The picnic fly is among the most vexing creatures ever created by the Almighty. While it is indubitably true that He moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform, it baffles the brain to wonder what moved Him to move in such a way that He felt inspired to think up, fashion, and let loose upon the world the picnic fly.
There is a body of opinion that the picnic bee, picnic wasp, and particularly the swarm of picnic hornets are more vexing than the picnic fly. Bee, wasp, and hornet, runs the argument, have tiny pointy envenomed protuberances with which they can sting any patches of bare flesh paraded by a picnicker, sometimes, though not often, resulting in an agonising death. The picnic fly, on the other hand, is by comparison harmless. This argument carries much weight, and even as I write I find myself wondering how it can be that I can possibly justify a claim that the picnic fly is the more vexing flying beastie. But I shall plough on regardless of common sense. That is my way.
Picnic flies usually go about in small swarms. They will hover in the air, at about human adult head height, at something of a loose end, awaiting the arrival of a brake containing picnickers with their picnicking appurtenances. Upon the arrival of the brake in the buttercup-dappled meadow by the gurgling brook, the picnic flies will disperse upon the air, temporarily. They do this because no picnicker in their right mind would lay the picnic blanket on ground immediately below a hovering swarm of picnic flies.
Note : this is not to say that all picnickers are necessarily in their right minds. Some are deranged or otherwise have dislodgements of the brain which cause them to make foolish picnic decisions. The terms “picnic fool” or “picnic fathead” have been coined to describe such persons. Neither are terms which should be bandied carelessly about. It is advisable to be on firm ground when uttering the charge.
Each picnic fly will now watch carefully as the preparations for the picnic are made by those who tumble out of the brake. Timing, for the picnic flies, is of the essence. They will not reconvene, forming a hovering swarm at human adult head height over the picnic, until it has been fully assembled. Thus, the picnic blanket is laid out and, if there is a hint of wind, stones will be collected to weigh down the corners. Folding chairs may be unfolded and placed around the blanket for the elderly, the infirm, or the picnic-inexperienced. The hamper or hampers will then be removed from the brake, and the contents arranged upon the blanket. In addition to cups and beakers and plates and saucers and bowls and dishes and cutlery, cutlery, cutlery, there will be sausages and pies and fruits of various kinds and bloater paste sandwiches and flans and tarts and Laughing Cow foil-enwrapped cheese triangles and biscuits and trifle and marmalade and pickled onions and butter and roll-mops and salads and iced buns and sliced cold meats and pastries and boiled eggs and chocolate buttons and boiled sweets and toffee and pork scratchings and puddings and potato snacks and soup in flasks. Other flasks will contain tea, and there will be lemonade and wine and Tizer and dandelion-and-burdock and beer and sherry and cans of Squelcho!. Depending on the picnic demographic, there may also be laid out, near to but not on the blanket, tennis racquets and tennis balls and medicine balls and the appropriate kit for sword-fights, archery contests, and hammer-throwing.
Within seconds of the last item being laid out and each picnicker sat or sprawled, the swarm of picnic flies will suddenly reappear, hovering directly over the picnic blanket. Taking their turns, a few flies at a time will separate from the swarm and make darting flights down towards the blanket, where they will plod on their tiny suckered feet across, say, the icing on an iced bun. They will regurgitate some sort of godawful gack from their innards on to the icing, then suck it, together with a modicum of the icing, back up into their tiny but ravenous fly’s maw. Momentarily sated, this grouplet of picnic flies will return to hovering-height, and another contingent will descend.
It is important to note two things about the activity described. First, that it all takes place in a matter of a few seconds, if that. Also, that flies are pretty tiny, as well as quick, so the disgusting business with the regurgitation and the sucking is not generally visible to the unassisted eye of the picnicker. What usually happens is that one of the picnickers – it may be a chap with a decisive moustache and a blazer and cravat – flails his arms in an attempt to swat the fly. Unfortunately, by the time the chap’s brain has sent the signal to his arm to flail, the fly will have done its unseemly feeding and be halfway back to the hovering swarm. I told you they were quick. And because the unseemly feeding is not apparent to the unassisted picnicking eye, what then happens is that another picnicker – it may be a demure young lady in a bonnet, clutching a slim volume of twee verse, or a bluestocking with a thick hefty book of intractable German philosophy – will pick up the iced bun with her free hand and take a dainty bite from it. Along with bun and icing, she will then of course swallow what remains of the picnic fly’s godawful gack, that part of it which it did not suck back into its maw.
I would argue that this is precisely why the picnic fly is the more vexing. At least you know where you are with a bee or a wasp or a hornet, singly or in swarms. If they cannot be swatted away, and a picnicker is stung, then the first aid kit can be fetched from the glove compartment of the brake, and salve and bandages applied. As I said, agonising death is rare, and basic cosseting will usually be all that is required. The picnic flies, being smaller and quicker and more determined than bees, wasps, and hornets, will be as near as dammit impossible to swat away, and their predations of the sausages and pies and fruits of various kinds and bloater paste sandwiches and flans and tarts and Laughing Cow foil-enwrapped cheese triangles and biscuits and trifle and marmalade and pickled onions and butter and roll-mops and salads and iced buns and sliced cold meats and pastries and boiled eggs and chocolate buttons and boiled sweets and toffee and pork scratchings and puddings and potato snacks will be all the more relentless. Each and every picnicker will climb back into the brake with a small amount of godawful gack in their stomachs, or lodged in their gums, with who knows what dastardly eventualities.
The best one can hope for is that at least some of the picnic flies will be fated to drown in the soup or tea or lemonade or wine or Tizer or dandelion-and-burdock or beer or sherry or, if they manage to negotiate the narrow opening in the lid, the cans of Squelcho!.
Does anyone remember the rhyme children used to sing, long long ago?
Wod & Pym, the choc ice men
Clattering towards the buffers
Their choc ices melt in the noonday sun
They’re such a pair of duffers!
That was the version I knew, which I sang lustily, with my tiny pals, as we skittered and scampered and made mischief in the bomb craters. I had absolutely no idea what we were singing about, and I had forgotten the song itself, until, the other day, I heard it on the radio. I was listening to a play. It was dull and foolish and badly acted, and beset by awful hissing and feedback, which may or may not have been deliberate. I would have switched the radio off had I had the chops to rise from my pallet of straw and cross the barn to do so, but I had a splint on my leg and a bandaged head and no sense of purpose. So I just lay there listening, in the small hours of the morning, before the crows began to caw, before the milkman started on his rounds.
There was a scene in the play, set, as far as I could gather, in the dystopian ruins of a bombed city, where the protagonists, a milkman and his floozie, were having a terrible row about crows. Exhausted by shouting, they both fell silent, and then, as from a distance, I heard the song, chanted by children somewhere in the rubble. It faded, there was hissing, and the pair started arguing again.
It would be nice to be able to say that hearing the song again after all these years brought memories of childhood flooding back, but it didn’t, not really. It did make me sit up on my pallet of straw, as best as I was able. Alert, I scribbled the words on the back of a cornflake packet. I might never sing again, if my childish caterwauling could have been called singing, but I felt a great sense of urgency to know more about Wod and Pym. Who were they? Why were they clattering towards buffers? Did their choc ices really melt in the noonday sun? Had they ever really existed? I suppose I thought that if I could find answers to those questions I could learn something, too, about my own life, about my past, about the trajectory that had taken me from the bomb craters of a ruined city to this barn, through the roof of which the rain came in, when it was raining, where my only visitor was the milkman on his morning rounds, where the only sounds were the cawing of crows and radio broadcasts, where time passed slowly, and there were no clocks.
When the milkman came that morning I pressed the torn scrap of cornflake packet into his hand, and pleaded with him to find out everything he could about the rhyme. He said he was a busy milkman, but that once a fortnight the mobile library parked on a patch of ground hard by the dairy, and he would try his best to help me. I told him he was a saint. He said he must be getting on, as he had much milk to deliver. I asked him to turn off the radio as he left. They were playing music now, Xavier Cugat or some such, and I could not bear it. Outside, the crows were cawing.
They say there was once a grisly murder in this barn. I have seen no ghosts. There is an ethereal albino hen that haunts my dreams, with its terrible eggs, but I do not think that counts.
The milkman was as good as his word. I do not know how many days passed before he came bearing a few pages torn out of a reference book, for I did not keep a tally. He gave me the pages, and a bottle of milk, and asked me if I wanted the radio turned on before he left. Again I compared him to a saint, and he blushed. One does not often see a milkman blush. I told him I was done with radio broadcasts, and that he could take the radio set away with him, and if he did not want it for himself then to drop it into a pond. He thanked me and unplugged it and left. He did not say what he would do with it. I listened out for a splash, but the rain was dripping through the roof, relentlessly, and the bandages around my ears would have muffled any other sound.
What I learned from the pages torn from the reference book by the milkman was that Wod and Pym were, indeed, true historical characters, from the previous century. They were a pair of chancers, continually thinking up money-making schemes, schemes invariably doomed to failure, sometimes leading to spells of imprisonment, sometimes leading to riot in small shabby townships. They made and sold decoy ducks, pin cushions, alarm bells. They planned but did not realise a crocus plantation. They hawked taffy. And with the coming of the railways, they devised their travelling choc ice shop. The idea was to be constantly mobile, aboard a locomotive, selling choc ices to hot and eager tinies at each railway station they stopped at. But neither Wod nor Pym gave a thought to refrigeration, and the train they commandeered crossed desert and prairie, not realms of ice and snow. This was the flaw that sunk their scheme, and for which they were ridiculed by the tinies gathered at hot sun-bashed stations along the line.
Hence the song I had sung in my very different childhood, when it was cold, when the wind howling through the ruins chilled my bones, when I sucked icicles and shivered in the porch of the ruined dancehall, wherein those adults who had not yet fled the city danced to the sounds of Xavier Cugat & His Orchestra, piped through a Tannoy, loud as bombs.
I have written before about hiking pickles, and I make no apology for turning to the subject once again. It is, I would attest, a topic of endless fascination. Most reasonable people would agree that there are few spheres of human activity which lend themselves to the likelihood of becoming embrangled in a proper pickle as hiking. When we consider just three of the challenges with which the hiker must contend – weather, terrain, and human folly – it is hardly surprising that pickles are a commonplace of the hiker’s lot.
But let us not make the mistake of muddling the pure hiking pickle with such other pickles as one might be plunged into when hiking. Take, as mentioned, the terrain. A hiker might be hiking in the fells, and, in the enshrouding mist, come suddenly upon a tarn, so suddenly that he fails to break his hiking stride, and instead finds himself ankle- or knee- or, good heavens!, waist-deep in tarn-water. In itself, this is not a proper pickle, as the hiker merely needs to turn around and hike back out of the wet tarn on to the dry fell. There will be a bit of a pother about drying out the tarn-soaked boots and socks and trousers, never an easy task in the moist air of the enshrouding mist, but this hardly constitutes a pickle. The hiker can sit on a stone and smoke his pipe and consult his map of the fells while awaiting a sunburst. No, for it to be a proper pickle we would have to add the detail that, lurking in the tarn, below the surface, is an unimaginably tangled tangle of subaquatic creeper or nettlevine, possibly with an eerie primitive sentience, such that at the first hint of the hiker’s legs invading its watery domain, it wraps itself round and round, with the rapidity and colossal strength of a boa constrictor, thus entrapping the hiker helplessly. Up on the remote fells, in the mist, his cries for help will be unheard, except by the birds of the fell, and other creatures. If he dares plunge his arms into the tarn, to make an attempt to untangle his lower limbs from the fiendish vegetation, then his arms too will become entangled, making his predicament all the more terrible. This, you can be sure, would be a proper pickle. But is it a hiking pickle per se?
I would argue that what we have here, in this mercifully theoretical scene, is not a hiking pickle but a tarn pickle, or even an uncanny subaquatic sentient vegetation pickle. The fact that our hiker hiked across the fells to get into this pickle is, in a sense, incidental. Given the mist, and the tarn, the very same pickle could happen to, say, a farm-person in search of a lost sheep, or an athlete in training for a prize race, or a commando parachuted on to the fell with instructions to survive until picked up in a week’s time. You get all sorts of people on the fells, and not all of them are hikers.
The true hiking pickle, then, is one in which the action or deed or pursuit of hiking is fundamental to the pickle itself. What we must -
Excuse me, I have just been handed a piece of paper, rife with scribbling.
I see, when reading it, that the scribbling is pertinent, not just to the topic of hiking pickles in general, but to the specific theoretical pickle I have just described. I had better copy it out, so that you may read it too, and to avoid accusations that I am trying to set myself up as the sole authority on this breathtakingly exciting subject.
A Counterblast To Mr Key’s Assertion That The Theoretical Pickle Described Is Not A Hiking Pickle
In attempting to portray the pickle as a tarn pickle or an uncanny subaquatic sentient vegetation pickle, Mr Key posits three non-hiking persons to whom the pickle could have happened. I will take each of these three in turn and demonstrate, in each case, the absolute wrong-headedness of Mr Key’s argument.
I. The farm-person in search of a lost sheep. It is well known that farm-persons know every inch of their land. Be it fell or meadow, field or dale, they know every blade of grass, every pebble, every ditch, every sprig. They certainly know where a bloody tarn is. Even in an enshrouding mist, high on the fell, the farm-person would never plunge inadvertently into a tarn. And even if we wildly surmise that he did, he would, like all farm-persons, be wearing wellington boots, from which he could easily extract his lower legs and leap with great agility out of the tarn and on to the fell, before the submerged creeper or nettlevine had sufficient purchase to entrap him, the outer part of wellington boots being smooth, unlike a hiker’s boots.
II. The athlete in training for a prize race. In this case, Mr Key’s error is so blindingly obvious that a slow-witted monkey would not make it. We have an athlete scampering across the fell, his brain focussed entirely upon the finishing tape of the prize race he is in training for. So, when he plunges all unawares into the mist-hidden tarn, does he stop and allow his legs to be entangled by creepers and nettlevines? Of course he doesn’t! He keeps on running, like the tiptop athlete he is, emerging on the other side of the tarn before any eerily sentient vegetation has a chance to bring him to a halt.
III. The commando parachuted on to the fell with instructions to survive until picked up in a week’s time. Commandos are armed to the teeth. Within seconds of having his lower limbs entangled, the commando would have unsheathed a knife so sharp it would make you shudder, and hacked and slashed at the vegetation to free himself. If, in the process, he hacked and slashed his own legs, he would not care one jot, for as well as knives and guns he has packed in his kit swathe upon swathe of bandages, and sachet upon sachet of disinfectant unguents, and as soon as he has clambered commando-fashion out of the tarn and on to the fell, he will smear and patch up any wounds he has inflicted and be on his way, bent on survival.
It is thus clear that the pickle Mr Key describes is indeed purely a hiking pickle, and could not in any circumstances short of arrant stupidity be considered as any other type of pickle whatsoever.
I stand – no, I hike – corrected.
I am grateful to Glyn Webster for alerting me to the latest fiendish schemes of the US Navy:
the lamprey’s body contains a single wavelength of oscillation at any given time, and thus always maintains an S-shape during swimming. Speed is proportional to the frequency of this wave, and can vary by an order of magnitude. Lampreys can even swim backward. Ayers is building an autonomous robotic lamprey that can do the same thing.
Ayers is not new to this. He’s been building robotic lobsters for years, and he’s basing his lamprey’s technology on those
“Now we’re almost to the point where theoretically we could begin building whole platoons of robotic lampreys and putting them on operational maneuvers in the water,” says Dr. Joel Davis, “A robotic lamprey is ideal for stealthy underwater search and identification missions.”
Well, this is exciting! Today I received in the post a personal letter from “one of the greatest clairvoyants in France and throughout the world”, David Phild! You know, David Phild, Clairvoyance, Numerology, Astrology, Medium, Magical Sciences and Remedial Magnetism! And he has written to me with the thrilling news that all good things will come to me in 2012. Just consider this:
All January – General improvement
18 February – Enormous Money Win
In March – An encounter with love
All April – Lucky at gambling
One day in May – Huge success
In June – Luxury travel
July – A loved one returns
19 August – Big secret revealed
September – Colossal inheritance
October – Good health confirmed
November – Your luxury home
24 December – 12 Sumptuous Gifts
David’s letter was obviously delayed in the post by those scallywags at the Royal Mail, which explains why the predictions for the first quarter of the year didn’t come to pass. There is a very simple reason, which is, as David says, “Important! You will not succeed without your Celestial Owl. Ask for it immediately.” I am going to ask for my owl as soon as I have finished writing this, so at least the rest of the year will go according to plan.
What I like about David is that he does not raise false hopes. He takes pains to point out that by asking for the Owl of Celestial Protection I will not actually receive a real bird in the post. No, what I get will be more valuable than that – a medallion!
This Magnificent Golden Talisman of Great Value has Recognised powers of Protection from evil spells, from misfortune and from health problems.
The engraving and the consistency of your medallion make it one of the most powerful protection domes. It is recognised as fabulous by the greatest Grand Sages and Mediums in the World.
The catalysis of the golden metal and the structure of your skin will generate a variety of beneficial waves that will be your rampart against evil. Some vibrations extinguish witches’ spells as well as spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle against you.
The very composition of the medallion provokes a type of recuperative energy that prevents you from wasting money and having to pay out amounts pointlessly that gradually plunge you into ruin. Under the protection of the Talisman, you will see that a single pound will enable you, under certain conditions, to live for as long as if you owned one hundred pounds.
The Owl can also reactivate your energy and your drive by inundating your cells with a redeeming force of renewal. You will be able to feel better, faster, and for longer, without any medical treatment.
Who wouldn’t want an owl like that?
David’s letter warns me that “what I am doing for you must remain our secret”, so very cleverly, the owl medallion is designed to look like a piece of cheap mass-produced tat., which clearly it is not. I contacted several Grand Sages, using ethereal powers not dissimilar to David’s, and they all confirmed that the Owl of Celestial Protection is absolutely the bee’s knees in the field of talismanic celestial protection through the medium of embossed owl on trinket. “There is no more powerful owl,” said one of these Grand Sages, whose name I didn’t quite catch, though I understand he resides on a mountain peak in a distant eastern realm, obscured by clouds.
I admit to being slightly disappointed that, fantastic as the owl is, David nowhere states that it is anything but silent, and emits no hoots. Quite frankly, even though my Owl of Celestial Protection is a free gift, I would prefer one that hooted. I am sure the construction of a battery-powered hooting medallion cannot be beyond David’s wit. If he needs financial help for its development and protection, he can use the thirty-two pounds I am sending him, as he requests, though nominally this sum is to guarantee my receipt of the Sublime and Detailed Revelation of the 12 Major Visionary Phases. As far as I can gather the free owl doesn’t work without the paid-for revelation, or vice versa. Perhaps I need to clear this up with the Grand Sages before committing myself.
POSTSCRIPT : I had the devil of a time trying to get in touch with the Grand Sages again, what with the weather and the aether and a severe case of the Blavatskys, so in desperation I turned to Het Internet. It made for interesting reading, not least in demonstrating just how selfless “dear David” is. While he is offering me a free owl which will protect me against “spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle”, there is little else about him on the interweb except spite and bad rumours and tittle-tattle, much of it quite vicious. The man is sorely in need of his own owl, with or without battery-driven hooting. Indeed, I am so appalled at the contempt in which he is held, I have a good mind, as soon as I receive my owl in the post, to send it back to him, that he may be celestially protected from the brickbats of the spiteful hordes.
In the meantime, I have set to work on the design and production of a Hooting Yard Owl Medallion. Clutch it to your bosom, and you will be granted the power to scamper up mountainsides and shimmy up flagpoles and disport yourself in other high places, there to crow your unstinting devotion to Mr Key from dawn till dusk, and from dusk till dawn. Await your personalised letter, offering you this fabulous owl entirely free of charge except for the charge that has to be levied on the advice of Mr Key’s bank manager.
For previous episodes of Maud, see here
Herewith my report of the events of the 14th inst. If I am required at a future date to give similar accounts of the 14th ult. and the 14th prox. I will be happy to oblige, present circumstances permitting.
My name is Dr Slop and I am a mesmerist, duly certified as such by the Worthy Fellowship of Victorian Mesmerists. On the morning of the 14th inst. I received a summons to the bungalow adjoining the bungalow of which I had recently taken possession. I was given to understand that the maidservant of the bungalow, one Baines, of slovenly yet devoted disposition, had taken leave of her senses and was giving vent to her inner life, in spite of being a person of the lower orders. In a matter of such urgency I dispense with the social niceties and I swept with élan and steely determination out of doors without wearing a hat.
Upon opening the gate of the adjoining bungalow and proceeding along the garden path, I was disconcerted to encounter a cad. The cad began to explain that his dearest wish was to entice the lady of the bungalow into the garden, and could I assist in persuading her? I cut him short with a clean gentlemanly thrust of my fist into his windpipe, a ploy I learned when serving overseas in the tropics, where it saved my bacon on more than one occasion. The cad collapsed upon the garden path and will not, I warrant, pester the lady for some time to come. My ears were offended by his unmanly gasping and gurgling noises, so before continuing to the front door I kicked him in the head several times.
I rapped upon the door of the bungalow with great urgency, whereupon I was ushered inside by a sloven I took to be the maidservant, Baines. Before I had the opportunity to place her head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands in order to mesmerise her, her mistress cried weakly to me from the breakfast parlour. She insisted that I join her for a breakfast of devilled kidneys before dealing with the patient. My own preference has always been for kedgeree, bloaters, and raw liver as the first meal of the day, and indeed I had already eaten double helpings of all, and had additional portions tucked in my pockets in case of sudden peckishness, but one does not refuse a breakfast invitation from a neurasthenic lady, so I sat at the table with her and tucked my napkin under my chin.
While I waited for Baines to pile my plate high, the lady, who I was given to understand had already eaten one devilled kidney, began to rock back and forth on her chair. Her pallid face blushed crimson, her Pre-Raphaelite tresses stood stiffly on end as if she were attached to one of those newfangled electromagnetic machines, and she began to declaim incomprehensible gibberish in a grating and disturbingly masculine voice. This was no mere attack of the vapours.
I leapt up from my chair and was about to place the lady’s head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands over her, when Baines, behind me, dropped the plate and clutched at my arm. Before I was able to berate her for the unseemly and socially reprehensible nature of her action, she gibbered something. Incapable of understanding her strangulated lower class vowels, I slapped her several times across the face, then several more times, and demanded that she speak slowly and clearly and in the best approximation she could manage of civilised human speech.
I must commend her efforts, for by listening closely I learned that in all likelihood the lady’s alarmingly unladylike plight was due to some malign tampering with the devilled kidneys, which had been prepared by a person from Porlock who was the devil incarnate and who was chained up downstairs in the basement where he had been acting as a skivvy but today had been recklessly entrusted with cooking the breakfast.
Apprised of this information, I tossed the maidservant a penny, as one might to a performing monkey, and proceeded with élan and steely determination down to the basement to confront the fiend. The sloven had spoken the truth, for there he was, red and horned and cloven-hooved and goaty. I was about to place his head in a vice and make strangely significant passing movements of my hands over him when something quite unprecedented happened. Nothing in all my experience, not even when I was serving overseas in the tropics and was regularly subject to all sorts of weird and mind-numbing doo-dah, was anything like this.
One moment I was taking a quick bite out of a bloater from my pocket preparatory to manoeuvring the vice into position, the next I was chained and red and horned and cloven-hooved and goaty and gazing back at… myself. I, or he, had not even swallowed the mouthful of bloater. Somehow the person from Porlock, the devil incarnate, had exchanged bodies with me, in an instant. I watched in horror as he proceeded up the stairs with élan and steely determination, bent on who knows what maleficent purpose. I rattled my chains and wept.
Thus far, I have nothing further to report. So loud does the steam hiss through the pipes in this basement kitchen that I cannot hear anything of what is transpiring upstairs. I must wait for Baines, I do not know for how long. My only solace is that the length of my chain is sufficient to allow me unhindered access to the pantry, where there are handsome supplies of kedgeree and bloaters and raw liver.
Her own people were mostly miserable. They wrote long glum books and sang glum songs and went on glumly about the extent of winter and the sound of the rivers freezing and the shortage of meat – not just the serfs who had had every reason to feel thoroughly depressed, but the rich and privileged. They worried about their souls and stared deeply and hopelessly into the depths of themselves. Well, that was how they had always carried on in the past anyway. It might be different since the upheavals, but Aunt Irene doubted it – circumstances did little to alter the nature of populations. They were probably worse, if the truth were known.
Alice Thomas Ellis, The 27th Kingdom (1982)
A further find in the paper-midden: a scrap dated 16th February 1992.
Yesterday I considered a string of words to form an alphabet, words beginning and ending a-b, b-c, c-d and so on. Let’s see if I can remember it. Alb, basic, cod, drone, earmuff, flailing, garish, hoi-polloi, [imaj?], jack, kernel, loom, marzipan, no, orlop, [p-q], quiver, railings, squirt, tofu, [u-v], vow, wax, xerophilously, [y-z], zeugma. The idea is (after finding something for the missing words – invented proper names if necessary) to write a story which mentions all those in order.
This story was never written, twenty years ago, but perhaps I shall apply myself to it now, or in the near future.
Long, long ago, so long ago that the Malice Aforethought Press was not even a twinkle in my eye, I wrote a poem entitled My Plankton Theory. Here it is:
All my life I’d waited
To announce my plankton theory
The public laughed
Top scientists jeered
When they heard my plankton theoryWhen I was a small boy
I swam in ponds and lakes
Then I grew up
Got diving gear
And I worked out my plankton theoryNow I’m about to die
I won’t go skindiving again
It’s in my head
On my deathbed
But I never, ever tested my plankton theory
As I remembered, there was another version of this in which I had a bauxite theory rather than a plankton theory. That can’t be right, because the middle verse would make no sense. The flaw in my recollection was confirmed when I came upon a big fat book of poems in the same paper-midden as I found the old Malice Aforethought Press mail order catalogue. It turned out I was confusing My Plankton Theory with a wholly separate piece, a love song entitled 40 Years Of Hell In A Bauxite Mine. I shall draw a veil over that one.
The point is that this book is crammed with over one hundred poems, written I would guess between 1980 and 1986, and they are almost uniformly dreadful. I can just about tippy-tap out the words of My Plankton Theory without running screaming into the hills to throw myself into a tarn, but only just. I find myself thanking the Lord and his angels and the hideous bat god Fatso and many another deity that Het Internet as we know it did not then exist, for there would have been a very real risk that I would have posted my verses for the world to read instead of scribbling them in a private notebook. Youth of today, be warned! Think before you commit your burblings to the interweb!
It is not as if I can excuse the drivel as the product of teenage angst, as I was no longer a teenager. I do not understand, looking back, why I was writing verse instead of prose. But verse it was, page after page of it. It is true that I had a very short-lived career as a performance poet, in those heady post-punk days when performance poets were all the rage. When I say short-lived, I ought to be clear and explain that I did one gig. This was in Norwich, in 1982, where I supported the amusing band Serious Drinking. (The amusing thing about them was that they pretended to be oiky proles but were of course university graduates, and at least two of them were in receipt of healthy trust funds. I suspect genuine oiky proles spotted the imposture without too much difficulty.) My approach at the gig was that, after shouting – yes, shouting – each poem (examples, Snackbar Hooligan and Ten Days In a Shed), I scrunched up the sheet of paper on which it was hand-scribbled and threw it into the audience. I think I was generally well-received, and I am not entirely sure why this remained my one and only appearance before I resurfaced on a stage, twenty years later, shortly before the dawn of the Hooting Yard you know and adore. I do recall feeling a tingle of pleasure when the Norwich gig was announced by John Peel on his radio show. I was billed as “Frank Key The Poet”.
Perhaps, in spite of the lack of actual performances, it was the thoroughly wrong-headed idea of myself as “The Poet” that kept me beavering away at verses for the next few years. I moved away from Norwich and was no longer in contact with any kind of local music scene where I might have been prevailed upon to spout my stuff to crowds of adoring fans. The big fat hardback notebook was, then, quite consciously, just for me. I am pleased to be able to say that I never badgered family and friends with it. Few experiences are as discomfiting as being trapped in a room with someone who says “Let me read you a few of my latest poems”, and I had been at the listening end of that particular horror often enough never to inflict it upon anyone else. But it does make me wonder why on earth I was writing all this stuff, and that it was all verse and no prose.
As for My Plankton Theory itself, the roots of this towering work lie in the late 1970s, when I recall watching a television programme – probably Horizon – in which it was confidently asserted that “krill is the food of the future”. Well, almost forty years on, here we are in the future, and I am not eating krill. At least, I don’t think I am. Maybe I ought to take a closer interest in packaging, and lists of ingredients, and modern food production processes. It may be that I am eating a lot more krill than I suspect, shredded or pulped and somehow injected into my breakfast cereals and snack items and smokers’ poptarts and so forth. But I envisaged a more explicit krill-centred diet, chains of fast food restaurants called Krill R Us or Kentucky Fried Krill, krill-based delicacies for the gourmet, or even that staple of science fiction imaginings, the krill-pill, which I would obtain from a Krill-O-Mat before zooming off on my jetpack. Alas, the future has not turned out quite as forecast. Thereagain, when I was a little boy I swam in municipal swimming pools rather than in ponds and lakes, I have never been skindiving, and I never, ever really had a plankton theory.
Q – What is your claim to fame?
A – My claim to fame, though modest, is one of which I am tremendously proud, and which I never tire of shouting from the rooftops, with the aid of a Tannoy. I cocked a snook at Pook Tuncks.
Q – That is flabbergasting. Tell us more.
A – Gladly. One springtime day I was bustling along the boulevard, bustle bustle, when across the way I spotted Pook Tuncks. He was standing, stock still, in the lee of a linden tree, lost, I thought, in thought. I hailed him. “Ahoy there! Pook Tuncks!” I boomed, “Thou Jesuitical duck-mesmerising versifier!” And I cocked a snook at him, and bustled on along the boulevard without waiting for a reply. When cocking a snook, one does not entertain a response, or the point is lost.
Q – What happened next?
A – My bustling continued until I arrived at a snackbar. It was called Big Pingu Snackbar and was situated at the intersection of the boulevard and Erebus And Terror Street. It is no longer there. The property is now I think a palazzo di tat. This then extant snackbar I entered, and strutted to the counter, where I ordered a snack before sitting down at a table by the window where I had a good view of the boulevard. I had bustled too far along from Pook Tuncks and the linden tree for either to be visible, though other linden trees I could see.
Q – What form of snack did you order?
A – A pickle-packed sandwich and a beaker of milk. Service at the snackbar was woeful, which is perhaps one reason why it closed down. I had to wait a long time, sitting looking out of the window, before a grim-faced bepimpled sallow stooped skivvy brought my snack to the table. No napkin was provided, so there was an altercation. I insist on several napkins in snackbars, one for my lap, one on which to wipe my hands, one with which to dab my lips, one to mop up any spillages I might cause during my snacking, and one for later use, which I pop into my pocket. But I was given no napkin at all, until I made loud complaint. The loudness was unassisted, in that I did not have recourse to the Tannoy I use nowadays to bruit my claim to fame abroad. My voice can be loud enough in the confined space of a snackbar, and the Big Pingu Snackbar, despite its name, was not a big snackbar. The skivvy was at first unwilling to bring me a napkin, which I thought odd. Surely, I thundered, the napkin is an essential component of any snackbar’s toolkit? My use of the word “toolkit” as it is deployed by management consultants and pointyheads bewildered the skivvy, or at least she pretended bewilderment. It was hard to tell. In my experience snackbar skivvies can be past masters at dissembling. My insistence and loudness and eye-popping frenzy did persuade this one to fetch my napkin, but she brought just one. I lowered my voice, just a tad, and explained that I required several napkins, though I did not itemise the uses to which I would put them, as I have done for you. It was not, in my view, any business of the skivvy’s. I was patronising the snackbar and I wanted my napkins, it was really as simple as that.
Q – This is all very interesting, but what of Pook Tuncks? Did he detach himself from the lee of the linden tree and pursue you into the snackbar?
A – I have yet to conclude the anecdote of the napkins.
Q – Well, let us pass on that. I think the listeners are agog re Pook Tuncks.
A – It is, I promise you, an anecdote both instructive and amusing and well worth the hearing.
Q – Be that as it may, this programme is called “My Claim To Fame”, not “Napkin World” or “Annals Of The Snackbars”, and your claim to fame is that you cocked a snook at Pook Tuncks, so perhaps we could concentrate on that.
A – I would not want it to be thought I am some kind of napkin monomaniac, so, reluctantly, I will desist. But I must ask, do those napkin and snackbar shows exist, or did you just make them up for the purposes of your argument?
Q – I am merely the host and presenter and, if you like, anchor of “My Claim To Fame”, so I am not familiar with the full schedule of programmes. I cannot say for certain whether those I adverted to exist or not.
A – Could you find out, while I sit here twiddling my thumbs?
Q – Now is not the best time. Perhaps at the end of the show you and I could go together to see the programme director, within whose head is gathered such a body of knowledge of the schedules that it would dazzle you.
A – That sounds like a capital idea.
Q – So, Pook Tuncks…
A – And if there is not currently a snackbar and napkin strand, then I would be happy to present such a programme, daily, at breakfast time, or even before breakfast, at dawn, or before dawn, in the middle of the night.
Q – I am sure the programme director would be only too willing to discuss that with you.
A – Good, that is settled then.
Q – Then let us proceed. Did Pook Tuncks come crashing into the snackbar, hot on your heels, to berate you for cocking a snook at him?
A – No, he did not. I never saw hide nor hair of him again, ever after. I like to think my cocking a snook at him must have given him pause, and caused him to retreat, away from the boulevard and the lee of the linden tree, into reclusion and solitude and the bleak existence of a hermit, shuttered in a hut on a remote promontory far from humankind. Such is the power of my snook, when cocked.
Q – Gosh.
[Tinkly, hesitant, music, followed by the weather forecast.]
Often, if you are out of doors and crane your neck at such an angle that you are looking up at the sky, you will see a flock of birds. Not always, but often, often enough in any case to make my opening sentence credible. I strive, as a writer, to be credible. I think all writers do. We want readers to believe what we are telling them, if only temporarily, during the act of reading. This is the case even with persons who write of outlandish and preposterous things, for example those kinds of science fiction stories set in the distant future on far-flung planets, where characters with names like Zybog and Kagvond try to prevent an explosion at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215, while menaced by intergalactic beings with tentacles and metallic parts. This is obviously tosh, but the writer will try to make it credible. As soon as you put the potboiler or pulp magazine aside, you can dismiss what you have just read as piffle. The important thing is that you believe it while you are reading it.
So I do not think it is outwith the bounds of reason to claim that, in peering up at the sky, you will often see a flock of birds. It depends where you are, of course. Some areas are more bird-haunted than others. If you are in a desert, you might see a flock of vultures, circling over potential carrion, but probably not as often as, at the seaside, you might spot a flock of seagulls. In fact at some seaside resorts, particularly those with gigantic rubbish tips in the vicinity, it is hard to look up at the sky without seeing teeming seagulls. The desert and the seaside are extreme cases, geographically, but the fact that in both, or rather above both, one might glimpse flocks of birds is telling, I think, in terms of my argument.
Not all birds fly about in flocks. Come to think of it, not all birds fly. The ostrich, for example, is a flightless bird, and a remarkably stupid one. That being so, you are unlikely to read a sentence such as
Above, a huge flock of ostriches swooped in the blue sky, silhouetted against the blazing sun at noon on Thursday.
which would probably cause you to fling the book across the room in exasperation. On the other hand, you might find it credible if the sentence was
Above, a huge flock of ostriches swooped in the beige sky, silhouetted against the blazing suns at noon on Thursday at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215, where Zybog and Kagvond were doing battle with intergalactic beings with tentacles and metallic parts while trying to prevent an explosion which would have unforeseeable effects on the space-time continuum.
In this context, flying ostriches might be credible. Much depends on your tolerance for science fiction. If it is low, you might still fling the book across the room in exasperation, and go to find something else to read.
If a writer wishes to entertain you, however fleetingly, with a scene in which a flock of birds is visible in the sky, they will need to do a spot of ornithological research to ensure that the birds they mention are indeed ones that fly about in flocks. One of the reasons for this is that no writer is omniscient, and it may well be that among their readers are persons who know more than they do about particular subjects. The ignorant but wily writer can get around this by being non-specific, as in this example:
“Gosh, Primrose, look! There is a huge flock of birds in the sky!”
The risk here is that the ornithologically-competent reader could find themselves wondering what type of birds, precisely, are being pointed out to international woman of mystery Primrose Dent in your exciting espionage thriller. In their wondering, they are likely to become distracted and disengaged from the convoluted plot you are doing your best to keep moving briskly along, and they might fling the book across the room in exasperation. It would be better, then, to write
“Gosh, Primrose, look! There is a huge flock of starlings in the sky!”
as starlings do in fact fly in flocks. Your bird-brainy reader will be entertained, and may even impute to you more ornithological knowledge than you actually possess. This is not without its own risks, but generally speaking the reader will bask in their delusion so long as you do not get too carried away. Just because you know that starlings fly in flocks does not mean that you can start blathering on about their feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, and what have you, unless of course you already know about these things. If you do not, but still feel impelled to write about starlings’ feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, etcetera, to add a piquant starlingy quality to your prose, then for God’s sake submit your manuscript to a trained ornithologist before unleashing it upon the world. This is particularly important if, in devising the character of international woman of mystery Primrose Dent, you decide it would be apt to make her a starling expert. If you cannot be bothered to do the research, or cannot afford the services of an ornithology adviser, your best bet would be to make Primrose Dent an intergalactic woman of mystery, and have her scooting about bent on espionage at the weapons facility on Planet X-47215. That way, she can be an expert on space-starlings rather than real, earthly starlings, and you can write whatever you like about their feeding habits, nesting patterns, lore and legend, etcetera, because you will be making it all up. Just don’t forget to make it credible.
It may be that you wish to peer at flocks of birds in the sky without ever writing a word about them. In that case, take a pair of binoculars and a packed lunch, and stride up into the hills, and gaze. Even in areas less bird-haunted, sooner or later a flock of birds will appear in the sky, God willing.
Over at The Dabbler today, I examine an episode from the life of the noted simpleton, Simple Simon. His adversary, the pieman, also appears in this tale, and not, it must be said, in a good light. As in all the best fables, a moral is drawn at the end, though not a very enlightening one.
