It was a dark and stormy night. I wrapped myself in my cloak and took my dagger, and I crept through the dark insalubrious alleyways until I came to a doorway. I pushed it open and entered a room full of smoke and mirrors. Through a glass darkly, I hatched a plot.

It was a complicated, secret, and fiendish plot, and if it succeeded, crowned heads would topple. If, on the other hand, it did not succeed, and I was caught in flagrante, then the only head likely to topple would be my own. I was fond of my head. Like Neville Chamberlain’s, it was oddly-shaped, but it was my head, the only head I would ever have. I was keen for it not to be toppled, and so I went over and over and over the details of my plot with my co-conspirators, in the room full of smoke and mirrors.

We tested the plot for flaws. Whichever way we looked at it, it seemed sound. It could perhaps have been slightly more dastardly than was the case, and that would have been a boon, but we did not wish to unleash the hounds of uncertainty. I had been pursued and attacked by these hounds in the past, and had been lucky to escape with my head. It was Lloyd George, I think, who said Chamberlain’s head was odd, though now I check my sources I see he said it was a “wrong-shaped head”. Mine, I would say, is odd, but not wrong. It is of standard human head shape, more or less.

Seen through a glass darkly, however, my head becomes distorted, as things will do when seen through dark glass in a room full of smoke and mirrors. I try not to let this upset me, reminding myself that it is merely a visual trick, and the real head, the solid one perched on my neck, is not so distorted, albeit it is a trifle odd. And I have to say that, in comparison to the heads of some of my co-conspirators, my head is well-proportioned and nearly flawless.

The plot, though, now that is absolutely flawless. We have plotted and plotted and plotted and we cannot spot a single flaw in it. At dawn, we will lie in wait for the prince behind a splurge of shrubbery. As his carriage passes, we will leap out, in our cloaks, and plunge our daggers into him. Those are the bare bones of the plot. From what I can gather from its depiction on postage stamps, the prince’s head is neither odd nor wrong-shaped. It is a pretty average princely type of head, though wet behind the ears.

Dawn, then, will bring not just a new day, but a new era of world-shuddering revolution!

NOTE : The narrator of the above piece failed to spot the obvious flaw in his plot. The prince had an extensive network of spies, ever on the lookout for bands of ne’er-do-wells wrapped in cloaks and wielding daggers, meeting in rooms full of smoke and mirrors in dark insalubrious alleyways. That the ne’er-do-wells all had odd and wrong-shaped heads made them all the more conspicuous. They were arrested shortly before dawn, and hurled into oubliettes, where they languish still, forced to lick postage stamps showing the beauteous head of the prince.

One would expect a person called Norm to conform to a norm, so it came as a surprise to me when I met someone called Norm whose conduct was anything but normal. Indeed, it was so far off what anybody might consider normal that I would happily sign an affidavit to the effect that Norm was absolutely bonkers.

“Norm,” I said to Norm, some little while after making his acquaintance, and having witnessed a plethora of oddities, “It seems to me that your parents, when naming you, chose whatever the nominal opposite of the mot juste is. Whatever possessed them to dub you Norm? Were you, perhaps, normal as a babe in arms, only latterly striking out in wild and unhinged directions?”

“Sigismund has unlatched his pig door,” said Norm, as he writhed within his straitjacket. You see what I mean? His reply made no sense whatsoever. He was a very trying companion. I am as loyal as the most loyal of puppies to my friends and acquaintances, but I think I might have broken things off with Norm, through sheer exasperation, were it not that I, too, was enswathed in a straitjacket, and shared with Norm the padded cell from which neither of us are ever likely to be released.

Looking back on my life, I believe one of the greatest challenges I ever had to face was when I found myself in possession of a glut of leeks. It was the first – so far the only – time fate brought me to such a pass, so it is no wonder that I was at sixes and sevens. And let me assure you that I had many, many more leeks than six or seven. I had a glut of them, and I did not know what to do.

With hindsight, I can see clearly that I was wholly unprepared. But that was not something I wished to admit to myself, in my vigorous youth. Living as I did in a fool’s paradise, I thought there was nothing I could not achieve. In spite of my perplexity, I was confident I could find some use for a glut of leeks before they began, as cruel nature demanded, to rot.

I tried out various schemes, some seemingly sensible, others wild and unhinged. No matter what I did, I was making no serious depredations to the glut. The leeks I had were countless, so I did not attempt to count them. The glut remained a glut.

Then, one day, I received news of an impending visit from my spiritual adviser, lifestyle coach, and tobogganing partner, the dwarf Crepusco. Heaven forfend, I thought, that he should have to fight his way through a glut of leeks simply to reach the armchair I reserved for him anent the radiator. (Crepusco suffered dreadfully from the cold.) Thus it was that I cobbled together a sort of pulley system and hoisted each and every leek in the glut up from the floor so it dangled from the ceiling.

Unfortunately, so low was my ceiling in that place at that time, that I, being taller than a dwarf, found myself, when standing, in the midst of dangling vertical leeks. My vision was occluded, and I had to jostle my way through them blindly. No such terrors for the dwarf Crepusco, who sailed past me, sat himself in the armchair, and, as I had hoped he would, dispensed advice.

“As your spiritual adviser,” he said, “I have nothing to say. As your tobogganing partner, I note we are due to make a run down a mighty crevasse next Thursday. And as your lifestyle coach, let me just say that I am deeply impressed by your innovative interior design initiative. A room with hanging leeks in profusion is both piquant and leeky, and is that not a combination anyone sensitive to interior design would kill for?”

I blundered against the dado rail, doing myself a mischief, but I had to acknowledge his wisdom.

Some while later, of course, the leeks did rot, but by then I had made a name for myself as a piquant and leeky interior designer, and I never looked back.

“You must be that fire-priestess everyone is talking about.”

This is a line from Game Of Thrones that I have been hoping to use in everyday conversation. I could, of course, just say it next time I find myself leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece at a swish cocktail party, to any woman within earshot, but even I realise how foolish that would be. No, what I need to do is to find the right milieu, one where not only can I fall naturally into conversation with a fire-priestess, but one where she is a common subject of discussion among the bien pensants. That is very unlikely to happen in my bailiwick, where I do not think I have ever met a fire-priestess. Nor have I heard anybody talking about one, though to be fair most of the people who live around here speak in barbaric incoherent grunts, if they speak at all.

Shortly after writing the above paragraph, I decided to immerse myself in some serious fire-priestess research. I took the phone off the hook, drew down the blinds, barricaded the door, and crouched in the middle of the living room in the stance Blötzmann calls “the alert chaffinch” (see the Third Notebook, Lilac Series). Concentrating hard for twenty seconds as recommended, I was then able to proceed. I put on my shoes and Tyrolean sports casual jacket, unbarricaded the door, and pranced off to the railway station, where I bought a ticket to Shoeburyness.

Using the Blötzmann method, I had ascertained that the Essex coastal town was a likely milieu to find everyone babbling about a fire-priestess and, indeed, a fire-priestess herself. I would then be able to meet with her and deploy the line from Game Of Thrones. To do so had become my dearest wish, to the point, I suppose, of mania.

Shoeburyness is notable for its proximity to the large Ministry of Defence facility at Pig’s Bay and also for its bottomless viper pit, of which I have written previously. As I disembarked from my train, I was confident that my Blötzmann-inspired hunch was correct, and I immediately pranced into the railway station canteen to commune with Shoeburynessites who, I felt sure, would have no other topic on their lips than the presence in the town of a fire-priestess. I bought a cup of tea, a sausage snack, and a slice of fruitcake, and sat down at one of the tables, cocking my ears.

To my bitter disappointment, in the time it took me to munch my sausage and fruitcake and to drain my teacup, I heard not a single mention of a fire-priestess. Ukip, badgers, foopball, Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, the weather – these seemed to be the hot topics in Shoeburyness that day. I crashed out of the door and went prancing through the streets, down to the beach. Nobody I passed had a word to say about a fire-priestess.

I wondered if perhaps I might draw her to me by setting fire to a waste bin. I found one, overflowing with paper and cardboard and seaside detritus, and ignited it with my lighter. As I hoped, a woman came rushing towards me. She was dressed in the uniform of a Shoeburyness Seaside Community Support Patrol Officer, but I knew, deep down in my gut, that it was merely a disguise. I opened my mouth, about to speak the magical words, but before I could do so she unleashed a Tazer and zapped me, deep down in my gut.

As I lay writhing on the ground, panting and frazzled, she doused the flames in the waste bin. But here is the curious thing. She did so by making the tiniest gesture, a significant sweeping movement of her hand through the air, so quick it was virtually imperceptible. Only a fire-priestess could do that!, I thought, before losing consciousness.

When I came to, I discovered I had been bundled into the freight van of a train, and it was just pulling out of Shoeburyness station. Pinned to my Tyrolean sports casual jacket was a civic proclamation banning me from ever setting foot in the town again. I staggered to my feet, and peered out of the train window, and there on the platform I saw, waving at me, her flaming red Pre-Raphaelite tresses blowing in the breeze, her eyes pools of fathomless inky-black witchery, the Shoeburyness Seaside Community Support Patrol Officer. Only I knew her for what she truly was. But as I gazed, the train gathered speed, and soon she was but a speck in the distance, and then she was gone.

At midday, greased and pungent, the village wrestler took up his position by the war memorial. With his aggressive stance and tiny brain, he challenged everyone passing by to a wrestling bout. But not one among the villagers was fool enough to fight him and so, in his frustration, he would fling himself upon a dog or a chicken or a defenceless toddler straying from its mother’s apron-strings, and wrestle them to the ground and pin them there, counting to ten in awful grunts, and then stand up, arms raised aloft in victory.

He was the undefeated champ when, eventually, the sheriff shot into him a dart tipped with a powerful horse tranquilliser, and he keeled over, bashing his head on the war memorial. He lay there unconscious for days. The villagers debated what to do with him when he awoke. Chains and cages were suggested, as was electro-convulsive therapy. But then, when he did awake, the village wrestler was placid, all aggression spent. He took a chicken and a flask of water drawn from the village trough, and he wandered off along the lane that led to the aerodrome. We never saw him again.

Here is the official Hooting Yard bird forecast for south-east England. Today’s guest forecaster is Dame Vera Lynn.

There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow.

NOTE : Hooting Yard is not responsible for any inaccuracies in the bird forecasts provided by our guests. And quite frankly, Dame Vera has been trotting out precisely the same forecast at regular intervals for the past seven decades. As far as we are aware, nobody has ever thought to carry out a statistical analysis of the accuracy, or otherwise, of her claims. Nor is her methodology at all clear. Certainly it is grotesque to think that she makes her pronouncements after “reading” the still-throbbing hot entrails of freshly-slaughtered bluebirds, a theory propounded by some irresponsible scalliwags in the Dover-based organisation Cliffwatch. Those people wouldn’t know a haruspex if one came up and biffed them in the chops.

Tomorrow’s bird forecast will be presented by special guest Dame Vera Lynn.