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It was a sweltering day. I was strolling along the lane that runs from Pointy Town to Filthdock when I chanced upon a Jesuit priest sitting on a bench. I tipped my hat and greeted him.

“Hello,” I said, “What a sweltering day it is.”

“Felix Randal the farrier O is he dead then?” said the priest, and I realised that I was talking to Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“Father Hopkins!” I cried, perhaps a tad overenthusiastically, for he frowned at me and said: “My duty all ended, who have watched his mould of man, big-boned and hardy-handsome, pining – ”

“Would you like a bite of my medlar?” I interrupted, and as I did so a dapple-dawn-drawn falcon flew past, narrowly missing my head.

“Pining,” continued Hopkins, without taking a blind bit of notice of my fruit-sharing initiative, “till time when reason rambled in it and some fatal four disorders, fleshed there, all contended?”

Swallowing a chunk of medlar, I wondered about these four disorders.

“Impetigo, ague, the bloody flux and Blotzmann’s syndrome?” I asked.

Father Hopkins was now fretting with his rosary beads.

“Sickness broke him,” he said. I was beginning to wonder why the priest was chuntering on about a dead farrier, but I decided to sit down on the bench. He didn’t flinch. He kept talking, but I was no longer listening. I had become transfixed by the sight of a flock of weird unholy birds circling above us. They were black and purple and huge, with savage talons and a wingspan of monstrous proportions. Could they be the legendary Birds of Bog I had read about in my little primer when I was an infant at Sunday School?

Suddenly Father Hopkins tapped me on the shoulder.

“How far from then forethought of,” he was shouting, “all thy more boisterous years, when thou at the random grim forge, powerful amidst peers, didst fettle for the great grey drayhorse his bright and battering sandal!”

The last few words were yelled so loudly that my hat nearly fell off my head. But it seemed as if the priest had finished jabbering at last. I felt a sudden urge to kiss his hand, as if he were a bishop, but I decided not to. Instead, I thrust my last medlar at him.

“Take it, take it, Father Hopkins,” I said, and I got up and walked away, towards Filthdock. There, I spent a profitable hour or two rummaging in the market square. My haversack, or rucksack, or knapsack – what young persons and Peter Hitchens would call, barbarously, a “backpack” – 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 Filthdock to Pointy Town, I passed again the bench where earlier I had encountered Father Hopkins.

The Victorian Jesuit 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 filbert 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 cried, and with that he jumped up from the bench and hared off down the lane. Sadly, he had ignored my gift of a filbert, 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.