Sunday, July the 16th, 2006
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Episodes one to five of our exciting serial story Testimony Of A Tundist appeared between 29 April and 14 May. Due to stupidity, the continuation of this unbearably exciting yarn had to be postponed. Now at long last we are ready to proceed. Herewith, then, episode six…
Owls done with, I was ready to begin the second, more rigorous stage of my pretundistship. On a March morning frightful with gales, Plankton Chews collected me from my room and took me to an abandoned quarry. Planting me in the midst of the ghostly landscape rife with broken rocks, he took out from his pocket and held before me on the open palm of his left hand a beetle. It had an astonishing number of legs, and appeared to be sickly. We remained thus for over an hour: see Binder, chapter ninety two.
At this point in my memoir I am twenty four years old. A further two years will pass before I become a Tundist proper. I have set out to tell you something of myself, and how I was impelled to wear the Vest. That task is more or less done. I could regale you with further details of my studies, but you would begin to yawn, and flip impatiently through the pages looking for the exciting scene where I attend my first Tundist dandelion and burdock tasting.Instead, I wish to leap forward two decades. Twice, I think, I have mentioned that during my forties I was confined to a dungeon for a half dozen years. Strictly speaking the circumstances which led to that disaster are unrelated to Tundism, but I hope I will not be trying your patience if I devote my remaining paragraphs to them.
My mentor Plankton Chews was a dedicated and faultless Tundist, one of the few to have passed the Tundist and Strob Noun Test at the first attempt. As a detective, however, he was unbelievably incompetent. Whenever I think about his career as a “solver[!] of those singular mysteries which perplexed the best minds of the professional police force” my jaw drops, and my brain is dizened. (The quotation, by the by, is from Dr Boilbag, slavish chronicler of every last deductive stupidity committed by Chews. For a long time I thought that the doctor embroidered, embellished, even knowingly distorted his fatuous recollections of Chews' “exploits”. Harsh experience taught me that the credulous Boilbag was an even greater fool than his idol.)
The “singular case” that resulted in my imprisonment is recounted in The Ratiocinative Genius Of Plankton Chews (Pigbath & Spew, 19--), the seventh volume of Boilbag's ridiculous series, where it appears under the title “The Strange Affair Of The Undigested Turnip”. Simpleminded readers likely to be convinced by Boilbag's version should stop reading now, and throw this book into a furnace: there. Now, I trust that those of you still with me will give more credence to my narrative than to Boilbag's asinine pratings.
It was March again, the March of my forty third birthday. I was a Tundist of long standing, proudly wearing the Vest, and making my living at the time by playing bongos and celeste in the dance band of the Bodger's Spinney Hotel. I had not seen Chews for, oh, ten years. He had been a tireless and astute mentor, and even today I have to acknowledge that without him I may have reached the age of thirty, forty, perhaps even seventy before I was worthy of my Tundist Vest. My Tundism was nurtured by Chews, and his rigour, gusto, and sprightliness still shape the Tundist I am today, in my ninetieth year. He was there to rehearse me through the Noun Test. He was there when I sewed the string on to my punnet. He mussed my hair when I successfully located the wafers. When, at last, I donned the Vest, it was Chews who cooked the pie. And in the first few years of my Tundism, he was there as a prop, an ear, a rudder. Then I moved to Bodger's Spinney, and he was called to a distant land. We exchanged letters for a year or two, then cards on Tundist gala-days, then silence. I was busy with bongo practice, he with goodness knows what absurdities.