Should he stay or should he go?

While you were off looking for powdered eggs in the cupboard, Leon has become manager of a successful football team. Here his natural stoicism serves him well. After five triumphant seasons, Leon decides it’s time to move on, but the Board of Directors won’t let him go.

Friends ask Clive how Leon feels about staying.

“He’s resigned,” says Clive.

Dark Humour

While you were dozing in your chair with your hand in a bowl of nachos, Clive has got lost in the maze of cellars beneath Hawker’s Pot.

“It’s pitch black down here and I can’t find my way out,” he says, feelingly.

After considering the propensity of gravediggers to make puns, Algernon Swift discovers that the same is true of geologists. (If you do not believe him, try googling “jokes about geology”.) Both professions involve looking at the ground for long periods of time and Swift supposes that this inclination of the head stimulates the area of the brain responsible for punning.

As an experiment, Algernon Swift tries staring at the sky for ten minutes, and does not think of a single pun.

The Ineffable

Algernon Swift has an experience that, in spite of his large vocabulary, he cannot successfully convey. He takes a hint from modern life and tries again, this time effing and blinding his way through the telling of it, but still to no avail. It truly cannot be expressed in words.

Sporting Chance

Algernon Swift (previously uninterested in athletic exercise) has the good fortune to fall in with the members of a women’s Olympic sporting team.

“I’m a great fan of any sport played with a high net, a ball, and your bare hands,” he says, suddenly voluble.

Polygraphic, Stratigraphic

Algernon Swift has been reading Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son and has been struck by Gosse Sr.’s theory that God created the world within the Biblical timescale, but gave it the appearance – by concealing fossilised remains in the rocks -- of a planet on which life had existed for millions of years previously.

The geological record, that is to say, is deceptive and some parts of it are just plain Lias.

Public Speaking

How nervous Algernon Swift feels when he is called upon to address the Naturists Convention. But he remembers his old mentor’s advice and imagines them all sitting there in their underwear.

Private Matter

Algernon Swift receives a card from his acquaintance Mavis and with some consternation notices she has placed an X after her name. His botanical textbooks have taught him only too well what that means:

I want to hybridise with you.

The Crisis (5)

A surprising number of guests came for Reverend Hawker’s funeral, and ate their way through the spread of cold meats in aspic that we had laid out on the old oak tables. Some came from epochs of Hawker’s life that we were accustomed to hear of – tug-boat Captains, High Church clergymen, casino owners, dictionary compilers – and others from periods that must remain a mystery, including a Native American woman and her four grown up sons. That afternoon, the reminiscences were many that flowed in the hall of Hawker’s Pot, and the deceased was celebrated as a man of great wit. But how many of those reminiscences ended with: “Oh! ... but I can’t remember exactly what he said ... least ways, we laughed a great deal ... I’m sure it will come back to me ... No.” And I received the strong impression that the words of the man were disappearing after him quickly, just as he had disappeared, and soon there would be no trace left of him upon the earth.

But now the guests were gone and Swift and I were left alone at Hawker’s Pot.

“And what will you do now, Mr Swift?” I asked.

“There is much for me to do. There is the matter of Reverend Hawker’s legacy, which must be continued, especially in the light of his dying words. I will mine the archives for the best of his jokes, turn them into greetings cards and travel the craft fairs of the land. For there is also the small matter of making a living ...”

“I wish you all the luck in the world, Mr Swift.”

“And should you care to join me, Mr Jones ....”

But I had just seen Margaret pull up at the gates in her black Morris Minor. I shook my head and shook Algernon by the hand. “My work with Puns is done now,” I said. “Henceforward, I will accept the brokenness of language and try my hardest to say the things that need to be said as best I can. And when I fail I will console myself that the world I try to describe can never be perfect either, so what matter if the words I use are imperfect too?”

Margaret tooted the horn. I grabbed my bag and ran out to greet her. Swift followed me to the front door.

“Always remember to have fun!” he called out after me.

As the car pulled away, I looked over my shoulder for one last time at the dark towers and mullioned windows of Hawker’s Pot, and its empty-handed beech trees waving their arms in the air (the rooks had left the day of Hawker’s death). Then, smiling at Margaret, I looked at the landscape ahead of us, the rolling hills and the maze of hedges climbing up them, and, up above, the few shining rags of fleecy cloud. I was irresistibly reminded of Milton’s words,

The world was all before them, where to choose
Their place of rest ...

as the car followed the undulating road among the bright and laughing fields.

Let's hear it for Starlings!

So You Wanna be a Rock and Roll Starling?
(A Song by The Byrds)


The Starling-Spattered Banner


Starlings in their Eyes