In dreams, we stop thinking in straight lines, and start to think by association. At least, that's the way it seems to me.

It is certainly that way with the Internet. If you can suppress your anxiety about getting results and go with the flow a bit, interesting things can happen.

So it was with me on a rainy day last week, when I was trying to find the origin of the words Wise Men Fish Here. I know where they are used on a sign outside one of the most famous book shops in the world, the Gotham Book Mart on 47th Street in New York.

But I am reluctant, for some reason I cannot explain, to think that the founder of this extraordinary shop is also their author. For some reason, my impression is that they were first used elsewhere.

Probably, I am wrong. The Gotham Book Mart was opened in 1920 by a remarkable, worthy woman named Frances Steloff, who died a few years ago at the age of 101. She was the valued friend of just about every English or American writer of note during most of the 20th Century, and was perfectly capable of doing some heavy-duty phrase making of her own.

But it bothered me that I didn't know for certain and could find nothing on my own shelves that gave any clue. So I went on an Internet fishing expedition.one that I hope you will agree yielded fascinating results.

The Wise Men of Gotham popped up early on. These are tales from the area around Nottingham in England dating, perhaps, from the 12th Century. They were published later than that, in about 1540, during the reign of Henry VIII.

The Wise Men were not wise at all - they pretended to be mad and stupid when they learned that King John wanted to build on a piece of property in the area.

The way they worked it out, they'd have been expected to help either with the work or with paying the bills, so when the royal advance party appeared, they put on a bit of a show. It gave the unsuspecting king second thoughts.

As the "wise men" of the village remarked later: "There are more fools that pass through Gotham than remain in it."

The stories about the Gotham `fools' are charming. This is one of the shorter ones: There was once a man of Gotham who started for market with two bushels of wheat. The wheat was in a bag laid across his horse's back, and the man sat just behind the bag.

He had not gone far when another man of Gotham called to him from a wayside field and said: "Your horse is small, neighbour, for so much of a load. Why don't you walk and lead it?"

"That's what I would do," replied the first man, "but my foot is lame and I can't walk very well."

"Then if you must ride," said the other, "I think you might take the bag of wheat on your shoulder so the horse wouldn't have to carry that, too.

"Why, so I could," said the first man. He hoisted the bag of wheat onto his shoulder, and there he carried it all the way to market.

"Ah," said he, when he reached his destination, "how my little horse does pant and sweat! I did well to share the work with it, for I see clearly that the horse has had burden enough carrying me without having also to carry this heavy bag of wheat."

It's a story that reminds me of a homegrown one. There was once a man from St David's, who rowed across the harbour one Friday afternoon to buy some groceries.

Succumbing to the brazen temptations of the big city, he had a couple of rums. Maybe a little more.

Next morning, when he got up and started some uncharacteristic bustling about, his wife asked him what he thought he was doing.

He said he was going back to St George's to dive up the sack of sugar he dropped when he lost his footing on the dock.

But I digress. Gotham, near Nottingham, became the best known village of fools because of these tales.

Three hundred years after they were published, they were exported to New York via Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle, who was apt to tease his fellow New Yorkers about their own foolishness.

He called New York Gotham City, a name that stuck, as we know. It seems fair to suppose that was the reason Frances Steloff called it the Gotham Book Mart.

So that was a productive find.

My next was quite the opposite of productive, but interesting, nonetheless. It was an article by a man called Brian Luke, published in a magazine called Feminist Studies, entitled: Violent love: hunting, heterosexuality, and the erotics of men's predation.

Setting out his purpose, Mr Luke said: "In this essay, I show how contemporary hunting by North American white men is structured and experienced as a sexual activity. The erotic nature of hunting animals allows sport hunting to participate in a relation of reciprocal communication and support with the predatory heterosexuality prominent in Western patriarchal society."

Quite how one moves from the Wise Men of Gotham to that, I will never know.

But from the same magazine, a couple of URLs later, came an article by Marlon B Ross, entitled In search of black men's masculinities.

Here's a little snippet: "The imagery of Black supermanliness, however - as it fantasises a unified national virility ready to enforce its will on the world - also desublimates the tendency to cast Black men as the self-destructing embodiment of the nation's potential self-castration, the paralysing division (by race, class, gender, sexuality, ideology, and region) that always beckons on the other side of a national obsession with fierce competition and battle readiness."

No mention of Works and Engineering contracts, though, so I didn't hang about.

My next stop was truly fascinating. In the English Historical Review, in an article entitled, Vox Piscis: or The Book-Fish: Providence and the Uses of the Reformation Past in Caroline Cambridge, Alexandra Walsham wrote of the appearance of an Ominous Cod on English shores on 23 June, 1626.

On that date, a Mr Benjamin Prime sent an unusual parcel to John Gostlin, Vice Chancellor of Cambridge, and Master of Gonville and Caius College.

The item in question was a half-dissolved book wrapped in canvas, covered in gelatinous matter and slime, and exuding an intolerable stench. This had been discovered inside the stomach of a cod caught off the coast of King's Lynn and gutted in Cambridge market an hour or two before.

Parcel post must have been faster in those days than these. It evidently scared the dickens out of everyone in the country, for they believed the cod was a warning from God of imminent judgements.

The leap to this kind of conclusion wasn't in the least unusual in the Britain of the day, apparently. Monstrous fish and other oceanic freaks were a dime a dozen in the moralistic ephemeral literature published in profusion in the late 16th and early 17th century.

Beached whales excited apprehensions of divine vengeance and national disaster. One leviathan driven on to the sands at Holderness in 1595 was declared to be an appointed "messenger of ensuing plagues", while another stranded near Harwich in 1617 was seen as one in a long series of oracular signs of impending calamity, including the sharp frost of 1608, deep snows in 1614 and the untimely death of Prince Henry in 1612.

Here's an interesting fact: They discovered that the writer of the documents found in the belly of the Ominous Cod was an early English reformer, burned at the stake in 1533 for having some decidedly odd views about salvation and sacraments. His name was John Frith.

Doesn't the fruit of that point look delicious? I'm wise to these tricks, though, so Madam will have to try the man in the garden next door.

Finally.from The Ecologist came another gem, entitled Here Come the Litmus Fish, which reads, in its entirety: "Using gene technology, scientists are developing a `rainbow' range of fluorescent fish that could be used to detect waterborne pollution.

"Zhiyuan Gong, biology professor at the National University of Singapore has, according to The Financial Times, already produced a green-and-red zebra fish.

"He is presently developing genetically modified zebra fish in which the fluorescent colour genes are switched on by specific chemicals in the water, such as heavy metals.

"The ultimate goal would be an indicator fish that turned a particular colour in response to a particular pollutant."

My friend, Clermont, who is from St David's, would say this: "Why do these people waste their time with this type of ignorance? Down to the East End, what we want to know is this here.When they're going to find out how to stop sugar disappearing in a little bit of dampness?"