Jasper The Baffled Eel is a brand new children’s book about an eel named Jasper who is baffled. What baffles him? Oh, just about everything that happens in his life as an eel. I don’t need to go into the details, as I am sure you can imagine yourself as an eel and tally up in your head all the things that would baffle you.

I say it is a children’s book, and that is indeed how it has been marketed by the soulless twerps in the marketing department of the publishing house. But I suspect the book may appeal more to older readers, very old readers, those in or approaching their dotage. It may even prove popular among those who have passed beyond dotage into death. At rest and encoffined, what better token of life to take with them, clutched in their cold stiff hands, than this baffling eely book?

There are no illustrations. Most of the words are simple ones, of one or two syllables, with only a few instances of longer or less common words, among which I noted flapdoodle, japonaiserie, and haemoglobin. Jasper the eel is baffled by these words, but you will not be, not even if you are dead, because nothing baffles the dead.

They say walls have ears, but birds and eels do not. They also say that Jesus wants me for a sunbeam, but try telling that to an eel. You will only baffle the eel, as Jasper is baffled, in a bravura display of realism. It may even be hyperrealism. There were certainly points in the book where I felt, vividly, that I had been plunged into the wide Sargasso sea. I was sopping wet and festooned with seaweed. Though it is fair to say that I am usually sopping and festooned, when reading books. It is, and always has been, my way.

Oh, Jasper! Jasper! Poor baffled eel. No longer a glass eel or an elver, with its life stretching before it, full of promise, but a full-grown adult eel, lost in the immensity of the world’s oceans and seas and rivers and lakes and other watery parts, watery parts that cover seven-tenths of this globe, with its magnetic bits and its vegetation and its eels. For Jasper is not alone.

But he is alone, in this book. Population of eels in its pages – one. One eel, but oh! how he fills those pages, turning up once, twice, even three times before it is time for you to turn the leaf. And that is not surprising, because this is his story. No other eel gets a look in, and nor does any other living creature, other than occasional mentions of a rabbit and a plover and a brass-necked goose. But these are incidental beings. They will, one day, have their own books, in which Jasper the eel may make a fleeting appearance.

I would have been interested to learn more, in this book, about eels and japonaiserie. But then, most people who know me well will attest that I constantly carp on about eels and japonaiserie, to the exclusion of other, perhaps more pressing, matters. I make no apology. Though I may never be transfigured into a sunbeam for Jesus, I have buttered my parsnips, and I will take them with me to the grave, instead of my copy of Jasper The Baffled Eel, which I will donate to an orphanage library, for the future edification of generation after generation of orphaned tinies, as baffled as Jasper by the complexities of this complex and baffling universe.

Now let us all sing Sag Mir Wo Die Blumen Sind?

Last night I dreamt I went to Urk again. Have you ever been to Urk, wide awake or in your dreams? You would surely remember if you had. Urk is a unique place, a tiny Belgian exclave oh! so high in the Alps. More precisely, it is an exclave of the province of Flanders, though its tiny population includes a tiny proportion of Walloons.

Urkites are known to state, with pride, that “nothing ever happens” in Urk. That is largely true. It is so tiny, and so high above sea level, in contrast to the rest of Flanders, that very little of note has ever occurred there. Its official history, available from the kiosk in the street (both singular), runs to a four-page pamphlet printed in very big type, one-and-a-half pages of which consist of advertisements. And the pages themselves are tiny! Just as the kiosk is tiny and the street is short.

Urk never signed up to the European Union’s Schengen Treaty, so visitors – if there are any – still need to show their passports at the frontier. This is a chalet at the foot of the funicular railway which climbs up, up, up, at dizzying steepness, to the village, where the air is thin and the police officer is idle.

As one alights from the railway, one is thrust almost immediately into the heart of Urk. This is the village square. It is a patch of well-tended lawn, with a flowerbed rife with tulips, and a tiny concrete statue of tiptop Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx. It is here you will also find, slumped on a bench, at all hours of day and night, the Blind Goose-Killer of Urk.

When the exclave was founded, by a smattering of Belgian tuberculosis patients over a hundred years ago, it was decreed that only one person in Urk was permitted to kill a goose, and that this person must be blind. All the other laws governing the territory were imported wholesale from Flanders. The origins of the goose-killing edict are obscure, and may have resulted from a misunderstanding. Whatever the case, there has always and forever been a designated Blind Goose-Killer in Urk. It is a lifetime position, one of great honour but paltry reward.

What happens is this. Let us say you are in Urk and you wish to make a goose die. You must go to the bench in the square and rouse the Blind Goose-Killer, who is probably dozing. You introduce yourself, presenting your identity papers, if you are an Urkite, or your passport, if you are a visitor. The Blind Goose-Killer cannot, of course, see these documents, but will enact what is known as “the sniffing and the rustling of the pages”.

You must then state, in Flemish, that you wish a goose to be killed, and ask the Blind Goose-Killer to kill the goose for you. Almost invariably, and while still half-asleep, the Blind Goose-Killer will accede to your request, although once in a blue moon, or if in an ill temper, or if bilious, he or she will refuse. Assuming the answer is positive, you must then go and fetch the goose you want killed.

You hand the goose to the Blind Goose-Killer. Apart from blindness, another characteristic shared by all who have held the position is the possession of a pair of hands with eerie, vaguely inhuman musculature. Once in the grip of these hands, the goose cannot escape its fate. You could say its goose is cooked, though that introduces a second, putative, abstract goose, which is one goose too many, and may serve to befuddle the Blind Goose-Killer, so is best left unsaid.

As soon as it has been strangled, you take the dead goose from the Blind Goose-Killer and offer your thanks. Although they are in receipt of an annual stipend from the burghers of Urk, you should give them some loose change as a tip.

As I said, last night I dreamt I went to Urk again. It was a disturbing dream, more of a nightmare. The entire tiny exclave was overrun with living, honking, dazzlingly white geese. And there, on the bench in the square, was slumped the Blind Goose-Killer, torn and bloody and lifeless. He had been pecked to death.

[This piece originally appeared under the title Tarleton Comes A-Cropper in April 2013.]

And then, as we know, there came the time when Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, came a-cropper. He was in pursuit of a shifty pastry hawker, a man with a barrow, known to galumph along ill-lit lanes. Tarleton carried a torch, sweeping its bright beam ahead of him, both to avoid pits and puddles and in hope that he might catch a glimpse of his quarry. But, as the old saying has it, a torch in the hands of a nincompoop sheds no light.

Incidentally, it is well worth your while to jot down old sayings in a notepad when you hear them. They can be invaluable in establishing rapport with countryside peasants. If you fall into conversation with such a person, you will discover that their utterances often consist of little else but old sayings strung together. By dropping in your own crumbs of rustic wisdom from time to time, you will be able to maintain conversational sparkle in otherwise trying circumstances. The beauty of it is, you do not need to grasp the actual meaning of the old sayings you deploy.

Consider, for example, the one we have just encountered, a torch in the hands of a nincompoop sheds no light. On the face of it, this would seem to make little or no sense, unless we presume the nincompoop has neglected to press the knob that lights the bulb of the torch he is carrying. But one must always avoid presumption, as we learned from Blötzmann (Third Notebook, Lavender Series). Say that saying to, say, a sophisticated urban person at a swish cocktail party, and you face a series of brusque questions demanding that you clarify what you are saying. Say the same words to a peasant in the countryside and as likely as not he will suck thoughtfully on his piece of straw and nod, before parrying with a saying of his own, such as You can’t milk a goat with a hammer.

But wait wait wait! [These are the words erupting inside your head, dear reader. You see, I know you only too well.] Grateful as I am to be given tips on talking to peasants, tips I will no doubt make use of when next I go trudging through an area of rustic squalor, I cannot let pass the clear implication in your opening paragraph that Tarleton was a nincompoop. How can such things be? Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur. a nincompoop? Surely, sir, you are in jest!

Let me answer that. It is true enough that few persons have ever trod this earth whose brains were as acute as Tarleton’s. Indeed, hold his brain in the palm of your hand and you would be astonished at its heft. It is worth noting, in this context, that you could, if you wished to, so hold Tarleton’s brain. It is kept preserved in jelly in a jar in a display case in the lobby of his alma mater, Miss Blossom Partridge’s Institute For The Education Of Frighteningly Adept Tinies. Make an appointment with the bursar, don a pair of gloves, and an attendant will open the display case and unscrew the lid from the jar and, with special tweezers, lift the brain from its protective jelly and allow you to hold it, registering its heft, for up to sixty seconds. The jar is clearly labelled with Tarleton’s name, so you will not mistake it for the brains of other alumni in other jellies in other jars in other display cases in the same lobby.

Now, as true as it is that Tarleton was no dimwit, it is equally true that nincompoopery is to be found in the most unexpected places. Here we might recall another aperçu of Blötzmann’s, from the Fifth Notebook, Lilac Series. No man is all nincompoop, he observed, but all men have an inner nincompoop ever ready to emerge and flourish. Blötzmann compares this inner nincompoop to a mayfly, in a passage I recommend to your attention. His point is that even the most dazzlingly sensible and spectacular minds may, from time to time, and ephemerally, exhibit the sure signs of nincompoopery. This is what, I argue, happened with Tarleton as he stumbled down an ill-lit lane in pursuit of the shifty pastry hawker.

It was night, a black night, moonless and starless on account of a great shroud of cloud. The first incipient sign of Tarleton’s inner nincompoop was that he did not wait until sunrise to go prowling after his quarry. Even the swiftest of shifty pastry hawkers cannot cover too much ground, trundling a barrow, in the hours between dusk and dawn. And though the lane would still be ill-lit, in the daylight, shaded as it was on either side by towering pines and titanic cedars, yet there would be light enough for a man of Tarleton’s piercing vision. Not so on this night, this black unholy night.

Unholy, I say, because it was the one night in the calendar year when imps and goblins are let loose from their fetters and are free to dash about, all mischief and havoc and mayhem. On this night churns are upended, wells poisoned, cows turned inside out. That, at least, is what the peasants believe. It is what they will tell you, in the form of old sayings, if you are willing to listen. The wise man stays abed on St Spivack’s night, they will say, or When Spivack’s Night comes round again, burn a dolly and slaughter a hen.

For all the startling heft of his brain, Tarleton, the amateur’s amateur, did not heed such warnings. In fact he dismissed the peasants’ old sayings as nonsensical babble. This was his undoing. This was his nincompoopery. And so he went a-stumbling along an ill-lit lane in the night, sweeping the beam of his torch ahead of him. What was he to do when, of a sudden, a goblin came swooping down and gobbled up the light and swallowed it and then belched it out in the form of thick black poison fumes?

Poor Tarleton was terrified, and in his terror he turned on his heel and ran from the goblin, but he made only a half turn, so no sooner did he begin to flee than he crashed into a towering pine, or a titanic cedar, and came a -cropper, and the bash given to his head dislodged his brain within its cranium, and he fell to the ground, and knew no more.

He might have been dead. The peasant who found him, at daybreak, thought him so, and being a gravedigging peasant, he hoisted his spade from over his shoulder and began to dig a pit in which to chuck the body. He whistled as he dug, an ancient rustic tune, and it was the sounds of his whistling and of his digging that woke Tarleton from his stupor. He rubbed his bonce, but remembered nothing of what had happened during the black unholy night. He did not even remember that he had been pursuing a shifty pastry hawker.

“Where am I?” he asked, in an uncharacteristically weedy and quavering voice, “What place is this? What day is it? Why are you digging a pit?”

The peasant did not reply. He was an obtuse peasant, and a peasant with a stubborn sense of purpose. Having begun to dig a grave by the side of the lane in the shade of towering pines and titanic cedars, nothing would stop him until he had shoved the body six feet under and covered it over with earth. And here was a second instance of Tarleton’s nincompoopery. Close observation of the peasant’s countenance, of the grim determination of his digging, might have persuaded Tarleton to get to his feet and run, run away as fast as he could. But he sat up, and lit his pipe, and listened to birdsong, and he was still sitting and smoking and listening when the peasant, his digging done, threw down his spade and turned and picked up Tarleton in one huge hairy hand by the scruff of his neck and chucked him into the pit and retrieved his spade and began to shovel spadeful after spadeful of soil and muck, rich with worms, over the amateur’s amateur, sprawled in the pit, and soon enough buried, never to be found..

The peasant stamped his great boots on the grave, to smooth the ground and remove all trace of his digging, and then, whistling, he went on his way.

Just one thing. If Tarleton was buried alive in an unmarked grave in an ill-lit lane in an area of rustic squalor, how is it that his brain was retrieved and stored in jelly in a jar in a display case in the lobby of Miss Blossom Partridge’s Institute For The Education Of Frighteningly Adept Tinies?

Ah. I could tell you a thing or two about Miss Blossom Partridge, and certain members of staff at her Institute, that would curdle the blood in your veins. Things innocent ears should never hear. Remember the old peasant saying, Ignorance is better by far / When you see a brain in jelly in a jar.

Last night I dreamt I went to the Nocturnal Pig Observatory again. But it was one of those dreams where everything happens in bright and battering sunlight. This made it particularly disturbing, because, with the exception of the unfamiliar light, everything else in the dream matched my memories of those times. I sat at the console, twiddling the knobs. I made adjustments to the pig scanner with a pair of pliers. I gazed out through the pig-proof plexiglass observation panel, while making indentations in my tally-stick.

One other detail that jarred was the presence, within the Observatory, of an albino chicken. I think it may have been a Vanbrugh chicken. It was so white, and the sunlight so glaring, that the chicken seemed to shimmer, like one imagines an Angel of the Lord come to earth upon a visitation.

I saw no pigs, so in that sense again the dream had an air of brute reality. Not once, in all my years of duty at the Nocturnal Pig Observatory, did I ever spot a real pig. Sham ones, yes, of course, and puppet pigs, and ghosts of pigs. But never a real, solid, porker. The flat wild bleak desolate windswept tarputa is inimical to pigs, thank heaven, but we must always be on the watch. Or at least we used to be, back in those days, when we were pig ignorant.

Now things have changed, many say for the better. Much of the tarputa is no longer as flat and wild and bleak and desolate and windswept as once it was. There are ice cream kiosks and miniature zoos and an aerodrome. There is a huge cement statue, on a plinth, of star of stage and screen Googie Withers (1917 – 2011). There is even, mischievously, an extensive modern state-of-the-art pig sty, though it is of course empty of pigs, including sham and puppet and ghost pigs.

Or is it? One would have to creep up to the edge of the pig sty in darkness, on a moonless night, and train one’s portable pig scanner upon the most likely ghost-haunted parts of the sty, and wait, in silence and awe, for a sighting, to be duly recorded in one’s ghost pig log, with a notch indented on one’s tally-stick. Who among us can say we are truly prepared for such a task?

Since I awoke, I have been thinking, like a man obsessed, about that shimmering albino chicken. What did its dream-presence portend? I can wring no sense from it, as I prance like a ninny across the tarputa, on my way to buy a choc-ice from the kiosk, and to lay a bouquet of gladioli upon the cement feet of Googie Withers. That will make my Thursday complete. And when I settle down to sleep, will I dream of the Nocturnal Pig Observatory again? Will the past haunt me still? Do I dare to eat a peach? Is there honey still for tea? Where have all the flowers gone? What’s so funny ’bout pigs, love, and understanding?

Further details here.

This sprightly homage to Procol Harum first appeared in 2009.

Conquistador, your stallion stands in need of company. For an adventurer and conqueror, especially one who led the Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru in the 16th century, this is a lapse on your part. You should never leave your horse alone and abandoned, for it is likely to become fractious, and the last thing you want to have to deal with, either in the jungles or the mountains, is a fractious horse. You might argue that a native Peruvian firing poisonous darts at you through a blowpipe would cause you more concern than a horse in a bad mood, but there you would be wrong.

Let’s say that the native Peruvian’s aim is impeccable, and his poisoned dart plunges into your neck. It is true that you would be surprised, and have only minutes to live as the toxins ravaged your innards, but it is a simple enough matter to pluck the dart out of your flesh and have one of your fellow conquistadors immediately suck on the puncture, drawing every last drop of poison into his mouth before spitting it out. Apply a medicinal poultice to the tiny hole in your neck and job done. You will be as right as rain and ready to carry on adventuring and conquering.

By contrast, if, after abandoning your stallion while you clanked off on foot on an errand of death, you return to it to find it lonely, fractious and temperamental, you may have some difficulty getting back into your saddle. Your horse may rear up on its hind legs and make terrifying bellowing noises. If you are not careful you could end up being crushed under its mighty hooves. A fleck of horse-spittle might land in your eye, blurring your vision. The rest of your conquistador troop may have ridden on ahead, leaving you behind, without food or water, or a compass. You will know, from your training back in Toledo, that it can take hours to becalm a fractious horse, by which time your chances of catching up with your fellow adventuring conquerors before nightfall are remote.

Unless the conquistador who sucked the poison out of your neck has stayed with you, you will now be all alone in a strange exotic landscape, famished. You do not know which fruits and berries are safe to eat, and in any case there will only be fruits and berries available to you if you are in the jungle. As I pointed out earlier, you might be up in the mountains, and there will be little to eat but impacted snow, which you will have to melt and soften before trying to shovel it down your throat. Bear in mind that the air is very thin up in the higher reaches of the Andes, and you will become exhausted quite rapidly, especially if you are expending energy hacking at a patch of snow to make it more easily meltable. Added to these imperilments, your horse will be hungry too, and its fractiousness may return, with a vengeance. You will have to find a way to placate it a second time, and by now it will be wise to your tricks, if it is a clever horse, which it probably is, having been chosen out of so many other horses to go on a conquistadorial campaign. It is also much more difficult to becalm a frightened horse in the dark, and the Peruvian night is far more eerie than the night in Toledo, with which both you and your stallion are familiar.

A further problem will present itself if a nocturnal Peruvian native fires a second poisonous dart into your neck through a blowpipe. Yes, it is simple enough for you to remove the dart, but without a fellow conquistador to suck out the venom, you will have to instruct your horse to do the deed. Not many horses are skilled in such an art. Apart from anything else, their mouths are much bigger than the average conquistador’s mouth, and their teeth are huge, so it is exceedingly difficult for them to get sufficient purchase on your neck to suck with any conviction. Of course, if you have a vampire horse, it will suck away quite happily, but after draining the poison it will continue to suck your blood, until you topple over, pale and dead.

All things considered, conquistador, you are advised never to leave your stallion in need of company. No horse is an island entire of itself. Further tips on looking after your horse when adventuring and conquering in Mexico and Peru are available in the government pamphlet 50 Tips For Conquistadors On Looking After Your Horse When Adventuring And Conquering In Mexico And Peru (Crown Copyright) (out of print).

Poor scribblers whose efforts are repeatedly rejected find solace from cases such as William Golding, who sent the manuscript of his first novel to more than twenty publishers before it was eventually accepted. Although stubborn persistence can sometimes pay off, the example of Golding demonstrates that, when a sympathetic editor offers advice, it can be wise to take it. Thus it is useful to learn that the beardy author made several changes to his book, which started out as the tale of a group of schoolboys trying desperately to remove a blockage of pig fat from a heating duct. He also changed the original title, Lard Of The Flues.

Whither the bint of Shelmerdox? The story goes that she went out a-hiking one morning and never came home. Some said she had a tryst with a tinker and ran away with him to his glen. Others spoke of a mysterious hot air balloon, spotted in the sky above the goaty place around noon. The parish priest insisted he saw her waving from its basket, but he was an old and foolish man and had had sundry hallucinations. There were those who muttered in the shadows of dark and desperate deeds.

Before she left, the bint of Shelmerdox ate an egg on toast and drank half a bottle of gin. She took the time to wash her dishes and place them on the drainer. But she left her purse and keys and passport and engagement ring upon the kitchen table, next to a saucer she used as an ashtray. Had she planned her disappearance, or had she not?.

The bint’s fiancé, the village wrestler, was much distraught. In the market square, by the horse trough, he blubbered like a baby as night fell and there was no sign of her. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman collected his tears in a cup, and boiled them, that she might see in the clouds of steam a vision of the bint and her present whereabouts. But the steam vouchsafed nought but unreadable swirlings, so the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman next eviscerated a few hens and read their hot bloody entrails, again to no avail. The bint of Shelmerdox had vanished off the face of the earth.

On the first anniversary, the village folk gathered in a barn and sang songs for her. They would have lit candles too, had the parish priest not eaten them all in his madness. The songs they sang were the current popular hits of the village and its hinterland, with newly-minted lyrics, some penned by the wrestler, who still wept every day.

Oh where is she now, my Shelmerdox bint? / I dab at my tears with a poor scrap of lint / If only the gods would let drop a hint / Of where she has gone to, my Shelmerdox bint!

The parish priest, whose chain was lengthened so he could just about reach the doorway of the barn, tried to offer up a prayer for the immortal soul of the bint, but he forgot why he was there, and blessed a couple of cows instead. The names of the cows were Puskas and Di Stefano. They were terrific cows, the pride of the village, and the bint had oftentimes patted their heads and whispered in their ears in that sozzled way of hers.

The commemoration was repeated in subsequent years, always with new songs from the village wrestler, still weeping copiously, and with haphazard blessings from the parish priest. One time he managed a spark of lucidity and actually prayed for the bint, though usually his benediction fell upon the cows or a patch of lupins or even the chain that ensured he did not stray beyond the village.

The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman refused to attend any of these ceremonies. But she had not forgotten about the bint of Shelmerdox. Within her hovel, among her dried-up poisonous plants and toads and beetles and pins and pokey-sticks, she carried on her eldritch flummery in secret. She had somehow got hold of the bint’s passport, abandoned on the kitchen table, and made dozens upon dozens of copies of the photograph therein, on the photocopying machine in the village post office, and plastered the walls of her hovel with them. The bint stared out at her, sour, gin-soaked, and half-asleep. The Woohoohoodiwoo Woman became fixated upon the bint’s smudged lipstick, convinced that the eerily shifting contours of the smudge in the passport photograph held the key to her vanishing. In some copies, the smudge resembled a subtropical peninsula. In others, it looked like a heron.

On the ninth anniversary, the villagers eschewed the barn and gathered instead at the goaty place. The parish priest’s chain had been shortened after he frightened some swans in the summer just gone, and he stayed in his presbytery, sucking on lettuce leaves for their moisture. The village wrestler dabbed at his tear-stained eyes with his filthy scrap of lint, and sang a threnody.

My broken heart has the weight of lead / I can barely totter out of bed / How many more sobbings must I shed? / My bint is gone, she must be dead.

According to the village’s ad hoc legal system, these words counted as a binding declaration of the death of the Shelmerdox bint. Her home and her remaining personal effects could now be burned entire, all trace of her expunged, and fireworks launched from the village green. The wrestler could stop crying and seek a new inamorata. Even were the bint to reappear, miraculously alive, she would be invisible to the villagers, fated to roam among them as a ghost.

Which, oddly, is precisely what happened, at the very moment the final firework fizzled out and was squelched underfoot by the village postie. Drunk and bedraggled and moth-eaten, the Shelmerdox bint emerged from a shrub clump and staggered across the fields into the village. She smashed the window of the off licence and hoicked a bottle of vagabond’s ruin from the display, but now she was dead to the villagers and nobody saw her.

Nobody save for the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, who inhabited a different, lopsided plane. She beckoned to the bint, and took her into her hovel, where the pair of them drank their fill and babbled about the bint’s lipstick smudge long into the night. When morning came, they trudged arm in arm to the barn, and whispered into the ears of Puskas and Di Stefano, and then the bint of Shelmerdox and the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman, and the two terrific cows, headed out of the village, across the fields, and into the hills, and up into the mountains, up where the oxygen grew thin, and they passed, oh! so happy, beyond human ken, forevermore.

Originally posted in 2009.