It so transpired that one evening of a bitterly cold January, with Jack Frost ever threatening to breach the sanctity of my window panes, I was to be discovered ensconced in an easy chair by the roaring fireside of my study, applying the most earnest scrutiny to a tome written by Samuel Purchas, viz. Hakluytus Posthumus, or Purchas his Pilgrimes, contayning a History of the World in Sea Voyages and Land Travell by Englishmen and Others, reprinted in the Glasgow edition of 1905-1907.
The flames of the fire flickered teasingly in the grate, first forming the lissom contours of a comely maiden I had once surreptitiously ogled at Dirty Dicks public house in Bishopsgate, then metamorphosing into the decidedly voluptuous shape of a buxom serving wench who dispenses Pornstar Martinis at Filthy Fanny’s cocktail bar on Shoreditch High Street, now assuming the formidable visage of a harridan I had once encountered in the Moody Cow tavern at Upton Bishop, and with whom there had been an unseemly contretemps concerning the portfolio of services she was offering versus the amount of money I was willing to pay her.
I had earlier consumed my victuals with no little relish, and was now enjoying a post-prandial bottle of the finest port wine, imported from Oporto in Portugal and transported from the port of Portsmouth to Porlock in a portable portmanteau by my portly porter, Porter.
In order that I might enter more fully into the spirit of this Literary Evening ‘at home’, I decided to light a calumet which I had previously filled, almost to excess, with a blend of the sublimest tobaccoes from the New World (lightly seasoned, I will confess, with a sprinkling of the choicest hashish from the Old World).
In welcome addition, and in the finest and noblest traditions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (the poet and celebrity chef who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Marinade) and Thomas de Quincey (the police pathologist who solved every murder committed in the city of Los Angeles between 1976 and 1983), I resolved also to ingest a modest tincture of laudanum, a heady concoction of opium and brandy very popular in rural areas, where the absence of picture palaces, music halls, and genteel brothels leaves no viable alternative to a narcotic lifestyle.
Hakluytus Posthumus is the worthy and diverting narrative which purportedly inspired the drug induced imaginative processes of Mr. Coleridge when he penned the notoriously controversial tale of Kubla Khan. Kubla was the Great Khan of the Mongrels and distant antecedent of the illustrious Aga Khan, inventor of the heavy but heat-retaining cooking stove which became a permanent fixture in many English kitchens from the 1930s onwards. The Khan family name has been most recently honoured by the celebrated thespian James Khan (RIP), who sadly perished under a hail of bullets in the moving picture of The Godfather. (To momentarily digress, that entertainment was directed by a Mr. Francis Ford Coppelia, himself the subject of a comic opera by Delibes.)
Kubla Khan is not a choice favourite of mine. I persevere with the utmost diligence in attempting to decipher the myriad references to various elements of the poem of which I know only too little. The only reason I apply myself thus is to try to understand what on God’s Earth is occurring in the many lines of text which readily comprise the opus. Selecting this extract for use as an exempli gratia for instance:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round.
The true poetry critic is sorely dumbfounded when confronted with this unlikely septet. Upon the inauspicious occasion of its first publication, a goodly proportion of the contemporary literary illuminati agreed that the poem passeth all understanding, rather like the Peace of God in the Bible (Philippines 21:7). Others found themselves in unequivocal agreement with regard to its wanton imagery of pleasure-domes, caverns and rivers.
Moving on, I fell into a deep sleep of dreams during the course of my study of Hakluytus Posthumus and upon my awakening I was immediately conscious of having composed, in my sleep, two or three hundred lines upon its very theme. I straightway embarked upon the necessary task of committing the magnificent lines of prose from my addled brain to the reverse of a cigarette packet I happened to have lying on my writing bureau, thus:
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*The night was dark and stormy in the extreme.
Snoopy, the eminent explorer, was visiting Kubla Khan in his lately assembled Gothic style pleasure dome in Xanadu. Kubla had earlier decreed that the dome should be constructed, prior to his intended occupation of it, on ten miles of mineral rich Green Belt soil hitherto unused for domes and other edifices because of problems gaining planning permission from the appropriate authorities.
Kubla and his hordes soon sorted out that problem to their own advantage.
The pleasure-dome had walls and towers coming out of its ears, should that detail prove to be of some small interest to the reader.
When Snoopy’s visit was over, Kubla escorted him along the path by the sacred river Alph. They progressed without incident or impediment through some enormous cavernous holes, and had just reached the estuary where the Alph met the sunless sea in the darkness of the night when, to Kubla’s great astonishment, Snoopy said…*
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The telephone rang out in shrill protestation at my labours with split nib and ink of India. I picked up the instrument and listened intently to its earpiece section. It spoke:
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*Earpiece: Hello? May I speak with Mr. Naylor please?
Moi: The name is Taylor. Samuel Taylor. And might I have the undoubted privilege and signal honour of knowing your own name, sir?
Earpiece: Sorry Mr. Mailer. We’re not allowed to give out names on the telephone. I am merely The Man from Porlock Insurance Services. May I have five minutes of your no doubt valuable time?
Moi: Well, actually I am…
MFP: This will only take half an hour Mr. Failure. And you could save yourself a lot of money. How much are you currently paying for motor vehicle insurance?
Moi: I don’t think…
MFP: Could you confirm your postcode for me please?
Moi: It really is…
MFP: Did you know that if you keep your vehicle garaged overnight, and never go very far in it during the day, there are substantial discounts available from the standard premium laid down by company policy for your own particular circumstances, motoring history, geographical arrangements and lifestyle requirements?
Moi: That detail is not without interest, Man from Porlock. Pray tell me sir, in terms of financial outlay on my part, what is the projected saving you consider I could achieve in committing my motor vehicle insurance business to your estimable Insurance Company of Porlock?*
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I completed the telephonic questionnaire and was quoted a premium £17.86 per month lower than the fee being levied by my current insurer. A significant diminution indeed for a man of my modest means, and with the promise of a much improved lifestyle quality to boot, according to the Man from Porlock.
However, when at length I was able to resume my scribe duties regarding my inspirational interpretation of Hakluytus Posthumus, I found to no small discommodity on my part that an amnesia had overcome my brain like an impenetrable fog descending on an unsuspecting countryside vista, suffusing the entire landscape with an extreme opacity, and that everything I had ever known had evanesced into the deepest mists of oblivion during the previous hour.
There is yet worse to come. On a visit to Filthy Fanny’s the day prior to yesterday, an itinerant chicken perambulating carelessly across a busy thoroughfare caused me to swerve violently and collide with a multi-storey car park, and the Man from Porlock maintains a noticeable intransigence in refusing to countenance my proposed claim for settlement of damage related disbursements.
He directs my attention to the small print in the policy, a document which has thus far failed to arrive at my home via the primitive horse and carriage transport system which ill serves the Royal Mail in its dilatory attempts to deliver letters with an acceptable degree of postal punctilio.
This minute codicil to the policy paperwork apparently protects the insurer from liability where deceased examples of chickens are involved, or such victims that may be distantly related to chickens, such as hens, cockerels, bantamweights, pigs, goats, cows, all other farmyard specimens not thus far individually identified, and all multi-storey car parks in the London Metropolitan area.
It would seem that I have been well and truly fucked by the Man from Porlock, and twice over, at that.
In conclusion to this vexatious matter, I have saved £17.86 on this month’s insurance premium, and this is excellent financial news indeed.
However, on the debit side of the Balance Sheet, I have now to examine the contents of my depleted purse in the vain hope of locating the sum of £12,057.49 for the purchase of replacement motorised transportation and a new chicken.
Meanwhile the Literary World still awaits a more comprehensible and artistic interpretation of Hakluytus Posthumus, and my motor insurance premiums from now onwards will doubtless increase commensurate with my lamentable driving record where jaywalking farmyard animals and multi-story car parks are concerned.
I will shortly require to vent my gall upon the commercial pusillanimity of the Man from Porlock who, I fear, inveigled me in this exigency without thought of rectitude or due propriety. That is no obloquy, you may depend on it. I must first rend my habiliments in preparation for an extended period of self-flagellation (accompanied by some wailing and gnashing of teeth) before repairing to my bedchamber and partaking of a small dose of the hypnotic and sedative potion chloral hydrate.
I have no wish to encourage the paroxysms which plague my very existence to renew their vigour and return without abatement to once again disturb the delicate rhythms of my nocturnal stupors.