I received an invitation to attend a swish sophisticated cocktail party, and decided to wear for the occasion my second-best bib and tucker.

On the evening itself, with the party in full swing, I was leaning insouciantly against a mantelpiece when I was approached by a fellow guest.

“You are a grown man,” she said, “Why are you wearing a bib?”

I embarked upon a lengthy explanation of the phenomenon known as involuntary slobbering, citing certain vivid examples both from my own experience and from the historical records. I prattled for quite some time, holding my interlocutor spellbound, until one of my exemplary slobbering vignettes caused her to interrupt me.

“Spiro Agnew?” she cried, so loudly that she caught the attention of guests on the far side of the room.

“Indeed so,” I said, “And I will not qualify my assertion with that weasel-word allegedly.”

At this, she executed a startled little jump, and confessed to a terrible fear of weasels. I told her they only alarmed me when they went pop! up and down the City Road. More than once, I added, such weasel-popping had caused me to slobber involuntarily. I was pleased, momentarily, to have brought the conversation back to my chosen topic, but my new companion was now fixated upon weasels, and insisted I join her in a search-and-destroy mission in case any weasels had infiltrated the cocktail party.

“With what,” I asked, “Shall we destroy any weasels we might hunt down?”

“Well,” she said, “What is that?” and she pointed to my tucker.

“That is my second-best tucker,” I said, “It goes with the bib.”

“We can use it to smother any weasels we find!” she cried, and she took me by the hand, and led me away from the drawing room towards another part of the house where, she hinted, there might be weasels.

I never did get the chance to finish my exemplary slobbering vignette featuring the thirty-ninth vice president of the United States of America. But the weasel-frightened lady gave me her telephone number, so one evening soon I will call her, and tell her the rest of that tale, and several others, until the cows come home.

Nobody knew whence Inspip fled. He was last seen at one end of Sawdust Bridge, but it was a fugitive sighting. It was not clear whether he was at the pointy end of the bridge or at the pointier end. Whichever end it was, one moment Inspip was there, and the next he was not, and nobody knew whence he fled.

In the days before his fleeing, it was said of Inspip that he was in the doldrums. But this was a mishearing. He was not in the doldrums, but on the doll drums. He was pounding out a hotcha boohoocha beat on a tiny drumkit usually played by a doll, its arms controlled, puppet-style, by strings manipulated by an adept. Inspip snatched the drums from the doll and popped them in his pocket and took them to his lair.

Nobody knew where Inspip’s lair lay. There were rumours that it was concealed in the shadows under the pointier end of Sawdust Bridge. Others had it anent the Blister Lane Bypass. After Inspip fled, the sheriff organised a posse to search for the lair. It proved fruitless, like the sheriff’s diet. “I once ate an apple,” said the sheriff, “Never again! Now I know how Eve felt.” He was a fallen man, the sheriff, unlike Inspip, who was not.

A trail of scattered talc led to a barge moored on the filthy canal, but this proved to be a red herring. (See Nashe’s Lenten Stuffe, Thomas Nashe, 1599.) Nonetheless, the barge was ransacked and turned upside down in the hunt for clues. They found a doll’s drumstick, a chicken bone. Was the chicken killed by Inspip before he fled? The posse fell upon an outlying barn. Hence the well-known song The Sheriff’s Posse In The Barn, with its hotcha boohoocha beat and emotionally wrenching lyrics and twangy guitar part.

In the end it turned out that Inspip fled where eagles dare, armed to the teeth and calling himself, by turns, Broadsword or Danny Boy. The name Inspip was erased, even from his metal tag. Such is the mystery of the patron saint of chicken-stranglers, there is not even a memorial plaque on Sawdust Bridge, either at the pointy end or at the pointier end.

Yesterday I told you lot it is International Brain Awareness Week. I neglected to mention that it is also International Brian Awareness Week. This is the time of year when we make sure we are aware that the full name of Cornelius Cardew, the firebrand Marxist-Leninist composer and author of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, who once threw Yoko Ono out of his house, was Brian Cornelius Cardew. Why did he drop the Brian? It seems a far more “proletarian” name than Cornelius, so one would have thought he would embrace it. As Wilcox – a non-Brian – noted, “it’th a mythtery”.

As you lot probably already know, today is the first day of International Brain Awareness Week. But not at Hooting Yard! No, here we decided instead to celebrate International Lobster Brain Awareness Week. Who gives tuppence for the paltry human brain when we could be raising our awareness of the majestic brain of the lobster? It is an organ that, as one noteworthy lobster enthusiast claimed, is quite possibly the pinnacle of God’s creation.

The first thing you ought to know about the lobster brain is that it is roughly the size of the tip of a ballpoint pen, or Biro. Imagine that! There are several other things you will wish to know, but we have a whole week ahead, so be patient.

If there is anything in particular you are keen to be made aware of, with regard to the brains of lobsters, please add your questions in the Comments. We have a team of lobster experts standing by, ready to answer them.

Nota Bene : Please feel free to frame your questions in the language of lobsters.

This afternoon I shall be undergoing what seems like the umpteenth injection of a needle directly into my eyeball. It occurs to me that at some point I ought to write an account of what goes on at Tuesday Injection Club, introducing you lot to some of the characters I encounter, the doctors, nurses, and ancillary staff and the other patients. I can also attempt to answer some of the burning questions that are raised, such as why do I never get offered a cup of tea? and who is that mad woman who marches to and fro brandishing a clipboard but never actually speaks to anyone?

I shall be interested to discover if, this week, I experience the Black Spot. Sometimes, after an injection, I have a Black Spot in my eye for a day or two, and sometimes not. The first time this happened it was mightily disconcerting. Now I treat it with airy familiarity, and imagine it as something that might have inspired a tale by J Sheridan Le Fanu.

My more devoted readers will no doubt be asking but Mr Key can you actually see any better? to which the answer is, no, not yet, I am still perceiving the world through a blur of hazy mist or a haze of misty blur.

Onwards to jab time!

So glorious, the Large Door. Behind it, one prince in one palace. A cage bird in a birdcage. Ruffled feathers and one cardboard box on its side. Clever men with enormous brains next to an armoire. Salutes made hilarious by puppetry. There are pianos and machine guns.

There is one prince. There is a chatelaine with a wooden leg. There is a cage bird in a birdcage. There is blood on the rug. There is a cake in the pantry. There are candles on the cake. A clever man with an enormous brain has put a cardboard box over his head.

Electricity has been installed. Jasper in overalls. Millet strewn under the birdcage. Echoes of chivalry or typhoid. Weeping widow in widow’s weeds behind an arras weeping. Also wooden leg. Wood from banister railings. Interior railings be damned! Breadcrumbs in the millet.

Intricate wiring courtesy of Jasper. Chatelaine’s oxygen pump. A vase of genetically modified lupins. Such tiny lupins. Such a hysterical prince. One prince without a cardboard box. The throwing of fits. The tidiest annexe. The marmaladeless larder.

Grief embroidered on a pin cushion. Tallow candles guttered. A worm in the birthday cake. Slime and cobwebs near the clever men at the armoire. The result of the Honved cup tie. Smoke from the attic. Hippies encamped in the grounds in tents in perpetuity. Elsewhere harpies.

Platitudes of sausage and gristle. One eye of one prince in one palace. Milk, lumber, string. Delirium of Jasper besotted. Bluebottle splattered on the wainscot dead. Funereal violins. Jug on the mantelpiece. Warped perspective of cardboard box and birdcage.

Saturday tennis. One lupin wilted and turned to stone. There is a freak thunderstorm. A bat was seen. One bat in one sky in one hour. Muffled gunfire o’er the hills and far away. Jasper running with scissors. The chatelaine’s leg hankering for its balcony.

Terrible giddiness of one prince. Enter the clairvoyant pig. Ten tin drums and a tuba. Vinegar blush of cloth-eared gran. A clever man hangs a Hazchem banner from the ceiling. Startling vulgarity of the firstborn. Dix Pap, Cray Lars. The bluebottle was a doll.

Drastic measures of Jasper in extremis. One prince chucks one golliwog from one window. Pity and guff. Heresies enumerated by the chatelaine in sight of the cage bird in the birdcage. Soup before marmalade. Fenland memento mori.

This could continue interminably.

Large door.

Oh look, a tubercular peasant, slouching through the muck. His tunic is a filthy rag. He lacks both grit and pluck.
If he had either, he’d stand tall, and shake his fist at God, and he would stride on o’er the hills, chuckling like Ken Dodd.
But he has never laughed, not once, in all his peasant years. And there is nothing, just a void, in between his ears.
Your ancestors were all like this, or most of them, at least. A slouching, snivelling ignoramus … “And what rough beast…?”

The other day, in my potsage [sic] about a man of the cloth, I made reference to a dough cormorant. Since then I have been inundated with letters from readers asking how they might go about making one. I am happy to report that the fashioning of a dough cormorant is child’s play – with two provisos. First, you need to ensure your dough is of the correct consistency, and second, you must have a basic understanding of bird anatomy, with particular reference to the cormorant.

Regarding the dough, you will need the physical strength to knead it, thoroughly, to achieve the right consistency. If you are too weedy to knead, you may have to consider employing a professional dough-kneader, and they don’t come cheap, at least in my experience. Recently, in connection with a different project, one not involving cormorants, I needed a supply of dough of very precise heft, and I was simply not up to the task. At the time, I was convalescing from an injury sustained in an accident when, funnily enough, a deranged cormorant was let loose in the confines of a baker’s pantry in which I happened to be present. Upon my release from hospital, and bent on my dough-related project, I had no option but to hire the services of a professional kneader, and it cost me an arm and a leg. Not literally of course. I doubt that a kneader exacting such a price would attract much custom, although I am willing to entertain the idea that in certain circumstances a person could become so dough-desperate that they would pay it.

The consistency of your dough will be as nought, however, if you are bird-ignorant. Let me put it as plainly as I can. You will need to know what a cormorant looks like. The cormorant is a type of bird, and birds are those things you see flying overhead, silhouetted against the sky. But it is well worth bearing in mind that not everything you see flying overhead is necessarily a bird. If it is enormous, and metallic, and has jet engines, it is almost certainly an aeroplane. Conversely, if it is tiny, so tiny that it is barely visible, it is likely to be a midge or a gnat. There are all sorts of other things that appear flying or hovering or being buffetted which are not birds, such as bees and wasps and hornets and wind-borne plastic carrier bags and heat-seeking missiles, to name but five.

Several types of bird, including the cormorant, are mentioned in the Bible. The theologian Loptap has argued, convincingly, that almost all birds are Roman Catholic, although one or two espouse Lutheranism, and chaffinches are notoriously godless. Personally, I have grave doubts about the partridge, but as a general rule let Loptap be your guide.

You can work out the differences between the cormorant and that well nigh limitless class of things-which-are-not-a-cormorant by studying diagrams and drawings in books such as The Bumper Book Of Diagrams And Drawings Of Cormorants.

When you are reasonably sure that you know what a cormorant looks like, simply take your lump of dough and mould it into the appropriate shape. Hey presto! You have a dough cotmorant.

To satisfy yourself that your dough cormorant is of an acceptable standard, and will not be mistaken for a dough model of another bird, or worse, of that-which-is-not-a-cormorant, it is a good idea to compare it with photographs in books such as The Bumper Book Of Photographs Of Dough Cormorants.

In nomine patris et filii spiritus sancti.

There was a man, he was a man of the cloth. I’ll repeat that. There was a man, he was a man of the cloth. Let that sink in.

When asked to identify himself, by a sentry say, the man would say “I am a man of the cloth”, and when he saw a flicker of doubt on the sentry’s face, a puckering of the brows, a purse of the lips, a narrowing of the eyes, he would say “Would you like to see my cloth?”, and he would take from his pocket a frayed and filthy rag, besmirched with remnants of food, soup stains and eggy smears and embedded crumbs, and he would hold it by two corners, between fingers and thumbs, to give the sentry the clearest possible view.

The sentry, perhaps cocking his rifle, would say something like “That is not a cloth, it is a frayed and filthy food-splattered rag”.

To which the man, the man of the cloth, would reply, “I did not say it was a cloth, I said it was the cloth”. He would say this with such conviction that the sentry would be jarred and disconcerted.

“What do you mean, the cloth?” he would ask.

“Is that not self-evident?” the man of the cloth would snap back without missing a beat, further discombobulating the sentry, who could do little but shake his head.

Sensing the sentry’s confusion, the man of the cloth would say, “Let me help you. I am a man of the cloth, and this is the cloth. You have now seen it, so I shall scrunch it up and replace it in my pocket, and I trust you will let me pass, unimpeded”.

Usually, this folderol would work like a dream, and the man of the cloth would be allowed to go on his way.

But there was an occasion when he met with a sentry of fearsome mettle, who would not be bamboozled. This particular sentry had long ago learned to give no quarter where attempted bamboozlement threatened. He still suffered from awful nightmares about his rookie days, and the incident with the ne’er-do-well bent on infamy, armed with a bottle of bleach and a dough cormorant, and the other incident, on his very next watch, with the other ne’er-do-well, fanatically committed to an enormity, carrying a lump of marzipan and a framed portrait of Nobby Stiles. This sentry was not to be bamboozled again, so he shot the man of the cloth.

He shot him in the ankle, hobbling him, and as the man of the cloth had not yet scrunched up the cloth and replaced it in his pocket, as he toppled to the ground and released the cloth from his grasp, between fingers and thumbs, it fluttered and was about to drop beside him, when a sudden gust of wind lifted it into the air and blew it away, o’er fields and filbert hedges, away, away, it was swept away and gone (see “Resignation” from A Character of a True Christian, Abiezer Coppe, 1680).

The man of the cloth ought to have resigned himself to his loss, but he did not. As soon as his ankle mended, he set out in search of the cloth. He carried with him, as succour, a cloth, which rapidly became frayed and filthy and food-splattered, but he was painfully aware that it was merely a cloth, not the cloth. He wandered the world, and wanders it still, o’er field and filbert hedge, o’er tor, fell, and hill.