Placard of the Year

Whatever else you may say about them, Islamic protesters know how to brandish a good placard. Witness the slogan quoted above, which puts Western lefties with their “Bush 'n' Blair, Oooh We Hate You” vapidity to shame. Something about the one time Cardinal Ratzinger clearly inspires the perpetually-offended Islamists. His recent comments - sorry, unforgivable insults for which he deserves to be beheaded - about the iniquity of old Mohammed led to the creation of Hooting Yard's favourite placard of the year.

The Potatoes of Potatovag

“When did you last clap eyes on the potatoes of Potatovag?”

I was asked this question while standing on a bridge over a muddy river in a high wind. I was wearing spats, as usual, minding my own business, and humming the theme tune to the exciting TV quiz show Cormorant Or Grebe? It was pouring with rain, but I didn't care, for atop my head I wore a sprightly wide-brimmed hat, all golden, and decked with plastic chrysanthemums.

Yes, dear reader, I was the spats-and-hat man you have heard so many stories about. Remember when you were tiny, and mama tucked you up in bed and opened the Treasury Of Bedtime Tales For Pallid And Sickly Infants, and how you begged her to ignore the vapid rubbish about giants and dragons and magic kingdoms and what have you, and to go straight to the stories of the spats-and-hat man? That's me. But of course you would never have been told the tale of this particular day that found me standing on a windswept bridge in a downpour being questioned about the potatoes of Potatovag, because it was only yesterday, and there has not yet been time for my scribe to boswell an account ready for the printing presses.

In truth, I have a team of scribes, who work in relays. One follows me about, morning, noon and night, scribbling down my doings. One sits at a desk in the chalet, making a fair copy of yesterday's scribblings. One types up the fair copy in the chalet's computer pod. One supervises the printing of the typed copy. One carts the printed copies around to all the kiosks where they can be purchased. And one has a day of rest, often spent studying the swans downriver. I am a lucky spats-and-hat man to have so many Boswells at my beck and call, even if they can be a tiresome bunch. Let me briefly describe their shortcomings. Hoobington is curdled and indiscreet. Tack is blind. Dalewinton has pins in his legs and a metal plate in his skull and his favourite tipple is the boiled blood of ducks. Poop is a nincompoop. Hudibras is a swivel-eyed Stalinist maniac whose cardigans always bear traces of yesterday's sausages. The sixth boswell is actually named Boswell, or rather, Boswellboswell. This one topples over far too often for my liking.

So, yesterday it happened that I was accompanied by this Boswellboswell person. There I was, standing on the bridge in the rain, humming, and peering over across the fields to where the phlox and pansies and pinks, the hellebore and hollyhocks, the marigolds, verbascum and charlock and mimosa, spurge, gorse and erica, the lupins, the daffodils, the broom and japonica, the creeping jenny, the old man's beard and the cow parsley, the speedwell and flax and dock and hops and oxlip and crocuses and teasel, and the geraniums and foxgloves and fleabane and jonquil and lobelia grow in such heavenly profusion, when the person from Potatovag drew up beside me in his death-trap jalopy, and shouted “When did you last clap eyes on the potatoes of Potatovag?”

I made my reply, with all the wit and brio you have come to expect from the spats-and-hat man… but Boswellboswell chose that very moment to topple over yet again, and as we were on a bridge, he toppled into the muddy river, and he sank, and with him sank the words I spoke to the person from Potatovag, words now lost forever, never to find their place in a new edition of the Treasury Of Bedtime Tales For Pallid And Sickly Infants, infants now who will be deprived of a thin, weak smile of glee before falling to a snooze in their iron sickbeds, a snooze from which - who knows? - they may never awake.

Glue : Some Do's and Don'ts

Far too many people simply don't understand how to make the best use of glue. For that reason, here at Hooting Yard we have taken it upon ourselves to educate our readers by providing some cardinal do's and don'ts. Read, ponder, and digest, and never again will you stand accused of glue-related tomfoolery.

1. Never use glue to stick your head to something it ought not be glued to. For example, you should avoid gluing your head to the nest of a being which will suck out your brains.

2. Do not confuse glue with gum. Some gum can be chewed - indeed, such gum is often called ‘chewing gum’. You cannot chew glue, and you will rue the day you do, should you be such a nincompoop so to do.

3. Make sure you read Dobson's various pamphlets on the subject of glue, all of which are highly informative. I particularly recommend The Adhesive Properties Of Six Hundred Different Types Of Glue, With Diagrams (out of print, but sometimes salvageable from rubbish tips in the vicinity of glue-making factories). This pamphlet has been condemned by a number of commentators as being a farrago of lies and bile, written by Dobson in order to exact revenge upon one of his enemies, but you should read it anyway, for even if the so-called facts with which it is packed are false and inaccurate, you will still learn much enabling you to hold your own in any argument concerning glue.

4. Some glues are designed for very specific purposes. For example, library paste is thick and glutinous, whereas mucilage is thin, clear and gelatinous. Don't get the two mixed up, or you may be beset by adherence issues, and none of us wants to face such a circumstance, bereft of glue-knowledge, alone and puny in a cold and pitiless universe. No!

That is quite enough about glue for today.

Shrivelled

When I removed the shrivelled human head from the burlap sack, my first thought was that there must have been foul play, as detectives like to call it. But I am not a detective, and foul play seemed incongruous in this sun-dappled meadow splattered with buttercups, tansy and wild hollyhocks, under a gorgeous blue sky. Just before stumbling upon the sack I had been singing at the top of my voice, singing a happy song, one of my own devising, a paean of praise to bees, extolling the virtues of these splendid buzzy insects, and I was dressed like a bee, sort of, in a black and yellow hooped jumper, and black leggings, and a black cap upon my head.

There was no cap or hat of any sort on the shrivelled head I took from the sack, just a few strands of filthy matted hair. I sat on the grass and took a pair of snippy butcher's scissors out of my pocket and gave the shrivelled head a much needed haircut, and I made a little pile of the clippings on a patch of bare soil, and set fire to it with a match, and it blazed oh so briefly, sparking and crackling, and then all that was left was a trace of ash. I plopped the shrivelled head back into the burlap sack, swung it over my shoulder, and headed off towards Old Farmer Frack's pig farm, singing lustily.

No one knew how old Old Farmer Frack was, and no one could remember a time when he was not squelching about in the mud, at all hours of the day and night, raising his pigs. As farms go, it was a tiny farm, but Old Farmer Frack was a giant of a man, by the standards of that land, and his pigs grew to giants too, under his care. It was a mystery how he made his living, for he never took his pigs to market to sell them. When they reached a size that made them too big for the tiny farm, he drove them up into the hills and let them loose. That is why dutiful parents warn their children against going a-wandering alone in the hills, and tell terrifying tales of giant rampaging pigs which capture and carry off misbehaved infants in their big chomping jaws.

I found Old Farmer Frack engulfed in a fug of culinary fumes in his kitchen. He was preparing his lunch, a concoction of jugged hare, devilled kidneys, and blancmange, and he was cursing like a sailor, for he had inadvertently jugged the kidneys and devilled the hare. One of his pigs - not yet titanic in stature - was rooting around the skirting boards, looking perhaps for beetles or other creeping things. I patted the pig on its shanks, if pigs have shanks, and placed my sack on the table.

“This might interest you, Old Farmer Frack,” I said, helping myself to a tumbler's worth of water from the spigot. Except for his maritime curses, learned when he was but a boy, Old Farmer Frack was a man of few words. He eyed the sack, and he eyed me, and he eyed his spigot. Then he put down his jug full of kidneys and opened the sack with unnecessary vigour, causing the shrivelled human head to roll across the table and topple to the floor. To its credit, the pig ignored it. Old Farmer Frack stared at the shrivelled head and immediately made the sign of the cross. I had no idea he was a Papist pig farmer!

“I just snipped the gory locks off this gory find,” I said, “And then I burned them!”

I stooped to lift the head back on to the table, but Old Farmer Frack clouted me with main force and I crumpled to the floor. Unconscious for a few seconds, I came to with the pig's snout in my face. The shrivelled human head was perilously close to one of the pig's cloven feet, and I feared that it would be crushed should the pig become excitable and begin stamping. Thinking fast, I reached my hand up and patted the pig soothingly. Previously, when I had patted its shanks, or what I believed to be its shanks, I had done so in a perfunctory manner, much as one might chuck a dog under the chin. Now I willed the placatory forces of Blotzmann Movement Number Seven (a) into my hand, that I might communicate absolute calm. At this point Old Farmer Frack smashed me on the head with a spade. Typical of a farmer, I thought, to keep a spade in his kitchen.And then I passed out, for hours.

I was woken by the unbearable sound of a transistor radio blaring into my ears. ‘Unbearable’, because on Radio Pipsqueak it was, apparently, U2 Day, and the noise assailing me was the voice of the preposterous Paul “Nobo” Hewson, a Christian Irish millionaire given to taking court action to retrieve a pair of trousers and a hat*. I lunged to deaden the sound in any way I could, and saw Old Farmer Frack looming above me, his jowls smeared with vestiges of devilled hare, jugged kidneys, and blancmange.

“You brought me the wrong head,” he said, lugubriously.

*NOTE :You can read about this matchless example of deluded self-importance here.

Hiatus

We've had another hiatus here at Hooting Yard. The chief reason for this is that I agreed to take part in an experiment and have spent the last two months living as an otter. Only yesterday did Professor Tadaaki pull up at the riverbank in his big yellow rusty jeep to tell me that I had misheard his instructions and wasted valuable research time splashing about to no apparent purpose.

I towelled myself dry and traipsed home in a bit of a temper, because the good Prof did not see fit to tell me what it was that I had misheard. Was I meant to have been living as a hatter? As a nutter? Who knows? Anyway, I am home now, and have already started scribbling prose to provide my loyal readers with entertainment, instruction, and a diversion from autumn thoughts of knitwear and shove-ha'penny. Now read on…

Untitled Work in Progress

Look at this man coming up the path, the waterlogged path. They call him the district line dentist. He has dentistry in his blood. He has blood on his shoes. Blood on his shoes, talc in his hair, and as he walks along the waterlogged path he is shouting and shouting and shouting. The blood on his shoes is still wet and warm from the slaughtering he has been engaged in, up in the hills, where the district line never goes. It is not the blood of humans. There are no humans in those hills, only cardboard figures, and hardboard figures, and balsa wood figures, and an enormous colony of very, very frightening birds, like savage and pitiless birds from an ancient myth, except that these birds are real, fat with feathers, and absolutely terrifying. You may have seen their like on the sides of buses in Pointy Town, for it was images of similar birds that were used in that ill-conceived advertising campaign for a brand new type of fizzy and frothing detergent pill which, it was claimed, would put more pep into your pots and pans. We know that banging pots and pans is a traditional method of scarifying birds, but it would not work with these birds, the ones that perch on the cardboard and hardboard and balsa wood figures in the hills from which the man they call the district line dentist has just descended, with blood on his shoes and a song in his heart. That is why he is shouting. He has a song in his heart but he cannot sing. His song is about the sad final days of Edgar Allan Poe, and the chorus replicates that neurasthenic writer's dying words…. “Reynolds! Reynolds! Reynolds!” That is what the district line dentist is shouting as he clumps along the path in his blood-soaked shoes. He clumps with a limp, for his legs are of uneven length, only just, but decisively so. He was not born that way. When he was a cherubic bonny baby both his legs were measured, and they were found by several independent authorities to be identical in length. Something happened to him between then and now to mar his symmetry, something he has always blamed on the ferocious birds up in the hills. That is why he is such a bitter man and a bird hater.

He hated birds, but he was fond of moles. He had a little toy mole made of cambric and string, a puppet you could call it, which sat on a china plate on the dresser in the parlour of the boarding house by the seaside where he lived. Seeing a mole on a plate, many people chided the district line dentist that it looked as if he wanted the mole for his dinner, albeit that it was only a cambric and string toy. The presence of a knife and fork alongside the plate served only to emphasise this misapprehension, but that was part of his plan, or I should say part of one of his many plans. Dentistry was in his blood, but he no longer practised that trade, for he was an old, old man, retired to a seaside boarding house, a boarding house named after Ray Milland, the film star who memorably appeared in The Man With X-Ray Eyes. The gardens of the boarding house were riotous with foxgloves, and as you may know, foxgloves are poisonous to moles. At least, that is the case in the land of which I speak, it may or may not be the case elsewhere in the boundless universe. But of course the foxgloves which bloomed in the Ray Milland boarding house gardens were not harmful to the district line dentist's mole, for it was but a toy, a plaything, sat on its plate on the dresser. The cutlery aligned next to the plate was of exquisite workmanship, of the finest metal, manufactured, according to legend, by gnomes, thoughthe tales told of these gnomes were full of holes, and every version was different. Sometimes the gnomes were said to live under a big bright mountain far away, and sometimes they were said to spend their lives jetting from one paradise island to another, making their knives and forks and spoons during stopovers in airport snack bars. In truth, nothing can have been more mundane than the actual making of the cutlery, and gnomes played no part in it. Every last teaspoon and sugar tong was made in a great grim factory, guarded by beagles, plonked in a field at the end of the district line, Hallelujah Field, where no grass grew, only weeds and tares.

There are storms in teacups and barn-storms, but it is a very particular sort of storm that engages our attention now. Henry Cow recorded a piece entitled Bittern Storm Over Ulm, the title taken from a passage in one of Charles Fort's compendia of anomalous phenomena, and likewise, we are dealing with a storm of birds. For up in the hills where the district line never goes, a surge of magnetism convulsed the colony of terrifying birds, and they filled the sky, screeching and shrieking, maddened beyond measure. Hearing the racket, the dentist clumped to a halt on the waterlogged path. His shoes were steeped in the blood of slaughtered birds, but for each one he had killed, dozens more had appeared, flapping in from who knows where, gathering in the hills, perched and brooding and awaiting the burst of magnetic energy sending them into a storm in the sky. But this was Pointy Town, not Ulm, and these were no bitterns. And the waterlogged path that came down from the hills led, in its meandering way, to a cluster of huts on the beach, huts that once belonged to boat builders, Noah figures whose beards were stiff with the salt of the sea, long gone now, the boats they built shattered and broken, wooden fragments scattered across the sands, eaten by worms, as those who built the broken boats were themselves devoured as they lay in their tombs in the pretty churchyard of Saint Bibblydibdib's, hard by the beach, and popular with poets. Sand worms and earthworms, and the work they do, have been ignored by the graveyard poets of Pointy Town, and for that they should be ashamed. The district line dentist was heading for the huts where once boats had beenbuilt, for there he believed he would find sanctuary from the vengeful birds. Pelange and Froumier are among those who have written authoritatively about ritual appeasement of bird gods, and while I am not suggesting for one moment that there is a divinity lurking in the breasts of those screeching horrors in the sky over the hills - the sky now black with their swooping, flapping savagery, incidentally - yet we would do well to recall, in particular, Pelange's nostrum regarding protecting shrouds. But of course, that popinjay writer knew nothing of birds driven bonkers by eerie magnetic forces which we still do not fully understand. Luckily for him, the district line dentist did.

It was no accident that the church by the beach was consecrated to Saint Bibblydibdib, for he was the patron saint of something or other resonant of marine life. He is one of those saints for whom there is no convincing evidence of his actual existence, and it may be that he was simply a phantom shimmering in vapours from the brains of seaside mystics. Buried in the churchyard was one such mystic, a wise woman known as the Woohoowoodiwoo Woman. Legend in those parts held that she it was who had fallen foul of the birds in the hills, and had pelted the old boat builders with potatoes until they ceased to build boats, and that she had done so because she lived in mortal fear not only of the birds but of the sea. Hideous aquatic beings haunted her nightmares, from which she would awake crying “Woohoowoodiwoo!”, hence the name by which she was known. Intriguingly, on 22nd November 1963, the day of the Kennedy Assassination, she awoke screaming “Reynolds! Reynolds! Reynolds!”, like Edgar Allan Poe on his deathbed, but we do not know why, and nor did she ever divulge her dream, even to the district line dentist, who did her bridge canal work, and praised the enamel of her molars, and was her confidante and, some said, her inamorata, all those years ago, before the frightening birds haunted the hills, and while boats were still built in the cluster of huts on Pointy Town beach, the huts clustered between two coastal features called impagu and sacketysack. She was invariably dressed, even festooned, in those days, in a maroon shawl, the Woohoowoodiwoo Woman. Maroon, too, was the colour of the plumage of the most frightening of the frightening birds. Did the shawl act as her protective shroud, a la Pelange? The district line dentist suffered from Daltonism, or colour blindness, and he knew not what maroon was, nor how it differed from blue. As we know, maroon and blue are the two ‘foundation’ colours in the Blotzmann Register.