Chaps Oozing Charm

Chaps oozing charm wedged in a chest. There's no knowing who'll come out best. One is called Billy, head made of cork, shoulders cast iron, arms and legs chalk. Mythology enwraps him like a shroud. His voice is grating and horribly loud. And then there is Cedric, aquatic, with fins. He likes to muck about with a box of pins. He has no ears but his feet are huge. His entire head is covered in rouge. Hummingbirds pain him, as do owls. He's always had trouble pronouncing vowels. The third of our trio is Swivel-Eyed Dan*. His head is the shape of a frying pan. He once went south, looking for bees, but all his dreams blew away on a breeze. You have to give credit where it's due - but not to Dan when he's dribbling goo. Three of them, then, wedged in a chest, each one wearing a red satin vest, oozing insouciance, polish and charm. Let's hope they don't come to harm. But the chest has been stowed in the hold of a ship whose captain is moody and curls his lip. As they sail out from port, the captain growls: “Damn the beakers! Damm the owls! Damn the crackers! Damn the flaps! Damn the chest of charming chaps!” Two hours later, the ship just sank, and all that remained was a single plank. It floated for weeks and was then washed ashore. I found it on the beach and used it for a door. So when you come to my stinking hut, bringing some food for my stinking mutt, go careful by the door and remember your prayers: “Get wedged in a chest, he who dares”. Source : The Vitamin B Pirate Gang & Other Maritime Doggerel by Gervase Beerpint

* NOTE : Despite what Van Ack says in his commentary on Beerpint's poems, the character “Swivel-Eyed Dan” is entirely fictional and should not be confused with Hooting Yard's soi disant “agony uncle”, Uncle Dan.

Pod News

We recently mentioned the futuristic pod on the outskirts of Bodger's Spinney which was once home to Claude Sopwith (see 13th April). Readers with an interest in architecture will be pleased to hear that the pod is being renovated to return it to its original lima bean shape. Given that lima beans are a key ingredient of the (originally Narragansett) dish succotash, one must applaud the local planning decision to reopen the pod as a restaurant when the current work is completed. Digby Thew has already been appointed as the head chef of the putative eaterie. He is well-known as the culinary maverick whose portrait has appeared on thousands upon thousands of bookmarks produced by the Blister Lane Bookmark, Bookcase, Bicycle Pump & Other Things Beginning With B Manufacturing Company, whose gravel-voiced CEO, T B Culc, has kindly given his permission for the reproduction below.

Interviewed about his new job by the Weekly Shackle, Mr Thew said: “As a tot, I always wanted to work in a pod. In fact my father built one for me out of driftwood, but he was a cack-handed man, and it collapsed within hours. I was trapped in the ruins for three days while the emergency services struggled to free me. Wellwishers passed sausages and dandelion & burdock to me through a specially-constructed plastic funnel. There were plans to make a feature film about the episode, but alas they came to naught when the producer was arrested while scouting locations disguised as a zealot. In an act of baffling derring-do, he jumped out of the police car delivering him into custody while it was careering along a country lane at unimaginable speed, landed in a hedgerow bright with pinks and foxgloves and cuckoopint, bashed his head on a discarded metal farmyard implement, and suffered permanent memory loss. He ended up working as a blanket-darner in Uttoxeter.”

Xylomancy

Xylomancy is the art of divination using twigs. A list of the various -omancys would no doubt be diverting, but you can look it up elsewhere. One tool of divination usually absent from the reference books, however, is Clancyomancy, the technique of predicting the future using fat paperbacks by Tom Clancy purchased from airport bookstalls. Please note that success in this art takes years of training, and should not be attempted by the ingénue.

Impenetrable Language

There may be readers who understand the above quotation. I like it for the simple reason that no matter how closely I read it, I know that it would take years of study before I could ever eke any meaning from it. There is a fascination in impenetrable texts which is quite different from looking at a passage written in a foreign language of which one is ignorant: that has its own pleasures, of course. Most of the words above are familiar to me; the ones that aren't I can look up in a dictionary; and still I will be unable to wring any sense out of it. I used to be a regular reader of the Bridge column in one of the Sunday newspapers. I have never played Bridge, nor had any desire to do so, but I loved these short texts describing situations, tactics and possibilities of a game whose rules I knew not. The words took on an abstract quality for me. That's all.

The Micro-axially Condensed Typewriter & Related Matters

Reader Tim Drage has drawn my attention to the pulp novelist Harry Stephen Keeler, and I am smitten. I think you will be too. Go and visit the Harry Stephen Keeler Society, try to ignore the rather breathless tone (the site's author is overfond of exclamation marks!!)*, and discover for yourself this writer who has already been given a posthumous Big Tin Medal by the Hooting Yard Sainthood Committee. Here is what to expect: “In The Man With the Magic Eardrums (1939), a bookie and a safecracker run into each other in a house in Minneapolis and spend the night talking. Oh yes, there are two phone calls, and another character comes into the house and talks for a while. This takes hundreds of pages. The direct action of The Portrait of Jirjohn Cobb (1940), which has to be one of the most astoundingly unreadable novels ever written, consists of four characters, two of whom sport outrageous accents, sitting on an island in the middle of a river, talking and listening to a radio, again for hundreds of pages. And these novels were only the first volumes of two multi-novel sequences! … How about these chapter titles from The Bottle With the Green Wax Seal (1942): The Chromatic Whimsicalness of Avunculi Samuelis; Synthetic Mexican; and The Micro-Axially Condensed Typewriter.”

* NOTE : Richard Polt, author of the site, writes to say: “As for my use of exclamation marks, I can only plead corruption!--by Keeler!--himself!!” Having now spent a couple of days reading Keeler myself, this makes perfect sense!!!!

Mrs Gubbins : An Update

Several readers have written in to express concern about Mrs Gubbins, who has now been on the run from the police for some weeks. We have just received a few tatty pages, smuggled from her hideaway, apparently written by the octogenarian fugitive herself: Friday. Soup for breakfast. Duck with broken leg outside hut. I brought it inside and fashioned a splint with some hairpins and elastic bands. It is called Agamemnon. Saturday. My “minders” are a terrific bunch. They have taken to wearing ribbons in their filthy hair and chewing cheroots. This afternoon there was a short gun battle with some police officers. We won. Sunday. By happenstance, one of my gang is a priest, so we were able to celebrate Mass. For the sacrament, we used what was left of a stolen packet of croissants. A tin mug of duckpond water had to do instead of wine. Monday. I have been passing the time by reading a stash of old Dobson pamphlets. I was particularly taken with Two Hundred And Two Spurious Latin Names For Birds Together With A Meditation Upon A Sheet Of Corrugated Cardboard. I read it out to [X], one of the minders, and he has started to translate it into Tagalog. Tuesday. Peewits on roof.

Dobson in Residence

One of the more arresting facts about Dobson is that he spent a five-year period living in an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. Such was the hold on him of this location that he devoted no less than sixteen pamphlets to it. According to the statistician Aloysius Nestingbird, Dobson wrote more words about this factory than on any other topic. What was it about the place that exerted such a fascination upon Dobson? How significant is it that, during his stay there, the factory was still functioning, producing thousands of tins of evaporated milk every week, and not, as it is today, an abandoned ruin populated only by screeching birds? Was the workforce aware that the pamphleteer had taken up residence in an unused room on the mezzanine floor, and that he had attached his own design of bolts and latches to the door to prevent his being disturbed? Or that the carefully-lettered sign on the door, reading “S Q Perkins, Janitorial Padré”, was a fake of Dobson's devising? Was Dobson responsible for the occasional small theft of a few tins of evaporated milk noted in a big ledger by the management's security team? Was it really necessary for the security team to march about the premises in gangs of four, dressed in uniforms not unlike those of a fascist junta, accompanied by howling, slavering dogs, each as tall as a ten-year-old? Were the dogs skittish when taken to their kennels at the end of a security tour? Did a wet-behind-the-ears junior evaporated milk technical consultant take the rap for the missing tins? Was he dismissed and did he have his epaulettes thrown into the shredder? What in the name of heaven was Dobson doing in that room for five years? Why are the answers to these cogent questions entirely absent from Dobson's pamphlets? And, most importantly, what birds screech there now?

More Moaning About Book Titles

I ranted recently about the never-ending slew of books entitled Flapdoodle's Pin-Cushion and variations thereof (see Rant, 5th April). During the unfortunate technical trauma that closed down Hooting Yard for a couple of weeks, a friend reminded me that I had got myself into a similar tizz some years ago. My bugbear then was that the Booker Prize shortlist always seemed to be limited to novels with pompous, portentous titles like The Redundancy of Courage - was that by Timothy Mo? (I could check, but I really, really can't be bothered.) Titles, in any case, which announced: “This is a serious work. It may be ill-written, tedious, and simple-minded, but it addresses big themes. This is literature.” My plan at the time - never fulfilled, alas, but you know how it is - was to write a thumping great tome entitled The Consistency of Porridge. I may still do so.

Inside Hooting Yard

You will be pleased to hear that we have not been idle during our enforced absence. Here is a picture of one of our new fleet of trucks, getting ready to deliver something (?) somewhere (?) …

Ground Control to Major Tom

Ground Control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on. Then St John Chrysostom will give you a bon-bon. Well, not the actual saint, of course, but a man dressed as him, in a robe sumptuous and long. He will offer you the bon-bon held in his tongs. You must take it and put it in your pocket, for you will not be able to eat it now, because you have your helmet on. The exciting 21st century transparent material from which your visor has been crafted will not allow you to stuff confectionery into your mouth until we give you instructions to press that red button on the side of the helmet. When you do so, the visor will go whooosh! upwards in an instant, and then you can eat your bon-bon, but only if our instructions to you are judicious and wise. You see, Major Tom, it may be that we tell you to press the button when you are in an airless vacuum far out in space. If we do that, and you obey, you won't be eating any bon-bon, or anything else for that matter, ever, because you will die pretty quickly. So be very careful that you weigh our instructions in your mind before acting upon them. Consider the pros and cons of everything we suggest to you. We're human too, Major Tom, and we may make a mistake for heaven's sake, like the time the Space Panjandrum 2 landed in a lake, instead of in the sea, where it was meant to be. Now blast off, Major Tom, while we bless your cotton socks.

Sopwith : The Marsh Gas Years

Claude Sopwith is the only one of Dobson's associates to have his biography written by the great pamphleteer. Dobson devoted a full eighteen-month period (October 1962 to March 1964) to the task. Such concentration on a single subject was unusual for Dobson - a notorious flibbertigibbet - but then Sopwith's was an unusual life. Following his trajectory from an orphanage in Borneo to a futuristic “pod” on the outskirts of Bodger's Spinney, via stints as an insurance salesman, bird expert, jewel-encrusted mountebank, and trainer of seals (among innumerable other escapades), following him from continent to continent, now in one guise, now in another, was a highly ambitious undertaking, and one perhaps unsuitable for a temperament such as Dobson's. The planned Life was never, of course, completed, but with Marigold Chew busy at the printing press, Dobson issued several pamphlets in the early 1960s, each a fragment of the projected work. The idle reader, stumbling upon one of these dog-eared tracts in a seaside junk shop, may not realise that Sopwith is even the subject. After all, Dobson's prose style at this period has been described by Poxhaven as “incomprehensible”. Nonetheless, readers will I am sure be intrigued by this all-too-brief excerpt:

He had nothing but contempt for vinegar and poppies. “Ach!” he would spit, as he became enveloped in clouds of marsh gas. Observing his eerily waxen forearms, that [illegible] priest had suggested a remedy of cornflakes and glucose tablets. He had lost his bus pass, but he no longer knew the bus routes. What was that dream Leonardo da Vinci had about a vulture? Well, he had that dream too, except in his case the image that lingered, as he awoke, was of twigs, thousands upon thousands of twigs, all sticky with birdlime, piled up in a tottering heap, and his docent, juddering, just vanishing behind them, waving a brightly-coloured scarf embroidered with uncanny visions of Swedenborgian splendour…

Source : Marsh Gas, Badge Man, Prester John & Other Imponderables by Dobson (Out of Print)

A Patch of Ectoplasm

Dobson's various pamphlets about Claude Sopwith contained no illustrations. We have tracked down this rare photograph and include it here as an adjunct to the above item. Snapped by his docent while relaxing in what looks like a deckchair, Sopwith seems unaware that a patch of ectoplasm has materialised just below his right elbow - an incident which Dobson chose to ignore, or one he never addressed in writing.

Mrs Gubbins' Emoticon Workshop

Before her arrest, escape, and current status as a fugitive, Mrs Gubbins was running a very popular “Emoticon Workshop” on Thursday afternoons. The intention - as she noted in her prospectus - was to create a definitive catalogue of emoticons to denote as many human (and inhuman) emotions as possible.

The workshop's first achievement was to devise emoticons for the four medieval humours (see Dobson's Leech Mishap, 16th March) as shown here:

“(-/. = melancholic

;&![] = choleric

v|-)( = sanguine

::}%; = phlegmatic

Subsequent sessions proved most profitable. Space precludes us from showing all of the emoticons so far created, but the selection below is evidence of the hard work of Mrs Gubbins and her team. Let us hope they can resume their endeavours soon.

(*--¬ = mild peril

+=;;' = attack of the vapours

}~@*! = afflicted with the King's Evil

'-)#` = slated for execution on Tower Hill at dawn

{}..~ = currently listening to Thick As A Brick by Jethro Tull

Alphabet Soup

Devoted readers of Hooting Yard - are there any other kind? - know that we do our utmost to bring you the very, very best in modern, cutting-edge soup recipes. As part of the latest tranche, here is a marvellous example, provided by Dr Ruth Pastry's sister Maud:

Ingredients: 1 lb each of apricots, breadcrumbs, coleslaw, dandelions, edelweiss stalks, flapjacks and goldfish brains; 6 tbsp honey; 2 oz isinglass; 1 lb each of jackdaw feathers, ketchup, love-lies-bleeding, marmalade, nougat and oxlips; 1 pea; 1 tub quicklime; 4 oz each of raisins*, spikenard and toffee; 15 tsp unspeakable goo; 1 family-size catering pack of vinegar; 3 whelks; as much xanthium as you can stomach; 12 pkts yeast; 44 zinnias.

Method: Pound everything beginning with a vowel into a mulch. Smear it on to the inside of a big bowl. Put the bowl somewhere safe and below freezing point for a week. Cut everything else up into chunks the size of a newborn baby's fist, then chargrill. Go and get the bowl and toss the chunks in haphazardly. Place the bowl under an outside spigot and fill to the brim with water. Leave to stand for as long as you like, depending on how hungry you are. Transfer to a cauldron. Bring to the boil and allow to simmer. Pour in some milk. Re-boil, indefatigably. Ladle off the scum from the top. Serve with hibiscus clumps and cocoa.

* NOTE : The mention of raisins in Maud Pastry's recipe prompts me to quote this splendid passage from Francis Wheen's How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered The World (Fourth Estate):

If [Islamic fundamentalist suicide-bombers] die in the struggle, so much the better - since they will be welcomed into paradise by seventy-two virgins, ready to satisfy every sensual need. (This titillating inducement may not be all it seems. A scholarly new Koranic study by Christoph Luxenberg suggests that the legend of the virgins is based on a misinterpretation of the word hur, which translates from Arabic as ‘houris’ but in the Syriac language meant ‘white raisins’. Imagine the disappointment of a suicide-bomber who arrives in heaven expecting a bevy of gorgeous maidens, ‘chaste as hidden pearls’, only to be offered a bowl of dried grapes instead.)

Publishing News

Following the rant on Monday about the woeful state of the British publishing industry, we have had a change of heart, and decided to take the book-behemoths' grubby shilling. We noted the shelves heaving with books about “self-help”, and have knocked out, in two days, an invaluable manual called Men Are From Bodger's Spinney, Women Are From Haemoglobin Towers. Taking two representative figures - Gordon Sumner, aka - laughably -“Sting”, and US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice - the book argues that when your pigs stray from their pen into another farmer's field, they can be lured back with hearty madrigal singing, but only when the sun is shining. During rainstorms, it is best to resort to a traditional goad. Other rustic “tales of the barnyard” are used to illustrate the theme, and several charming drawings have been photocopied from an old copy of Dr Alex Comfort's Joy Of Sex.

Our next port of call as we infiltrate the industry will be a management tome entitled Unleash Your Inner Dobson, wherein the out-of-print pamphleteer is hailed as an exemplar for the dynamic business git on the make. As I write, one of the Hooting Yard janitorial team is busy with a marker pen, adding briefcases, personal organisers, mobile phones and similar accessories to the photocopied pictures from Dr Comfort's book.

The Disgusting Bilge of Cadet Vig

Cadet Vig's bilge was disgusting. Most people remember him as the so-called “tiny cadet”, but I always think of his bilge. He kept it in a pail in his locker. I wrote the sign for him: Cadet Vig's Locker - Keep Out - My Disgusting Bilge Is in Here. He wanted it printed in 24pt Gill Sans Condensed, but I told him to shut up, and scrawled it with my nib. I will tell you all about my nib another time, on a day when the astrological signs are favourable to my doing so, that is, Toxin in the Fourth House with Gymnopédies rising and Cack in the Funnel of Smew. That old bat-headed man with the bandaged ear tells me that this conjunction is unlikely to occur for the next two score years and ten, so you will have to be patient, just as Cadet Vig was. I made him wait a year and a half for his sign, suffering as I was from whitlows and scrofula, but he never, ever complained. I think that was admirable, particularly for a cadet renowned for his rigour. Well, I should say for his rigour and his bilge, and indeed his tininess. Gosh, was there ever a tinier cadet? I suspect not. I had my amanuensis trawl through the records, just in case a cadet tinier than Cadet Vig had trodden these blue corridors at some time in the inconceivably distant past, perhaps during the time of the Great Dismal Thaw, but alack! nothing was found. Now I sit slumped in my boudoir staring at the one photograph of Cadet Vig in my possession. He has a forlorn expression in the picture, and looks as if he is chewing something, or about to chew something. The air, perhaps. There is a hummingbird on his cap, but whether it is real or made of styrofoam is hard to tell - the photograph is blurred. I try so hard to pin these things in prose, but how could I ever compete with Beerpint's poem? The old rugged cross / The cows in the field / [something, something] / And Vig [something]. Hand me that sandpaper. Crows have landed on the roof, and I have work to do.

Mysteries of the Nun Explained

On storm-tossed seas, clinging to the gunwale aboard her barquentine … this is where we find Sister Hortense. She reminds us, does she not, of Hopkins' tall nun? Back at the convent, perched dangerously on the edge of the Dizzyingly High Cliffs of Ümblasco, she was the subject of much impromptu doggerel. That Sister Hortense / She makes no sense / Mother Superior / Said “Get thee hence!” sang the novitiates as they queued in the canteen for their jugged hare and creeping jenny. Sister Hortense turned a deaf ear, but she could not ignore the blandishments of the grubby old Catholic sea dog who lay sprawled in a heap outside the convent gate on that fateful day in April. He had come for alms: he left with Sister Hortense. He took her away with him to sea, and she followed willingly, and when he fell overboard after an accident with a topgallant shroud as the ship approached the Arctic Circle, she gave not one whit of a thought to returning to the convent. She prayed; she said her novenas; she drank rainwater; and two weeks later she hove into port, who knows what port it was, gave the barquentine a lick of paint, stocked up on provisions, renamed the boat the SS Our Lady of Lachrymose Convulsions, and sailed away. Auks and skuas shrieked, and a guillemot swooped low over the poop deck. God was in His heaven; the novitiates had no nun to badger; the barquentine was bright; and Sister Hortense grew grey and old and mad and sailed on the high and storm-tossed seas …

Ask Uncle Dan

Dear Uncle Dan

Why are you blundering about in a room that has all those leeks dangling from the ceiling?

Perplexed of Blister Lane

Dear Perplexed

That is not me, you clot! I have never worn such a pullover in my life.

Uncle Dan

Invaluable Cereal Donations

A masked brigand equipped with a brace of pistols and an incredibly sharp cutlass popped into the office this morning, bearing a message from Mrs Gubbins. Although there is some gruel left in her hideaway, the slops and pap have been exhausted, and our fugitive is wondering whether any readers could send her some cereals. “She says,” growled the brigand, as he manicured his surprisingly elegant fingernails with the cutlass, “She wants bran, durra, millet, sorghum, emmer, spelt, panic, barley, groats, and a lot more millet”. Gentle reader, see what you can do.

Spinoza's Rhubarb

I mentioned this book in yesterday's Rant. Now it transpires that it actually exists:

Dear Hooting Yard : I have been searching the internet for references to Spinoza’s Rhubarb in vain for some years. As the owner of the only known copy of this work (Printed in Venice in 1668) I have become what my family call ‘pathologically obsessed’ with promulgating the philosophy of Spinoza’s greatest but least known work. In my eagerness to spread the word I have created a number of ‘stump work’ pictures showing the life of Spinoza and have been touring the exhibition around the churches and chapels of my native country for some years. I wonder if you would have space on your website for a picture of one of my latest works. I would be so grateful if this were possible. Yours in hope and with God’s Blessing, Stanley J. Cachinnatione, Montana, USA

Rant

Perhaps the novelist Julian Barnes is to blame, since his novel Flaubert's Parrot was a huge bestseller. I haven't read it myself, so offer no opinion. What bothers me is that the title of the book has seemingly cast a spell over the entire British publishing industry. That format - [historical figure]'s + [everyday or whimsical object] - now infests the shelves of our bookshops to the point of teeth-gnashing despair. At first, only fiction caught the bug - Hemingway's Chair and Lenin's Trousers spring to mind - but once non-fiction contracted the virus, the plague was unstoppable. Yesterday, browsing desultorily in Waterstone's, I came upon the following within about five minutes: Pandora's Breeches; Wittgenstein's Poker; Rembrandt's Whore; Dorothy Parker's Elbow; and Schopenhauer's Porcupines, not to mention Schopenhauer's Telescope. I could go on, but I already feel quite ill.

A significant side-effect of this wretchedness is that in some cases one suspects the very content of the book has been twisted to fit the title. Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg was ostensibly a history of the early spice trade, a subject of interest in itself. But because of the imperatives of the title, the author buoys up a single character - Captain Nathaniel Courthope - and gives him an importance in the narrative that is simply unjustifiable. I have no doubt that Giles Milton knows this, and knows that it damages his book, but bows to what is required by theBritish publishing industry - a contemptible, money-grubbing, market-driven playground for the alumni of Oxford and Cambridge universities, rife with nepotism. Even the witless goons who run it must surely learn when enough is enough?

This is one reason, of course, why Hooting Yard appears on the web. Renamed Sir Matt Busby's Cistern or Spinoza's Rhubarb, it would probably attract a five-figure advance … but only if the content were tailored to meet the requirements of the intellectually bankrupt poltroons who sign the cheques. I prefer to plough my lonely furrow. End of rant.

A Noodlehead in Peril

Here, to brighten your day, is a picture of an imperilled noodlehead. The source of his peril was lurking in one of the custard-balls piled in his bowl. Due to monstrous kitchen slapdashery, a gewgaw was inadvertently baked into one of the balls. The gewgaw, a tiny metal cameo brooch depicting Gordon Sumner, is now stuck in the noodlehead's throat, and he is choking. Let us hope that he manages to spit it out.

Gordon Sumner is one of that select band of middle-aged popular singers who still calls himself by a nickname he adopted as a considerably younger man. In his case, that name is Sting, or possibly Stig. Doesn't this embarrass him? Does he occasionally wake screaming in the night and phone Paul Hewson, or Bono as he is absurdly known, so that they can compare notes on their irretrievable loss of dignity?

Dark Star Crashes

Pouring its light into ashes. Reason tatters. These are weighty matters. So weighty, indeed, that you must note them in your jotter. But - horror of horrors! - with what will you jot? You recall with a pang that your biro is lost, or perhaps has been purloined by the Biro Thief, he whose exploits have so enthralled the readers of the Daily Clang. Your drawer, of course, is innocent of pencils. It has been so since childhood. Your papa would have no pencils in his house, you recall, and yet he never revealed the wellspring of his loathing. Once, you tried to write about it - with your biro - and your book His Loathing: Its Wellspring was, well … well-received up to a point, though there were those who said it lacked a certain dash. To your shame, you blamed your papa's chlamydia, a conclusion so preposterous that your uncle sued you in a court of law. Behind the door of the court of law lurked a lactose-intolerant nitroglycerine boffin, a bluestocking who became your wife and changed your life. You pulped all copies of your book and sat in steam. You had a hideous headache for a week. But planning, as you did, to raise no storms, you kept all pencils from your house, just as your father did. Your wife asked why - you used a nib to jot down your reply. I am my father's son, you wrote, He died a pauper. He was that kind of guy.

That “Dobson” Photograph

On Thursday 1st April we published an anonymously-sent photograph of a man and a child, one of whom was purportedly Dobson. I suggested this was probably an April Fool's Day prank. Now, reader Peter C Ross writes:

Sir : Having known Dobson for more years than I care to mention I am certain that the photograph you have received is of Dobson as a child and that the figure behind is his father (also known as Dobson). The identification is further confirmed by the corner of a Crittal window visible in the background. It is a well known fact that Dobson spent his formative years behind such a window.

This is clearly nonsense. In his breathtaking - if indigestible - List Of Every Single Person Dobson Met In His Life, Jasper Poxhaven never mentions anyone named Ross, let alone Peter of that ilk, with or without a C. Our correspondent is either the shadowy figure who sent the photograph, or a maniac, or possibly both. There is a third possibility, but it is so terrifying in its implications that I will have to go and bathe my head in Dr Fleming's Brain Soothing Infusion & Nerve Tonic (for external use only) before addressing it…

Sidney the Bat Is Awarded the Order of Lenin

Like many bats, Sidney spent much of his time hanging upside down in a dark, damp cave. Both of his parents were still alive, and on Saturdays he would visit them. They lived in the attic of a museum, and enjoyed swooping, wings aflutter, around the heads of any museum employees who came up to the attic, which was used as a clutter-strewn storage area. The museum housed collections of electromagnetic apparatus, galvanometers, and cast iron mesmeric engines. It was the most renowned museum of its kind in the land, numbering among its exhibits not only Von Ick's Patent Trance Mechanism but also an archive of papers from the laboratory of the great celery scientist Kapisko.

Professor Maud Dweb was the chief curator. Her in-tray was piled high with complaints about the bats in the attic. One young assistant janitor, on his first ever visit up there, had been literally frightened out of his wits. He had been removed to a sanatorium in remote mountainous country, and his family, despite most of them being brain-addled, had made known their intentions to prosecute the museum. One of the land's most relentless lawyers had been paid a retainer. Professor Dweb decided to act.

One Saturday evening, after the museum had closed, when soon the full moon [would] swim up over the edge of the world and hang like a great golden cheese (in the words attributed to the shade of Oscar Wilde by the spirit medium Hester Travers Smith), the curator ascended the staircase to the gloomy attic. It was the work of minutes to set a number of bat-traps in the darkness. As she made to leave, Professor Dweb stumbled over a crate containing the world's only surviving example of Bickering's Superb New Hinge, banged her head on the wall, and dropped to the floor, unconscious. Sidney's parents swooped low, and perched - do bats perch? - on her back.

At that very moment, Sidney flapped in through the skylight. He and his parents exchanged greetings, in bat-language. They told him what had happened to Professor Dweb, who was sinking into a catatonic stupor. Sidney was most disappointed, for he could not see any fun in flapping around someone who was unconscious. She wouldn't be scared at all! He resolved to arouse the curator, and at once began to make hideous bat-like squealing noises directly into her ear, flicking his wings against her temples. It took some time, but eventually Maud Dweb woke with a start. Then she screeched, flailing her arms at the mischievous bat. She fled the attic, slamming the trap-door behind her, leaving the fiendish bat-traps to do their work.

An hour later she was back in the attic, armed with a torch. She found Sidney hanging upside down from the rafters. “Well, young bat,” she announced, “Inadvertently, you have performed a great service to your country! Had you not woken me from my stupor, thieves would have made off with the museum's most prized exhibit! I was only just in time to nab them! Fleeing from you, I went downstairs to find a pair of counter-revolutionary ne'er-do-wells about to make off with Darjeeling's Anti-Imperialist Galvanising Motor! You are - as a mere bat - probably unaware that this machine is a potent symbol of our glorious revolution. I shall recommend to the General Secretary of the Party that you are given an award in recognition of your deed. Well done!”

Sidney's parents patted him proudly on his bat-head. Professor Dweb dismantled the bat-traps. The full moon shimmered through the skylight.

Sprung From Chokey

News has reached us that Mrs Gubbins has been sprung from chokey. (See 23rd March for details of her arrest.) She is now holed up in a safe house - or, more properly, derelict shed - protected by a heavily-armed gang of thugs wearing boa constrictor masks. They are subsisting on a diet of gruel, slops and pap until a criminal supply line can be set in place. We will keep you fully informed of developments. Please remember them in your prayers.

Reincarnation News

Let me begin with a caveat. Reincarnation is not a topic I know much of, so I may be about to write something inaccurate and simple-minded. I am under the impression that those who claim past lives always seem to have been at, or close to, the seat of power. Napoleon's manservant and Cleopatra's handmaiden are popular “phantom memories”, or, if more anonymous, the previous corporeal existence has usually become embroiled in major historical events - a footsoldier at Agincourt, or a spectator, knitting, as the tumbrils rolled through Paris during the French Revolution. No one ever recalls a past life as a simple peasant scrubbling around to eke a few potatoes from the muck, which is what the vast majority of our forebears spent most of their time doing, regional substitutes for potatoes notwithstanding.

Then, when it comes to posited future lives, there is a consensus that one's return is as a non-human. Cats and dogs are popular choices (or aspirations), as are horses and other majestic and elegant beasts. Those lacking self-esteem may bemoan their likely reappearance as a worm, but that's about it. Nobody says, thrillingly, “I think I'll come back as a locust!”, do they?

The point of all this is to pose a question. Is it feasible for someone to be reincarnated as a multinational corporation? Consider the evidence. Exactly twenty eight years ago, on 1st April 1976, the painter Max Ernst died. Onthe very same day (exciting emphasis), Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak formed Apple Computers. Spooky? I think so. Is Apple the first global surrealist company? And if - as seems likely - it is, how does that affect its business operations, its day-to-day running, its mission statements and project schedules and, by all the angels in heaven!, its human resources policies? An in-depth investigation is urgently needed, but I haven't got the time. Perhaps a reader or two might take this up and report back.

Is This Dobson?

An anonymous reader has sent what is claimed to be a photograph of Dobson. I suspect this to be an April Fool's Day prank, but have sent the snap to Mr Poxhaven, soliciting his expert opinion. The envelope - with a smudged postmark - contained nothing else to indicate its provenance. Scribbled on the back of the photograph are just three words: “This is Dobson”, which is less than helpful as it is unclear whether it refers to the child clutching an ice lolly or to the gaunt, bespectacled adult behind him.

Mrs Gubbins and Her Infatuation With Buttons

Our popular item Mrs Gubbins Recommends has been suspended while that dear old crone remains in police custody. Rather than leave readers bereft of exciting links to pursue, we asked her colleague Matilda Choctaw to ghost-write the column on a temporary basis. Here is her first contribution:

“That Mrs Gubbins has a complete mania for buttons. Velcro, zips, and other fastening methods are completely foreign to her. That being the case, and ignoring the fact that she is facing serious criminal charges, I wish to honour her by pointing Hooting Yard readers in the direction of the Buttonarium. Now, where did I leave my crutches?”

Johnfowlesopoly

David Stoop has sent in a story from a game of Johnfowlesopoly (see “A Word Game”, 23rd March).

Once upon a time, there was a debauched fairy named Bindweed. Bindweed, who liked to dress in fashionable, foreign-made fairy clothes, had a fairy sister called Ringrot. Ringrot was jaded and neurotic. On the day the big spaceship landed in Dandelion Dell, with its whirling propellors, Bindweed and Ringrot went skipping along to greet the goo-splattered alien beings.

“Ugh!” screeched Bindweed, “Aren't they sickening?”

Ringrot began to vomit, right next to the spaceship. The goo-splattered alien beings were extremely disturbed by this bestial behaviour. They climbed back into their spaceship and flew off to another planet, called Zixurg-K79. Goodnight children.

Our critic writes: David has made a pretty good fist of it, I think. All nine adjectives are included, the story is very short, and I would certainly read it to my grandchildren at bedtime.