Mad Arabs

Those of you who have read H P Lovecraft will be familiar with the mad Arab Abdul Al-hazred, author of the Necronomicon, that forbidden and blasphemous tome which is, thankfully, under lock and key. Lovecraft is fond of alluding to Al-hazred, but one cannot help but regret that he paid no attention to other notable mad Arabs. Nowhere in the canon, for example, is there any mention of the mad crooning Arab, Abdul Al-bowlly, who died in the Blitz, nor of the diminutive mad acting Arab, Abdul Al-anladd, who stood on a crate so he would look taller, on screen, than his co-star Veronica Lake.

Then there is the mad retired footballer Arab, Abdul Al-anshearer, currently appearing on the BBC as a rather dull World Cup pundit. Lovecraft has nothing to say about him, and nor does he find room in his many stories for the late mad right wing Conservative MP and diarist Arab Abdul Al-anclark. Indeed it has been left to another crooner, Paul Simon, to draw attention to one of the neglected mad Arabs. Simon, one-time colleague of actor, poet, singer, wild frizzy hair pioneer, intellectual and general Renaissance man Arthur Garfunkel, had a hit record with his paean to fictional mad television chat show host Arab, You Can Call Me Al-anpartridge.

If you know of any other mad Arabs never referred to by H P Lovecraft, please submit their names to the Hooting Yard Mad Arab Database.

The Adventures of the Men With Whisks

On Sunday this page was graced with an illustration from The Adventures Of The Men With Whisks (see below). Quite a few readers had their memories stirred by the picture of a stray peasant being bashed on the head with whisks, taken from The Men With Whisks Set Upon The Peasantry In A Whirling Tangle Of Violence (1952), once one of the most popular of this seemingly forgotten series of children's books.

Ruth Pastry, for example, wrote in to say: “Thank you so much for reviving my memories of The Adventures Of The Men With Whisks. When I was a tiny tot I had an almost complete set of these wonderful books, and seldom did I fall asleep at night without having one read to me by my mother or my father or, if they were indisposed, by the family factotum, Igor. My favourite volume was The Men With Whisks Are Attacked By A Giant Invisible Squirrel With Blood-Soaked Fangs, and I particularly treasured the scene where they cower in a spinney, trying desperately to scrape from their whisks the rust with which their utensils have become unaccountably caked.”

Dr Pastry goes on at length about the psychological impact of The Men With Whisks upon her infantile brain, but the rest of her letter is riddled with incomprehensible jargon, misplaced punctuation marks, and some sort of grotesque spillage, so I shall not reproduce it here.

There were over thirty books in the series, all but the last two written and illustrated by Pabstus Tack. The manuscript of what would have been his final adventure, The Men With Whisks Visit A Toothpaste Factory, perished with him in the Munich Air Disaster of 1958. Although his satchel was recovered from the wreckage, its contents had been destroyed. For many years a rumour circulated that the lost story had been memorised by the Manchester United manager Matt Busby, who survived the crash. Busby became adept at deflecting questions related to The Men With Whisks, much as, in later years, the Secretary General of the United Nations, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, always refused to confirm or deny that he had been abducted by aliens, no matter how hard he was pressed by zonk-eyed conspiracy theorists.

It is certainly not the case that the last two books, The Men With Whisks Tuck Into A Slap-Up Dinner Of Cocktail Sausages And Potato Pie, and The Men With Whisks Beat Benfica 4-1 In The European Cup Final, were written by Busby himself under the pseudonym Geraldine Scroonhoonpooge. Forensic examination of the manuscripts put paid to this absurd theory, as did an affidavit signed by Ms Scroonhoonpooge herself attesting that she had been visited during her sleep by the spirit of Pabstus Tack, who dictated the stories to her in an ethereal monotone. These last two volumes are, of course, unillustrated.

Every single one of The Adventures Of The Men With Whisks is now out of print, yet there are many, like Dr Ruth Pastry, who remember them with fondness. Surely the time is ripe for a revival? In our post-literate age, maybe it will take the imprimatur of a Hollywood adaptation to spark the interest of a new generation. So, if you have any battered old copies of the books in your attic, dig them out, photocopy them, and send the copies to Kevin Costner.

Scenes From The Adventures of the Men With Whisks : Number One

Pipistrelle Pursuivant

The pipistrelle pursuivant is a heraldic bat, usually golden and black, but sometimes red. It appears on shields, flags, and banners, visible when the banners are unfurled but hidden when they are furled. In its furled state, the bat is known as a clandestine pipistrelle pursuivant.

You will have seen this decorative bat if you have ever visited the bleak and crumbling stately home you pass if you are cycling between Pointy Town and O'Houlihan's Wharf. It is easy to miss it, as the house is set in vast overgrown grounds and the grounds are ringed by titanic cedars which have gone unpruned for a generation. No pruning, nor any sort of gardening activity whatsoever, has taken place at Plunkett Hall since it fell into the hands of Tadaaki Van Dongelbraacke, the half Japanese, half Dutch kleptomaniac stamp collector, who bought it for a token shilling in 1966.

Van Dongelbraacke chanced upon a mezzotint of the pipistrelle pursuivant in a shabby gift shop in O'Houlihan's Wharf, where it was used as scrap paper to wrap up a gewgaw that took his fancy. In the unheated rumpus room of the stately home, the philatelist, accompanied by his lanky companion Raoul, examined his purchase.

“What do you think of my new gewgaw, Raoul?” asked Van Dongelbraacke.

Raoul was a man of exquisite aesthetic sensibilities, which first became evident when, at the age of six, he fell into a neurasthenic swoon while listening to the first Blodwyn Pig album. A huge dosage of Baxter's Revivifying Brain Salts was required to steady his nerves once he regained consciousness, but thereafter Raoul was treated as a flawless arbiter of taste. Thus, Tadaaki Van Dongelbraacke reacted to his pal's judgement with punctilio.

“The gewgaw is a worthless piece of trash,” pronounced the frail beanpole, “But the paper in which it is wrapped is gorgeous, so much so that a mere glance at the mezzotint of the heraldic bat and I feel my nerves juddering as if I may swoon at any moment.”

Instantly, Van Dongelbraacke smashed the gewgaw into a million pieces with a big fat hammer, and resolved to blazon copies of the pipistrelle pursuivant from every cranny of his domain. And so it came to pass. Raoul, of course, confronted wherever he looked with the image of the superb bat, was in a constant state of enervated fragility, regularly wolfing down bowls of mashed potatoes to try to keep his strength up. But inevitably, he faded away, a puny weakling confined to his bed, while Van Dongelbraacke paced the corridors of his magnificent home, biting his fingernails and tootling dirges on his recorder.

Hold that image in your head, dear reader, for we shall return to it at a later date.

Hidden Fictional Athlete Quiz

Here is an exciting quiz for all the family. Below is a list of interestingly-named players taking part in the current World Cup. But - aha! - hidden among the footballers there is a fictional athlete. See if you can spot him! Clue: the fictional athlete was a protégé of the legendary trainer Old Halob, famed for his mud-bespattered raincoat, disgusting table manners, and collection of lobster thermidor recipes.

Pantsil. Jerko Lecko. Kaka. Boumsong. Jop. Shaka Hislop. Ooijer. Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink. Frings. Boulahrouz. Gilles Yapi Yapo. Fabrice Akwa. Pappoe. Nedved. Razak Pimpong. Buffon. Ching. Fred. Bosko Balaban. Ono. Song Chong-gug. Ji-hoon. Wicky. Gygax. Bobnit Tivol.

Attempted Seduction of Dobson by a Floozie

So here is Dobson, reclining in an arbour on a bright, fresh morning. The grass is dew-dappled. Dobson has an air of lassitude. In his right hand he holds a slim volume of twee verse, but he is not reading. He is gazing into the middle distance, rapt in thought. Little birds are perched on a bower above him, and they are singing sweet and mellifluous airs.

I'm sorry, that is wholly inaccurate. Let's start again. It is pouring with rain. Dobson, windswept and dejected, is trudging along the muddy towpath of the canal. He has a scowl on his face. Suddenly, he stops, and peers at something floating in the canal, something fetid and rotting and quite unidentifiable. So fascinating does Dobson find this soggy nothing that he does not notice the approach of Popsie Shadrach, the notorious floozie.

“You were absorbed in thought, Dobson,” observes the wanton, planting herself in front of him and twirling some taffeta frippery through her long fingers, the nails of which are painted crimson or scarlet or some other garish colour suitable for a floozie's manicure.

“I was indeed” replies the pamphleteer, after clearing his throat and spitting into the canal. There is a slim volume of twee verse by Dennis Beerpint poking out of the pocket of his grubby jacket, and it does not go unremarked by Popsie.

“You were thinking of her you love, I would wager” she says, and sighs. It is a startlingly impassioned sigh, but Dobson appears not to take a blind bit of notice. Instead, he begins trying to dislodge a shred of cabbage from his teeth, at first by probing with his tongue, and then by shoving a calloused finger into his gob. Dobson's nails are unpainted. In fact, they are hideously gnawed. Popsie Shadrach sighs again, languidly this time.

“You are beloved in return - yes, Dobson, most charming of out of print pamphleteers, you are indeed beloved,” she says. There is a tremulousness in her voice, a throbbing in her breast, and a fleeting shudder as Dobson finally manages to extract the shred of cabbage and inadvertently flicks it into her face. She blinks, but regains her sultriness and edges closer to the pamphleteer.

“Are you certain?” he replies, eventually, though he is still peering at the decaying matter which is bobbing in the water.

“Oh, I am but too certain. You are beloved - oh, how madly, by me!” cries Popsie, and she flings herself at his feet, caring not a jot that her gaudy red dress is now covered in muck.

“By you, Popsie Shadrach, notorious floozie that you are? You jest surely - Rise, rise, I beseech you from your unbecoming posture - unbecoming towards me” shouts Dobson, turning to look at Popsie for the first time. As he does so, a maniac crow flies past very close to his head, attracted perhaps by the beetles which crawl through his unkempt hair.

“Oh, Dobson, I love you, I adore you! Spurn me not then, I conjure you, for I cannot, cannot conquer the fatal passion with which you have inspired me” implores the notorious floozie, clutching at the hem of Dobson's filthy jacket, and pulling on it so violently that the slim volume of twee verse by Dennis Beerpint falls from his pocket into a puddle. Dobson stamps his big boot onto the ruined paperback, squelching it underfoot.

“Mistress Shadrach, you strike me with horror! It is Marigold Chew, my muse, amanuensis and typesetter, that I love” he snarls. On the other side of the canal, a lugubrious pig emerges from a clump of trees. It has roamed far from its sty, and is quite lost.

“What - and you will never love me, pamphleteer?” babbles Popsie.

“No, never while I have breath - never!” yells Dobson, slightly distracted by the appearance of the pig and wondering whether or not to report its sighting to the nearest Lost And Abandoned Pig Reporting Station. “Allow me, if possible, to respect you,” he adds, though he has no intention of doing so.

Popsie Shadrach claws at his jacket, rises to her feet, and takes a melodramatic step backwards, almost toppling into the canal. She flails her arms alarmingly, and declares in a screech, “Curses then seize thee, miscreant! I will live to blast thee for this!”

The pig disappears back into the trees, but not before Dobson has taken out his notepad and pencil and jotted down a memorandum. Popsie Shadrach awaits his response, frozen in an attitude of boiling rage.

“Most infamous of women,” says Dobson, once he is satisfied that he will be able to make an accurate report of the lost pig, adding, as he returns his pad and pencil to his inside pocket, “Let me fly from thy loathed presence - let me in the wide world seek a refuge from infamy and shame, for infamy it is to be the object of thy love!”

Batting Popsie aside, the pamphleteer trudges off along the towpath. There is a cloudburst overhead, and the rain splatters down relentlessly. Popsie scampers back to the car park and revs her souped-up jalopy, thundering off at reckless speed towards a gin joint.

We do not know whether Dobson was actually seized by her curses, nor whether she succeeded in blasting him, but it may be pertinent that when he went to the Lost And Abandoned Pig Reporting Station later that day, to report his sighting of the lugubrious pig, he found it shut.

NOTE : With a few minor adjustments, the lines of dialogue in the above have been stolen from Zofloya : or, The Moor by Charlotte Dacre (1806)

Fiends of the Farmyard

There is, or may have been, an old superstition that every farmyard has its own fiend. It is said that Beelzebub personally allotted each fiend to its farmyard, and ratcheted up the fiendishness of his dastardly plan by making the fiends extremely hard to identify. So, for example, neighbouring farmyards may have very, very different resident fiends - a pig here, an old rusty iron pail there, a one-legged hen in one farmyard and a big bright red tractor belching smoke in another. Exorcising a farmyard of its fiend is thus fraught with difficulty, for the average countryside exorcist, stepping through the gate of a farmyard for the first time, does not know where to begin to look.

There is great disparity in the fiendishness of farmyard fiends, and some diabolists have argued that Beelzebub treated the whole matter with an uncharacteristic lack of diabolic concentration. For every farmyard that is stricken by an energetic fiend, there are many more that can pass for years, even decades, in untroubled bucolic peace. But of course it is the former that gain attention. Who can forget the ruination visited upon Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard in the 1930s, all those crop failures, diseases, fires, murders, contaminations and inexplicable barn collapses, which ceased only when a marauding night-time squirrel was captured in a net by Father Dermot Boggis and subjected to the full rigour of his holy wrath? It took six months for the exorcist to expel every last vestige of fiendishness from the squirrel, leaving the poor bushy-tailed mammal thin and shrivelled and exhausted and close to death. And yet, as it was slowly revived by the coddling of Old Ma Purgative at her verdant squirrel sanctuary, so too did the farmyard flourish anew, with majestic fields of golden wheat, gleaming new buckets replacing the old rusty pails, and happy, happy pigs.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the taxonomy of farmyard fiends is precisely the kind of subject to which Dobson would have devoted a pamphlet or two. Indeed, Marigold Chew often pressed him to tackle the topic, supplying the out of print pamphleteer with a constant stream of newspaper cuttings about hideous devastations of an agricultural kidney. She was a subscriber to the once popular monthly magazine Glimpses Of Farmyard Ruin, and wrote many letters to the editor, some of which were published and one of which (October 1954) was selected as ‘Letter of the Month’, for which Marigold received a prize. Unfortunately, the prize was a very large hog with a brain disease which went on wilod rampages through the house. Mischievously, the editor of the magazine, who had his own farmyard, regularly used the monthly prize to rid himself of his farmyard fiends.

Ah yes, note the plural. What happens, you will ask, when a fiend of the farmyard is identified and destroyed, whether by slaughter, exorcism, or being given away as a prize in a raffle, tombola, or by some other means, as happened with Marigold Chew? Did Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard stay fiend-free once its sinister squirrel had its demons cast out? How attentive was Beelzebub to the welfare of those he had sent to wreak havoc in our bosky rural domains? Were new fiends recruited and trained to carry out various infernal farmyard acts of fiendishness? These and other questions were answered by Father Dermot Boggis himself, in his deathbed ravings, carefully transcribed by his wrinkled old helpmeet, the widow Popsicle. Among the thousands of pages she scribbled, we find this startling passage:

“Gaaaa… gaaaa… inexplicable torment of the devil's long poking fork… his ladle… cataclysm of shuddering abasement in the pit… and when did you last see your potatoes?… gaaaa…. have the fields been hoed?…. I see hundreds of cows… thousands of cows… millions of cows… brutes… the flames of the fiery furnace… a crow on the branch of a dead tree… blasts of lightning… no diesel for the tractor… blight!… blight!… worms eating the flesh of resurrected horses… never resurrect a horse… never… pass me that feeble lamp… puddles of sludge and slop and constant rainfall… forty days and forty nights… flooded fields… the wheat ruined… ergot poisoning… a gruesome figure in the shroud of death… find me a lonely cave… remote from human kind… dark as the midnight grave… and dismal as my mind… gaaaa…”

And with that last brief flash of lucidity, the remembered words of John Eccles (c.1688-1735), Father Boggis relapsed into inanity, four hundred pages' worth of the widow Popsicle's palsied pencil-scrawl. The clue to the farmyard fiends' damnable resilience is, I think, in that reference to the crow perched on the branch of a dead tree. Dawn is near. The sun will soon be lighting your path to the far flung fields. Go and till and plough and harrow, feed your horses and your cows and your happy, happy pigs. You may spit upon your farmyard fiend. It will pester you no more. It was only ever a superstition, or it might have been.

And When Did You Last See Your Potatoes?

Spot the Flaw

Ratatatat! Ratatatat! Prohibition-era machine gun fire pursued Blodgett as he fled down an alleyway. He was panting, dripping with sweat, and made an easy target, decked out as he was in the colourful raiment of a Bolivian mountain goatherd. But the cops were poor shots, having only been issued with their new guns that morning, and their cack-handed bursts of ratatatat pinged harmlessly off dustbins and sheets of corrugated iron and other dustbins.

Blodgett hurled himself over an impossibly high brick wall at the end of the alleyway, landed on his feet, and - pausing to catch his breath and light a perfumed Serbian cigarette with his dainty, girly little lighter - he ran on towards the railway station. He had to get out of town fast. They were on to him, and if he were captured he was looking at twenty thousand years in Sing Sing, maybe even forty thousand years. Jumping a freight train, Blodgett settled himself in a boxcar with a pair of hobos. They had many discussions over the next few days, without a single platitude passing their lips. Blodgett began to think he could become a hobo himself. He practised introducing himself as such.

“Hello there, I am Blodgett, the Panglossian hobo,” he tried, until it was pointed out to him by one of his boxcar hobo companions that these were ill-advised words for a fugitive.

Convinced by the logic of this argument, Blodgett changed his mind and decided to hole up in a hideout until the heat was off. Sooner or later the cops would forget about him, distracted by paperwork, ratatatat practice, and the emergence of a previously unknown criminal mastermind bent on masterminding criminality. Tipping his hat to the hobos, he rolled off the freight train as it slowed on the outskirts of a shining city. It was a pitch black night, and Blodgett the Panglossian fugitive crept stealthily through the streets, chewing on a brazil nut, seeking an unlocked door in one of the large buildings among which he wandered. Dawn was still an hour away when he found one. He blundered into the deserted building and jammed the door shut behind him, piling up crates and boxes and cartons to seal himself inside. At last he was safe. He had overlooked just one thing…

The Language of Futbol

I said that I would not babble on about the World Cup, but that was merely a rash promise, easily broken. And how can I not mention the superb comment by Santiago Segurola in El Pais regarding England's opening performance against Paraguay?

“It's hard to say what England were,” he wrote, “A flat team, grotesque and contaminating.”

You can almost hear the chewy disgust in that exquisite choice of words (albeit in translation). Why can't the inarticulate has-beens slumped in their TV studio chairs talk like that?

“What did you think of the first half, Brian?”

“It was grotesque, it was contaminating, it filled my belly with disgust. Such a display of depravity have I ne'er seen in all my days in the dugout.”

I have also been toying with the idea of noting down some of the more baffling comments from the commentary box, so watch this space…

World Cup Anagram Contest

We will not be blathering on about the World Cup to the point of tedium here at Hooting Yard (or perhaps we will) but it seems an opportune moment to direct your attention to a favourite parlour game.

Whisk yourself back to Sweden in January 1938. It is a freezing cold night, starless and swept by gales. In a little cottage, there is a light in the window. You trudge towards it in your snow-shoes, fighting against the bitter wind. Peering in, you see a warm and happy scene. Mr and Mrs Grip are swaddling their newborn son, a little pink Scandinavian bundle. You watch as an elderly crone enters the room, carrying a basin of piping hot water. She places the basin by the roaring fireplace, and then you hear her ask “What are you going to call this little gift of heaven?” And Mr and Mrs Grip speak in unison, proudly, “We shall call him Tord!”

Little did the parents or the grandmother know that the tiny tot cradled so lovingly would grow up to become what the official Football Association website calls “an invalubale part of the Team England setup” [sic]. Sven Goran Eriksson's loyal assistant is ‘invalubale’ not just for his astute and brainy approach to the game, but because his name gives rise to some exciting anagrams, among them Prog Dirt, Port Grid, Drip Grot, Prod Grit, and RR Dot Pig, among others.

How many more can you come up with? Although we are unable to provide free tickets for any World Cup matches to the winning entry, the reader whose Tord Grip anagram list is most entertaining will be given a spare chair at the next fixture involving the Blister Lane Academicals.

Bright Ideas

You know that feeling you get sometimes, when you wake from a fitful sleep and the first thing that pops into your head is “I really must obtain a portrait of ex-Vice President Spiro Agnew, one grown from wheat or maize or some other crop”? It is not always easy to satisfy such a longing, although of course it may not be a longing or a yearning, it may simply be a flash in the pan whim, one which will evaporate once you get out of bed and plunge your head into ice cold water. Indeed, by the time you sit down to your breakfast sausages, the very idea may seem absurd, and you can get on with your day untroubled by such thoughts. For some though, there can be a sense of desperation, an absolute need that must be assuaged. This can be a very debilitating condition.

Luckily, help is at hand, if one is able to divert one's desires from the ex-Vice President to his boss, President Richard Milhous Nixon. All one need do is copy the technique used by Lillian Colton, who won the Blue Ribbon Best In Show at the 1969 Minnesota State Fair with her portrait of Tricky Dicky grown from seeds of timothy, brome grass, canola, and birdsfoot trefoil. How simple is that?

Testimony of a Tundist & Related Matters

Yes, yes, I know you have been tearing your hair out in the absence of recent Hooting Yard bulletins. I can only apologise. Every now and then, I am consumed by self-doubt, knowing in my heart that I will never be as great a writer as the out of print pamphleteer Dobson. You have no idea how hard it can be, to sit staring at that blank screen, fingertips poised over the keyboard, knowing that no matter how hard you try, you will never in your life write anything fit to share the same universe as Squelching Through A Field Outside Oswestry During A Thunderstorm, Humming ‘Heavy Horses’ by Jethro Tull.

But anyway… we must all try. So Mr Key is back again, however fruitlessly. And with an announcement to make before anything else. The serial story Testimony Of A Tundist (see below for the first five episodes) ought to be continuing from today, but due to a very nonsensical reason has had to be postponed. The sixth part, and those following, will appear here from next week onwards.

And so we move on…

Fort Hoity

Came the day the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper smashed their way by main force through the huge iron gates of Fort Hoity. They were both astonished and disappointed to find the fort deserted, save for a tethered goat in the courtyard. The goat's tether extended far enough for it to be able to reach a flowerbed by one fort wall, so it was a well-nourished goat as well as a tethered goat.

“That goat,” said the fanatical Trebizondo Culpeper adherent they called Bim, “Has eaten half the flowers in that flowerbed, and has not even begun on the weeds.”

His companions jotted this observation down in their logbooks, under “B For Bim”. They each used the spidery handwriting they had learned at the feet of Trebizondo Culpeper's pencilling master, the nameless gravel-voiced Peruvian laundry basket man who had inadvertently sent them to Fort Hoity in the first place. Replacing their logbooks in their pockets, the adherents gathered about Bim, who was now lolling by a brazier in which hot coals burned still. Clearly, the fort had not long been abandoned.

“This fort has not long been abandoned,” said Bim, “For the coals in this brazier burn still. But how did the fort people flee? If they had left by the huge iron gates, we would have seen them when we were standing on the hill as dawn broke and we ate our breakfasts. The plans of the fort which we have studied so conscientiously show no other exits. This, then, is a highly perplexing circumstance. I wonder if that goat, in addition to being tethered and well-fed, is also a talking goat?”

The fanatical adherent known as Bam slapped his forehead. “For crying out loud, Bim!” he shouted, “Have you taken leave of your senses? There is no such thing under the heavens as a goat that speaks human languages. That is the stuff of fairy tales.”

The other fanatical adherents mumbled together as a group. Both Bim and Bam had them confused now, for they had expected to enter Fort Hoity through main force and to be chopping and slashing and unleashing madcap havoc. Instead they were standing around mumbling and pondering the connection, if there was one, between fairies, elves, sprites and goats. The fanatical adherent named Diocletian, much mustachioed, raised the topic of tethering. If one could tether a goat, as the Fort Hoity goat had been tethered, could one tether a fairy? Would a fairy not be nimble enough to slip its bonds? To this, Pembroket suggested that a fairy could surely be tethered by using gossamer thin magical thread. The mumbling grew louder. Time was passing. Bim made an announcement.

“Not many leagues yonder is Fort Toity. I know in my bones that that is where the Fort Hoity people have gone. I know not how they got there, but that is where they must be. We shall leave a team here to secure the place, and the rest of us will march like the clappers to Fort Toity. And we shall untether the goat and take it with us.”

And so Bim and his bedraggled gang of fanatical Trebizondo Culpeper adherents set out to traipse across the plain, whistling as they marched. Those who had not undergone whistling training parped hooters instead, or imitated crows, corncrakes, and loons. Every so often they would stop and sit, and eat from their bags of confectionery, and Bim or Bam would make pronouncements and the band of fanatical adherents would jot down their aperçus. All sorts of subjects related to the teachings of Trebizondo Culpeper were covered, from dishwater and clanging noises to oil slicks and the bossa nova, from freckles and optometry to cuddy and tack. They tied a colourful and perfumed rag to one ear of the untethered goat, and let it lead the way across the plain towards Fort Toity.

So who were they, the people they pursued, who had fled from Fort Hoity to Fort Toity and who were now being borne down upon, slowly but surely, by the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper and an untethered goat? First, they were the people who made miniature cardboard hens and placed them on the sides of paths. Second, they execrated the very name of Trebizondo Culpeper, regularly, every night in fact, as they sat around their brazier of hot coals, staring at the moon, if it was visible through the clouds. If the moon was not visible they shut their eyes. They would sit quite still for so long that birds would nest in their hair and moss grow upon their feet. There were more than a hundred of them, and they worshipped nothing, not even the tethered goat they had so cruelly abandoned back at Fort Hoity.

Why did they not take the goat with them, as they fled? This is the kind of question the out of print pamphleteer Dobson would have addressed, had he been alive at the time of which I write. But he was yet to be born. It is hard for us to imagine a world without Dobson, a world where inexplicable things could happen - did happen! - and there was no hastily-scribbled pamphlet issued, within days or weeks, to make sense of events. How one would have longed for even a few precious pages entitled Why Those Who Fled Fort Hoity For Fort Toity To Escape The Fanatical Adherents Of Trebizondo Culpeper Cruelly Abandoned Their Tethered Goat, With Footnotes And A Map!

A map would certainly have been of use to the pursuers, who became utterly lost on that barren plain. Try as they might, they could not find Fort Toity. They wandered for months, led by the goat, until their confectionery bags were empty, and the batteries on Bim's portable metal tapping machine were dead. They were far from home, exhausted and hungry and increasingly rancorous. Pembroket in particular was thoroughly frazzled, and took to poking his fellows with a pointy stick, until they took it away from him and stamped on his toes until he promised to desist. And desist he did, for he fell victim to an ague, sweating and shaking and babbling incoherent gibberish. Bam accused him of having a spurious ague, to elicit sympathy.

Diocletian said “This is not the first time you have made an accusation of spurious ague, Bam. Do you have an idée fixée?”

Bam replied: “Yes I do. Is that so wrong?”

But Pembroket's ague was all too real, and it was on the Thursday morning he expired out on that plain that the fanatical adherents of Trebizondo Culpeper were plunged into despair. One by one they perished, and with them perished the cult of Trebizondo Culpeper.

Hooting Yard Music Prize 2006

Last week, outside a semi-derelict tin kiosk perched on the brow of Pang Hill, our favourite octogenarian crone Mrs Gubbins announced the Hooting Yard Music Prize 2006. Here is a transcript of her speech, from which various interruptions (hacking cough, drooling, unexplained shrieks) have been excised:

The rules for the Hooting Yard Music Prize this year are so simple that even the snivelling infants chained up in Pang Hill Orphanage will be able to understand them. Rule One is that the entries should be musical settings of words taken from anywhere on the Hooting Yard website. That includes all the quotations from other writers with which each bulletin begins. Rule Two is that entries should aspire to sound like the piece of music described by Marie Corelli in The Sorrows Of Satan (1895). I quote:

“The music swelled into passionate cadence - melodies crossed and re-crossed each other like rays of light glittering among green leaves - voices of birds and streams and tossing waterfalls chimed in with songs of love and playful merriment; anon came wilder strains of grief and angry clamour; cries of despair were heard echoing through the thunderous noise of some relentless storm, farewells everlastingly shrieked amid sobs of reluctant shuddering agony; and then, as I listened, before my eyes a black mist gathered slowly, and I thought I saw great rocks bursting asunder into flame, and drifting islands in a sea of fire - faces, wonderful, hideous, beautiful, peered at me out of a darkness denser than night, and in the midst of this there came a tune, complete in sweetness and suggestion - a piercing, sword-like tune that plunged into my very heart and rankled there - my breath failed me, my senses swam, I felt that I must move, speak, cry out, and implore that this music, this horribly insidious music should cease ere I swooned with the voluptuous poison of it - when, with a full chord of splendid harmony that rolled out upon the air like a breaking wave, the intoxicating sounds ebbed away into silence. No one spoke - our hearts were yet beating too wildly with the pulsations roused by that wondrous lyric storm. Diana Chesney was the first to break the spell. 'Well, that beats everything I've ever heard!' she murmured tremulously.”

Before you start to complain that one can hardly affix an exclamation mark to a murmur, tremulous or otherwise, I want you to reread those two rules. That is all you need to know. So pick up your viol or banjo or sackbut or what have you, choose some words from the Hooting Yard website, and set to work as if your life depended upon it!

Insignificant details such as closing date, judging panel, prize etc will follow.