Sunday, January the 16th, 2005

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One Afternoon on the Lane That Runs From Coctlosh to Pointy Town

It was a sweltering day, and I had spent a profitable hour or two rummaging in the market square at Coctlosh. My haversack was filled with purchases, including aniseed and bleach and curd, a dark enticing flap, gewgaws, a hat, iced and jellied kiwi fruit lozenges, mayonnaise and more items from the first half of the alphabet. Making my way home along the lane that runs from Coctlosh to Pointy Town, I passed again the bench where that morning I had encountered the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. I told you about that meeting on Tuesday 7th December last year.

Father Hopkins was no longer sitting on the bench. His place had been taken by a bespectacled chap with a high forehead. At a glance, I took him to be a man of powerful intellect.

“Good afternoon,” I said jauntily, tipping my hat.

“Cat's foot iron claw. Neurosurgeons scream for more at paranoia's poison door,” he shouted.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, disconcerted.

“Twenty-first century schizoid man!” he bellowed.

To my great excitement, it dawned on me that I was talking to cerebral pop god Robert Fripp. I had not been mistaken when I judged my interlocutor to be a man of great intellectual accomplishment.

“I am thrilled to meet you,” I babbled, “For you are the man who managed to have an electric guitar technique named Frippertronics after you, even though others had developed it and used it long before. That shows chutzpah!”

“Blood rack barbed wire,” he replied, “Politicians' funeral pyre. Innocents raped with napalm fire. Twenty-first century schizoid man.”

I tossed him a plum as I pondered the deep significance of his words. I treasured this moment. How rarely we find ourselves in the presence of genius, rarer still to meet genius, chutzpah, round spectacles and pop immortality commingled in one man. I was hanging on his every word.

“Death seed blind man's greed,” he roared. I hastily scribbled it down in my notebook.

“Poets' starving children bleed,” he continued, as I gazed at him, awestruck. The afternoon sun glistened on his spectacle lenses and shiny high forehead.

“Nothing he's got he really needs. Twenty-first century schizoid man,” he growled, and with that he jumped up from the bench and hared off down the lane. Sadly, he had ignored my gift of a plum, but I did not let that spoil my glow of contentment. I walked briskly home to listen to my much-treasured CD of Toyah Wilcox's Greatest Hits.