The Stench From Outer Space

Detective Captain Pondbedwas a worried man. He flung himself into an armchair, his pipe clenched between his jaws, then called out for Mungo, his factotum. Within seconds a tall, impossibly handsome fellow strode confidently into the detective's study.

“Fetch me some balsa wood!” rapped Pondbed at this Ray Milland de nos jours.

“At once, Master,” snivelled Mungo, before adding, “You know you are becoming as irritable as Sir Denis Nayland Smith in the Fu Manchu stories by Sax Rohmer, don't you? You ought to take up a sport. I have heard it said that the Pang Hill bobsleigh team is looking for a new recruit.”

Pondbed almost bit the stem of his pipe in two before shouting something unprintable at his servant, who had already glided out of the room. It was Thursday morning, and the weather outside was spectacular and frightening.

By the time Mungo returned, an hour later, with a balsa wood crate packed with hundreds of sticks of balsa wood, Detective Captain Pondbed had completed a pencil drawing of Mary Jo Kopechne, who died at Chappaquiddick. He had begun the drawing some months earlier, but he was nothing if not a perfectionist, a trait he had inherited from his mother, who, he recalled with a curious admixture of fondness and regret, had been known to arrive at railway stations with more than four days to spare before the departure of her train, in order to familiarise herself with the shift patterns of the tea-room persons. The angle of the detective's hat caused Mungo concern, and he stooped over to straighten it. As he did so, Pondbed grabbed the crate.

“What is that hideous screeching noise, Mungo?” asked Pondbed, his pallid face screwed into prune-like wrinkles. The factotum looked out of the window.

“Oh, just one of the local hobbledehoys tormenting voles,” he said. At that very moment there was a monstrous flash of lightning, and a spacecraft landed outside the town swimming baths, directly across the road. The spacecraft was one of those smelly ones. The noise it made as it came into land was so loud that Pondbed spilled the sticks of balsa wood all over his recently shampooed carpet.

“Confound these pesky alien interlopers!” he rapped. Mungo took the pencil drawing and pinned it to the wall above the fireplace. The Invasion of Earth had begun in earnest…

Source : Captain Pondbed's Casebook by Clovis Lanternjaw

Tree News

Here is a wonderful thing. Edith Walker has traced her family tree back to Adam and Eve, and her grandson Terry Hardin has turned it into a PDF file. Terry has kindly allowed the team at Hooting Yard to make this available to our readers. So click on the tree below and be astonished….

The Teutonic Memory-banks of Mister Blatfinch

I want to bestow a prize on Mister Blatfinch. A cup perhaps, or trophy. Or just a cup. He has just published his second book. The first was a word-for-word transcription of That Hideous Strength by C S Lewis, differing from the original only in that the sentences are jumbled up in no particular order, or not one that I can decipher. In his postface, Mister Blatfinch claims to have “wrested from this lamentable Christian apologist's noxious sci fi potboiler a new and urgent text, or re-text, or über-text, or we might go so far as to say a proto-Blatfinchesque text, the one he meant to write, had he not been C S Lewis”. Make of that what you will, or, as I did, dismiss it as the raving of a nincompoop.

His second book could not be more different from the first. Indeed, I made a point of checking that it was the same Mister Blatfinch, by doing a forensic comparison of the author photographs on the dust jackets of both volumes. You can carry out the same task yourself:

and

All I can say is that if those are two different authors, then Lord love a duck, you can knock me down with a feather and call me “Fontanelle, Bernard le Bovier de (1657-1757)”, and I'll wager you some pins and a cork or two for all that! The reason I want to give Mister Blatfinch some sort of award is because this second book of his is a delightful and entertaining memoir, rather than a vapid bit of twaddle. Not only that, but it rekindled my own memories of that very special time in the early 1970s when it seemed that “Krautrock” could revolutionise the way we listened to popular music. Remember Amon Duul? Magma? Popol Vuh? So does Mister Blatfinch. Well, he gives each of these groups a mention in his index, even if they are curiously absent from the body of the text itself. But that can be excused, for the book - My Teutonic Memory-Banks - is essentially a narrative of the author's experiences as a sound engineer with the forgotten group Döb Suun.

Döb Suun took their name from the out-of-print pamphleteer Dobson, and the lyrics to all their songs are taken from illegal German translations of some of his more… shall we say, “arresting” ornithological texts. The moving spirit in Döb Suun was lead singer, spinettist and all-round wild man Horst Brötzenkammernvergleist, who found a cache of pirated Dobson pamphlets when sorting through his father's papers after the latter's death. (Brötzenkammernvergleist Senior died during the so-called Weems Terror of 1967.)

It is to our great good fortune that Mister Blatfinch's memoir ends before the group degenerated into the turgid heavy metal monsters they became. Commercial success ruined them, of course, and they were never quite the same after being invited to support The Captain & Tenille on a tour of Canada, Alaska and Papua New Guinea as the 1970s ground to an ignominious end. Join me, then, as I beat my breast earnestly, raining a thousand and one “thank you”s upon Mister Blatfinch's remarkably-attired head for reminding me of the glorious days of those ear-splitting yet valiant albums Poisoned Linnets and The Ten Thousand Chaffinches Of Dr T.

Incidentally, tone deaf readers who prefer the latter-day Döb Suun may be interested in this article on the Heavy Metal Ümlaut.

The Mystery of the Poisoned Pancake

This puzzling affair is mentioned in passing in Chapter Two of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars. See Monday 21 June for an introductory note on this exciting serial, or click on the postage stamp to read it…

Annals of Rascality

Historians of crime have long been fascinated by the Birdbag family, whose exploits were regularly recorded in the penny dreadfuls of their day. Seldom has such purple prose been so apt, for their deeds were truly the last word in scampishness and mischief. To rekindle the memories of older readers, and to introduce a new generation to this dastardly clan, here is a brief guide.

Smedley Birdbag, wanted by the police of four continents for doing something weird with a toy pig sty.

Dobson's Wit

Dobson was famous for being utterly incapable of telling jokes. In his memoir of the out-of-print pamphleteer, A Few Days Spent With Dobson On A Mystery Charabanc Tour, Jasper Poxhaven recalls a particularly agonising evening:

We disembarked from the charabanc at a derelict country tavern called, I think, the Cow And Pins. Dobson headed straight for the bar and bought our drinks. It was quite in character that he did not ask me what I wanted, but presented me with a tall glass of some foaming, fuming beige-coloured liquid which tasted like a tomb. Casting his eyes around the gloomy interior of the pub, which was lit only by a couple of Tilly lamps, he leaned towards me and mumbled: “You know what, Poxhaven? I think these people need cheering up!” I groaned. Usually I could tell when Dobson was in one of his rare gregarious moods, but this time I was taken completely by surprise. Had I known the itch to entertain was upon him, I would never have accompanied him into the tavern. There was a copse of blasted cedars nearby, and an hour or two spent standing there in the drizzle would have been more amusing than what I was about to witness.

Dobson stood up and cleared his throat. The sullen denizens of the Cow And Pins, barnyard persons to a man, took little notice. “Listen,” commanded Dobson, in that voice of his, “There was a linnet, an ostrich, and a partridge in a train carriage. The ticket inspector came in and said, 'Are any of you birds going to Totnes? Because if you are, there's been a derailment and due to cancellations there won't be any pastries in the canteen'. The linnet looked at the ostrich, and the ostrich looked at the partridge, and the partridge fainted away. Then the train passed an abandoned birdseed silo and the ticket inspector married his childhood sweetheart, Mavis.”

Dobson sat down. Nobody laughed. I abandoned my drink and went to the copse. There was a hornets' nest in one of the cedars. I examined it with my torch. The drizzle became a downpour.

Extract From a Pirate's Diary

We had been awake for eleven nights. Cloth had been wound around the jugs, and a fresh coat of varnish applied to the trapdoors. The hooks were blue. Their blue was the blue of farmyards, oilrigs, malfeasance. I broke the engineer's pencil in half. He was furious. His fists met mine. There was something gruesome stuck underneath the lantern. I hurled it over the gunwale, to the cheers of my crewmates. Then they turned on me, one by one: Blubb with his yellow tooth; Slubb with his bottle of vinegar; Flubb with the rhinoceros mask & hideous trousers. I fled. Later that night, the Carpathians in my sight, a small shard of bitumen became embedded in the rafters of my cabin. The time had come to throw the ledgers into the sea. With irrational joy, I glared up at the stacks of sailcloth, and my eyes ran with tears. Would I taste potatoes again?

Swept Away on a Winter's Night

The Book of Gnats

I - So was a tempest loosed upon the city, and its very fabric uprooted from the mud. Whirling and howling, the city was dispersed upon the firmament, coming to rest none knew where. And the mud spawned all manner of noisome pests, squirming and wriggling to escape the gigantic puddles which were left in the wake of the storm. These were not puddles of water, no, nor of any liquid known to the human mind. And then my eyes saw, standing fiery on a wooden plinth ringed by scum-pools, the obscene figure of Winckelmann. In his left hand he brandished aloft a scrap of burning linoleum. His right hand was made into a fist. As, dribbling, I watched, the fist was slowly opened to reveal a….. I cannot say. I do not know. For just at the moment my peering, watery eyes would have seen that… that thing, I was startled by a toad, which leapt up at my face, and thwacked me on the forehead, leaving an imprint which remains there to this day, like a brand.

II - The man with the toad-mark flapped his shattered wings. In vain, in vain. Perched on the rock, beaten by harsh winds, encrusted with seaweed, sightless, he was of a sudden assaulted by a voice, roaring at him across a thousand continents. “Man with the Mark of the Toad! Know ye the Song of the Boll Weevils? Aye? Then sing, damn ye, sing!” Whence came that monstrous voice? What hideous nursery had cosseted its owner, what kitchen fed it? “Man with the Mark of the Toad!” it screamed again, pulverizing universes, “Hare ye to me now, leave your drab rock! Shed your cracked wings! Sprout fins, smack the boiling sea with your flippers, come to me! I hold in my gnarled, gnarled hands many gifts for you! I hold anconeal bowls! I hold strangled curlews! I hold pods and gum and pitchblende! Spring forward now! Go from your dour perch! I hold magnification instruments, Coddington lenses, and towels for you! I hold pigeons' blood, crayons and isinglass! The crayons are of colours no human eye should ever contemplate! The isinglass gleams in a charming handmade jar! The jar has your mark upon it, Man with the Mark of the Toad! Come….” There were hours upon hours of this wretched gibberish, enough to make an ant die. The man with the toad-mark beat his useless wings against the wind and turned his head away. His brow was crawling with gnats. The gnats had come a long way, from barely imaginable puddles of slop where once a city had stood. The City of Gnats.

III - Winckelmann strode importantly through the boulevards of the walled city. He chucked trinkets and baubles to beggars and cripples, holding a vermilion cravat over his nose as he did so. Worms slithered up his dainty anklets, only to be torn away by scrofula-ridden flunkies. Imposing but haphazard, Winckelmann relied upon his most trusted attendant to lead him in the right direction. These boulevards all looked alike to him. He could be going anywhere, were it not for Sigismundo's genius. As a factotum, he was a treasure. Save for his inexplicable habit of pissing on coinage, Sigismundo was faultless. In this warren of pestilent streets, he knew precisely what to do. Turn right by the trough; ignore the screeching placardists; beat the pedlars insensible with their own clubs; smartly avoid the motorbikes. Before long, Winckelmann and his retinue stood in the courtyard of the Impossibly Huge Building. The stink was repellent, but Winckelmann knew etiquette if he knew nothing else. With an effort, he removed the cravat from his nose and, at a signal from Sigismundo, pushed an envelope stuffed full of flies into the grubby hand of the waiting serjeant-at-arms. A ludicrous ballet of bows and scrapes took place, Sigismundo taking photographs the while. After what seemed like hours, Winckelmann was ushered into an inner chamber. His attendant was not allowed to accompany him. Without his trusted lackey at his side, Winckelmann was a little nervous, but his discomfiture did not last long. No more than fifteen seconds passed before he was greeted by his hosts - a swarm of gigantic gnats, whose thrashing wings knocked Winckelmann mercifully unconscious before they devoured him, every last bit of him, grinding him to dust between their powerful biting jaws. It was over in a flash. Then, buzzing and twanging, the swarm left the chamber as it had entered, through a chute, through a chute, through a chute.

Oil Painting News

A recent survey of British tastes in art announced that “the nation's favourite painting” was a work called, I think, The Singing Butler by Jack Vettriano. Mr Vettriano is a self-taught painter whose often whimsical realism is, of course, execrated by conceptualist noodleheads and the Saatchi-financed “Britart” mafia.

I wondered if a similar survey were to be conducted in Hooting Yard what the result might be, so I contacted the polling agency run by a sister of suburban shaman Joost Van Dongelbraacke and asked them to find out. The methodology they used was perplexing, so much so that it gives me a splitting headache just thinking about it. In fact I think I am going to go and lie down in a darkened room, with a dampened medicinal bandage wrapped around my forehead. [Pause.] That's better. I am pleased to inform you that this morning's post included the agency's definitive result of the poll, scribbled on a piece of blotting paper by Clytemnestra Van Dongelbraacke herself.

In third place is Allegory of St Bonaventure & The Poolside Attendants, by Sir Gordon Sumner, RA (no relation to that “Stig” person, thankfully). In second place is Some Wheat And A Couple Of Hens by Hattie Le Mesurier. But a clear winner as the favourite painting of all time here at Hooting Yard is the second official portrait of ex-President Richard Milhous Nixon, reproduced below. I think all our readers will appreciate the justice of this choice.

In an addendum to the result, Ms Van Dongelbraacke noted that several thousand proxy votes, by which Mrs Gubbins had sought to influence the outcome in her charmingly malign way, had been discounted. And not only discounted, but incinerated in a big cast iron pot.

Mystic Badger News

We are very excited to announce that, after weeks of negotiations, we have managed to persuade Little Severin, the Mystic Badger, to join the team here at Hooting Yard. (See Vaporetto Or Bus? 22nd June.) Little Severin will be foretelling the future for us on an occasional basis, in his usual manner of scrabbling around in the undergrowth, snapping twigs, and digging holes. As a special treat, here is a picture of Little Severin. If you click on the image, you will hear a sound file of him eating his delicious midnight snack of earthworms.

We are aware that when he had a regular spot on a radio show, Little Severin was subject to much criticism. Typical was this letter which appeared in the Pang Hill Weekly Psychic Supplement: “That badger has no more idea of the future than I do,” wrote a certain Anselm Earjug, “For example, last week he ‘predicted’ the sinking of the Titanic, Richard Milhous Nixon's ‘Checkers’ speech, the popularity of the television series Love Boat, and Betsygate. Correct me if I'm wrong, but these things have already happened.” Of course, what Mr Earjug failed to realise is that Little Severin is that rare thing… a badger out of time!!! - like something from a Philip K Dick novel. That makes him all the more invaluable as a recruit to Hooting Yard, and if we receive any carping letters from readers, we will tear them to shreds and put them in a big wastepaper bin.

Spooky Boswell Coincidence

I received a letter yesterday from reader Max Décharné, in which he mentioned, apropos of nothing at all, that he is currently reading James Boswell's London Journal 1762-1763. Indeed, Max was kind enough to include a splendid quotation from what he calls “a constant joy. I hadn't looked at it for maybe fifteen years, and it's as good as Pepys' Diary for that sense of what it was like to live in London back when it was more of a small town. I thought you might like this description of preparations for theatre-going from 15th December 1762: At five I filled my pockets with gingerbread and apples (quite the method), put on my old clothes and laced hat, laid by my watch, purse, and pocket-book, and with an oaken stick in my hand sallied to the pit. I was too soon there. So I went into a low inn, sat down amongst a parcel of arrant blackguards, and drank some beer.”

Later on in the day, desultorily watchiug television, my attention was caught by a new (to me, at any rate) L'Oreal advert. Readers should know that I still harbour ambitions to become the new “face” of that confounded company (see 6 and 17 May) and will not stint in my efforts. Anyway, that aside, I was struck by the magic ingredient of whatever ridiculous new product was being pushed. This latest L'Oreal hair-goo* apparently contains something called Boswelox. (How typical that they misspell our hero's name, with just one L.) Suppressing my resentment at not (yet) having been granted a multimillion dollar contract, I shall be writing to L'Oreal to applaud their use of eighteenth century literary figures as inspiration for product-naming, and make some further suggestions: Dr Johnsonite, ColleyCibberox, Smollett, DelarivièreManleyox, and Walpolette spring to mind.

* NOTE : Poppy Nisbet has written in - promptly, it must be said (25 June) - to correct what appears to be an error:

Dear Hooting Yard : I read your L'Oreal's secret ingredient/18th-century literary figures theory. Unfortunately, Boswelox is not an ingredient in L'Oreal's ‘hair goo’, but the key element of their anti-ageing 'Wrinkle De-Crease With Boswelox', a skin cream. My own sources say that L'Oreal plan to use 17th-century inspiration for their hair products, including JohnDrydenite, Cromwellox and, of course, Regicide.

Yours knowledgeably, Poppy Nisbet

A Ticking-off for Uncle Dan

Last Friday, in our “Ask Uncle Dan” feature, an innocent question about anchovies from reader Glyn Webster was met with a somewhat tetchy reply from the Renaissance Man we employ as the fount of all wisdom. Pansy Cradledew has written in to complain:

Dear Uncle Dan : Your reply to Mr. Webster's query (An Offence Unto God, Friday 18 June) left me in stunned silence. Only now do I feel able to put pen to paper and express my dismay. Your response to Mr. Webster's piscine turmoil seemed at best insensitive and at worst downright rude. How is Mr. Webster to provide you with all the background information you require? How long is he to go without pizza? Can you only answer a question with a question? Yours flummoxed, Pansy Cradledew

We tried to reach Uncle Dan to ask him to reply to these cogent points, only to be told that he has decamped to a flamingo park on the outskirts of some nameless and deserted village by the sea. He has ejected the Head Keeper from her cottage, by casting an eldritch spell, and is now mooching about in her comfrey-and-hollyhock-splattered garden biting his fingernails and musing on his shadowy criminal past. Well of course he is! It is the month of June, after all, and those privy to the clankings and whirrings of Uncle Dan's formidable brain know that at this time every year he likes to take up temporary residence near a colony of particularly stupid birds. Come July or August he will, I am quite sure, be back to answer readers' enquiries. When he returns, Uncle Dan will find that Mr Webster has addressed himself to the matter with far greater equanimity than Ms Cradledew would have us expect, and, during a telephone call, eked from his friend all the required information. See below:

Name : Bruce Noel Gilbert.

Full postal address : [encrypted]

Telephone number : [encrypted]

Email address : bng57@hotmaiil.com

Bird count : Nil.

Name of regular dentist : “[Name of previous dentist] No, no, no, no, no, no, no! I've got his card in my pocket. Stuck in my pocket. What's going in my pocket?! There it is: Doctor Henk Eksteen, Dental Surgeon.”

List of hats : One regulation brown woolly hat provided by the Head Injury Society.

List of chalk : No chalk.

And list of tatty things : A dozen cardboard boxes contain all Bruce's possessions. They have lain unopened for many years.

Date of graduation from the Collegeiate Institute of Brusque Snarling Ecclesiastical Phantoms : Does the Salvation Army count?

How many fob pockets has he filled with sand, and where did the sand come from? : Three fob pockets stuffed with black magnetite sand from the Waikato Heads. I once succeeded in picking Bruce's breast pocket. Like all dedicated Christians, he carries a small book stuffed with scraps of notepaper and folded pamphlets - I like to think the Apostles roamed the Empire clutching such tatty books. Bruce also jams an outmoded personal organiser into that pocket. Whenever an important date is mentioned he will flip up its lid and laboriously prod the thousand tiny rubber buttons inside in an agony of concentration that can awe gatherings of any size into complete silence.

Was he in Chappaquiddick on that fateful night? : I tried discreetly introducing the subject into the conversation: he took so much pleasure in repeating the name “Chappaquiddick” over and over that I have to conclude he wasn't involved.

Why is there a big stain on the map of Java pinned up next to the sideboard, and of what wood is the sideboard made? : The stain is spirulina. “Spirulina makes a good stain.” His sideboard is formica: plain cream with numerous stains. I have tried to examine the wood beneath but the formica is hard enough to resist my penknife.

How many cows lumber about in his barnyard? : None. Bruce lives in a cubical apartment building in the centre of a “greenspace”. The man in the apartment above Bruce is slow and lumbering and wears three boots.

Is there something monstrous and crude about the average burlap sack? : Quite possibly. But Bruce's burlap sack, of which he is proud, is delicate and refined and once held basmati rice.

The Potus and the Beast

We don't speak ill of the dead here at Hooting Yard - well, none of us except that Mrs Gubbins, who tends to spit venom about the living and the dead, bless her cotton socks. By the way, we haven't heard any news of that saintly old crone since she fell in with a band of Tundists (see 7th May) but we have sent an emissary to the Port of Tongs to check that she's at least getting her daily dose of Dr Gillespie's Invigorating Powders, now in chewable form. But I digress.

The point of this item is to record my favourite fact about the recently-departed Ronald Wilson Reagan, fortieth President Of The United States. Incidentally, I read somewhere that within the government bureaucracy, the office is known by the acronym POTUS. This seems a much better word than “President”. In Britain we have a “Queen” (in itself a strange word - repeat it a few times and it begins to sound like something out of Edward Lear ) so perhaps the US ought to have a “Potus”.

Where was I? Oh yes. When Ron and Nancy retired to California, they moved to a place in Bel Air bought for them by friends. The address was 666 St Cloud Road, but they were so appalled at sharing a house number with the Number of the Beast that they persuaded the civic authorities to change their number to 668 - effectively, the Neighbour of the Beast. I've always wondered about the knock-on effect of that for the people living at the existing 668 and upwards, in a dull-witted and trivial kind of way.

Some of those affable types who like to study the Book of Revelations have noted that each of the ex-Potus's three names has six letters, suggesting that changing his house number was just a wily deceit to throw investigators off the scent. And before ending this item, you will be pleased to hear that Dobsonista Ned Cargpan is reportedly working on a magick numerological analysis of Hooting Yard. We shall have the results soon.

Nuns Purporting to Come From Finland

Following yesterday's item about The Sound Of Music, I have received if not thousands, then at least two requests to illustrate the jarring concept of holy sisters engaged in the quite atrocious practice of pretending to be Finnish. Where will it all end?

Vaporetto or Bus?

A thumping great tome lands on the Reviews Editor's desk. It is nothing less than the Incredibly Detailed Report Of The Commission Of Enquiry Into The Provision Of Public Transport Services In And Around Hooting Yard As Requested By Civic Functionaries Many, Many Years Ago. It would, one feels, be a kindness simply to burn the thing. After all, is anyone ever going to read it, apart from your dutiful editor? Did it not occur to its compilers that decades-old research cannot simply be written up over the succeeding years, with agonising slowness, and retain any validity? One notes that the authors have opted to remain anonymous, or semi-anonymous, in that they have given their identities only in the form of cryptic crossword clues: thus we have Spigot in lane gets plank with Dutch cheese (4,8), General Editor; Dad's pie on hinge (6,9) and Peewit's churchgoer frantic with collapsed lung, says monster (8, 7), Associate Editors; Tenebrous elk, perhaps? (10, 12), Deputy Editor; Sounds like miasma of cloacal gruel hurled sideways (7, 7), Picture Editor; and not forgetting Large pig on holiday island (6, 9), Intern. As the great Terry-Thomas used to say, what an absolute shower!

This enormous volume is basically a mishmash of risible twaddle. Take this, for example: “The gorgeous vaporettos which ply the canals of Hooting Yard are run by a forward-thinking company which emblazons all its vessels with a startling logo of a budgerigar.” It is difficult to conceive of a sentence of similar length which contains so many errors. Or this: “The bus route between Blister Lane and the Dye Works at Chew Parva has won many awards for its revolutionary approach to timetabling, not least the employment of ”Little Severin, the Mystic Badger“, a real badger who predicts the timing of the buses by doing something or other with his paws. Little Severin is kept in a hutch at the Bus Depot and has become a star of local press and radio. He has also become the official sponsor of the Annual Cake Show.”

And just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, how is this for blithering inanity? “The infrastructure of the pneumatic railway system, with its nerve centre on Yoko Ono Boulevard, was designed upon the territorial patterns of the funnelweb spider, hence the breathtaking beauty of the interchanges, sidings, and station tea-rooms.”

Dismissing the text with a groan of disgust, the reader turns to the maps, charts, statistical tables and appendices hoping that here, at least, some sense may be wrung from this preposterous book. All I can say is that it looks to me as if the work was farmed out to a gaggle of the younger inmates in the lunatic wing of Pang Hill Orphanage. What we have here - and it takes up over a third of the book as a whole - is a hideous collection of daubs, blobs and scribbling. Nor does it help that most of the pages appear to have been dusted with egg yolk and breadcrumbs.

There are those who will say that this undoubtedly imposing publication is a bargain, costing just eight panes forty, and that I am merely a cantankerous and grumpy reviewer with an axe to grind because my essay The Psychic Significance Of A Flat-Fare Structure For All Journeys On The Fiendish Pond Swivel-Engined Gas-Powered Subaqua Taxi Service was excised by the publishers at the last minute on the clearly ridiculous grounds that it was “pompous and self-interested”. Have they no shame?

Overall Rating : Bilge

Always Read the Label

This advice is always given on proprietary medicines, of course, but one ought to bear it in mind with other products too. What, I thought to myself, could possibly be more entertaining than watching a DVD of The Sound Of Music and choosing the Finnish language option? By God, I know how to enjoy myself. Imagine my chagrin, then, when I realised that only Suomi subtitles were available, not the soundtrack! I very nearly gnashed my teeth in despair. Sympathetic readers can look at this picture of some nuns while pondering my sorry plight.

Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From the Stars

About ten years ago I wrote a short, unpublished novel entitled Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars. (I stole that phrase, incidentally, from Playing With Water by James Hamilton-Paterson, which I recommend.) The time has come, I think, to place the complete text of this exciting philatelic adventure story on to the Hooting Yard site, but rather than doing so in one go, it will appear as a weekly serial. Every Monday, for the next thirteen weeks, a chapter will be added. To begin reading, click on the postage stamp. But don't forget to come back.

The Hooting Yard Biennale

Summertime is of course the time for arts festivals, and here at Hooting Yard, the famous Biennale rivals Venice for what Mrs Gubbins has called “cultural clout”. Highlights include:

A one-man show by Tad Wensleydale, in which the great child Method actor will essay a number of parts, including Agamemnon, Thomas a Becket, both Jack Hulbert and Cicely Courtneidge, Christopher Columbus, Christopher Plummer, Clive Bunker, the one-time drummer with Jethro Tull, late lamented astronomer Carl Sagan and French author Françoise Sagan (in an excerpt from Beerpint's classic A Tale Of Two Sagans), Yoko Ono, Ayn Rand and a ferocious giant invisible hamster.

The first showing in two decades of Globb's triptych The Shroud Of Hengist.

Enrico Fubby & His Performing Tea-Strainers.

Morris dancing, balaclava wearing, pond draining, skipping, gamboling, frolicking, mucking about, and pointing warily at birds.

Rufus Hinge reads from his classic A Little Book Of Bus Tickets.

All of these events, and more, taking place during Rainfall Awareness Week.

Please note that, as its name indicates, the Hooting Yard Biennale takes place every two years, and this is the other year, apparently.

Ask Uncle Dan

Dear Uncle Dan : My friend says anchovies are fished from the Dead Sea by Italians and are an Offence unto God. Should I stop ordering anchovies with my pizzas?

Yours in all simplicity, Glyn Webster

Dear Glyn : In order to answer your question with precision and clarity, I will need to know more about this “friend” of yours. I need to know their name, full postal address (including postcode or zip code or whatever system you use in New Zealand), telephone number, email address, bird count and the name of their regular dentist. I need a list of their hats, chalk, and tatty things, and the date of their graduation from the Collegeiate Institute of Brusque Snarling Ecclesiastical Phantoms. How many fob pockets have they filled with sand, and where did the sand come from? Were they in Chappaquiddick on that fateful night? Why is there a big stain on the map of Java pinned up next to the sideboard, and of what wood is the sideboard made? How many cows lumber about in their barnyard? Is there something monstrous and crude about the average burlap sack? Quite frankly I am appalled that you expect me to reply to this anchovy business in the absence of such background information, so appalled, indeed, that my hair has become frazzled and my collection of postage stamps which once gave me such delight now seems to me a puny, curdled thing fit only for that big dustbin over there beyond yon lone, stark, lightning-blasted sycamore on the edge of the muddiest field in all Christendom. Get a grip.

Yours fuming, Uncle Dan

44 Curlews

Yesterday we mentioned Dobson's first published pamphlet, the Description of & Reverie upon Forty Four Curlews. An anonymous reader has drawn attention to the text below, of unknown provenance. What can it all mean?

There I was, crumpled and decisive, standing between two trees on the edge of the Blister Lane Bypass. The trees were both yews, I think. I was looking for curlews. The first one I saw was made of plastic, it was a toy or perhaps a decorative figurine. It had been abandoned in the gutter. Then I saw a second curlew, swooping across the blue, blue sky. I did not know it then, but within hours there would be no blue to be seen, for dark and brooding thunderclouds would waft in from the east. A third curlew appeared in my mind's eye. It was gigantic and ferocious and terrifying. I shuddered. I walked away from the yews, in the direction of Bodger's Spinney, pulling my resplendent teal cardigan tight about my torso. There was a fourth curlew, an embroidered one, on my necktie. Why in the name of heaven was I wearing a necktie? All of a sudden this length of fabric wrapped around my neck felt like a hangman's noose. I took it off, with violent jerks, and discarded it in a puddle, where it would remain until discovered later that day by a scavenging hobbledehoy from The Bashings, that gloomy cluster of huts which sane people shirk. Oh, as the tie dropped into the puddle I saw a fugitive reflection in the water of the embroidered curlew, so that made five. It was still only ten in the morning.

By five past ten I had seen another dozen curlews, or it may have been a single curlew seen twelve times, I cannot be altogether certain. I was standing on Sawdust Bridge at the time, feeling hopeless and disgruntled and cantankerous. The tunic I was wearing beneath my cardigan, which I had stolen from an ingrate, was playing havoc with my [invented skin disease], and rashes were appearing. My doctor had prescribed a daily dose of some sort of bean mashed up into a bowl of milk of magnesia, and I had forgotten to take my dose that morning, so keen was I to see curlews.

Later I took a mop and began to clean the floor of one of the corridors in an ugly building which shall remain nameless. I was indoors now, so unlikely to see any curlews. But lo!, little Maisie - a polka-dot-dressed orphan whose parents perished in the Tet Offensive - came rushing up to me clutching her stamp album and showed me her latest acquisitions, a set of twenty bird-related thematics issued by the Tantarabim Interim Authority. I could not help but note, as I shared my brazil nuts with starving Maisie, that eight of the stamps depicted curlews.

On my way home, as the evening closed in and dark thoughts of skulduggery frolicked in my throbbing skull, I saw a dead curlew on the canal towpath. Bird detectives had already thrown a cordon around it, so I was unable to take a closer look.

That night, by candlelight, I took out my ledger and gave names to each of the twenty-six curlews I had seen. Alcibiades, Bim, Chumpot, Dromedary, Eidolon, Flaps, Gash, Heliogabalus, Inthod…. That is how I started my list. Then I recalled that I had set out to see forty four curlews. I gnashed my teeth in misery and dejection. And I recalled that I had forgotten to wring out the mop.

One of Orphan Maisie's Many, Many Curlew Stamps

Dobsonday

Over in Ireland they're celebrating the centenary of Bloomsday, of course, today's date being exactly one hundred years since James Joyce first stepped out with Nora Barnacle, the day on which Ulysses is set. Here at Hooting Yard, we commemorate the day for a far more significant reason, for today is Dobsonday. It was on 16th June 19-- that Dobson published his first pamphlet, the notorious Description of & Reverie upon Forty Four Curlews, an astonishing, complex, unclassifiable and incomprehensible essay. It is, as you will have guessed, out of print. Dobson wrote it the day after a miserable charabanc outing to a deserted and windswept seaside resort during which he first became intrigued by the manufacture of cement, although this new fascination is not acknowledged in the text. In his newly published study Being Dobson, Nestingbird gives full weight to the importance of Dobson's first appearance in print. “From that day on,” says the critic, “Dobson wrote indefatigably. His ambition was limitless. He decided to write about everything in the known and unknown universe, not in any systematic way, but following his own strange yet spotless star. That, ultimately, he failed, and failed dismally, ought not detract from an appreciation of his genius. Go and sit next to a pond, and think about that, and scrunch up your hat in your fists as you do so.”

Dobsonday is usually celebrated by the worship of curlews. Here is a picture of one. Print it out, place it on your shrine, and contemplate it for hours and hours. That's what all of us at Haemoglobin Towers will be doing today.

The Lure of Hooting Yard

Reader Chris Atton has alerted me to the profound influence of the Hooting Yard Search Engine Lure. He writes:

Dear Frank, the spam message below recently came my way - I forward it to you since you might enjoy the unexplained list at its foot, which remind me of the Hooting Yard Lure in some ways.

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About Belt, Bong & Yaw

Red huts on the horizon stank of steam. Yaw's boil made Belt more hollow. He went towards the lighthouse with paint from the hotels. Bong spoke of coastguards, anvils, butter and Yaw. Belt felt sick. Bong stank of starch. Yaw had his wax. He broke up in the potters.

Horses had got Bong all worn out. Belt's more furtive. He's got lawns. Yaw caught a fever. Bong yelped. Wellington boots pained him. Yaw was floored. Belt took a closer look. Things looked black. Bong had gravy in his sack. Some of Yaw's pancakes took Bong aback. He kept on mentioning Belt behind his back. Yaw was careful with his spoon. Belt went to the kennels. Bong rang a bell. He threw up in his dinner. That made Yaw gawp. He curled up by the sails. They put Bong in prison. He was all tucked up. Yaw wrote a letter to his mother. Belt was in the pantry helping Bong make butter.

Fooling around in Didcot, Yaw found some bones. Those bones were Bong's bones. Belt's matron ate his cheese. Yaw muttered. He fell about in fits. At the waterworks, Belt broke corks. His elk was in a tent. It looked like Bong. Bread rolls and snacks were stacked in crates. Yaw put them by his flask. He threw up on some rudders.

Bong's belt made Belt choke. Yaw coughed up. Hooks in Bong's bungalow looked like claws. But Belt kept calm. Yaw disembarked from a barge. His harbour was red. Belt's was blue. He struck a match. Bong bent twine. His coat was torn. His gun was stuck. Belt's pottery had to be glued. But Yaw's was hard. It looked like wood. Bong had said it would. Bong stank. But Belt had other irons. They raged. Bong's grew. Yaw had no irons in the fire. He kept them in his lockers.