Anniversaries

Regular readers know that here at Hooting Yard we like to keep abreast of important doings in the world of petulant Canadian pop songstresses. That being so, it did not escape our attention that a new acoustic version of Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morissette is being issued as a “ten year anniversary commemorative edition”.

Next year will see the twentieth anniversary of the publication of two ground-breaking books, Stab Your Employer and Smooching With Istvan. These were early collaborations between Max Décharné and Frank Key and are, just like Dobson's pamphlets, sadly out of print. Following Ms Morissette's example, I think that twentieth anniversary commemorative acoustic editions would be a splendid idea. I know what you're thinking - these were written works, not musical ones. Hell, we won't let that stop us! Max and I have already arranged for a series of meetings to thrash out the details of the project.

Meanwhile, admirers of the woman Johnny Esposito calls “Her Shrillness”, if there are any, ought to visit the Alanis Morissette Random Lyrics Generator.

It Was Dusk

It was dusk, and wantons had gathered in the spinney. Beyond the spinney, across the lake, was the running track where Bobnit Tivol had sprinted his way to immortality. The trackside, where once lupins had flamed forth, was now overgrown with charlock and bindweed and blackish darnel, clumps of which were thickest by the old well, where long, long ago the Woohoohoodywoo Woman had cast her spells. When they marked out the track back in 1934, they had forgotten about the well. They had forgotten about the hornets, too, and the wasps, and the bees, all of them drawn to the field for as long as anybody could remember, and never successfully exterminated. Even the sulphur bombs detonated by old Halob's squad of flying insect killers failed. Back then, of course, old Halob was not yet old, but he had already cultivated a certain gravitas. Punctilio came to him later.

Now the ghosts of old Halob and fictional sprint champion Bobnit Tivol haunt that long-abandoned athletics venue. That is why, at dusk, over in the spinney, the wantons gather. Dressed in flowing gowns stitched together from fire-damaged curtain material, the wantons descend upon the spinney armed with baskets of peppers and peapods and potatoes, brimming baskets from which the peppers and peapods and potatoes tumble and are strewn as the wantons skip along the path that leads to the spinney. No wanton stoops to pick up the fallen veg, as dusk falls, for they like to lay a trail. They make no secret of their gathering in the spinney across the lake from the ruined running track. All the townsfolk know they are heading there, at dusk on the third Thursday of each month, the skipping wantons with their baskets, but they are never followed. In the town, shutters are shut and lamps lit, and in their gloomy rooms the people switch on their radios, loud, and listen to dance band music of the golden age, and distract themselves with card games and charades, for they try not to think about the wantons in the spinney summoning up the ghosts of Bobnit Tivol and old Halob.

By the running track itself, as dusk grows deeper, the hornets and bees and wasps no longer stir. They go wherever flying insects go at night, or they sleep, if such creatures sleep, in their nests, hidden in the brambles and the bindweed. Often the field that once saw Bobnit Tivol run round and round in record time is engulfed in mist. Why do the wantons gather in the spinney across the lake, instead of here? Before we find out, there are some blots to contend with.

You have negotiated the blots, as a kayak negotiates rapids. Well done. Now we must discover why the wantons gather in the spinney. It is because they believe that phantoms are imbued with special powers if they are made to cross a body of water. The wantons want Bobnit Tivol and Halob, or their spirits, to materialise among the slumbering hornets and wasps and bees of the derelict running track, and then to pass over the still silent lake, and thus to come to them in the spinney. These athletic ghosts, empowered by water, will be given offerings of peppers and peapods and potatoes, and then the wantons will send them into the town, to do what the wantons want done. But nobody yet knows what the wantons want, for on no third Thursday have the ghosts come shimmering across the lake to them. No, the wantons wait all night, skipping while they wait, in circles, their gowns flowing, and at dawn they skip away from the spinney, their baskets empty, back into the town where radios still blare, where the shutters are still shut, into the dawn of another day when no one will speak the names of Halob or of Bobnit Tivol, not today nor evermore, for of course neither the wily trainer nor his protégé ever existed in the first place, and if their ghosts do appear, it is only once a month, one misty night, in the wild minds of the wantons who skip in the spinney.

The Bilgewater Elegies

Like the Arctic tern, which is neither from the Arctic, nor a tern, Dobson's famous Bilgewater Elegies are emphatically not elegies about bilgewater. I'm sorry, I have begun that all wrong. The Arctic tern is from the Arctic, and it is a tern. I was thinking of some other bird of misleading nomenclature, or perhaps not a bird, but an animal, at any rate, which is not what its name indicates. I will try to remember what it was I was thinking of. The central point remains true, however, that the Bilgewater Elegies are not elegies and not about bilgewater, except in passing.

Dobson wrote these magnificent pieces in a wintry month or two while living in a far distant land whence he had gone to escape having to pay his gas bill. Keen students of Dobson's life know that gas in many forms seems to take on a quite bewildering importance. In one biography, for example, there are three times as many index entries for “gas” as there are for “pamphlets”. Marsh gas, in particular, permeates much of Dobson's middle years, almost as if it were what he was breathing instead of oxygen. Perhaps it was.

The out-of-print pamphleteer had a deep and abiding reluctance to pay for gas, and often considered living somewhere powered entirely by electricity, or the wind or the sun, or indeed existing without being dependent upon any source of energy whatsoever. But, as Marigold Chew has noted, rail as Dobson might, he was drawn inexorably to the blue, blue flames of burning gas, a man mesmerised.

I was thinking about guinea pigs, of course, which are not from Guinea and are not pigs. Why I confused them with birds, particularly Arctic terns, is beyond me.

That winter season, then, determined to outwit those who provided him with gas, Dobson decamped to that far distant country, mountainous and cold, remote yet populous, a land of which he knew nothing except the design of its flag. On arrival he discovered that even this minimal knowledge was redundant, as there had been a revolution. The old flag had been ditched, and a new one - pink, black, green - flew from flagpoles wherever he looked. Between the seaport and the chalet where he was to live for two months, Dobson counted at least seven hundred flags.

In the chalet, Dobson closed the traditional butcher's drapes and placed his canister of calor gas in a cubby hole. Gnawing on a nut, for he was forever nut-gnawing, he considered his surroundings. It was a small chalet, with no hidden chambers, false walls, or concreted-over ancient wells. Dobson was perplexed at the absurd number of metal coat-hangers in the master wardrobe, and the equally numerous drawing-pins in the drawer atop the cubby hole. The cubby hole itself was just the right size for his canister. He was looking forward to burning the portable gas as the evening drew in, but it was still morning, so he curbed his impatience by exploring the outcrop on which the chalet perched. Knowing nothing of geology, and caring less, this took Dobson about five minutes, or about the time it took him to gnaw one of his brazil nuts to nothing. Later in life, of course, Dobson wrote a number of pamphlets on geological topics, as an exercise. Curiously, he never wrote about brazil nuts.

Temporarily out of reach of his gas-creditors, Dobson decided to spend his first afternoon in the chalet on the outcrop in that faraway flag-mad land writing. But he was by turns listless and restless, and irritated that his new domain failed to inspire him. By four o' clock, having scratched a mere dozen words in his notepad, then torn out the page and set fire to it, he went for a walk. Turning his back on the outcrop, he headed downhill, towards the nearest village, through which his taxi had taken him that morning. He had paid it no attention, for his eyes had been shut, as they often were in taxis. Dobson used such rides for reverie rather than observation.

Marigold Chew once put her hand to a story about Dobson's walk that day. It was called The Village That Lacked Basic Sanitation, and she refused ever to allow it to be published. All we know for certain is that Dobson returned to the chalet that evening astride a massive, ungainly horse, of chestnut complexion, called Tim. He seems to have been convinced that mice were scurrying uncontrollably about the chalet, and that they would be frightened away by the sight of a big horse. In truth, there were no mice. Dobson had fallen victim to delusional visions because of the high altitude. Nevertheless, the presence of Tim, snorting and stamping his hooves, becalmed the pamphleteer, and the next morning he dragged a wooden table and chair outside the front of the chalet and sat down to compose the Bilgewater Elegies.

Here is a list of buckets of bilgewater I have seen, he wrote, the famous opening words of what was to be his own favourite among his countless pamphlets. He spent whole days in the crisp open air, scribbling away, occasionally filling Tim's nosebag with horse-food. In the evenings he sat in the chalet staring at the blue glow of burning calor gas. His nights were untroubled by nightmares. Every few days a panting cadet from the insanitary village would deliver a metal tapping machine message from Marigold Chew, keeping Dobson abreast of events at home.

Dobson wrote the final words of the Elegies on a bright day in October. On the same day, there was a counterrevolution in that cold distant country. The pink and black and green flags were torn down and stamped into the muck, swiftly replaced by red and blue and yellow flags. The panting cadet delivered Marigold's latest message, his cap askew and bloodstains on his sleeves. The look in his eyes told Dobson it was time to flee. He made the cadet promise to look after Tim the massive horse, packed up his things, and headed off for the seaport on foot. The gas canister was empty, and his work was done.

The Cribbins Research Institute

A Press Release appears on our news desk from the Cribbins Research Institute, a “fully-funded body devoted to academic exegesis of the oeuvre of Bernard Cribbins”, apparently. Publication of the launch issue of the Bulletin of Cribbins Studies has had to be postponed after two members of the editorial advisory panel got into a fist-fight underneath the canopy of the Institute's hospitality tent at an international Cribbins Conference in Ülm. Worse was to come, as a screening of The Railway Children was disrupted by a gang of Nesbitistas, a paramilitary groupuscule devoted to the memory of author Edith Nesbit, whose uncompromising stance is that all film adaptations of her work are taboo. An inner “star chamber” of the most fanatical Nesbitistas issued a statement denouncing the Cribbins Research Institute. We will do our best to keep you up to date with further developments.

Bobnit Tivol

A letter arrives from reader E Duggleby:

Dear Frank : Until I read the piece entitled A Snapshot From The History Of Athletics (21st July, below) I had no idea that the fictional sprinter Bobnit Tivol was your father. You will probably be interested to know that some years ago, when my collection of memorabilia related to this great invented athlete threatened to swamp my modest living quarters, I opened the world's first Bobnit Tivol Museum. My collection includes the following items:

His bus pass, his iron vest, a lithograph of one of his ears, the tentacles of a squid he admired, cranky old Halob's cotton wool bag, several urgent telegraphic messages relating to the 1952 Helsinki “disturbances”, a plasticine model of an apple-core with Bobnit Tivol's teeth-marks clearly delineated, a jug, a pot, a basin, lavish petunia-strewn flooring from a podium uprooted from the soil of an incredible sporting arena described in the novel Bobnit Tivol And The Rotating Things From Planet Glub, silhouettes of Bobnit Tivol, Halob, and Christopher Plummer, old rags, a bottle of gripe water, splendid tungsten pincers, the hat of a gondolier and a red fez from Luxor, a pin cushion, turpentine, Norwegian wool, a map with blots, and ten recordings of the Shipping Forecast acoustically treated by one of the leading Dutch music pioneers of the twentieth century.

If you or your readers would like to visit the Bobnit Tivol Museum, please be aware that it is virtually inaccessible to normal folk, being located in an ice-girt wasteland beset by howling gales. Ticket prices available upon request.

Spot the Nun Competition Results

The Adjudication Panel for the Spot The Nun Competition (see Friday 15th July below) had a tense meeting in the gorgeously redecorated Bodger's Spinney Tea Rooms yesterday. I am not sure why it was tense, though there was some sort of magnetic disturbance in the atmosphere, and one of the tea urns was making violent throbbing noises. Anyway, the winner of the competition was announced after several hours of deliberation. Reader Vincent Byrne of California sent in this correct entry:

If you look far enough into the background on “C”, using a magnifying glass, you will see that there is, in fact, a nun glowering at the men holding the calf, with a ruler ready in hand. “D”, on the other hand is a picture of a drawing of a nun, and therefore not wholly a nun. “A” and “B” are much the same as “D”, being records of famous nuns, but not nuns in themselves.

Vincent's prize is a no-expenses spared visit to examine the important roadworks at the Blister Lane Bypass. Well done!

Local Recipe Map

Readers may recall that one of my favourite publications is Further Science by Norman Davies. (See Hedge Auras, 20 February 2004.) I have still not managed to track down any other issues than Book 20, the marvellous A6 yellow-covered spineless 76-page pamphlet from 2001 which, maddeningly, contains no indication of its provenance. Here is Mr Davies' Local Recipe Map, reprinted exactly as it appears in the original:

1. Far NE Scotland - marmalade / far NW - biscuits / far North - fish.

2. Mid SW to NE - Devon / Yorks - rolls - cheese -sausage / cheese.

3. So that about a Midlands triangular Pie Nucleus - there are fingers and eggs: hot pots, to the NW - marmalade / ham / loaf to the East. With a ginger NW apex.

4. Tarts to the South - with W/E in the far South. Dumplings and Welsh herbs / cakes / fish puddings and scones. Etc.

I think we need to arrange a Hooting Yard expedition to the Midlands triangular Pie Nucleus!

Paragraph About a Pooch

Elsewhere in Further Science Book 20, Norman Davies has a section on dogs, which begins, enigmatically, “That the fact that sea centuries old wood when broken, is fresh orange and turns grey in 40 seconds, then black, is significant”. That may well be so, but it is not really pertinent to this paragraph. Nevertheless, while we are on the subject of dogs, it gives me great pleasure to include this photograph of Richard Milhous Nixon with his legendary pooch, Checkers.

A Snapshot From the History of Athletics

When I turn my mind to the great sprint champions of the past, I often think of Bobnit Tivol. He came from the Tyrol, and he was such a fast runner that it was said he could outrun an express train, which was a strange thing to say, for at that time there were no trains, express or otherwise, in the Tyrol. But of course Bobnit Tivol was famous throughout the world, and he often raced in foreign countries, so it is conceivable that he was tempted on one of his travels to compete against a railway train. His trainer was cranky old Halob, who himself had been a very great sprinter. Making his champion run in front of, rather than alongside, a speeding train is exactly the kind of technique Halob would have used. Once, it is said, he made Bobnit Tivol run an uphill double marathon wearing an iron vest, twice in one day.

One has only to consider the records broken by Bobnit Tivol to recognise him for the superb sprinter he was. Leafing through old athletics almanacks, his name appears again and again and again, invariably in capital letters, annotated by one, two, or even three stars, at the top of every list. They say he had to rent a warehouse to store all his cups and shields and trophies. To think that he had won all the major Tyrolean sprinting events before he was twenty years old is to gasp in wonder.

Could he have succeeded without old Halob? They made a striking pair, the whippet-like runner with his mop of golden hair and the wheezing, elderly man, who smoked four packets of Black Ague rolling tobacco every day, dressed always in his Stalinist cardigan, a stopwatch in each pocket, leaning on a stick he claimed to have broken off the Tree of Heaven.

If I shut my eyes I see them still, my father and his mentor, Bobnit Tivol and old Halob, heroic figures from a past I have had to invent anew, for none of it is true.

The Evil Bakery

“Eek! Eek!” trilled the twins, as they turned a corner by the market square and saw, looming above them, the big dark walls of the evil bakery. It was a sinister, if familiar, sight. Instinctively, the twins clutched each other's hands, as from behind the iron gates they heard what they knew was the bellowing of the Hairy Man. They hoped they would be able to pass by without him seeing them, but they suspected that, as ever, the Hairy Man would be peering out at the street through his powerful binoculars, and they were right. As they tried to flit past, wishing themselves invisible, the Hairy Man thrust one of his massive hairy paws through the railings and beckoned them. He stopped bellowing for a moment. The twins' legs had turned to jelly. Clouds scudded across the sky. Across the way, a French Impressionist painter captured the scene with swift, sure brushstrokes. The twins, the Hairy Man, even the vast gloomy bakery itself, are all a blur, just as they are in my memory.

It is hard to believe that fifty years have passed since this scene took place. I should be telling you about tin, tin and zinc and titanium, but I am ever drawn back to the evil bakery, and the twins and the Hairy Man with his binoculars. What did he say to them, when, terrified, they responded to his beckoning paw as if drawn by magnetism? Is it true that he merely gave them each a pastry and sent them on their way? That later, as they sat outside the Owl Library, they chuckled as the fruit filling of the pastries dribbled down their chins? What exactly did Under-Sheriff Coggery mean when he testified, later, that the very air of the town that day had a tang of rare Oriental spices, and of diesel fumes? I am standing on the bridge now, and hailstones are pinging off my hat, and still the mystery remains.

The Hairy Man lies buried in the churchyard, the twins of course are entombed in some giant foreign cathedral, and the evil bakery itself is no more. It was torn down after the events of that day, in riots, and on the site there now stands a teenage milk bar wherein scruffy youngsters strum guitars and sing inane songlets, oblivious of the evil spirits flying round and round, invisible.

God Almighty

That's right, the figure above is Almighty God, in His incarnation as Jesus. Here is the superb description of Him from Puppet Revelation:

Jesus is a beautiful full body, half body, rod arm puppet. This big mouth puppet is 30“ tall and has removable legs, mouth straps, 1.5 inch neck movement, same fabric throughout and comes with one puppet rod. This religious puppet is an excellent choice for puppet ministry and children's church. Use him to teach scripture and for many bible lessons. This biblical puppet is fully functional for both children and adults and can be used as a full body puppet or remove the legs to make a light weight rod style half body puppet. These puppets are similar to Muppet style puppets.

This Jesus puppet was made with great care and love and was designed to depict Christ in a loving, kind approachable way. We wanted a Jesus that children would want to know, love and cherish. He is in a garb of the biblical days with sandals and a satin deep red shawl that represents the blood shed on the cross and royalty as the King of Kings. All of this big mouth puppet's clothes are completely removable including his shoes. He has accentuated fingers, feet with toes (to wear sandals) and sewn elbow and knee joints. You can enter this lovely puppet from either the back in a ventriloquist puppet style or from the bottom like a standard half body puppet. He has a natural tanned skinned flesh tone and has big brown eyes and dark brown yarn hair and a short cropped beard. A plastic attachment is available to make the puppet appear to walk on water. This fully functional performance puppet is not only totally functional but he has been made affordable for puppet ministries with a tight budget.

Thanks to Private Eye for bringing this to my attention.

Cake News

I know that readers always look forward to Cake News, our weekly round-up of news, views and demented rantings from the world o' cake. Whether you're an aficionado of chocolate swiss roll or of Old Mother Brimstone's blob triangles, you'll find Cake News essential reading.

Sometimes you might find yourself miles away from the nearest cake-shop, at the wheel of a tractor belching poisonous fumes perhaps, out in a field, suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to eat a sponge cake with raspberry jam filling. And yet all you have with you, tucked in the cubby of your tractor, is a flask of water, and the water is stale, because you filled the flask from a spigot over a fortnight ago. The moon is shining brightly and fat stars splatter the sky. You are engaged in illicit night-time tractoring, for you are a malefactor soaked in crime. But even criminals need cake, as was pointed out long ago by the social scientist Vargas Vorgas Vig, who wrote: “My studies have shown that cake appetite is not dependent upon the subjects' propensity for law-breaking, malfeasance and pelf.”

In Biblical times, of course, you might expect manna to fall from heaven (see for example Exodus 16: xiv), but these are not Biblical times, clearly, for if they were you would not be driving a tractor. In those days they had no tractors. Where then, are you to find the succour of cake, out in a field in the middle of the night? The sad answer, I am afraid, is that you are not. You will have to abandon your tractor and trudge to the nearest town and locate a cake-shop, and if it is shut, as it will be, during the night, you will have to jemmy the lock, which you will do with skill, being a criminal, and creep on tiptoe to the cake-shop pantry to find the cake-hoard. Ah, but there too you will find Inspector Smedley the Cake Detective, who will place his mighty paw on your shoulder and place you under arrest.

The moral of this story is that you should always wait for a cake-shop to open its shutters in the morning.

Spot the Nun

Here is an amusing diversion to test your wits. Below are some pictures. Using your skill and judgement, after drinking a cup of cocoa and improvising some caterwauling vocal exercises as if you were a small, terrified animal, see if you are able to identify the nun.

ABCD

Send your answers to the Spot The Nun Competition Judging Panel, with the subject header “I think I know which one the nun is”. The winning entry will be drawn from a hat, or pouch, or bag, on a day of inclement weather.

Team Hooting Yard

News that London is to host the 2012 Olympic Games has created something of a kerfuffle in the Haemoglobin Towers annexe. Mrs Gubbins is insisting that she wants to be captain of Team Hooting Yard and to take part in the volleyball, widdershins, and indoor puck-related contests, even though she will be well over ninety by the time of the Games. She has already designed a blazer for the team, with special pockets, though she has not explained what is to be kept in them, nor indeed why they are special. Nor has she seen fit to tell the rest of the staff why she wants them to rub orange peel into their scalps each morning for the next seven years. My guess is that she has been reading the discredited sports scientist Plodgat, whose teachings had such disastrous consequences for the Duggleby brothers in the 1924 Games.

We have set up a shadow organising committee without telling Mrs Gubbins, laughing off that “I have my spies everywhere” comment she is forever muttering from her toothless gums. This despite the fact that we know she does have spies, seemingly hundreds of them. How she keeps them on her payroll is anybody's guess, though perhaps the series of burglaries over at the Bodger's Spinney Retail Park And Adventure Playground has something to do with it. Every now and then La Gubbins makes a series of strange chopping movements with her hand. I'm not sure why I mention that.

Team Hooting Yard - the Gubbins one or the shadow one, or both - will of course be competing in every single event come 2012. We have already commandeered that strip of grass near the Blister Lane Bypass as a training ground, built a little fence, and have plenty of buckets of water on hand. You may want to memorise our team song, which goes like this:

Hooting Yard, Hooting Yard / Ha-ha and gazebo / We will vanquish all our foes / Where have all the flowers gone? / Hooting, Hooting Yard!

Fop in a Quandary

Consider the perplexity of a fop in a quandary. Consider the quandary the fop finds himself in. A bird has built its nest in the fop's tremendous hairstyle. A small bird, of course, a hummingbird or a wren. It has laced the fop's hair with twigs, hay, moss and bits of duff from the forest floor. Were the fop a hater of birds he would not be in a quandary. He would simply tear the nest from his tresses and punch his fist at the hummingbird or wren so that it flew away. But the fop of whom I write was no hater of birds. His love of our wingéd chums was so great that he was known to some as The Bird-Adoring Fop. Perhaps the hummingbird or wren had, with some avian sixth sense, apprehended this bird-love and chosen the site of its nest accordingly. Or it may have been simply the luxury of the fop's locks, espied from high up in the sky as he reclined languidly on a chaise in a salon, fluttering a perfumed kerchief and sipping some delightful infusion from a bone china cup. Birds cannot speak in human language, so we shall never know. Nor do we know what terrible series of events found the fop, ten days later, facing a firing squad.

Our Lady of the Railings

Pompous Lip-reader

Dobson once worked, very briefly, as a park-keeper. On the morning of the first Thursday of his second week in the job, he had an accident while creosoting some railings, and was temporarily deafened. Finding Dobson twitching and shattered at the edge of a bed of peonies, the Captain of the Creosoters alerted the Park Railings Person, who in turn reported the accident to the Top Cadet of the Park Perimeter Patrol, who told the Acting Duty Monitor, who sent a metal tapping machine message to the secretary of the Park Surveillance Gang, who passed it to the Railings Subcommittee Recorder, who told me. I sent a squad of paramedics to tip Dobson into a Mobile Accident Response Pod which was propelled at unimaginable speed to one of the underground Park Personnel Recuperation Units. When, later that afternoon, Dobson stormed into my office shouting that he was temporarily deaf, I saw my chance to introduce him to the so-called Pompous Lip-Reader.

The Pompous Lip-Reader had been hanging around outside my office for weeks on end with nothing to do, for not a single one of the Park Persons had any kind of hearing problem. I was growing increasingly irritable with the presence of this tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug, and indeed pompous lip-reader, who was making unwarranted inroads into my supply of teabags, so much so that I had taken the precaution of padlocking the Park Pantry. The Pompous Lip-Reader promptly smashed the padlock and left it in fragments on my desk. He was goading me, I knew that much. I tried, one evening when everyone had gone home, to disable the kettle, but I am not of a technical bent, and I succeeded only in electrocuting myself. It is lucky that I am not a whooper swan, or I would have been eaten by Peter Maxwell Davies*. As it was, I discovered that I have a superhuman ability to withstand electric shocks, though unfortunately this is not accompanied by any other special powers, nor, in truth, by any burning ambition to right wrongs and to overpower criminals. As far as I was concerned the only person who needed overpowering was the Pompous Lip-Reader. I had been told I could not dismiss him, for apparently both his pomposity and his lip-reading skills gave him the Sanctuary of the Parks. I had not come upon this phrase before, but the Brevet Colonel of Park Practices pointed it out to me in the handbook.

On this Thursday afternoon, then, as Dobson stood berating me, holding his puny fists - still caked with creosote - against his temporarily useless ears, I saw my chance. Depressing the knob on my plastic buzzing console, I summoned the Pompous Lip-Reader. When he wafted in, tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug and pompous, a cup of tea balanced on the damned saucer he held so delicately, I announced: “I am assigning you to this man here,” — and I pointed at Dobson, although there was no one else in the room save the three of us - “He is a member of the Southwest Sector Creosoting Fivesome, and he had an accident this morning at the Southwest Sector Peony Bed Railings. He is temporarily deaf, so you can follow him about and lip-read for him until further notice.”

Dobson's hearing returned during the small hours of the very next morning, when he was woken by the sound of rats gnawing his wainscot. He saw that the Pompous Lip-Reader was perched at the end of his bed, tall, swaggering, unkempt, smug and pompous, and drinking a cup of tea. Something about the Pompous Lip-Reader appealed to Dobson, and despite his now being able to hear perfectly, the pair of them were inseparable for the next seven years, until they parted one day, with a handshake, in a patch of waste ground rife with thorns.

* NOTE : See Swan News, 31st May.

The New Goat

It is a very long time since I last mentioned Blasphemous Ted Cargpan. Readers with long memories will recall that his dog won the Ayn Rand Household Pet Of The Week award back in March 2004. Shockingly, just two days after the prize-giving, the hound was abducted by paid fiends. Even more shockingly, Blasphemous Ted Cargpan announced that he did not care two pins nor a jot for the dog, and in any case he was bent on obtaining a goat.

Before examining in detail the thrilling story of how Blasphemous Ted got himself a goat, I should explain why he is never referred to as plain old Ted Cargpan. Both his father and his paternal grandfather, and several of his nephews, were called Ted Cargpan, though not one of them was blasphemous. But Ted, on the cold blustery morning of his eighth birthday, climbed a hillside bleak, and when he reached the top he bellowed out a volley of curses and imprecations at dozens and dozens of gods, shouting at the sky. Half an hour later he was sat in the back room of his parents' cottage, unwrapping his birthday gifts, a picture of piety. But the wind had carried his words far and wide, and it soon became known what he had done, and thereafter he was always known as Blasphemous Ted Cargpan.

Now, about this goat. Contumely was heaped upon Ted's head after he expressed a callous disregard for his abducted prize-winning dog - that is one reason he began to wear a grotesque sponge hood - but it was nonetheless true that his sights were already trained upon a goat. He had grown tired of his pooch, and even when it was returned to him after a daring night-time rescue operation carried out by the Ayn Rand Household Pet Rescue Squadron, he refused to go back on his word. It was at around this time, that is, around the time of the Tet Offensive in the Vietnam War, that Cargpan placed an advertisement in the Pang Hill Bugle.

Will swap dog for goat, it read, Toggenberg preferred. Seven words only, but seven words that had global repercussions. Busy anagrammatists in the Pentagon, convinced that it was a coded message, worked tirelessly to crack it. George, George, rotate a slop bin! Dwf lrf wgr pd! was one of their earlier, and baffling, efforts. With hindsight, it easy to laugh at the paranoia of the military, mistaking an innocent dog-goat exchange for something of more sinister intent. Blasphemous Ted Cargpan was not laughing, however, when, traced as the author of the advertisement, he was bundled into a jeep one morning and ferried to a compound deep below the earth's surface, where he was interrogated by interrogators for days on end.

Weirdly, each of the interrogators shared their name with a Hollywood star, so Cargpan found himself questioned by Lionel Barrymore, Claude Rains, Vilma Banky, Tyrone Power, Edna Purviance, Dorothy Lamour and Burgess Meredith. Seven interrogators, one for each word of the fateful text. It was Dorothy Lamour, allocated the word “Toggenberg”, who discovered on day twelve that Blasphemous Ted Cargpan was not Vietnamese, nor had any connection with the Vietcong.

Judging him useless, they decided to release him, but not before Tyrone Power suggested programming Cargpan's brain to turn him into a Manchurian Candidate-style assassin. The contents of Ted's skull, however, proved to be so uncanny that the idea was dropped, and in the middle of the night he was taken further down into the subterranean complex, to an underground cove, pushed into a rowing boat and towed out to sea.

Adrift for weeks, Blasphemous Ted Cargpan had ample opportunity to study natural phenomena, both common and uncommon. He watched, with his one good eye, the ephemeral beauty of clouds, cumulus, cumulonimbus, stratus, stratocumulus, altocumulus, cirrostratus, altostratus, nimbostratus, cirrus, and cirrocumulus, to use Luke Howard's terms, though of course Ted was ignorant of the Quaker cloud classifier. He looked at the surface of the sea. One night he was surprised by a shower of toads, and he noted that the light of the following dawn was bleached and eerie. Gulls, auks, skuas, guillemots, terns and other birds of the sea soared and swooped within his purview, to put it pompously, for “view” would do.

In ancient times it was foretold that Blasphemous Ted Cargpan would be rescued by a schooner, but the prophecy was wrong, for after eight weeks alone in the ocean he was picked up by a floating haberdasher. The haberdasher took him home to his seaside village, and as he walked unsteadily up his garden path, his prize-winning pooch came to greet him. It yapped happily. Cargpan thought it looked suspiciously well fed. Then he noticed, standing in the open doorway of his charming bungalow, holding a fork and a tin of dog food, Old Man Poxhaven from the Institute of Plastics, who was his bitter enemy.

“What in heaven's name are you doing in my house?” shouted Cargpan.

“Feeding your prize-winning dog, as a matter of fact,” said Old Man Poxhaven, a look of insouciance on his pallid face.

“I have been at sea,” said Cargpan, “And I would like a cup of tea.”

“Feeding your prize-winning dog, as a matter of fact,” said Old Man Poxhaven again.

“I said I would like a mug of piping hot tea!” yelled Cargpan, growing enraged.

Old Man Poxhaven simply repeated himself again, and only then did Ted Cargpan come to understand that the enemy in his doorway was a phantom. Later that day, after he had boiled the kettle and made a mug of piping hot tea using the one remaining teabag in his pantry, and put his feet up, and ground his teeth, Blasphemous Ted went to the library and consulted the newspapers that had appeared while he was out at sea, and discovered that Old Man Poxhaven had died a fortnight ago. “Siege At Institute Of Plastics Ends In Mayhem” said the headline of the Daily Cushion, while the Doppelganger Gazette reported the same story under the heading “Old Man Poxhaven Slain By Mutant Moth Beings”.

Cycling home via the track that bisected the dinghy marina, Cargpan wondered if his dog was also a ghost. It had plainly eaten its fill in his absence, but could a real pooch be fed by a phantom? Being a blasphemer, he knew little of the spirit world. He braked sharply when he caught sight of the dinghy depot, dismounted, and headed for the hut of the marina chaplain.

Father Tabbaglibnahatto was an elderly, crumpled priest who had ministered to the marina for over half a century. He was also a poet of some renown, whose finest work was probably Daft Ned, The Whelk, The Crocus, a completely anagrammatic rewriting of fellow Jesuit Gerard Manley Hopkins' The Wreck Of The Deutschland. Sheltering in his hut from a fine drizzle, Father Tabbaglibnahatto was surprised to see Blasphemous Ted Cargpan lumbering towards him. He clutched a crucifix in his gnarled fist and shrank back in the shadows. Cargpan hammered at the door of the hut.

“Are you in there, priest?” he shouted, “I need your spiritual advice! There is a ghost in my house that has been feeding my dog. Is such a thing possible?”

The good reverend held tight to his cross and prayed, desperately hoping that his blasphemous visitor would turn and leave. For him, the existence of ghosts was a heresy, and he knew nothing of dogs, being a budgerigar sort of person. And indeed, his prayers were answered, for after bashing the door a few more times, Ted Cargpan slunk away. He realised that he had not made one vital check. Was his hound indeed still alive, or had it joined Old Man Poxhaven in the shadow world beyond death?

As we wait for Cargpan to cycle all the way home to check his dog's brute corporeality, or otherwise, we might do well to consider whether his instinct was still to replace his canine pal with a goat. Was he having second thoughts? After all, if his feelings remained unchanged after his abduction by Pentagon agents and the weeks alone on a rowing boat in the vast and unforgiving ocean, why had he not simply put the dog in a basket and taken it to some sort of beast exchange office, for surely such places existed, even in the small seaside resort where Blasphemous Ted spent his bungalow days? One might put his initial newspaper advertisement down to a desire to avoid the beast exchange, perhaps, but assume that he returned home with renewed determination to get a goat for his dog. Why then, was he scurrying about the place like a scatterbrain, if not that he was toying with the idea of retaining the dog and consigning the goat idea to what a certain type of writer likes to call the dustbin of history?

These are the sorts of questions you might be asking yourselves. I am not, for I am not asking any questions at all. I am beyond questions. My part in this is merely to tell you what happened. And what happened was this. Blasphemous Ted Cargpan arrived home, pushed past the apparition in the doorway, and thundered about the bungalow looking for the dog, which was asleep on a blanket on top of a tallboy, and he poked at it with a pointed wooden stick, until he was satisfied that it was solid and real and alive, and he was not taken aback that it did not yap nor yelp, for his pokings were very gentle, and it had always been a heavy sleeper, indeed its capacity to remain unconscious in the teeth of provocation had been one of the things that had commended it to the judging panel of the Ayn Rand Household Pet Of The Week contest, that and many other things, its equitable temper, its ears, its tricks with a balloon being among the other qualities which won it the prize, and then Blasphemous Ted Cargpan lifted it up, blanket and all, and hoisted it over his shoulder, still sound asleep, and took it outside, and stood at his garden gate, where they were joined by the phantom of Old Man Poxhaven, and then he vowed that he would stand there, come weather what may, until someone came past trundling a goat in a wheelbarrow, and he would lower the blanket with the dog in it into the barrow and lift out the goat, whether it were a Toggenberg or not, and wave the wheelbarrow person on their way, and lead the goat into his garden, and at last his desire would be met.

And that is precisely what happened, within ten minutes of his taking his stand at the gate, for he was a lucky as well as a blasphemous man, was Ted Cargpan, lucky on this drizzling day, at any rate. And I know this because I am the ghost of Old Man Poxhaven, and I watch over Ted, and his goat, and the bungalow, and will do so for ever more, for I am a guardian ghost, of a kind that Father Tabbaglibnahatto wishes did not exist, although he has a guardian ghost himself, every bit as conscientious as I am, and every bit as determined to ensure that from now on nothing will ever change in this seaside town, that from now on it will always be Thursday, and it will always be drizzling, and the man with the wheelbarrow will walk round and round in circles, first with a goat, and then with a dog, and the goat will be a Toggenberg, and the dog will be fast asleep.

Larder Tips

Welcome to this month's Hooting Yard Larder Tips. If you have a larder, we strongly recommend that you stack the shelves with lots of jars containing different types of sauce. It is a good idea to glue a label to each jar, bearing the name of the sauce it contains. A bold, clear typeface should be used for the label, not some hasty scrawl made with the last remnant of a crayon. In the unlikely event that you do not drool with glee at the prospect of eating all those sauces, you can instead pack your larder with pots of paste, but follow the same labelling advice. Pots may need smaller labels than jars, so bear that in mind.

Make sure your larder is airy. If the door shuts very very tight, and by some chance all the air is sucked out of the larder, you will find that you are unable to gain access to your jars of sauce, or pots of paste, because the larder will have become a vacuum, which nature abhors. Readers in the United States who face this quandary may find it useful to contact Dave Aspnes (pictured below) who is the current president of the American Vacuum Society. As Dave says, “the historic roots of [the Society] are in the creation and measurement of vacuum”, so he should be able to help if your larder becomes one.

Bronchitis Person's Helicopter Journey

“Hand me that gewgaw,” said the Mullah.

The Mufti snatched the gewgaw from the Ayatollah and handed it to the Mullah.

“Are you going to take the gewgaw to the Grand Vizier?” asked the Mufti.

“That I am,” said the Mullah, turning on the heel of his floppy bootee, and exiting through a rich brocade curtain.

The Ayatollah stroked his tremendous hairy beard and looked at the Mufti.

“Do you have your portable metal tapping machine on you?” he asked, and on seeing the Mufti nod, he added, “I want you to contact the Muezzin.”

“The Muezzin?” cried the Mufti, dumbfounded.

“The same,” said the Ayatollah.

Leaving the Mufti to tap a message to the Muezzin, the Ayatollah went out into the courtyard. Almost hidden behind the luxuriant mimosa, japonica, candytuft, madder, lupins and oxlip, a whirring robot version of Big Bill Broonzy was playing the blues. The Ayatollah was tolerant of music, so long as it was mournful. He sat down on a mat and ran his fingers through his hairy beard again.

Meanwhile, at the Grand Vizier's palace, the Grand Vizier was impatiently awaiting the Mullah with the gewgaw. Last week he had volunteered to undergo ideological re-education. All the talk in the palace now was of the correct application of Mao Tse-Tung thought. The Grand Vizier wanted the Mullah's gewgaw to add to his collection of baubles, the significance of which was only now beginning to dawn on him. He popped a filbert into his mouth and continued pacing up and down on his big and attractive carpet, his impatience growing.

Just as the Ayatollah was stroking his superb hairy beard for the umpteenth time, the Mufti joined him in the courtyard. The Mufti had an abnormal growth on his forehead.

“Strikingly disconcerting news,” he announced, “The Muezzin has bronchitis.”

The Ayatollah let go of his beard.

“Disconcerting indeed,” he said, “Go and switch off the Broonzy robot. I need a bit of peace and quiet to think.”

In January, the remote control device for the robot had been left out in the rain, and no one had been able to repair it, so the Mufti had to fight his way through lilac, phlox, cotoneaster, hollyhocks and erica to reach the knob on the side of the machine to switch it off. Now the only sound in the courtyard was the insistent call of a corncrake far far away.

Suddenly the Ayatollah ceased cogitating and spoke.

“Mufti,” he said, “There is a helicopter idling on the helipad. Go to it, fetch the Muezzin, then fly him to the Grand Vizier's palace. That is my clearly considered plan of how we should proceed.”

And so the scene was set for that historic meeting in the palace, when the Grand Vizier, the Mullah, the bronchial Muezzin and the Mufti sat on divans in the room of baubles, their attentions fixed upon the gewgaw. Rex Tint's mezzotint of the occasion, a work of the imagination, for of course he was not present, is one of his greatest mezzotints. It took him four years to complete it, and when it was done, he gave it as a gift to the Ayatollah, who framed it and hung it on the wall of the courtyard, where it was soon obscured by burgeoning fleabane, veronica, eglantine, hibiscus, poppies and daisies and lady's slipper and old man's beard, by saxifrage and narcissus, by orchids, by briars, by creeping jenny and viola, and it hangs there still, though the Ayatollah is long dead, and the faraway corncrake is no more.