge of these matters. I suppose when one lives by the sea one has to pay due attention to one’s footwear.

Neither of us said a word. What would have been the point? We spoke in different tongues, mine that of the interior, his, like Beau Brummell speaking French, that of those accustomed to chewing pebbles and talking next to the sea. Without a pebble, he made do with his boiled sweet. Even if we had shared a language, we were too awestruck to speak. And as our awe grew, so did our antagonism. Would either of us claim victory?

I do not know how many hours had passed when the referee emerged from somewhere behind the clumps of scrub and gorse and bracken and furze and phlox and lupins and stunted hollyhocks. He flicked his ribbon at our hands, still clenched in handshake, and pronounced a tie. We would have to return, to the same place, at the same time, next week. He hinted that there might be television crews eager to cover our confrontation.

Our seconds appeared, and bore us home on palanquins, me to the chalet by the level crossing, he to the sea, the sea. He took my cigarette butt as a memento, and I pocketed his boiled sweet wrapper. At sunset, the patch of vegetation was deserted and undisturbed, as if we had never fought there at all, as if the whole thing had been but a dream.

A letter plops on to the mat from Tim Thurn:

Oi, Mr Key! You seem to know an immense amount about birds, yet virtually nothing about fish. Is there any reason for this disparity? If so, I am agog to know, agog I tell you!
Passionately yours,
Tim Thurn

Often with Tim’s letters, I find the best thing to do is to ball them up in my fist, scrunch them a few times, and then deposit them in the waste paper basket. Occasionally, after the scrunching, I drop them directly down a waste chute, if, for example, the waste paper basket is overflowing, as it sometimes is, or, even if space remains in the waste paper basket, I feel impelled to cast the letter as far from me as possible, to obliterate it from my sight.

There is always the possibility, you see, that if I put the scrunched letter into the waste paper basket, I might, while it languishes there, hoick it out and unscrunch it, and unball it up, if that is a phrase, and reread it. Once it has plunged down a waste chute, it is gone forever, of course, or at least its retrieval is made a matter of great complexity, necessitating the involvement of various municipal waste management personnel, who may or may not demand bribes or other favours in order to send one of their number, or some kind of scuttling robot, down into the midden to rummage for Tim’s scrunched letter.

Usually when I discard Tim’s letters so promptly it is because they are annoying. He can be a very exasperating correspondent, and I think he takes a curious pride in being so. I may be wrong on that point, but I don’t think I am. Some people gain a great deal of pleasure from being annoying, and Tim is one of them. I believe he sits there, wherever it is he lives, picturing in his mind’s eye me, huffing and puffing, balling up and then scrunching his latest letter, tossing it into a waste paper basket or down a waste chute, and then going to have a lie down in a darkened room to recover from the mental disturbance he has caused me. I, in my turn, lie there in the dark picturing in my mind’s eye Tim Thurn, chuckling, or chortling, or even guffawing, fatuously, as he imagines my irritation. I impute fatuity to his laughter because this makes it more vivid, and hateful.

Having no idea what Tim looks like, I have to rely on my imagination. Sometimes he is as thin as a rake, angular, and seedy, with unseemly stains on his clothing. At other times he is a tubby kind of fellow, smug and goofy, and seedy, with unseemly stains on his clothing. Once I was so damned livid after reading one of his letters that I decided to consult a graphologist who could, from Tim’s handwriting, fashion a convincing portrait of him, the possession of which would help me visualise his despicable chuckling chortling guffawing fatuity all the more vividly. Unfortunately, Tim confounded me by typing his letters, which rather put paid to my plan.

It would be wrong, however, to think that all of Tim’s missives are equally annoying. Some of them are not annoying at all. Those ones I do not ball up and scrunch and dispose of, but instead lay out flat upon the blotting pad upon my desk, and I reread them, carefully, while composing, in my head, a reply. Such was the case with the one cited above, regarding birds and fish. It was an unexceptionable, vaguely polite, query, and I thought it deserving of a civil response. Of course, I did not want to give anything away. I do not want Tim Thurn, or anybody else for that matter, peering into the innards of my head to see what lurks within. Whether or not I know the first thing about birds or fish is my business, and nobody else’s.

So, though it called for a polite response, I could not answer Tim’s question directly. I would have to craft my reply as carefully as I read and reread the letter – that is, very carefully indeed. Eventually, fuelled by a slurp of Dr Baxter’s Invigorating Brain Syrup, I worked out precisely what to write. First, though, I called on my priest to ascertain how many years I would have to languish in purgatory were I to be less than truthful, or, to put it bluntly, to tell a barefaced lie. Apprised of this information, which seemed not too onerous, I wrote:

Dear Mr Thurn
Thank you for your delightful and not at all annoying letter. I am afraid that, somewhere on its journey between your postbox and my doormat, it was gnawed and nibbled by squirrels or some such small skittering mammals, and much of the content destroyed or rendered illegible. The only surviving text is “an immense amount about birds” and “I am agog to know”. Might I suggest that, grammatically, it would be better to place those phrases in reverse order? That being so, I would happily bombard you with whatever it is you wish to learn about, for example, swifts and swallows and geese and starlings and linnets and partridges and quail and woodpeckers and teal and pratincoles and thrushes and warblers and auks and guillemots and shearwaters and spoonbills and skuas and albatrosses and swans and pigeons and owls and penguins and rooks and crows and dunnocks and pipits and ostriches and cassowaries and grebes and divers and cranes and egrets and sandpipers and cuckoos and parrots and waders and gulls and nightjars and cockatoos and budgerigars and petrels and fulmars and bitterns and herons and moorhens and pelicans and kestrels and cormorants, especially cormorants, and hobbies and kites and rails and eagles and bustards and corncrakes and peahens and plovers and lapwings and wrynecks and curlews and terns and doves and grouse and razorbills and parakeets and hummingbirds and wrens and magpies and jackdaws and, at a push, chickens. Let me know in a bit more detail which birds are of particular interest to you.
Yours carefully,
Mr Key