Ice!

Many years ago, on an earlier, vanished version of the Hooting Yard web pages, much attention was paid to ice. Indeed, there was an Ice Project, a collaborative venture the parameters of which were somewhat hazy. In contrast, there has been far too little ice-related material here, and I am aware that this must cause great anguish for many readers. So let me put things right. Look:

Isn't that great? This is one of a set of photographs taken in Geneva last week, and you can look at many, many more of them here.

Meanwhile, perhaps it is time to resurrect the Hooting Yard Ice Project. Don't fret about pesky distractions like Guidelines For Submissions. Just send in your ice-related material, be it observations, pictures, passages of purple prose, or bagatelles, to the Hooting Yard Ice Project Übercoördinator.

Poppy Nisbet's Music Tips

Mrs Gubbins is frantically busy with her new magazine about velcro, dubbin and crayons* (see 26th January), so we asked Poppy Nisbet to come up with a recommended website for you to visit when you have exhausted the heady, exotic pleasures of Hooting Yard. Here's Poppy:

Hello readers. There's nothing I like better than to clamp my iPod to my head and listen to exciting music. Being a woman of rectitude, I never download anything illegally, so my recommendation today comes with a stern injunction to purchase the delightful compact disc from which the sample tracks are taken. I just know you're going to adore it. My own reaction on hearing these songs was a combination of glee and awe.

I speak of that unique musician Bob Drake, whose new record, The Shunned Country, is packed with no less than fifty-two songs. Go and download eight of them, sit back, and listen carefully. You too, I have no doubt, will be as thrilled as I was. While you're listening, if you can bear to stay away from Hooting Yard for a while, it will be worth your while to roam around Bob's site, which contains many, many delights.

*NOTE : Mrs Gubbins has just sent - by pneumatic packet - a note to say that she has expanded the purview of her new publication. In addition to velcro, dubbin and crayons, her Daily Digest will also cover string, grease, bellows, plasma gas, methods of divination, parcels, The Love Boat, different types of paste, hints on horticulture, the life-cycle of bumblebees, Spring-heeled Jack, grizzly bears, cotton, Cotton Mather, shampoo recipes, tungsten railings, poop deck etiquette, the Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax, towels, blizzards, cocoa, genuflection, hatred, floppy things, irked Klondike gold prospectors, the legend of Anaxagrotax, ink, bales, crumpled things, the Burgomeisters of Calais, dots on a transparent plane, geese, why Jif is now called Cif, mordant pelicans, drums in the night, the contents of the stomach of an ostrich, the recording of Disraeli Gears by Cream, turquoise jewellery, goldfinches, starlings, the collected writings of Elkan Allan, taverns in Didcot, maps of Sumatra, tonsured friars, food poisoning, wooden kettles, Toc H lamps, pulverized lumps of basalt, wimples and snoods, Daktari, voodoo, jam, kale, strabismus, Molotov cocktails and the true meaning of the pendant worn by Christopher Plummer on his wedding day.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing

Hark! The herald angels are singing the song of Stakhanov, the heroic worker. The herald angels are legion, but there are only two Stakhanovs. That's right, two. One Stakhanov is busy at the forge, just like Felix Randal the farrier, busy in his bellowing room, smelting iron or hammering a huge sheet of steel with implacable industry. The other Stakhanov is a pale aesthete. He has a bow tie, luxuriant locks, a thin Ronald Colman moustache, and is lounging in a buttercuppy meadow, propped on one immaculate elbow, reading a book of poetry. It is the collected lyrics of some forgotten noodling progressive rock group. What will become of the two Stakhanovs? Hark! Let us listen to what the herald angels are singing.

The hero worker at his forge / The aesthete in a meadow / Lampblacked one and the other in serge / But both end on the gallows

Gosh! So, according to the herald angels, both Stakhanovs will come to a sticky end. We must assume that they can accurately predict the future, being herald angels. When they had finished their song, we sent one of our reporters to interview them. They were not happy about this, but put forward one of their number, an angel named Angerecton, to act as their spokesangel.

Now you and I know that Angerecton is a fumigating angel rather than a true herald angel, so it should be no surprise that the interview was unsatisfactory. In any event, our reporter found that his tape recorder malfunctioned, and all he could hear when he played back the tape was the sound of mighty and glorious angelic hosannahs, not unlike Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis. As Dobson once wrote, in another context, “Angels sing, and devils make a din, but the heroic worker pounds his hammer and the poet praises Stalin”. I think that before too long, you and I and both Stakhanovs will be deafened by the devil's din.

Stakhanov, Colman

Aleksei Grigorievich.Stakhanov was the heroic Soviet worker who, in 1935, extracted one-hundred-and-two tons of coal in a six-hour shift, exceeding the norm more than sevenfold. Stakhanov was from the Donets Basin, one of a number of basins we will be examining here at Hooting Yard in the coming weeks. The abiding fascination of basins is subject to almost criminal neglect, a situation we hope to put right. Please note, however, that not all basins are sites of coal extraction, and certainly not of heroic works of coal extraction by Stakhanovites.

It is unlikely that Ronald Colman ever extracted coal from a basin in his life, heroically or otherwise, but he had other talents, one of which led to him being known as “the man with the velvet voice”. Colman will never be forgotten, of course, for he starred alongside Greer Garson in the single most heart-rending tear-jerker of all time, Random Harvest. Watch it and weep, and then watch it again and weep again. Is there another film with so preposterous a plot which remains utterly and completely captivating at the umpteenth viewing?

Scrofula and Penitence in the Middle Ages

Scrofula is the Latin word for brood sow, and it is the term applied to a tuberculous infection of the chain of lymph glands in the neck, creating swellings between the angle of the jaw and the top of the breastbone. It has been known to afflict people since antiquity, and during the Middle Ages was known as “the King's Evil”, because it was thought that the monarch's touch would cure it. We may scoff at such naïveté, especially given the rather disturbing personal habits of kings and queens past and present. An early scoffer was Valentine Greatrakes (1628-1666), a Cromwellian soldier during the English Civil War. In the revolutionary mood of the time, he correctly surmised that God could act through himself as well as through the royal personage, and did his own scrofula-healing by gently stroking his patients. He also applied poultices made from carrots, although it is unclear whether these were divinely inspired.

Back in the Middle Ages, of course, when only the King was thought to be capable of curing scrofula by touch, there was also a great enthusiasm for penitence. Natural calamities of all kinds were thought to be the Terrible Judgment of an Angry God, a not unreasonable idea. Pestilence was met with penitence, rather than with carrot poultices, although perhaps I am oversimplifying. No doubt some canny peasants used both approaches.

And what can we learn from this, o tiny ones? Well, if you think you have contracted scrofula, or indeed any other malady, such as Asiatic Bird Flu, a pandemic of which we are promised by world health officials, you would be well advised to repent your sins, preferably in a manner that involves the mortification of the flesh, and while doing so, grate some carrots.

Next week, we shall take a look at Fundamentalist Aztec Sun-worshippers and Swamp Fever.

Glib Hatter

One of the stories I grew up with, that I heard a hundred times at my mother's knee, was the tale of the glib hatter. When I say “at my mother's knee” I am using a cliché, of course. For one thing, I did not literally squat at my mother's knee, and in any case she had two knees. If I wanted you to picture me, so many years ago, hearing the tale of the glib hatter, and if I had squatted as indicated, I would have been precise, and written “at my mother's left knee” or “at my mother's right knee”, not just “at my mother's knee”, unless of course she had only one knee, due to amputation of one of her legs above the knee, which was, happily, not the case. Although even if it were, it would still be proper to indicate which knee, the left or the right, she retained, after Old Mister Sawbones had chopped the leg with the other one off and put it on a pyre to be burned.

I heard my mother tell me the tale of the glib hatter many times, but usually when I was tucked up in bed, under my blankets, ready for sleep. In fact, almost always, I drifted into sleepyland while my mother was in the middle of the story. Sometimes she would only get as far as the bit where the glib hatter steals a basket of potatoes from the ice maiden. If I was a little more alert, for example if I snuck into the pantry before bed and helped myself to a few glucose tablets, which I sometimes did, for I craved glucose as a child, and still do, I might be able to remain awake for as long as it took my mother to reach the point in the story where the glib hatter is attacked by a bison out on the savannah. But usually I was so exhausted from my Canadian Air Force exercises that my eyelids were drooping almost as soon as that dulcet voice said “Once upon a time there was a hatter, and the hatter was glib”.

I do want you to be able to picture me, all tucked up, listening to my bedtime story. It is important that you can see in your mind's eye the blankets, the bed, the carpet and the curtains, the floor, ceiling and walls, the chair and chest of drawers and all the other things in the room, and me with my tousled mop of hair snug on the pillow, and my mother sat by my bedside, her hair in a bun and her smock filthy from cooking, one plump hand holding the book and the other plump hand holding a torch, its faint beam aimed at the page from which she is reading, for we had no electricity in the house, we relied on that one torch and many, many candles.

I forgot to say that there would always be a dog on the floor at the foot of the bed. It was a mastiff called Bob. My mother insisted in later years that it was named after President Nixon's disgraced, indeed imprisoned, Chief of Staff H R “Bob” Haldeman, but she was wrong, she was oh so wrong. The mastiff was called Bob for quite a different reason. It saddened me, in those later years, to argue over this so violently with my dear mother, after all those hours she had spent reading the tale of the glib hatter to me by torchlight, while I fell asleep, in my bedroom on the attic floor of the house on the edge of the marshes, that crumbling house that stood all alone surrounded by will-o-the-wisps and eerie flickering lights.

I remember that once I managed to stay awake for the whole story. Mama began to read after giving me my tumbler of hot milk at around nine o' clock. It was winter, so already pitch dark outside. Mercifully, the shutters were closed tight and all the doors had been locked and double-locked. The only sounds were the tick tock of the clock on my bedroom wall, the wheezing breath of Bob the mastiff at the foot of my bed, and, faintly and from across the marshes, far far away, the bellowing of Old Farmer Frack's barnyard animals as he herded them from one field to another, back and forth, over and over again, for no apparent purpose. One of the first things I ever learned was that Old Farmer Frack was a mad old man and that if I ever came face to face with him I should turn and run like the wind. I don't know why I was so wakeful that night, why I listened so intently as my mother reached the bit about the ice maiden's potatoes, and then the bison-attack, and still I lay wide-eyed, lapping up every detail, new things I had never heard before, because I always dropped off, things like the glib hatter falling down a pothole, and eating lettuce, and the blind man getting his hair cut, and thousands of frogs, and the part where the glib hatter cheats at cards when playing whist with the widow, and the village where all the children wear pointy caps, and the adventure of the pit pony, and the part where a vaporous apparition of Ringo Starr floats over the rooftops, and the glib hatter gets mixed up with a lax potter, and the shrubs and firestorms and cotoneaster and clay and architecture and a new serum and Klondike gold and cows and crows and bauxite and birdseed and huge ponds filled with teardrops, millions and billions of teardrops in millions and billions of sad and salty ponds.

I think it must have been about four o' clock in the morning when my mother read “And that is the end of the story of the glib hatter”, and she extinguished the torch and kissed my forehead and I shut my eyes at last and fell asleep.

Waxy Insensibility

Another letter arrives from Max Décharné, wit, sage, and originator of the well-known catchphrase “Well, tie me to a tree and call me Barry”. Max writes to say that, in his recent reading, he learned of the now-neglected British surrealist painter Robin Ironside. “When he wasn't designing the four-foot obelisk in Sevenhampton churchyard which commemorates Ian Fleming,” writes Max, “Ironside painted pictures with titles that might appeal to you.” They do, they do. Here are the titles of six paintings from the 1940s:

Street Entertainer Playing Threatening Music To A Cinema Queue

A Picture To Prove That The Greeks Only Painted With Three Colours

Wounded Man In Bed-sitting Room

Crowd Awaiting A Portent

Famous Statues Visiting A Museum Of People

Patients Suffering From Waxy Insensibility

I have not been able to track down any reproductions on the web: perhaps an enthusiastic reader can do further research?

The Glove of Ib

Here is an accurate account of a dream I had just before I woke up this morning.

I was in an unknown seaside resort with a companion, whose identity was hazy. We were walking, and passed a couple of men of Mediterranean appearance, gaunt, and dressed in very plain, neat brown coats and hats. They had a film noir air. If they hadn't been so thin Peter Lorre would have been a good choice to play one or both of them. I turned to my companion, pointed at one of the men, and said “He just said ib”. The man at whom I had pointed thrust out his hand, clad in a brown (leather?) glove and clutched me around the throat. He fixed me with a stare more intense than menacing, and withdrew his hand, leaving the glove in place. “That is the Glove of Ib,” he announced, “Now read this.” He handed me a pamphlet, on which was written “He has weak Bomba. His Bomba is not good”. I understood that this referred to me. The words were printed in heavy black block capitals on brown paper and reminded me of a Vorticist tract like Wyndham Lewis' BLAST. The Glove of Ib, around my neck, was not uncomfortable, but I wanted to be rid of it. The Peter Lorre figures had disappeared - time had passed - and I walked around the seaside resort, alone now, trying to find them. Then I woke up.

What can it all mean? I should point out that I did not wake to find myself being strangled, nor had my neck become entangled by a stray dressing-gown cord or length of string. One thing of which I am sure is that I must work hard today on strengthening my Bomba.

ADDENDUM : Last week I had one of those dreams in which you read or write something of breathtaking profundity. Usually, the earth-shattering words are forgotten as soon as you awake, and the morning is spent in a state of frustration, trying to retrieve what seemed so meaningful. On this occasion, I was lucky enough to recall what I had dream-written, and I can thus share my dazzling insight with you. It was a poem, and - in its entirety - read as follows:

We are steam, and we mean what we mean

Five Tiny Birds

Look, look! Here are five tiny birds! That was a tiny bobolink, I am sure of it. I know a bobolink when I see one, which is not often, admittedly, as I live in a hermit's cave, though I am not a hermit by inclination. I am garrulous. And that looks like a tiny pyrrhula, Stalin's favourite bird, according to The Fat Compendium Of Spurious Bird-Related Facts About The Soviet Union, my father's favourite book. My father was garrulous too, and no one ever asked him to live in a cave. He lived above a shop that sold prosthetic limbs. Here comes another tiny bird! It is a tiny scarlet tanager. Now that is a bird I have never heard of before. Gosh! Hot on its heels comes a tiny painted bunting, not that birds have heels as such. They have claws and talons or very thin little twig-like feet. Some say that long, long ago human beings began to write by copying the tracks made by the feet of birds in snow or mud. There is one more tiny bird to come. I think it will be a tiny harlequin duck, I can feel it in my water. Oops! I was wrong! It is a tiny mute swan. And now I too will become mute, for it is breakfast time, time for a bowl of roots and chaff, and I must concentrate on the effective working of my digestive juices.

Mrs Gubbins' New Publishing Venture

That indefatigable crone Mrs Gubbins has announced the launch of a brand new, subscription-only magazine. Here she is, to tell us all about it:

Hello readers. It was a dark and stormy night, just like in that novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and I was lying awake in bed, tossing and turning under my counterpane, watching little fairies twinkling over by my washstand, when I had one of my bright ideas. Actually the fairies may have been moths. Anyway, all of a sudden I realised that there would be a huge market for a glossy magazine, with a spine, probably, devoted to velcro, dubbin and crayons. I jumped out of bed, a bit creakily, and went over to my escritoire, rummaged for my lorgnette, found a pad and pencil, and scribbled down my ideas in the dark, because my little lamp is broken and I was too excited to go all the way across the room to turn on the main light.

I decided to call my magazine A Daily Digest About Velcro, Dubbin And Crayons By Bathsheba Gubbins (Mrs). That has a nice ring to it, don't you think? In the first issue I thought I would tell my thousands of subscribers the story of how George de Mestral invented velcro in 1948 after taking his dog for a walk. “I will design a unique, two-sided fastener,” he decided, “one side with stiff hooks like burrs and the other side with soft loops like the fabric of my pants. I will call my invention velcro - a combination of the words velour and crochet. It will rival the zipper in its ability to fasten.” That would take up a few pages.

Then I would have a picture spread about dubbin, a combination of oils, beeswax and other waxes, hence the pleasant smell when opening the can. I would have to make a few telephone calls come morning to see if I could include a little scratch-and-sniff panel on page 14.

The remainder of issue one would be an exciting article all about crayons, including the fact that Alice Binney came up with the brand name Crayola by combining two words that mean “oily chalk”. Craie, in French, means chalk, and oleaginous means oily.

By the time I had planned out the first issue the storminess had ceased and the night was still, but before going back to bed to have a good long snooze, I made a quick note about what should go on the cover. I decided that each issue should have a full-colour cover-picture of a celebrity, if possible shown holding or using or maybe just ruminating upon velcro, dubbin, or crayons. Who could it be for the launch issue? It would have to be a toss-up between new US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Glenn Cornick, one-time bass guitarist of Jethro Tull.

I scrambled back to bed happy in the knowledge that subscriptions would come pouring in.

Blodgett's Fiendish X-ray Plot

Some say Blodgett conceived his fiendish X-ray plot as revenge against a world that laughed at him because he was a short man, but they are wrong. Blodgett was not of diminutive stature. He was actually somewhere between six and seven feet tall, although it is hard to be precise because he was resistant to tape measures. They would become knotted or twisted or indeed simply burst into inexplicable flames when Blodgett was near. At a snap of his fingers, similar devices, such as rulers or yardsticks, would crumble to sawdust, if they were wooden, or just dust, if made of some other substance. Remember that Blodgett was a frightening, frightening man.

He conceived his fiendish X-ray plot on a wild and windy Thursday just a week after Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen discovered X-rays accidentally while studying cathode rays in a high-voltage gaseous-discharge tube. Despite the fact that the tube was encased in a black cardboard box, Roentgen noticed that a barium platinocyanide screen, placed nearby by chance, emitted fluorescent light whenever the tube was in operation. Hearing the news on some sort of criminal grapevine, Blodgett immediately obtained a high-voltage gaseous-discharge tube and a barium platinocyanide screen. He sent his minions fanning out around town to steal a black cardboard box, and this led to his undoing.

A dishevelled plain clothes police officer, a protegé of Chief Inspector Cargpan, apprehended one of Blodgett's forty thieves trundling a stolen black cardboard box down a noisome alleyway in the small hours of the morning. The box was not empty. It contained a tangle of enraged and venomous vipers*. The game was up.

Sometimes, when writing about failed criminal enterprises, one is tempted to embroider the bare facts in the interests of entertainment. Here, I am content to let the facts speak for themselves. They may not speak eloquently, but they speak, and that is enough, one hundred and ten years after the foiling of Blodgett's fiendish X-ray plot.

*NOTE : Tautology. All vipers possess envenomed fangs, apparently.

Fripp It to Shreds

Following our heartfelt homage to King Crimson maestro and über-cranium Robert Fripp (see below, 16th January), my old mucker Max Décharné writes with exciting news:

“Thought you might enjoy this link to the barking mad website of Fripp's sister, who seems to be a Californian motivational business speaker. Nice to see the relatives of famous people playing down their connections and being all modest. Dig them Frippicisms, dad!”

Thanks, Max. Visit the site and you too can be the lucky purchaser of a six-CD set (yes, six) of Mr Toyah Wilcox speaking for hours and hours. “Intimate conversations with Robert Fripp produced by Patricia Fripp”, we are told, “For the first time ever… experience the private side of Robert Fripp. Hear him be profound, poignant and up-close-and-personal. When Patricia Fripp is not promoting her brother she is building leaders, transforming sales teams and working as a speech coach to executives.” I wonder if her motivational techniques include forcing the gullible saps to listen to Larks' Tongues In Aspic?

Crime of the Century

That beacon of common sense and moderation, the Reverend Ian Paisley, described the recent £22 million bank robbery in Northern Ireland as “the crime of the century”. Things bode well for the next ninety-five years, then.

His comment set me thinking about the crime of the century just gone, so I went to Google to have a look. There were 65,800 results, but I was able to discount the majority of these because they referred to songs by Shania Twain and Supertramp. (On second thoughts… maybe those titles were accurately self-referential.) Anyway, the usual suspects were predictably present - JFK, the Lindbergh baby kidnapping*, Leopold and Loeb, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, and more recently the so-called “war on terror” and the destruction of the rainforest - but I was more interested in the less celebrated misdeeds which had been described as “the crime of the century”. These included:

Government advice that people should take mineral and vitamin supplements

The demolition of a building in Missouri as part of the US Custom House & Post Office Project

An eight-inch crawdad deposited in someone's grandmother's rain barrel

The recent Ukrainian elections. A Yanukovich supporter said of Yuschenko's “coup”: “This is the crime of the century - worse than Hitler, worse than Chernobyl. This is a battle to Armageddon. It's a battle between the Antichrist and Christian peoples. They are turning people into orange zombies… all of them have abnormal sexual energy.”

Theft of an item of sporting memorabilia from Geelong Football Club

Publication of the Kinsey reports, Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour in the Human Female (1953). The perpetrator of this crime of the century is denounced as the “patriarch of perversion”

Something I don't quite understand about cold fusion theories, to wit: “The hot fusioneers have made a fundamental error in judgment. Because they are so thoroughly skilled in gas plasma physics, where light-element fusion can and does occur, they have expected that any fusion in an electrochemical cell, on or near the surface of a metal lattice, must be similar to fusion in a gas plasma. The only way these scientists could have been more seriously in error would be to condemn the discovery of cold fusion, which some did!”

The proposed sale of the KPFA radio station by its parent company, the Pacifica Foundation

The theft, from a photo shoot in the South of France, of an advance copy of an album by a pop group called U2.

*NOTE : It should be well-known by now that eerie fascist Charles Lindbergh accidentally killed his child during a prank. Go to The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax for the full details. You may find it helpful to wear dark glasses when visiting the site.

Bilingual Comintern Mocker

Back in the days of Stalin, it was a brave soul who mocked the Comintern. Uncle Joe and his myrmidons tended to get attacks of the vapours when ridiculed. Svetlana B was not particularly brave, however. For one thing, she mocked the Comintern from the comparative safety of a radio shack hidden in a village in the English fens, which she pronounced “fence”. Her regular nightly broadcasts were inaudible outside the shack itself, because none of her equipment was plugged in to any kind of power source. Remember that we are talking here of fenland in the 1930s. You would be lucky to get hot water out of a spigot, let alone mock the Comintern and be heard by dissident ham radio enthusiasts in Vladivostok, Nizhniy Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Perm, or Omsk. Nevertheless, Svetlana B took no chances, and her fierce mockeries of the Comintern were delivered in two languages unfamiliar to Stalin's brutes. She talked in Gã, a variant of Nkrã, spoken in the coastal towns of Eastern Ghana and the subject of a fascinating Grammar by C Protten published in Danish in 1764, and then repeated herself in Avestan, the sacred language of Zoroastrianism. Small Zoroastrian communities still exist in the Iranian towns of Yazd and Kerman, but these were strategically unimportant to the Soviet Empire. Even if her words had been transmitted, however, more often than not they would have been drowned out by the roaring icy gales sweeping across the flat and forbidding fens. Sometimes the radio shack was so cold that Svetlana B took her samovar with her to brew up some steaming mugs of tea. No one had ever told her that it was an ornamental samovar. Svetlana B's husband had a Stalinist hat, a Stalinist moustache, and a heavily pock-marked face just like Stalin. His appearance was the subject of much taunting by school-age fenland rascals, but that is another story, one that will keep, for there is much else to tell about Svetlana B, and her bilingual Comintern mockery, and her samovar, and the fens, particularly the fens, the cold flat spooky wet black fens, and the nocturnal animals which creep there, and the phantoms that shimmer in the mist. I will tell you more on another night, children, for now it is time for your bedtime snack of fish-heads and hot cocoa.

Bogodan

Bogodan, Bogodan, who will speak for Bogodan? I will speak for Bogodan. I will be Bogodan's mouthpiece. I will say what I think Bogodan wants me to say. Something like: “There are cows in the field and trees at its edge, I think they are larches, and that is a hedge.” When I say “that” I will point, decisively, or, no, not decisively, but with a trembling finger, as if I am the terrified protagonist of a piece of spooky fiction encountering the ghost of one long dead. Then I will look back at Bogodan to make sure I have said what he would say in the circumstances, if he but had a voice to speak with.

Bogodan has been called my familiar. He is tiny and grey and flits. The air around him is chill, but not unpleasantly so. He wears a little cap, like a cadet in a small Mittel-European army. He smokes Disque Bleu to give himself, I surmise, a sophisticated sheen, but the linings of his lungs are paper thin and I fear for his health.

What will become of me without Bogodan? Did you know that there is a special place for people who have been abandoned by their familiars? It is not a pretty place, despite the fact that mirrored there are the cows, larch trees and hedges of our own world, almost identical but that they are all covered in ectoplasm. Would I, too, if deserted by Bogodan, experience the world through a refulgent film of white goo? Now there's a thought.

The Hooting Yard Gallery of Goo

Having read the above item, would you like to experience the world through a film of ectoplasmic goo? One way to begin is to do as Minnie Harrison did. She is shown here, in Middlesbrough in December 1948, creating her own extrusion of ectoplasm.

Pageantry

I am not averse to pageantry, so when a parade came past my door last Friday I went to my window to watch. Although the pane of glass in my window is besmirched by grease, I had a splendid view. I saw a yellow brougham, three green pantechnicons, a brown cabriolet, at least a dozen crimson charabancs, a pair of white phaetons, and a blue chariot, each with its flags and bunting and streamers and ribbons, some with hooters and klaxons making a terrible din, and they were followed by countless wagons and floats and cars, gigs, coaches, brakes, droshkys, jalopies and landaus, jeeps, bogies and coupés, drays, palanquins and flivvers, so many that before I knew it hours had passed, and it was dusk, and there seemed to be no end to the parade.

I was beginning to wonder how I would be able to cross the street. I wanted to go to the tobacconists' to pick up a twist of nap and a plug of slot, but the succession of carriages, decorative snowploughs, unicycles and troikas showed no sign of abating. The crowd that had gathered to cheer and throw hats in the air and dance impromptu polkas was thicker than it had been all day. One mountebank had set up his stall close to my front gate and was attracting custom with whoops and whistles.

I decided to risk crossing the road, thinking I could weave my way through the parade. I put on my hat and stepped out of the door, and was at once caught up in a surging mob of revellers and borne aloft like some sort of mascot. They ignored my tremulous whimpers of protest, but eventually dumped me on the kerb about a mile down the road from my house, and here the pageantry, and crowds, were if anything more boisterous, colourful and noisy than ever.

“What is this all in aid of?” I shouted at a black-clad widow-woman who was selling bundles of strange herbs from a barrow. She was reluctant to answer me until I had forked out a handful of cash for a sprig of irkbane.

“A potentate from a far distant land is visiting our town,” she told me, “and the council wanted to make him welcome. He is a terrible tyrant, and he has been known to kill a horse just by uttering its name. His palace is bigger than the tallest mountain, and is built from the bones of enemies he has slain in combat. But they say that in his bailiwick sheep may safely graze.”

The crone continued to speak, but she was drowned out by a band of pipers on the back of a passing flatbed truck. I stuffed cotton wool into my ears. An urchin pressed a pennant into my hand and I found myself waving it unthinkingly. Night had fallen now, but the town was bright with flares and gas and calcium night lights. I stood at the roadside, hemmed in by carousing crowds, and watched the passing parade.

Somewhere bells were clanging. A mile away, in the dark dark woods, owls swooped on field mice, badgers grubbed for worms, and insects glowed. A mile further on, the potentate's assassin tied a bandanna around his head, lit a cigarillo, shouldered his rifle and began his heavy deliberate trudge across the marshes towards the town.

One Afternoon on the Lane That Runs From Coctlosh to Pointy Town

It was a sweltering day, and I had spent a profitable hour or two rummaging in the market square at Coctlosh. My haversack was filled with purchases, including aniseed and bleach and curd, a dark enticing flap, gewgaws, a hat, iced and jellied kiwi fruit lozenges, mayonnaise and more items from the first half of the alphabet. Making my way home along the lane that runs from Coctlosh to Pointy Town, I passed again the bench where that morning I had encountered the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. I told you about that meeting on Tuesday 7th December last year.

Father Hopkins was no longer sitting on the bench. His place had been taken by a bespectacled chap with a high forehead. At a glance, I took him to be a man of powerful intellect.

“Good afternoon,” I said jauntily, tipping my hat.

“Cat's foot iron claw. Neurosurgeons scream for more at paranoia's poison door,” he shouted.

“I beg your pardon?” I asked, disconcerted.

“Twenty-first century schizoid man!” he bellowed.

To my great excitement, it dawned on me that I was talking to cerebral pop god Robert Fripp. I had not been mistaken when I judged my interlocutor to be a man of great intellectual accomplishment.

“I am thrilled to meet you,” I babbled, “For you are the man who managed to have an electric guitar technique named Frippertronics after you, even though others had developed it and used it long before. That shows chutzpah!”

“Blood rack barbed wire,” he replied, “Politicians' funeral pyre. Innocents raped with napalm fire. Twenty-first century schizoid man.”

I tossed him a plum as I pondered the deep significance of his words. I treasured this moment. How rarely we find ourselves in the presence of genius, rarer still to meet genius, chutzpah, round spectacles and pop immortality commingled in one man. I was hanging on his every word.

“Death seed blind man's greed,” he roared. I hastily scribbled it down in my notebook.

“Poets' starving children bleed,” he continued, as I gazed at him, awestruck. The afternoon sun glistened on his spectacle lenses and shiny high forehead.

“Nothing he's got he really needs. Twenty-first century schizoid man,” he growled, and with that he jumped up from the bench and hared off down the lane. Sadly, he had ignored my gift of a plum, but I did not let that spoil my glow of contentment. I walked briskly home to listen to my much-treasured CD of Toyah Wilcox's Greatest Hits.

Saint Mungo : Read and Learn

A couple of days ago we noted, as we do, the feast day of Saint Mungo. You ought to know that Saint Mungo's mother, Tenew, was thrown from the top of Traprain Law, a large hill outside Edinburgh, by her father Loth. Because she survived the plunge, it was thought she was a witch, so she was cast adrift in a coracle. Fetching up at Saint Serf's religious establishment on Culross, she gave birth to Mungo on the beach. This happened in the sixth century.

Mungo had a bell. He is a very important saint to robins. Saint Serf had a pet robin which was slaughtered by Mungo's jealous classmates, who hoped to pin the blame on him. But Mungo restored the bird to life. Later on, he swapped his pastoral stave with Saint Columba.

There is a special mass for Saint Mungo, dating from the thirteenth century, which has been printed by the Bollandists. The Bollandists are an association of ecclesiastical scholars engaged in editing the Acta Sanctorum, a great hagiographical collection begun during the first years of the seventeenth century, and continued to our own day. The work was conceived by Heribert Rosweyde (1569-1629). Under the title Fasti sanctorum quorum vitae in belgicis bibliothecis manuscriptiae, he gave in a little volume, published by the Plantin press at Antwerp, an alphabetical list of the names of the saints whose acts had been either found by him or called to his attention in old manuscript collections. This list filled fifty pages; the prefatory notice in which he indicates the character and arrangement of his work takes up fourteen. Finally, the work contains an appendix of twenty-six pages containing the unpublished acts of the passion of the holy Cilician martyrs, Tharsacus, Probus, and Andronicus, but not Mungo, who was not, in any case, a holy Cilician martyr.

Rosweyde planned supplementary volumes which would include the authors of the lives, the sufferings of the martyrs, the images of the saints, liturgical rites and customs mentioned in hagiographical documents, profane customs to which allusions had been made, questions of chronology, names of places encountered in these same documents, barbarous or obscure terms which might puzzle the readers, and tables showing the names of the saints whose lives had been published in the preceding volumes, the same names followed by notes indicating the place of the saint's birth, his station in life, his title to sanctity, the time and place in which he had lived, and the author of his life, the state of life of the various saints (religious, priest, virgin, widow, etc.), their position in the Church (apostle, bishop, abbot, etc.), the nomenclature of the saints according to the countries made illustrious by their birth, apostolate, sojourn, burial, nomenclature of the places in which they are honoured with a special cult, enumeration of the maladies for the cure of which they are especially invoked, the professions placed under their patronage, the proper names of persons and places encountered in the published lives, the passages of Holy Scripture there explained, points which may be of use in religious controversies, those applicable in the teaching of Christian doctrine, a general table of words and things in alphabetical order, “and others still,” added the author, “if anything of importance presents itself, of which our readers may give us an idea”.

This is such an important topic that we shall return to it at a later date. Meanwhile, you can commit to memory the little rhyme associated with Saint Mungo:

The tree that never grew, The bird that never flew, The fish that never swam, The bell that never rang.

Gods

Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. These are gods. They are not toys or trinkets, plastic figurines or dolls made out of scraps of wool or straw. They are gods. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. These too are gods. Mighty, imperious gods. Geb is the Great Cackler, Hapi the Father of the Gods, Anubis the Jackal, Khnum the Lord of the Cool Waters, Ra the Sun God, Maat the Goddess of Truth, Aten the Lord of All, Sekhmet the Mighty One, Hathor the Mistress of Heaven and Horus He Who Is Above. Bow down before them for they are powerful deities. While you cower in your ditch, grovelling, they bestride the heavens. Not toys, I say, but gods. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. The devourer, the throne, the tearer, the sky, the opener. Above you the sky is black and fat with stars, for it is night, illimitable and desolate, and you are an uncomprehending mite alone on a burning planet, sprawling in your ditch. They are gods. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. Big, towering, potent gods and goddesses. Aker the Double Lion God. Khepri He who comes into existence. Sobek He who causes fertility. Taurt the Great Lady. Seshat, ah Seshat, the Lady of the Library, and Seth the Lord of Upper Egypt. These are the gods. You are not in Upper Egypt, nor in Lower Egypt. You are not in Egypt at all. But wherever your ditch is, in this night as hard as iron, you abase yourself before these gods, because you must. The time for toys and trinkets, for the bauble and the gewgaw, is long past, and you have left all fripperies behind you. Now there is simply you and your gods, locked together, in the face of the stark blank sky. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. The Chief of Heaven, the Lady of Heaven, the King of the Dead, the Hidden One, the Lady of the House and the Great Goddess. Bow down, bow down. You have a forelock. It is there to be tugged, so tug it. Tug it in obeisance to Thoth, the Great Measurer. And to Ra, to Ra, to Ra!

Now plant your brow in the muck on the floor of the ditch and cast your mind back to that golden happy childhood when you plashed in the paddling pool on a sun-blazed summer's day. The water was cool and delightful, the water in your paddling pool. Did you rush home wrapped in your big yellow towel and worship Khnum? Did you thank Khnum for the coolness of the water? Dried and cooled, did you clutch your library ticket in your tiny hand and scamper excitedly to the public lending library to borrow a book of fairy stories? You would have looked for something with pictures of elves and wizards and peris and hobgoblins, and found a compendium, perhaps, carried it on tippytoe to the issuing desk bathed in the glorious sunshine streaming through those enormous library windows, had it stamped, and borne your borrowed book away, out onto the path in the bright afternoon. When you got home, safe in your bedroom strewn with pillows and cushions and patchwork quilts and throws, did you cry out in gratitude to Seshat?

Mut. Nut. Horus. Seth. Anubis. These are gods. All-powerful and eternal. I can picture you, a few summers later, older but no wiser, traipsing around in the park at lunchtime. You have a bag of breadcrumbs and you intend to cast them upon the grass as food for sparrows and magpies and starlings, for linnets and ravens, for bufflehead ducks and grebes. Sitting on the rusty bench with its rusty plaque in memory of one long dead who sat here often and adored the view, the view of rooftops and chimneys and football fields and allotments, of tennis courts and orchards rich in cherry trees, I see you casting your crumbs to the birds, and I know that you are not giving thanks to Aten or Geb or Sekhmet or Ptah. No. Still at this time, despite your riches and your bravura, your poor head is filled with visions of Itzpapalotl, Coatlicue, Temazcalteci, Tlaloc, Mayahual, Cihuateto, Huixtocihuatl, Popocatepetl and the like, for these are your gods. In the grip of your delusions, it is perhaps not coincidental that you like to sport a yellow polo neck sweater like the one worn by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and even have your hair cut in a similar mop, though you are not yet going grey, and you insist that you have not seen the film, for you profess a devotion to the silent screen. In your pantheon, Abel Gance rubs shoulders with Oxomoco, Lilian Gish with Quetzalcoatl. You have seen Broken Blossoms more than a dozen times, and sometimes you like to pace the back streets of Limehouse as if in search of the opium dens that are no longer there, the dens from which Sherlock Holmes emerged twitching and shattered in The Man With The Twisted Lip. Those fog-enshrouded days are as distant now as the bright summers of your paddling pool youth, yet you cling to your false gods as you feed the birds and ducks in the park, shaded from Nut's glittering sky by the overhanging branches of sycamores and hazel trees, on the bench by the magnificent iron railings which were replaced after the war in which you were wounded thrice. You were shot in the stomach, burned by flaming barrels, and crushed by falling masonry, but now there is not a scratch on you, and you have forgotten that terrible day in Scheveningen. You were treated well in the field hospital, but what did you do, once you could again use your hands? You scavenged scraps of wood and built a little toy altar and put it on your bedside shelf, praying to Ixtlilton, your god of healing, for having saved you from the realm of Mictlantecuhtle.

So let us spring forward again now, another ten, twenty years, and now your hair is grey, but no longer cut à la Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man. Your yellow polo neck is threadbare now, and you use it as a dust-cloth. There is much dust in your home, for the air is never still there. Draughts curl in under the doors and around the window frames, for much of the wood is rotting away under sustained attack by weevils and woodworms, microscopic forms of life you have ignored for too long. Baleful, greasy, plump, a little cracked, you shuffle from room to room, pointlessly, as if you have been kennelled. All your money is gone, exhausted by your postwar debaucheries. You have a blighted reputation and constant pins and needles. That is what accounts for your restlessness, this shuffling from bedroom to pantry to parlour to outhouse, from attic to cellar, and back again, up and down and round and round and always with your liver-spotted fist clamped around a little tin medallion of Montezuma as if that might fend off the night, the darkness, the vastness of eternity. You have a kitten, but it hates you. You have not yet been subjugated by Bastet, but that time is drawing nigh. So you call your kitten Karen Carpenter and feed it with fish that you pluck from ponds, or with eels you thieve from the back-kitchens of canteens, and your kitten hisses at you and claws you and loathes the sight of you. You are fearful of the light in those green eyes, for you rightly sense that they see into your soul, your small and puny soul, all curdled by a life of waste and delusion that Centeotl would bring you corn, that Chantico would warm your hearth, that the wind cried Ehecatl. The gods are in readiness for you and the wind is cold.

Yes, it is night now, and you are in your ditch. The wind is cold and the sky is black and there are no birds, not even crows. Your kitten tore that pitiful tin medallion from your hand and dropped it down a well. You are alone, but for the gods. Geb. Hapi. Anubis. Khnum. Ra. You have sunk to your knees. That blurred black and white image of Lilian Gish, stricken by panic in The Wind, is fading fast. Like Sherlock Holmes, you too are twitching and shattered, but no opiates brought you to this. Maat. Aten. Sekhmet. Hathor. Horus. There is no longer any traffic, no car horns, no rattling carts, no clanking steamer plying across the strait. Despite your wealth, you never did fly in an aeroplane across oceans and continents. You never did go and live in that house on stilts that you pictured in your mind's eye when you were young. Parks and ponds were your domain, parks and ponds. And now this ditch, a trickle of foul brackish water running through it. You cup some in your hands and splash it on your burning brow but it is not the cool water from the paddling pool given to you by Khnum all those years ago. Ammut. Isis. Bastet. Nut. Ptah. Aker. Khepri. Sobek. Taurt. Seshat. Seth. There came that day, that Thursday, when your nerves were so brittle and the pins and needles became too much, and you flung your Montezuma medallion across the pantry and cursed your gods, and the kitten crept up to you and fixed its green eyes on you. You retrieved your tin gewgaw and fled to the park to watch the grebes, but you were shaken. You have not been still since then, you are like the gusts of air swirling around your house, the house you lived in then. Min. Mut. Osiris. Amun. Nephthys. Neith. These are the gods. And Ra. And Anubis. And Thoth, the Great Measurer, Thoth who is ready to take your measure now. Be still. Be measured. Be still.

More About The Anatomy of Melancholy

Glyn Webster has drawn my attention to a puppetry adaptation of The Anatomy Of Melancholy devised by Pamella O'Connor. You can read a review of it and see plenty of production stills like the one below. I think a British puppetry impresario needs to be persuaded to bring the show to this country. Now.

Erst Spruce, Now Rusty and Squalid

Consider that fall. One day, you are spry, preening and spruce. Then, knocked sideways, cast down, become rusty and squalid. How does it happen? Is there a moment, a split second, when jauntiness turns to sackcloth and ashes? What would your journal read? Eleven a.m.: o! such bliss and splendour! How blessed am I to be among the animate and quick. Eleven o one a.m.: Ach! Does earth harbour a wretch as miserable as I, one who crumbles in despair and is fit only to slither in the muck with the worms? How are we to make sense of such a catastrophic change? Crystal balls may help seers and soothsayers see into the future, but is it true, as some say, that we can make sense of the present by staring long and intently with our eyes wide open at the surface of a muddy pond over by Bodger's Spinney? And not any of the ponds there, just one, the most brackish of the ponds, the one which is inky black and fathomless. What will we see on the surface of that pond if we stare at it long enough? I will tell you. Ignore the flies and mosquitoes and the mutant tadpoles that occasionally disturb the water, and sooner or later, you will be able to discern, dimly at first, but with increasing clarity, the incredible face of the Psychopond Dweller, shimmering, gaunt, bewitched and bewitching, and its expression will reveal to you the meaning of neither past nor future but of the present moment, radical, decisive and, like the cockles and mussels in the old song, alive, alive-oh.

Inconsequential Trivia

There are those who make fun of my continuing fascination with the Kennedy assassination - good afternoon, Pansy Cradledew - as if that little pang of excitement I get when I read the words grassy knoll or Umbrella Man or Agent Hosty means I am some kind of bug-eyed conspiracy theorist of questionable personal habits.

Actually I think it is the mountain of theories and documentation and obsessive poring over minutiae that interests me, much as the similar activities of, say, Loch Ness Monster hunters have an inherently attractive monomania. Anyway, for those (and they are legion) who like this sort of thing, here is a Kennedy Assassination Fact.

In November 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald's wife Marina, and the two children, were staying in the house of Ruth Paine, a Quaker, in the suburb of Irving. Oswald stayed in a Dallas rooming-house during the week and joined them at weekends. He kept his Mannlicher Carcano rifle in Ruth Paine's garage. Blah blah blah. The interesting fact is as follows. Ruth's husband Michael Paine (who had moved out of the house for reasons unrelated to the Oswalds) was the great-great-grandson of Ralph Waldo Emerson and also a direct descendant of one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, Robert Treat Paine.

I am really glad to know that smidgeon of information, useless as it is. Now you know it too.

When I Was Interrogated

I don't remember much about my interrogation, but under the new Freedom of Information Act I managed to get hold of a cassette tape. For the best part of half an hour it's a mishmash of hisses, squeaks, mufflement and what sounds like a water vole gnawing on a wet twig. One part of my interrogation has survived, however, and I have taken the trouble to transcribe it for you, so you may study it with care.

Q - When was the last time you stood in the middle of a suspension bridge in a high wind, emptying your lungs and belting out the Uruguayan national anthem at the top of your voice?

A - Last Thursday.

Q - Were you accompanied on piccolo by Von Straubenzee and on cor anglais by Tack?

A - I was.

Q - Are you aware that Tack is wanted by the police of four continents for doing weird things with the pips of citrus fruits?

A - I am not.

Q - Or that Von Straubenzee is not Von Straubenzee's real name?

A - I was not aware of that.

Q - Do not be curt.

A - I am not being curt.

Q - We shall be the judges of your curtness. What is that noise in your pocket?

A - That is my water vole gnawing a wet twig it eked from the riverbank just before I was placed under arrest.

Q - Did Constable Fang tell you you could bring a water vole to the top secret interrogation centre?

A - He didn't say one way or the other.

Q - That will be all. We will call you back after several ukases have been issued.

I kept a close eye on the papers for the next few days, waiting for the ukases to be issued, but they never were, nor was I ever dragged back to the top secret interrogation centre. Tack vanished without trace, but a month or so later I ran into Von Straubenzee outside the Palace of Churns. I asked him if it was true that his real name was not Von Straubenzee.

“Van,” he said, “Van”.

He was of a delicate constitution, so I didn't press him further. Many years later, his sister told me that it was very important to him that his surname and his blood group were “in alignment”, as she put it. He was a great piccolo player, and so was his sister. But my singing voice is not what it was, and I no longer sing. I just stand on the windswept suspension bridge and remember, with a lump in my throat, and another water vole in my pocket, gnawing on another wet twig.

The Stone of Turpitude

I cannot resist quoting again from Robert Burton's The Anatomy Of Melancholy (see 3rd January). At a time when the press is full of stories of people living on credit and building up massive debt, Burton reminds us how they used to deal with these things:

At Padua in Italy they have a stone called the stone of turpitude, near the senate-house, where spendthrifts, and such as disclaim non-payment of debts, do sit with their hinder parts bare, that by that note of disgrace others may be terrified from all such vain expense, or borrowing more than they can tell how to pay. The civilians of old set guardians over such brain-sick prodigals, as they did over madmen, to moderate their expenses, that they should not so loosely consume their fortunes, to the utter undoing of their families.

Stress, Distress, Tristesse

Most readers will have seen one of those lists of life-events ranked in order of the stress they cause. (If you haven't, go here, but come straight back.) Now, our in-house team of psychologists, brain experts, phrenologists, mesmerists and cranial integument analysts have devised a definitive list based on a study of everyone on earth, alive and dead. Here are the top ten stress-inducing events.

1. Staring at a bee.

2. Inky fingers.

3. Eating fruit in a concrete paddling pool.

4. Dreaming of natterjack toads.

5. Broken Godspell soundtrack LP.

6. Impenetrable flimflam.

7. Klaxon next to ear.

8. Being trapped in a birdcage with a starving chough.

9. Library ticket panic.

10. Unravelling Fairisle sweater.

Pit Vipers on Postage Stamps

This is number one in our new series showing pit vipers on postage stamps. Hooting Yard wishes to thank the Western Montana Agkistrodon contortrix Philatelic Society for a generous grant enabling us to carry out this important work and keep Mrs Gubbins supplied with tea bags.

The Mincing Corsair

Many moons have passed since we last received a letter of complaint from Dr Ruth Pastry, but she has at last been stirred into action. The following email arrived the other day:

Dear Mr Key : I was disturbed to note, in your item headed Petrochemical Shiver-Me-Timbers Conclave (20th December 2004), that you unthinkingly preceded the word corsair with bloodthirsty. This is not only a cliché, but also panders to the stereotype of corsairs as violent maniacs who careen around the decks of sailing ships off the Barbary Coast with gleaming cutlasses clenched between their equally gleaming teeth. I have met many corsairs in my time, and not one of them bears any resemblance to this nonsensical image. Indeed, the corsair with whom I was best acquainted, in that he was my fiancé for a few months in the early 1970s, was a gentle soul named Federico Dellapiccola de Grunwald, who spoke with a pronounced lisp and whose usual form of locomotion, when he wasn't prancing, was to mince. I do not think he had ever been near a cutlass in his life. Much of his time, whenever he was absent from his buccaneering privateer ship, was spent raising rhododendrons and dahlias, holding raffles in aid of the local orphanage, and gambolling o'er green fields with puppies and flopsy-tailed bunny rabbits. Next time you write about corsairs, please be more accurate. Yours fuming, Ruth Pastry.

In a Cabin, on a Ship

In a cabin, on a ship, steaming into harbour, were two glum men. No. The ship was steaming away from the harbour, or port, a port whose name ended in -dam. Do not try to guess which port I refer to, for your brain will become dizened by the effort, and if you were an animation, little tweeting birds would circle around your head, such would be your befuddlement. I know whereof I speak, so trust me.

This ship, now, the HMS Important And Grandiose Flying Many Flags, had gravitas, if we can ascribe gravitas to a ship, and as it steamed out of the port of -dam it had many, many flags flying. Some of the flags were blue, a cerulean blue like the best skies on the most gorgeous summer days. If you stare at the bright sky on such a day for long enough, you will see that the air is teeming with spirits, as multitudinous as flakes in a snowstorm, according to a French person called Leo Suavius. And look! Many of the flags flying from the ship, those that are blue and those of other shades, have pictures of angels on them. You may scan the flags as carefully as you wish, but you will not find a skull-and-crossbones hidden among them, for this is not a pirate ship.

Is or was? I fear I have veered from the past tense to the present without explanation. Unless I am careful we shall hurtle into the future, and what is intended to be a sober piece of reportage will become science fiction, and you will toss it aside with a harrumph of displeasure, for if I know you well, dear reader, you would rather have me tell you of that which is prosaic and mundane than be titillated with intergalactic space rockets captained by alien beings called Thargon, zapping x-ray beams at inexplicable foes whose very geometry is unearthly.

Once, when I had time to spare, and the ship was still in port, I tried to count all those magnificent flags and found that I could never arrive at an exact number. Perhaps there were sailors aboard hoisting and lowering them so rapidly that I did not see. I did not have a pair of binoculars in those days. Indeed, I still don't, for what use would they be to a Cyclops like me, whose left eye was damaged during the Munich Air Disaster? I shall tell you about that another time.

For now, picture that ship, with its serried blue flags and its innumerable angels, steaming out of -dam, and two glum men in a cabin below decks. The door is closed. The cabin has two portholes, and they are of frosted glass, for no particular reason. One of the gloomy men is sitting on an upper bunk, dangling his spindly legs over the side. When he used to laugh, years ago, he sounded like a bronchial horse, and indeed he suffered terribly from bronchitis and often, on his daily rounds, walked past a field in which a tremendous number of horses were put out to fallow, if that is the correct word. I don't think it is, but I shall let it stand, I am in that kind of mood. But that was long ago. Now, glum and emaciated, he sits on the bunk in a cabin of the ship of many flags and clears his throat. He is about to introduce himself to the other miserable man in the cabin, who has just come in, slamming the door behind him.

This second man is wearing atop his pulsating cranium a dippy hat. For the last few hours he has been thinking, thinking so damn hard, about ducks, for that is the sort of man he is. He wants to complete a catalogue of duck markings, duck behaviour and duck habitats, but has been unable to work on it for a while as he has sprained his wrist and cannot write. This accounts for his glumness, and also for his sling. The sprain occurred when he was trying to unscrew the jammed lid from a jar of hoodie-maroodie paste.

We might ask, at this point, the cause of the other man's gloom, the man on the bunk who used to laugh like a horse long, long ago. Sadly, his interior life is a thing of mystery, to me at any rate.

From bulkhead to poop-hatch, instructions are being shouted back and forth by the ship's crew. The mighty sun is gleaming bronze. Flags are flying and the sky is alive with auks and terns and guillemots. Below decks in the gloomy cabin, the two men reluctantly greet each other. This was the historic moment when Blodgett met Dobson.

One Type of Frightful Hobgoblin

Bird Research With Mrs Gubbins

On Christmas Eve, we invited Mrs Gubbins to resume her occasional “weblink recommendations” which many readers find so invaluable. Indeed, the octogenarian crone became so excited that she brewed an extra pot of tea and ate a whole half-packet of those delicious Rich Tea™ biscuits. So, just over a week later, she's back again:

Hello readers, Mrs Gubbins here. One of the incidental pleasures of the BBC News site is their regular list of Ten Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Week. At year's end, they collected together 100 Things, which is my recommendation for you today. A word of warning, however. Many of these hundred things are quite dull, and one of them even mentions that loathsome fraud Clive James, who has been insulted here before*, with good reason. But I was quite taken with number 11, which notes that in its original translation The Communist Manifesto spoke not of “a spectre haunting Europe”, but of a “frightful hobgoblin”, which is much more thrilling, and number 21, on the earliest use of the word “electricity”.

It is the bird facts, though, that make the site worth a visit. Find out about crows (4), pigeons (9), ducks (73), and birds crashing into buildings (76). There is also a photograph of some penguins.

* NOTE:See “Minor Rant”,19 September.

About The Complete Book of Cheese

Today's quotation is taken from a 1955 compendium of invaluable cheese information. Turophiles can go here to read the Project Gutenberg edition, which I was delighted to note includes the original illustrations by Erik Blegvad, papa of that Godlike genius Peter Blegvad. Here is one of Blegvad senior's drawings, the cover of a non-cheese-related book which has, I aver, a certain magnificent beauty:

Phantasmal Quest Thing

One of the more lamentable episodes in Dobson's career was the year he wasted trying to write a Tolkeinish fantasy novel. What on earth got into him? It was the year Fulgencio Batista fled Cuba, that Alaska and Hawaii joined the United States, that Archbishop Makarios returned to Cyprus from exile; the year of a royal wedding in Belgium and of the so-called kitchen debate between Nikita Krushchev and Richard Milhous Nixon. It was the year which saw the debut of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, but also, in February, the day the music died. John McEnroe, Jens Stoltenberg, Max Décharné and Magic Johnson were born during that twelvemonth, while Frank Lloyd Wright, Mario Lanza, and Blind Willie McTell all perished.

And all the while Dobson was holed up in a hut in some Arctic wasteland, writing something to which he gave the working title Phantasmal Quest Thing. It is anybody's guess why he tried to write fantasy fiction. He had no feel for the genre. The reader will find here no elves, hobbits, or wizards - just fleas and flies. Dobson seemed to think he could build a thousand-page epic around a flea called Dave. The other characters - if such they can be called - have equally prosaic names. Instead of, say, Aragorn, Legolas and Gandalf we get Keith, Colin, Sue and Geoff. In place of adventures, we get these barely-anthropomorphised insects - accompanied by a few midges, ticks and bluebottles - flying and leaping around the place engaged in conversations which report on action sequences that are never themselves described.

It is a soulless and tedious work, and it is best to draw a veil over Dobson's habit, during that year, of dressing in cardigans and tweeds, hanging around in taverns drinking warm beer, and spouting politically reactionary drivel as a way of ingratiating himself with the fantasists he modelled himself upon. Let us just be thankful that Marigold Chew snapped him out of it. On the twelfth of October 1959 she bundled him on to a boat, locked him in the cabin, and, through a coded system of knuckle-raps on the door, threatened him with a big fierce sword-wielding pneumatic robot dervish. It was a turning point in his career.

Audubon Bird-of-the-month Competition

Winner of the December Audubon Bird-of-the-Month Competition (see foot of the page) was reader Pierre Sloggit, whose entry reads as follows:

I know what this bird is, it's a Taft’s Guillemot. It is shown in your picture guarding the famous oyster that was thought by many to incorporate in the convolutions of its shell an image of Howard Taft, one time US President. [Pierre is, I think, using here an outmoded term for “Potus”.] This bird was only discovered in the early twentieth century and was therefore added to a supplement of Audubon’s work.* It should be distinguished from Barbara’s Guillemot, which of course stands guard over the head of former First Lady, Barbara Bush, who by remarkable coincidence has a facial birthmark that looks like an oyster, as well as a moustache like Howard Taft.

*Missing Guillemots and Auks: Series IX (Presidential Guillemots): Supplementary vols. CCCXI – CCCXXVIII (Great Lakes and Seaway Guillemots, Three Toed and Lesser).

Pierre wins a hallucinatory bowl of myrrh and some trinkets.