Quite often, a farmer will choose to give one of his cows the name Buttercup. This is lost on the cow itself, which is too stupid to understand the concept of names for things. When a cow gazes upon the world it is as if through a dense mental fog. We can go some way to replicating this, even with our much mightier brain power. For instance, I once spent a morning – a misty morning – standing in a field, chewing on a mouthful of uprooted grass, staring straight ahead, and emptying my mind of all and any stimulus, using a technique I learned from a witch doctor. It was a salutary experience, and afterwards I felt I had a much greater understanding of the interior world of a cow. I continued the experiment by asking people to call me Buttercup, to see if I would respond when my name was spoken aloud. I did not so respond, on that day or on any day thereafter. If somebody called out, in my hearing, “Oi! Mr Key!”, my ears would prick up and I would look around for whomsoever had called my name, and, when I spotted them, raise an eyebrow and answer “Yes, what is it you want, my good fellow?” or, as it may be, “my good woman?”, or even “young urchin?” But I found that when somebody yelled “Buttercup! Buttercup!” my immediate reaction was to assume I had fallen among florists.

It can be quite unnerving to fall among florists, particularly when there is a gang of them. They tend to hold, in their clenched fists, bunches of buttercups or daffodils or god alone knows how many different types of flowers, and they will thrust them under your nose while holding out the open palm of their free hand in expectation of coinage. The idea is that you give them money and in return they present you with the bunch of buttercups, or whatever. But when there is a whole sussuration of florists surrounding you, each importuning you, it is no easy matter to pick one out of the crowd and to buy his sprig in preference to any other sprig, and it is unlikely you are carrying enough cash to be able to afford all the blooms thrust at you. Whenever I fall among florists in this manner, I remember the lessons I learned from the witch doctor, and I assume the mien of a cow. Usually, but not always, the florists will disperse.

If the florists do not disperse, the best idea is to snap out of your cow-trance and to shake a stick at them, the more wildly the better, accompanying the wild shaking of the stick with blood-curdling screams. Production of such screams can also be taught to you by any witch doctor worth their salt.

If you intend to eat a dish of buttercups, either raw or cooked, do not garnish them with salt. If, on the other hand, you have it in mind to eat a cow called Buttercup, a sprinkle of salt does not go amiss, and will make the meat more palatable. For vegetarians, a cow made out of marzipan is an acceptable substitute, but here again, as with the buttercups, it should be innocent of a salt seasoning.

Never eat buttercups in the presence of a florist.

Dear Bonkers Maisie, thou art so fair.
Blind beetles scuttle through your hair,
That unwashed tangle atop your head
Wherein’s your brain, poisoned by lead.

You breathed in oh so many fumes
And now the gleam of madness looms
Behind your eyes, or rather eye,
As you muck out the filthy pig sty.

‘Twas a pig took out the eye that’s missing
When we were in the pig sty kissing
An idyll I shall ne’er forget.
The day was windy, cold, and wet.

But all days are, in this rustic hell.
Oh Bonkers Maisie, my countryside belle!
They locked you up in the potting shed.
Poisoned by lead, poisoned by lead.

When James Newell Osterberg Jr was a tiny infant, he was fed on a diet of mashed up pap made from eggs. It was the piquant memory of these slops that informed his later decision, when embarking upon a career as a musical performer, to adopt the pseudonym Eggy Pap. A typographic error – or rather two typographic errors – rendered the name differently on the label of his first vinyl waxing. Deploying one of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies avant la lettre, Osterberg determined to “honour [his] error as a hidden intention”, and retained the inaccurate pseudonym throughout his subsequent career.

From the porthole of your bathyscaphe, you see a pair of crabs scuttling across the floor of a silent sea. They are discussing the poetry of T S Eliot. It may be thought that critical analysis of modernist verse requires higher cognitive functions than those possessed by crabs, whose brains are tiny. Indeed, they are about the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen. But you might be surprised. The difficulty, for you, is one of translation. Crabs have fairly rudimentary communication skills, but they do communicate with each other, and sometimes the subject of those communications might be The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. But you would not know this, behind the reinforced glass of your bathyscaphe porthole. You would just see a pair of scuttling crabs and have no idea what was going on in their strange little heads. What you would need is some sort of manual, clearly-written, to enable you to decipher the signals being passed from crab to crab. At time of writing, no such manual exists.

But there you are, at the bottom of the silent sea, with a perfect view. Perhaps fate has decreed that you are the person to write that manual, to learn to communicate with crabs in their own language! It will probably take months, if not years, of study, and of course you do not have that much time, because before long your oxygen supply will be exhausted and you will have to return to the surface of the silent sea and return the bathyscaphe to the chandler from whom you hired it. So before surfacing, it will be a good idea to point your camera at the pair of crabs and film their discussion of T S Eliot for several minutes. You will then be able to study the film, oh so brow-furrowingly, in the comfort of your permanently-oxygenated seaside redoubt.

We shall all look forward to the publisher’s announcement of A Clearly-Written Manual Of Rudimentary Crab Communication, including several chapters of crab-exegesis of the poetry of T S Eliot, translated into human.

Clint Eastwood’s new film American Snipe has broken box-office records in its first week on release. It is quite an achievement for the octogenarian director, the more so, perhaps, given its ornithological theme. American Snipe tells the true story of a snipe with a record number of kills. The film follows the bird as it flies around, swooping down to catch and gobble up crane flies, horse flies, deer flies, beetles, dragonflies, crickets, grasshoppers, ants, mayflies, butterflies, caddis flies and moths. No explicit moral judgements are made, though at one point an ornithologist, observing the slaughter, remarks “They’re just insects”.

The film has provoked controversy in the United States, winning plaudits from right-wingers while those on the liberal left have condemned it for painting a picture of unalloyed avian savagery, instead of showing nature as twee and cuddly.

The role of the American snipe is played by an award-winning snipe with a particularly long slender pointy bill.