Monday, January the 19th, 2004

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A Person From Porlock

Like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, I know the misery of being inconvenienced by a person from Porlock. It happened thus. It was a Wednesday, I recall, teeming with Hooting Yard's most tremendous rainfall for forty years. I was sat at the kitchen table attempting to insert a new pair of laces into my gleaming big black leather boots. Minnie was at her spinet, as usual, idly tinkling. I suspected that soon the tinkling would cease and she would launch into an impassioned performance of one of her ten thousand and twenty two songs. I hoped she would play my favourite, the Anthem for a Brutish Haberdasher, or perhaps her mangled sea shanty Bring Me Your Winding Sheet, O Mother of Mine. As I fiddled ineptly with the laces, our door crashed open and a hirsute and drenched individual burst into the room. In an instant, a puddle formed at his feet. Minnie continued to tinkle.

“I come,” announced the stranger, in a declamatory roar as if he were addressing a vast crowd of huddled petitioners, “I come not from haunts of coot and hern. Nor do I come in response to your whistle, my lad.”

“I was not whistling,” I replied.

“Precisely!” he continued, “I come from Porlock, and I am going to confiscate your aglets.”

So saying, he withdrew from the pocket of his bright yellow windcheater a pair of garden secateurs, swiftly cut the aglets off the ends of my brand new laces, and charged out into the downpour. He did not close the door behind him. I held my head in my hands and began to weep. Minnie played the pounding opening chords of Dismal Corncrakes.