Saturday, February the 12th, 2005
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This item was intended to have a different title. Unfortunately, the only beneficiary of my titanic efforts is the dustbin, or more accurately the wastepaper bin. Now that I have stopped sobbing, allow me to explain.
Many years ago I planned to write a story about a fictional insurance convention. This tedious premise was an excuse to bring together the three most interesting insurance executives of the last century—the writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924, Workers' Accident Insurance Institute) , the composer Charles Ives (1874-1954, Ives & Myrick), and the poet Wallace Stevens (1879-1955, Hartford Accident & Indemnity). It's conceivable that the three could have met at some godforsaken conference hall, pearls among swine, shortly before the first world war. I never got round to writing the story, in any case, possibly because insurance is so life-sapping a topic, and possibly through sheer idleness.
This morning I recalled the idea when listening to Ives' second string quartet, the one where “four men meet, quarrel, are reconciled, then stride up a mountainside to view the stars twinkling in the boundless firmament”. I thought it might be an idea to ditch insurance, writer, composer and poet, but to retain the idea of a group of characters thrown unexpectedly together. And what characters could be better than Dobson and Blodgett and Mrs Gubbins and Aloysius Nestingbird and Matilda Spamclot and Tiny Enid and Jim Pond and Lars Talc and Ugo and Ugo's ma and Ulf and Lothar Preen and Istvan and Zoltan and Richard Milhous Nixon and Marigold Chew and Dennis Beerpint and Gervase Beerpint and Yoko Ono and the Grunty Man and Chris De Burhg and all the other characters teeming through these pages, all gathered to celebrate the birthday of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger?
So I wrote: It was time to conquer a new, dustier planet but I tore that up and wrote The rainsoaked hens in the rainsoaked farmyard but I scribbled that out and wrote Take three tins of Dr Birdlip's Patent Goo and a sack of potatoes and whatever I wrote petered out, and it was still morning, it was still light, or at least grey and overcast, so I was unable to stride up a mountainside to view the stars twinkling in the boundless firmament, and I sat and drank much tea, much, much tea, and then I wrote this instead.