Wednesday, November the 29th, 2006

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The Potatoes of Potatovag

“When did you last clap eyes on the potatoes of Potatovag?”

I was asked this question while standing on a bridge over a muddy river in a high wind. I was wearing spats, as usual, minding my own business, and humming the theme tune to the exciting TV quiz show Cormorant Or Grebe? It was pouring with rain, but I didn't care, for atop my head I wore a sprightly wide-brimmed hat, all golden, and decked with plastic chrysanthemums.

Yes, dear reader, I was the spats-and-hat man you have heard so many stories about. Remember when you were tiny, and mama tucked you up in bed and opened the Treasury Of Bedtime Tales For Pallid And Sickly Infants, and how you begged her to ignore the vapid rubbish about giants and dragons and magic kingdoms and what have you, and to go straight to the stories of the spats-and-hat man? That's me. But of course you would never have been told the tale of this particular day that found me standing on a windswept bridge in a downpour being questioned about the potatoes of Potatovag, because it was only yesterday, and there has not yet been time for my scribe to boswell an account ready for the printing presses.

In truth, I have a team of scribes, who work in relays. One follows me about, morning, noon and night, scribbling down my doings. One sits at a desk in the chalet, making a fair copy of yesterday's scribblings. One types up the fair copy in the chalet's computer pod. One supervises the printing of the typed copy. One carts the printed copies around to all the kiosks where they can be purchased. And one has a day of rest, often spent studying the swans downriver. I am a lucky spats-and-hat man to have so many Boswells at my beck and call, even if they can be a tiresome bunch. Let me briefly describe their shortcomings. Hoobington is curdled and indiscreet. Tack is blind. Dalewinton has pins in his legs and a metal plate in his skull and his favourite tipple is the boiled blood of ducks. Poop is a nincompoop. Hudibras is a swivel-eyed Stalinist maniac whose cardigans always bear traces of yesterday's sausages. The sixth boswell is actually named Boswell, or rather, Boswellboswell. This one topples over far too often for my liking.

So, yesterday it happened that I was accompanied by this Boswellboswell person. There I was, standing on the bridge in the rain, humming, and peering over across the fields to where the phlox and pansies and pinks, the hellebore and hollyhocks, the marigolds, verbascum and charlock and mimosa, spurge, gorse and erica, the lupins, the daffodils, the broom and japonica, the creeping jenny, the old man's beard and the cow parsley, the speedwell and flax and dock and hops and oxlip and crocuses and teasel, and the geraniums and foxgloves and fleabane and jonquil and lobelia grow in such heavenly profusion, when the person from Potatovag drew up beside me in his death-trap jalopy, and shouted “When did you last clap eyes on the potatoes of Potatovag?”

I made my reply, with all the wit and brio you have come to expect from the spats-and-hat man… but Boswellboswell chose that very moment to topple over yet again, and as we were on a bridge, he toppled into the muddy river, and he sank, and with him sank the words I spoke to the person from Potatovag, words now lost forever, never to find their place in a new edition of the Treasury Of Bedtime Tales For Pallid And Sickly Infants, infants now who will be deprived of a thin, weak smile of glee before falling to a snooze in their iron sickbeds, a snooze from which—who knows?—they may never awake.