Correspondence Received

An entertaining letter arrives in the Haemoglobin Towers postbox from, I think, the United States. It is headed “The Hooting Yard Effect”, and sounds a cautionary note for podcast listeners. Here it is, in full:

Dear Mr. Key,

In late May of this year, I was pointed toward Hooting Yard (in the metaphorical sense of having the Hooting Yard podcast suggested to me as an enjoyable listening experience, as opposed to the more literal sense of being given directions to the physical location of Hooting Yard). After listening to a few shows, and being introduced to the works of Dobson, Blodgett, and Pebblehead, learning about Bonkers Maisie, Marigold Chew, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, Mrs. Gubbins, and diminutive adventuress Tiny Enid, and being exposed to some highly suspect, albeit scrupulously alphabetical, soup recipes, I felt a bit lost and resolved that perhaps if I listened to the complete archive of Hooting Yard shows, I might gain a more thorough understanding of the world of Hooting Yard, and possibly even learn how to spell “Bibblybibdib’s.”

I have now completed my task, and in the space of little more than two months, have listened to all 140 shows that I was able to find on the internet. Whether or not this effort has noticeably improved my understanding of Hooting Yard, its environs, and inhabitants is a matter open for debate. However, I have noticed an unusual side effect of absorbing so much Hooting Yard over so little a time: I find that my “internal voice,” when applied to odd bits of prose I come across in the course of the day, now sounds exactly like Frank Key.

For example, I was recently in San Diego, California. In want of something to do, wandering the Old Town section, I happened across an old, restored cemetery. Most of the graves were marked by blank wooden crosses, with small interpretive signs made of deteriorating photocopied text sandwiched between glass plates. One of these signs read, as best as I can recall:

“THE UNKNOWN GERMAN
This grave marks the resting place of the Unknown German. This man came to San Diego from Germany in 18– [terminal digits illegible]. Very little is known about his life here. How and why he came to San Diego, as well as how he died, is unknown.”

I read this, silently, to myself. But the voice I heard was plainly Frank Key’s. This doesn’t happen with newspaper articles, magazine stories, street signs, short stories, or novels. It occurs only when I read unusual bits of prose like that above. I would caution any other Hooting Yard listener contemplating ingesting a large amount of your shows in a short period of time. The effect, while not unpleasant, is unusual.

Thank you for the hours of entertainment you’ve provided.

Very respectfully,
Dr Jeffrey Chilton

August 21st, 2008 Random Twaddle. 4 Comments

Occasional Graveyards, Number One

The first in our Occasional Graveyards series is a shrine to a graveyard rather than a graveyard as such. You can read about the Cross Bones Graveyard here. It is about five minutes walk from the ResonanceFM studio on Borough High Street, so next time you listen to Hooting Yard On The Air, bear in mind that Mr Key may well have been pondering the Eternal Verities at the shrine just beforehand, or possibly soon afterwards. The photographs were taken by Pansy Cradledew, who has not posted them on a flickr page, because she’s not that kind of girl.

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August 20th, 2008 Things I Have Learned. 1 Comment

Food For Sport

There has been much press coverage of the frankly bonkers dietary regime followed by Olympic uberchamp Michael Phelps. It is instructive to compare the swimmer’s daily food intake with that of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, the sprinter and pole-vaulter who thrilled the masses during the last century.

We are fortunate, then, that the fictional athlete’s coach and mentor, the all-too-real and non-fictional Old Halob, devoted many pages of his Memoirs to this very topic. Old Halob himself grew up in paupery, and often had little else to eat but birdseed stolen from bird-tables on the lawns of bird-obsessed villagers in his bird-choked village. Later in life, dining in expensive restaurants, he would often demand a bowl of millet as a side helping, and, being Old Halob, he always got what he wanted.

When it came to devising a diet for his sporting protégé, the irascible and chain-smoking coach paid heed to the theories of the nutritionist Catnip Wedge, who was himself a top bobsleigh competitor, though never a champion. Wedge was convinced that he could have won a mantelpiece’s worth of cups and medals had he eaten more “Laughing Cow” brand processed cheese triangles during his active bobsleighing years, backing up this theory with abstruse charts and diagrams. Old Halob could make head nor tail of these, but was won over by a certain hectoring tone in the nutritionist’s prose. As he wrote in the Memoirs:

I could make head nor tail of Wedge’s abstruse charts and diagrams, but there was something in his hectoring prose that convinced me he must be correct. Thus it was that when I took fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol under my capacious wing, I insisted that he eat a dozen packs of “Laughing Cow” brand processed cheese triangles for breakfast every day, including the packaging, with the tinfoil and that little red thread ostensibly designed to unseal each portion. Within a fortnight, he came second in the Bodger’s Spinney Athletics Club’s Annual Rainsoaked Five Hundred Yard Sprint Practice. In all his previous attempts at this race, the spindly fictional athlete had toppled to the ground in a swoon at the report of the starting pistol. It was the first time I realised that I had a future champion on my hands.

Old Halob’s hands, by the way, were hairy and curiously fat, but that need not concern us here. He sought out the more obscure writings of Catnip Wedge and, though he did not really understand them, as the translations were unreliable, he soon had prescriptions for Bobnit Tivol’s lunches and dinners as well as his breakfasts:

Lunch, he wrote, consisted of curd and balls of suet and reconstituted meat slices on a bed of sponge and fish innards, washed down with two big tumblers of aerated malt vinegar sprinkled with plenty of pips, followed by a slab of seed cake and a toffee apple. Dinner was a whole vegan pig substitute boiled in linseed oil, with a drizzle of cognac, two bowls of raw ears of wheat with paprika and enriched mulch, duck brains, cornflakes, hedge clippings, roast potatoes, cabbage and sugarsnap peas, and a dozen smokers’ poptarts, plus pails of water siphoned from a distant eerie pond. If he had a race coming up the next day, I insisted that the fictional athlete tuck in to an extra supper of innumerable sausages in sausagey sauce straight from the saucepan.

Bobnit Tivol’s performances, both on the track and in the pole-vault, underwent a dramatic improvement, but he failed to become an outright winner until Old Halob made a significant and unexpected addition to his diet.

All else would have been as naught, he wrote, had I not experienced a mental thunderclap one Thursday morning. I had good reason to be thankful to Catnip Wedge for showing me how to shovel food down fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol’s gullet, but for him to be a perennial runner-up was not good enough. That morning, as I hacked and spluttered my way through a coughing fit brought on by my umpteenth cigarette of the day, the supply of oxygen to my pulsating cranium was temporarily cut off, and, during the resulting spasms, I think I had some sort of abnormal hallucinatory insight. Whatever it was, when I came to, writhing on the linoleum with sputum dribbling down my goatee, it was crystal clear to me that what was missing from all of Wedge’s advice was guidance upon elevenses. Now, for any athlete, fictional or otherwise, elevenses is the most important meal of the day. I realised I would have to devise something for my protégé, a toothsome snack that would make him into the world-beater I knew he could be.

And so began a series of experiments. Over the next few months, Old Halob tried out a bewildering variety of elevenses recipes on the lanky runner, including Bath Olivers, distilled ditchwater, lettuce ‘n’ castor sugar flan, jugged stoat, fish in pastry, contaminated yoghurt (pronounced yoh-hoort), chocolate swiss roll, greasy partridge pie, milk of magnesia through a straw, and the bone marrow of sacrificially slaughtered Toggenberg goats. Some of these snacks knocked seconds off Bobnit Tivol’s sprinting times, but some made him windy or sluggish or hysterical. None seemed to work consistently. The breakthrough came on the eve of the fictional athlete’s most important race to date. Back to the Memoirs:

The breakthrough came on the eve of the Blister Lane Exciting Tiptop Sprinting In Inclement Weather Challenge Ribbon. I desperately wanted Bobnit Tivol to be able to twine that legendary ribbon around his legendary - albeit fictional - forehead, and I was so fraught that I collapsed into a coma. Unsupervised, the fictional athlete spent the whole day snacking on elevenses, neglecting his breakfast, lunch and dinner. Not only did he scoff down my various recommended elevenses, but he got out the pots and pans and cobbled together some of his own, such as a delicious lemon meringue pie with eels. The next day, at Blister Lane, he triumphed. We never looked back.

I don’t know about you, but I find these memories almost unbearably moving, so much so that I am going to sob into my napkin. Michael Phelps may be the most successful Olympian in history, but he has not been coached by Old Halob, and compared to fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol he is just a weedy milksop.

August 17th, 2008 Prose, Old Halob and Bobnit Tivol. 0 Comments

Paper Pianos, Blots, & Dead Physicians

Here are a few useful things I learned while reading Buchanan’s Journal Of Man, Volume 1 Number 4, published in May 1887:

“Pianos have lately been made from paper in Germany, instead of wood, with great improvement in the tone.”

“There is no denying that the young man about town of the nineteenth century is a blot upon our boasted modern civilization. His is not a pleasant figure to contemplate, though it is one that we all see very often and know very well - clothed irreproachably in the most expensive raiment that London tailors and unlimited credit can supply. He lives lazily and luxuriously on his father’s money and his wife’s, and, being after his natural term of days laid away in a tomb at Mt. Auburn, ends his existence without making any more impression upon the world’s history than a falling rose leaf, or an August cricket’s faintest chirp.”

“In 1885 we were informed of the success of spirits at Cleveland, Ohio, in communicating messages by the telegraphic method in rapping, in which our millionaire friend, Mr. J. H. Wade, has taken much interest. A little apparatus has been constructed, with which the spirits give their communications in great variety. I have repeatedly stated that the diagnoses and prescriptions of deceased physicians have always proved in my experience more reliable than those of the living. This has been verified at Cleveland. The late Dr. Wells of Brooklyn has been giving diagnoses and prescriptions through the telegraph.”

I think we can agree with the correspondent of the Vineland Rostrum, who said of the Journal’s editor J R Buchanan “We never read an article from the pen of this world-renowned thinker, but that we feel we are in the presence of one whose shoes’ latchet we are unworthy to unloose”.

Many thanks to Odd Ends.

August 17th, 2008 Things I Have Learned. 1 Comment

Crimestoppers

Elberry at The Lumber Room has an excellent solution to feral youths and knife crime:

I imagine there are several thousand, or hundreds of thousands, of young men carrying knives ‘in self-defence’ who will, however, pull it as soon as they imagine a confrontation is in the air. They would be far better to carry expandable batons, and far less likely to accidentally kill someone. They would do even better to stay at home reading Sir Philip Sidney.

Personally, I would recommend The Anatomy Of Melancholy, but just staying indoors, reading improving literature, seems to me a splendid idea.

August 15th, 2008 Random Twaddle. 2 Comments

To Knit Knots, Peradventure

Much has been written, in the past, by people who knew of these things, about the knitting of knots. Knots, we learn, have been knit from cord and twine and rope and string and wool, among other materials. While it is true that more knots have been tied rather than not, without the aid of knitting needles, it remains the case that the knitted knot has its own special place in our hearts, whether our hearts flutter like a bird’s or a squirrel’s heart, or pound like a drum. For with the knitted knot we see a true craft, whereas it can be argued that the mere tying of knots, while sometimes requiring deftness and digital agility, can as well be done by a brute in a hurry. Not so the knitted knot.

Hurrying brutes, particularly those whose tails thump upon the ground as they rush headlong to the scene of their next enormity, are most unlikely to have the patience and wit necessary for the knitting of a knot. Nor are their paws likely to be dexterous enough to handle knitting needles, or even crochet hooks. Crochet is not knitting, of course, and the crocheted knot is a different creature to the knitted knot, and one with its own literature, exemplars, and paragons.

There exist pattern books containing instructions for knitting knots, and depictions of knots so knitted, but it would be a mistake to think that one needs such a pattern before embarking upon the knitting of a knot. Some of the finest knitted knots have been the work of improvisers, brave, adventurous souls who begin to knit with no other aim in mind than the knitting of a knot, its final form unimagined, not even a blurred wisp in the mind’s eye of the knitter.

Even improv knot knitters, however, need a degree of foresight, for they will wish to avoid the act of knitting being interrupted by a hurrying brute. Such interruptions can prove fatal, if not to the knitter then almost certainly to the knot. A brute in a hurry, coming upon a knitter, will tear and shred and rip and rend, all the while roaring its brute cries as its tail thumps the ground. Thus the knitter of knots is advised, in many of these books of the past, to find a secluded haven in which to knit. To be hidden behind a clump of brambles, or snug in a concealed nook in a cave, or safe behind the ramparts of a mighty and towering fortress, each of these has been recommended. A knitter’s choice of refuge will depend to some extent on the nature of the brutes who hurry through the lands in which they knit. There are single brutes who roam alone, and pairs, and occasionally trios, but by far the most common, and the most frightening, are those who hurry about in packs.

Various writers have pointed out that the knitter of knots can use the knots they have knitted as part of the apparatus to bind and immobilise a hurrying brute. This is undoubtedly true, but these same writers tend to neglect the inconvenient fact that, before such binding and immobilising and judicious use of knitted knots can occur, the hurrying brute must first be overpowered. In most cases, at least those cases that bear examination, the overpowering of a brute in a hurry requires inhuman strength, and the kind of musculature rarely found in the average knot knitter. Even more important, then, to ensure that before the very first clack of needle against needle, the knitter has located a place of safety in which to knit.

Perhaps the finest of the books I chanced upon when researching this article is actually more a pamphlet than a book proper. It is How To Knit Knots While Remaining Invisible To Hurrying Brutes by Dobson (out of print), and contains a plethora of terrific mezzotints by the mezzotintist Rex Tint. Dobson claims to have invented a so-called “enshrouding spectral ether-cloak” which, when activated, renders the knot knitter invisible, thus obviating the need for a time-consuming search for clumps of brambles, nooks in caves, or mighty and towering fortresses. It also silences the clack of knitting needles, or at least drowns out the clack, by generating a noise like the buzzing of a million hornets, audible only to a brute hurrying past, its tail thumping the ground. I suspect that Dobson’s “cloak” is wholly spurious, but the pamphlet is worth it for the mezzotints alone.

August 10th, 2008 Prose and Dobson. 3 Comments

The Nightingale Board

For most of us, the words “Nightingale Board” call to mind that empanelled panel of eminent persons who devote valuable time to the counting and measuring and tallying and calculating of nightingales and nightingale populations, their habitats, flight patterns, wingspans, song variations and much else that is nightingale-related, sometimes tangentially. I have been meaning to write about the Nightingale Board for some time now, and regret the distractions of voodoo pig husbandry, ditch digging, aimless lolloping and despair which have prevented me from doing so. What I had in mind was to do a comparative study of the Nightingale Board and the Hummingbird Board, the latter an equally tireless band of empanelled persons who count and measure and tally and calculate all things hummingbird-related. I had, in fact, set aside this morning to attack the project with vim and verve, having farmed out the voodoo pig husbandry and ditch digging to a paid companion, made a promise to myself not to lollop, aimlessly or otherwise, and countered despair by drinking an infusion of Baxter’s Perky-Uppy Expectorant Fluid. After vomiting into an iron pail, I planned to sit down and bash out thousands of words on both the Nightingale Board and the Hummingbird Board.

Alas! As I wiped my chin with a rag, the postie brought a letter from Hooting Yard reader Roland Clare, drawing my attention to a completely different Nightingale Board. Mr Clare has borrowed from his brother a book entitled Small Homes And How To Furnish Them by Mrs Waldemar Leverton, published in London in 1903 by C Arthur Pearson Ltd.

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With great diligence, Mr Clare has executed some photorealist pencil drawings of selected paragraphs from the book, the first of which tells us about this other Nightingale Board:

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Elsewhere in the book there is a splendid passage instructing the reader on the important matter of toy owl construction:

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According to Mr Clare, it is thought that “Mrs Waldemar Leverton” is a pseudonym, an anagram of the name of the true author of this excellent book, the Rev. Lowland Stammerer. Intriguingly, that godly man was a founder member of the very first Nightingale Board to be empanelled in his bailiwick. He may also have been involved in the Hummingbird Board, though my researches into that must sadly be postponed yet again, for I must lollop aimlessly now, in despair, while my paid companion husbands voodoo pigs and digs a ditch.

August 7th, 2008 Prose and Things I Have Learned. 2 Comments

A Princely Breakfast

Yesterday I was very pleased to be a guest writer at the IGGY Summer U. The students on the creative writing course, aged 13 to 16, were charming, enthusiastic, creative and full of ideas. One of the things I shared with them was the inspirational joy of cryptic crossword clues. Forget about trying to solve them (that is a separate pleasure), just treat them as phrases cut loose from any context, in which case they can act as starting points for pieces of prose.

“Prince enters flat of major” was one of the clues in yesterday’s Guardian crossword, and I wrote a short piece inspired by it.

Prince Fulgencio’s entourage – all clanking armour and burnished golden helmets – gathered in the corridor outside the dingy flat wherein Major Blenkinsop lurked. The brevet captain of the entourage rapped on the door, thrice, before the more brutish and sullen members of the entourage kicked it down and stomped into the flat, roaring their heads off and unleashing a flock of half-starved starlings to sow havoc and confusion. Thus was the necessary atmosphere created for Prince Fulgencio’s entrance. He had come to have breakfast with the Major, and wanted to eat his cornflakes and doughballs while watching starlings peck the wallpaper off the walls. That was the kind of Prince he was, especially at breakfast time.

August 6th, 2008 Prose. 0 Comments

The Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar

Because it was constructed mostly from canvas and cloth, and the canvas and cloth were fed on by moths, the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar is sometimes known as the Moth-eaten Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar. Ravaged by moths and time, and lashed by wild winds that blow across the tarputa, it is a wonder the temple still stands, a thousand years after the first devotees entered it through the sacred flap. It has of course been much patched and stitched over the centuries, and its fabric is regularly stiffened with starch, carried in canisters for miles upon miles by worshippers of the hideous bat-god Fatso. For it is He to whom the temple is dedicated.

The wild winds that lash and batter the temple are meteorologically very interesting indeed. Students of the weather have been perplexed by them ever since modern wild wind studies began. Before our scientific age, of course, the sheer weirdness of the winds that blow across the tarputa was ascribed to the mercurial and petulant nature of the hideous bat-god Fatso, for it was thought that He was responsible for them, as He was for everything in the universe. We are wiser now, but no closer to getting to grips with the wild lashing winds.

Those who still believe in Fatso have a simple explanation. For them, the winds are the physical manifestation of the temperament of Fatso’s magic pig. Actually, He has two magic pigs, but we can safely ignore one of them for a moment or two. The idea is that this particular pig – which, it must be understood, is not a real pig in any sense – somehow sends the winds howling across the tarputa whenever it is fractious or hungry or obstreperous or maddened or otherwise out of sorts. Why the hideous bat-god Fatso does nothing to placate His magic pig is an ineffable mystery. The religion dedicated to Him is short on theologians of any stripe, although one of the few to have addressed the problem contended that Fatso spent much of his time pacifying the other magic pig, which, if ever it fully awakened, would make the wild winds that batter the temple seem like tiny pipsqueak gusts of summer breeze. Other so-called scholars argued that this implied the other magic pig was somehow more powerful than Fatso Himself, a clear heresy, so the first theologian was put in a crusher and crushed.

There used to be at least five crushers on the mud plain around the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar, so we must assume that there were plenty of heretics to be crushed. Occasionally, a bright young whippersnapper archaeologist will announce plans for a dig at the site, hoping to exhume a fantastical hoard of crushed bones, but not one of these schemes ever succeeds. It is said that Fatso Himself sabotages the expeditions, by causing shipwrecks and helicopter crashes and by pickling the archaeologists’ brains while they sleep. In these ploys he calls on the assistance of his flock of bitterns. Unlike the two pigs, the bitterns are not magical, but nor, of course, are they real. They are phantom, spectral bitterns, beholden to Fatso for some service He did them in the distant past. We cannot guess what that might have been, for it is a topic suspiciously neglected by all the priests and wizards and jumping-about men who interpret Fatso to his followers. Or, I should say, who used to do so. There are none of them left alive today, at least none that we know of. Believers in Fatso are a dwindling band, often greasy and myopic and spindly and gormless. They tend to lack élan. Most of them, probably, would be crushed in the crushers if the crushers were still there, because one thing we can be quite clear about the hideous bat-god Fatso is that He expected His devotees to cut a dash. There may have been few opportunities for glittering social panache on the prehistoric tarputa, especially with those wild winds, but what rare chances there were were seized on by Fatso’s followers. Great attention was paid to the angles of hats, the tying of cravats, and affectations of toffee-nosed insouciance. This is not to discount a concomitant yearning for the mud, encouraged by one of the magic pigs.

So today there are few who haul their canisters of starch for miles and miles to stiffen the moth-eaten canvas and cloth of the Temple Of Hoon Fat Gaar. Perhaps in a hundred years there will be none at all. Yet Fatso himself will still, as far as He is concerned, hold sway over the universe, and His magic pig will still make the wild winds blow, and His other, even more frightening magic pig will doze and slumber, dreaming of havoc. It is easy for us to dismiss their very existence. Until, that is, we have struggled, stylishly, across the inhospitable tarputa, and stooped down to crawl through the sacred flap, to enter the Temple. Then we see what all those believers through the centuries saw, a sight so magnificent and terrifying that we sprawl helplessly in the mud, shrieking, brains bedizened, gaga for the god of all gods.

July 30th, 2008 Prose. 3 Comments

On The Behaviour Of Bees

“There are differences in the ways serial killers and bees behave, obviously.” – Dr Nigel Rayne, bee-and-serial-killer expert, on Radio 4 this morning.

July 30th, 2008 Things I Have Learned and Bees. 0 Comments

Tea Cosies : Your Questions Answered

After I posted the piece entitled Denktash Fugue Syndrome, in which mention is made of Mrs Gubbins and her knitted tea cosies, I was deluged with mail from younger readers who complained that they had no idea what I was talking about. The general tone of these missives was along the lines of “Oi, Mr Key, what in the name of heaven is a tea cosy, for crying out loud, innit?”

It would appear that today’s youth have been seduced by something called “tea in a bag”, and no longer make use of teapots and, thus, of tea cosies. This is a sorry state of affairs. However, here at Hooting Yard we occasionally make attempts to be “with it” and “groovy”, so we decided to track down some of these so-called “tea bags” and see what all the fuss is about.

Our delegated rapporteur, decked out in trendy East European clothing, strode manfully into an indoor retail-and-leisure consumer park and, selecting a boutique at random, went up to a counter and said, politely yet forcefully, “I would like a bag with tea in it, please”. He had chosen an inappropriate boutique to make such a request, however, for the only bags for sale at this counter were empty ones, with handles, made of leather or plastic or cotton or the pelts of various endangered animals. Surmising, not unreasonably, that bag and tea had to be purchased separately, our doughty rapporteur picked from the display a small dimity pippy bag and, having paid the criminally expensive asking price with his Hooting Yard Card™, made off along the rattling pneumatic pedestrian express walkarama in search of somewhere to buy tea.

Locating an emporium packed to the gills with grocery items, our chap hunted the aisles until he found a cardboard box of shredded tea leaves. After paying for this at a bleeping self-service console, he wasted no time in ripping open the box with his gnarled fingers, until it looked as if it had been savaged by a squirrel. He then poured the contents of the box into the pippy bag.

The next step was to eke from the bag a lovely cup of piping hot tea, so our rapporteur repaired to a yard where he knew he would find an outside spigot. Holding the pippy bag open under the spigot, he filled it with brackish water, then zipped it shut. He then caught the bus back to Haemoglobin Towers, where Mrs Gubbins was waiting with her array of giant bunsen burners. Using a contraption of coat-hangers to suspend the pippy bag over the fearsome flames, crone and rapporteur waited for the tell-tale sight of steam escaping from the partly-unzipped bag to alert them that the bag’s innards were coming to the boil. From there, it was a simple matter of detaching the bag from its coat-hangers and placing it under a tea cosy. Of course, Mrs Gubbins used a pair of heat-resistant padded mittens to perform this action.

Giving the infusion a few minutes to brew, the rapporteur then borrowed the mittens from La Gubbins, fully unzipped the pippy bag, and upturned it, sloshing the tea inside into a couple of dainty tea cups. There was a little spillage, but that was soon mopped up by a passing factotum armed with a mop and a pail. A dash of milk added, and the duo sat on a threadbare ottoman to enjoy their well-earned cuppa.

All in all, and in spite of the sterling efforts of both the rapporteur and Mrs Gubbins, this seems to be a frankly foolish way of obtaining a cup of tea, and it is not an experiment we will be repeating.

July 27th, 2008 Prose and Mrs Gubbins. 8 Comments

Denktash Fugue Syndrome

Mrs Gubbins, the octogenarian crone given to knitting and villainy, has recently come under the supervision of a doctor. It will not be too long before she becomes a nonagenarian crone, and though she is in terrifyingly tiptop health for one so aged, there have been signs that all is not well. First there was the abduction of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger, after which she went on the run for several months, holed up in a dank cave guarded by bats and owls. This was followed by her becoming smitten by the unlikely figure of Mark E Smith, and her habit of playing the complete works of The Fall at ear-splitting volume on a brand new Bang & Olufbangbangbang hi-fi system, with her windows open, at all hours of the day and night. A dawn visit from Blunkett and Blears, respectively sightless and diminutive, and somehow all the more minatory for being so, set her back on the straight and narrow.

A couple of weeks ago, La Gubbins’ knitting circle invited Rolf Harris to give a talk. Unable to attend, yet honoured to be asked, Harris instead sent a tape recording of an entertaining address in which he spoke for some hours about various Rolfs and Ralphs and Rafes and Raufs. Fatefully, at one point he mentioned the name of Rauf Denktash, the one-time President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Hearing those two syllables, denk and tash, together, Mrs Gubbins was propelled into a fugue state, from which she has yet to emerge.

Denktash Fugue Syndrome is a thankfully rare condition, so rare that Mrs Gubbins is only the second person in history to display the symptoms. It was first identified by the Victorian mountaineer and eccentric Dr Henry Hyde Hargreaves Hopton Hibbingdibhoondoon during a sojourn in Tashkent. The journals in which he wrote of his discovery have long been lost, or disfigured by potato mould, depending on who you believe, but the basic facts were retailed by Dobson in one of his early pamphlets. Atop a Tashkent mountain one day in 1862, the doctor’s brain was ravaged by mysterious fumes, and, when he tried to say “Tashkent” it came out as “Denktash”. With him upon the peak was a dumpy, bearded sage, a man not unlike the Beatles’ pal the Maharishi in appearance, who, when he heard the word “Denktash”, was sent into a fugue state. In his journal, Hibbingdibhoondoon spelled it “foog”, but it is clear what he meant.

What remains unclear is for how long the sage remained so affected. Dobson’s account simply peters out, in that annoying way he had, and which can make his early works such a trial to read. Also unclear is the nature of the fugue itself. In Mrs Gubbins’ case, it appears to take the form of dribbling, staring vacantly into the fireplace, and absentmindedly unravelling not only the tea cosy she has herself been in the midst of knitting but also those of her compañeros in the knitting circle.

Doctor Drainditch, who has been called in to treat the loveable yet spiky crone, claims to be the only living expert on Denktash Fugue Syndrome. Unfortunately, the treatment she recommends consists of a two-week retreat in a dank cave guarded by bats and owls with an abducted badger for company, followed by a therapeutic course of listening to the complete works of The Fall at ear-splitting volume. So round and round we go, it seems.

If you, or anybody close to you, is suffering from Denktash Fugue Syndrome, there is a helpline number available. Premium rates apply, and if you manage to get through you might be lucky enough to hear a pre-recorded message from Rolf Harris telling you not to worry yourself sick. All callers are entered in a raffle, with the chance to win one of Mrs Gubbins’ tea cosy knitting patterns. You must tell your parents before placing the call, and if your parents have passed to the ethereal realm beyond our puny understanding, there is a range of ouija boards and ectoplasmic goo on special offer at Hubermann’s department store.

July 27th, 2008 Prose, Dobson, Mrs Gubbins and Little Severin The Mystic Badger. 0 Comments

Brains In Bags

It is, I think, common knowledge that by eating the brains of certain animals we can boost our own mental powers. Granted, this is not a practice which has won the backing of the greatest living Maestro of the Mind, Tony Buzan, but the results can only be described as buzantastic. The difficulty, of course, has always been obtaining brains in the first place, and making them edible. Few of us are so ruthless that we would consider tearing the brains out of the heads of our domestic pets, our cats and dogs and budgerigars, and in any case, those are not the kinds of brains that will do much to supercharge our mental abilities. I know a poor soul who lived on a diet of budgerigar brains for a week, and he is now fit for little else but dribbling and writing features for the Guardian weekend magazine. Similarly, although your local zoo will provide a far greater range of animal brains, some of them particularly mind-enhancing such as the brains of giraffes and of exotic birds, zoos tend to have security guards who will Taser you without compunction should you creep towards the enclosures at dead of night armed with a jemmy, a skull-slicer, and a spoon. Being Tasered does not improve your mental prowess, despite what you may have read in the Guardian. That article was written by budgerigar-brains man.

It is a very welcome development, then, that there is a new section on the delicatessen counter at Hubermann’s where lucky shoppers can buy a huge variety of boil-in-the-bag animal brains at ridiculously low prices. The selection seems to have been made with human mental agility boosting as the basic criterion, for we can find the brains of weasels and pigs and crows and cows and giraffes and hoopoe birds and jellyfish and starlings and wolves and locusts and okapi and trout and flamingos and bears and monitor lizards and corncrakes and carp and badgers and hornets and lobsters and ducks and gazelles and dozens of others, all conveniently packaged and ready to boil.

Faced with such a cornucopia there is an obvious temptation to go overboard and stuff your gob with particularly toothsome brains, such as those of the rooting hog. This is why the staff at Hubermann’s are fully trained to advise on the government’s five-a-day guidelines, and hand out free leaflets with every purchase. To maximise your brain potential, it is important to follow certain tips:

  • Your daily intake should include the brains of five different animals
  • Make sure you boil the brains in the bag until they are piping hot
  • Do not eat the bag
  • Best accompanied with a side dish of suet pudding

Having said that, there may be occasions when, in order to boost a particular area of your mental apparatus, a judiciously limited diet can be helpful. For example, you may wish to improve your ability to interpret the scores of the more complex madrigals of Thomas Weelkes (1576-1623), in which case you might want to eat a couple of boil-in-the-bag conger eel brains for breakfast and supper each day. Studies have shown that there are substances in the brains of all eels, but especially the conger, which stimulate those parts of the human mind receptive to madrigal score complexities. Admittedly, these studies are very much in their early stages, and have yet to be given the imprimatur of any recognised academic institute, but the experiments conducted so far have been more than promising. Separate research is being done by historians of both eels as food and of choral music on whether Thomas Weelkes himself ate the brains of conger eels during his time as a Gentleman Extraordinary at the Chapel Royal.

Generally speaking, however, unless you have a specific mind empowerment scheme you wish to propel forward, it is best to stick to those five-a-day guidelines. Make sure you pick up one of the leaflets from Hubermann’s delicatessen counter, and study carefully the many diagrams in the fold-out section so you can learn to tell the difference between the various animal brains available, as it must be said that they all look quite similar when packed into bags.

One final note. Those of you who fret about things can rest assured that, according to the latest press release from Hubermann’s, boil-in-the-bag budgerigar brains are most definitely off the menu.

July 25th, 2008 Prose. 2 Comments

All Around My Hat

All Around My Hat is an English folk song, popularised in the 1970s by folk rock titans Steeleye Span. Their version was very similar to the one published in A Garland Of Country Song by Sabine Baring-Gould in 1895. Apart from folk song and folklore collections, Baring-Gould wrote hymns, a sixteen-volume Lives Of The Saints, many novels, a study of werewolves, grave desecration and cannibalism, and a biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), the eccentric country vicar who spent much of his time smoking opium in a clifftop hut made from driftwood, talked to birds, dressed up as a mermaid, excommunicated his cat, and had a pet pig.

“All around my hat” are also the opening words of one of Dobson’s more curious pamphlets, in which he describes wearing a hat lined with lead to deflect weird invisible rays aimed at his brain. It is not clear who, or what, is sending these putative rays, nor why the Dobsonian cranium needs to be protected from them.

“All around my hat” writes the pamphleteer, “the air is a site of constant barrage from weird invisible brain rays!” Note the exclamation mark, an uncharacteristic touch which has convinced some critics that Dobson was fooling around. The idea that this pamphlet is an unserious blotch on the canon has gained ground in recent years, with Nestingbird, for one, going so far as to claim that Dobson did not even write it, but simply copied out random paragraphs from a booklet given away as a free gift with a packet of breakfast cereal. This argument loses a certain force when Nestingbird has to admit that he has not managed to identify the said booklet, nor the breakfast cereal. In any case, as upstart young Dobsonist Ted Cack has pointed out in a series of increasingly aggressive letters, Dobson usually ate bloaters for breakfast.

The Nestingbird-Cack correspondence is a perfect example of the way in which the minutiae of Dobson studies can be magnified to the point where common sense is blotted out, much as the bulk of a pig the size of Robert Stephen Hawker’s pet pig would blot out the sun if you were sprawled in a particular patch of muck in its sty. It was a very large pig. Thus, the senior critic floats the idea of the breakfast cereal booklet, the upstart counters with the point about bloaters, the elder counters that the packet of breakfast cereal may have been purchased by and munched by Marigold Chew, the youngster replies with a computerised database of known breakfast cereal free gift booklets for the period in question, the old man picks out flaws in the research, the rookie lets loose a vituperative attack on his opponent’s atrophied brain sinews, and before long the columns of a reputable literary journal read like the ravings of H P Lovecraft in his more hysterical passages. All of this can be great fun for those entertained by Dobson-related pap, but sober-minded scholars are, I think, ill-served. There is a great temptation to take both Nestingbird and Ted Cack by the scruffs of their necks and crack their heads together. Hairline fractures in the skulls of both might just allow in thin shafts of light, akin to the weird invisible rays Dobson feared may be beaming towards his own brain. Or, I should say, the weird invisible rays Dobson possibly feared, unless of course he was just fooling around for reasons which must remain obscure to us.

Without wishing to generate further controversy over what is, in any case, a pointless and trivial matter, I should add that I have recently completed a lengthy work, at fifteen volumes just one book short of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Lives Of The Saints. It is a comprehensive study, with lots of illustrations and diagrams, of all Dobson’s known and suspected hats. I conclude that not a single one of them was lined with lead.

July 24th, 2008 Prose, Dobson and Marigold Chew. 0 Comments

Enthusiasms, Number Three

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Earlier enthusiasms are here and here.

July 23rd, 2008 Random Twaddle. 0 Comments

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