My prankster mate, Barney, occasionally calls up the online version of ‘Off the Cuff’ (as he has told me). I suspect he does so out of a natural-born curiosity to see what I’ve reported about him to the public at large. That shouldn’t sound like an ungenerous remark. It’s in keeping with his nature. He likes to know that he is known (far and wide) and if that means using a newspaper as a medium, so be it.

Anyhow, over our cup of coffee recently, he told me — prefaced diplomatically by “don’t take offence” — that I tend to write in a style known as “stream of consciousness”. Far from being offended, I found the comment elevating and his concern for my feelings amusing.

In literary criticism, we know this term is used to describe thought and conscious reaction, perceived as a steady flow. I hastened to assure Barney that I was not put out in the least but happy and mildly embarrassed to find that he’d lumped me in the exalted company of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and Marcel Proust.

A relatively recent literary term (1890) its other common name is ‘interior monologue’. Fearing that he might have unintentionally pumped my ego up with a little too much air, Barney let some of it out by saying, “Not too much streaming of the consciousness, Kev. Just a tad.”

Right. Bull, I thought. Because Barney is full of it. But, hard on the heels of ‘bull’ I couldn’t help sliding slightly in my own thought process and recalling the phrase ‘papal bull’.

Now, what might a papal bull be? I can just visualise a school teacher, armed with this knowledge, putting the question to his class and not getting the desired response. Papal bull? A bovine from the Vatican farm? Certainly not.

“Give you a clue, it’s a letter,” says the teacher, believing that every pupil deserves a second chance.

“Written in parchment made from cowhide?”

No, not that, too, although it’s a clever answer, “Give up?”

Teachers love to ask and double check on this moment of pupil surrender. They subconsciously don’t like to feel they have ‘imposed’ their knowledge on the children without having given them a fair go. At least that’s what my teacher-friend Ryan often says. Used to be different in my day where we were expected to sit at the guru’s feet and ‘drink from the fount’, and, as everyone knows, not much talking can take place when one is drinking.

Teachers were required to be loquacious. They definitely needed to be experts at playing games such as ‘Just a minute’ where they spoke non-stop for a whole minute and then ‘just a few minutes more’, like say 39 minutes, by which time the liberating peals of the bell would be heard along with the stilled voices of the pupils.

But, to harness my ‘streaming away’ thoughts and bring them consciously back to ‘papal bull’: The word bull has nothing to do with an animal whatsoever. (In detective fiction it would have been called a red herring. Imagine that, a bull disguised as a herring.) No, the word ‘bull’ (a big yawn from those who still remember their Latin) has its origin in that language, derived from the word ‘bulla’ meaning ‘seal’, which in the times was made of lead and was affixed as a ‘sign off’ at the end of official documents. If the document (usually elaborate) originated from the Pope and carried such a seal, it was deemed to be a ‘papal bull’.

I can’t vouch that it still exists, but there used to be a ‘register of the bulls’ which, I kid you not, was an office. A register of the bulls in Pamplona might be quite a different thing. And at some point, even in the stream of consciousness, the flow hits a barrier and comes to a temporary halt. And I return to the present, and find Barney’s eyes on me, narrowed.

Kevin Martin is a journalist based in Sydney, Australia.