Teacher Brett Ellis tries to understand what Steampunk is.

When planning this week’s column based around ‘Steampunk,’ it hit me that I could not, if asked, describe what it is. So, with my hard-earned, I purchased a book on the topic and will now be sending it back to Amazon as I am still none the wiser.

The closest I can get to the meaning is a formula: Mad scientist behaviour x Victorian setting + reactionary politics x adventure plot = steampunk.

In effect, it is a style, nay, ‘movement’ frequented by eccentrics who wear 19th-century dress fuelled with aviator goggles, velvet frills and metal-lined hats, all with a view to taking something from yesteryear and making it sustainable, ie covering it in metal and ultimately creating theatre through elaboration, by breathing new life into dandified dress or items that are soon to become relics of the past, if they can’t be punked.

Brett Ellis has tried to learn about steampunk Steampunks also enjoy carrying weapons or tools, which is exactly what some of them look like, as well as spats and pocket watches as they dandy about town as one of the four distinct styles of street urchin, the tinker, the explorer or the aesthete.

And with products, the emphasis is on ‘steam’ meaning lack of electrical power and hence, there is a real emphasis on mechanisation and an obsession with zeppelin airships and the use of clockwork as, if the Victorians liked it, it must have some merit, right?

So, once we have the steam, what of the punk?

Well punk stood for, before it got all over commercialised, rage against ‘the machine’ or the man, and that is the essence of steampunk: Taking something, maybe fashion or other items, and raging against it whilst morphing into an improved, clockwork or mechanically powered new age version of what the Victorians managed to come up with before the scurvy came to take them to their makers.

And so, with little intention of joining in, I aimed to take my first tentative steps into the world of steampunk in August.

The world's largest, and longest-running, steampunk festival on planet Earth is the Asylum Festival in Lincoln. The festival features ‘classes,’ workshops and the grand ball, as well as the ‘tea duelling championship’ which sounds like a blast!

Facing your opponent across a table, you must dunk your biscuit and then hold the said item for as long as you can before placing it into your oral orifice.

I find the whole spectacle fascinating, and I wonder if future inhabitants of this mortal coil may do similar in the year 3000 when they dress up in shell suits and attempt to bring back the VHS video recorder as the fashion of yesteryear comes full circle once more!

• Brett Ellis is a teacher.