Renaissance : noun, from the French for “rebirth”. If you stumble upon this word in the course of your reading, you need no longer scratch your head in dimwitted befuddlement. Its primary definition is a reference to the occasion, in early July in the Year of Our Lord MMXVIII, when the Hooting Yard website, having been kaput for some while, came blazing back to life (hence, rebirth) like a phoenix rising from the ashes. (If you want to know what a phoenix is, you will have to wait for the “P” section of the Hooting Yard Guide To Non-Existent Birds.)

Lonely, he made a companion of string and wood and tin, and sat her at his window, as if she were looking out. And whenever he returned from tiresome jaunts, she was there, framed in the window, to welcome him home.

But when he was at home, she had her back turned to him. She was facing the outside world, immobile, yet desperate to go frolicking dizzily into that world, where other things of string and wood and tin were surely to be found.

At the hotel, the bellhop had, implanted in his head, the brain of a cat. His own brain had been removed and sat in preserving jelly in a jar on a shelf in a cupboard in a lab. It was a locked lab, the only key to which was kept in the pocket of the mad crazed lunatic boffin who had carried out the brain-swap, during a thunderstorm on the previous Tuesday. This boffin habitually assumed the guise of a janitor, and performed janitorial duties the better to hoodwink his hoodwinkees, of whom there were several dotted about the site, from the parking attendant to the secretariat. The secretariat consisted of but a single secretary, into whose head the boffin planned to insert the brain of a badger, having first removed the secretary’s actual brain and placed it in preserving jelly in a jar on a shelf in another cupboard in the lab. He calculated that the use of two different cupboards would prevent him from muddling up the two different brains, the bellhop’s and the secretary’s.

Each cupboard was itself locked, as locked as the lab, and the boffin-janitor thus had three keys to cope with. To anybody unlettered in the art and science of locksmithery – that is to say, to as near as dammit every single person present upon our gaily rotating planet, alive or dead – the three keys appeared to be identical, or at least so similar one to another that they could not be told apart. Thus, affixed to each key by a looped length of cord cut from a bootlace was a small rectangle of cardboard. On each rectangle was written, in a biro shortly to be exhausted of its ink, in draughtsmanship staggering in its delicacy, as if learned and perfected in an earlier century when penmanship counted for something among the educated classes, and surely too beautiful for the usual effusions of the humble biro, an indication of the lock the attached key was designed to unlock.

The labelling of the keys was simple, and thus resistant to misunderstanding by anyone but a halfwit. “Lab”, “Cupboard with red door”, “Cupboard with yellow door”. The boffin-janitor could think of no circumstance that might cause him to muddle the keys, save for the unscheduled repainting of the cupboard doors, in different colours, over a bank holiday weekend, by contractors hired and brought in from some area beyond janitorial control. That such a thing could happen was so egregious that he tossed the idea aside, much as one might toss a tossable bittybob down a well, were one passing by a well, clutching a bittybob for which one had no use. There was a well in a field between the hotel and the lab. The boffin-janitor passed it on most working days, but had never tossed anything into it.

Nor had he drawn any water from it, for he could not. It was a dry well. It had been dry for some years, by dint of subterranean engineering works not unconnected to the construction of the car park anent the lab, and another, larger, more distressingly bleak car park that served the hotel. The works had been carried out, in their underground phase, by a team of what used to be called navvies, the brain of each of whom had been removed and in its place implanted the brain of a mole. All the removed brains had been stored in preserving jelly in jars on shelves in cupboards in the lab, but one night malfeasance had occurred, conducted by highly-organised ne’er-do-wells. It was on the morning after this enormity that the boffin-janitor went tootling into the nearest village to parlay with a locksmith.

In reporting these matters, it may be that I have got some of the details wrong. I was drifting off to sleep when my papa told me the tale, which he himself had heard from an old pal of his, a frequent guest in many an hotel, a travelling salesman who dealt in exotic rugs and carpets, whose name I seem to recall was G. I. Gurdjieff.

Pity me, O people of Switzerland. I am a Swiss soldier, and I languish in a Swiss dungeon, under sentence of death. My crime? I sang, in a public square, the milking-song Khue-Reyen. And thus I was condemned. I broke the law, and now I must pay the price.

For comfort, in my cold Swiss subterranean cell, I clutch to my cheek the Bib of St Bibblybibdib. There is a story to tell of how this sacred relic came into my possession. It is not a particularly arresting story, but I will tell it anyway, to pass the time before I am dragged from my dungeon to the gibbet, and hanged by the neck until I am justly dead.

There were a half-dozen of us, six Swiss soldiers, camped on a hill above a Swiss village. Our orders were to await the dawn and then to charge, screaming, down to the village and to lay it waste. Doing so, we were told, would bring us one step closer to victory over our foe.

And so we charged, and so we screamed, and so we laid waste. And among the buildings to which we laid waste was the village church. And in the sacristy of this church was kept, in a bejewelled casket, the Bib of St Bibblybibdib.

Was it the real Bib, or was it one of the dozens, even hundreds, of counterfeit bibs thought to be held in parishes throughout the cantons of Switzerland? We did not know. We were rough tough Swiss soldiers, not men of God. That is why, in deciding which of us should carry off the Bib as his war prize, we cleared the surface of the altar in the village church of its holy bric-a-brac, and played a game of cards upon it. We played My Lady’s Pudding under knock-out rules, and I was the last Swiss soldier standing.

And so I was given first dibs on St Bibblybibdib’s bib.

I will carry it with me to the place of Swiss execution, if they will let me. Whether they do or do not, at this hour of my death, pity me, people of Switzerland.

Sick at heart and improperly trousered, the vicar galumphed across the fields towards the viaduct. Not for nothing was he known as the vicar of the viaduct. Air wafted about his head, tiny little flying insects perched ephemerally in his hair. He had his sermon all prepared, committed to memory, for the service of the blessing of the crutches. The sun blazed down. Brave Helios!

You Will Fail, Laurence is the title of a book which appeared to me in my dreams last night. It was a children’s book, written in very short, staccato sentences, and lavishly illustrated with detailed, brightly-coloured drawings – in spite of the fact that Laurence spent much of his time enveloped in what my dream insisted on calling “fog-storms”.

An additional curiosity was that I was looking at a facsimile of the book online, and the dream suggested that the book itself did not exist, this digital version being a hoax perpetrated by japesters for reasons which must remain unutterably mysterious.