The Life and Loves of Mrs Gubbins

Readers will recall that the octogenarian crone Mrs Gubbins has returned to her duties running various important aspects of the Hooting Yard empire. After being on the run from the police and gaining sanctuary with the Tundists for a few months, she seems revitalised, and in among everything else she is writing her autobiography. I crept into her office the other day and stole a few pages of the manuscript, extracts of which will appear here from time to time.

After my divorce from the man who liked to sing Shenandoah morning noon and night, setting my teeth on edge, I became a flapper and spent the next five years going from one party to another. I doubt that any of the demimondaines I canoodled with had any idea that, between parties, I was lecturing at various colleges on the history of bell-ringing and the doctrine of transubstantiation in the Tudor church. It was through this shared interest that I met Ah-Fang, who became husband number two.

“Bathsheba,” he would say to me, “I often wonder why my parents named me Ah-Fang. After all, my father was Belgian and my mother hailed from the tenebrous, dense forests of northern Finland. My siblings all have names like Jan and Joost and Hakki and Einojuhani.”

“How many siblings have you got, Ah-Fang my sweet?” I would ask, pecking him on the cheek. Then his brow would grow furrowed and he would become morose and mutter something about going out to buy a bottle of dandelion and burdock. I became unhappy at this secretiveness of his, and it grieves me to think that during our eight months together I felt closer to my pet anteater, Desmondo. Nonetheless, I wept for a week when Ah-Fang perished in the Hindenburg disaster. I owe my life to the fact that for once I was not at his side, having that very week been employed to spy on the young Anthony Burgess, or John Wilson as he then was, for reasons I forget. I must say it rains a lot in Lancashire.

Next episode : Mrs Gubbins goes to war

BEAN DISEASES!

A new play by Dennis Cargpan

Scene I

Enter Trimulchio and Vincenzo, Duke of Squallorca

Trimulchio : The principal disease affecting beans is a form of anthracnose caused by a fungus that attacks the stems, leaves, and pods of the bean. It is most visible on pods, in which it causes deep, dark pits.

Vincenzo : Fie, sirrah! To prevent the disease, seeds are carefully selected, and care is taken not to spread the fungus from one plant to another during wet weather.

Exeunt

Scene II

Enter Bostinza, a fop

Bostinza : A type of rust may defoliate bean plants. It first appears as small brown dots containing a brown powder, the spores of the fungus.

Scene III

Enter Trimulchio

Trimulchio : Forsooth! Later the spots become larger and the spores black.

Exeunt, covered in beans.

Curtain

Rhinoplax Vigil (See Above)

Tales of the Riverbank

The riverbank of which I speak was inhabited by glamorous moles. There were dozens of them, each more glamorous than the last, and the one who engages our attention on this damp Wednesday is the most glamorous mole of all. Her name is Hortense. Before you start complaining about the regrettable practice of anthropomorphising riverbank creatures, please bear in mind that not a jot of that is going on here. The mole was called Hortense and she was extremely glamorous. She wore a sort of mole version of a cloche hat, but there was nothing remotely human about her. She was just a mole, albeit one so glamorous that other moles swooned in her presence. Have you ever seen a mole swoon? It is quite a sight, and you will do well to have your camera at the ready. On the Wednesday of which I speak, there were many swooning moles to be seen by the riverbank. And we have not even begun to explore the marshes!

Tales of the Marshes

Out in the spooky marshes, at dead of night, nothing stirred. Nothing except tiny nocturnal creatures whose habitat was marsh and fen. Cock an ear and you might hear scrabblings and scurryings, fugitive wisps of sound in the otherwise eerie silence. There you sit in your concrete pillbox, a primed grenade in one hand and a mug of tomato soup in the other. The dampness of your socks is most distressing. You are distressed by the dampness of your socks, in the marshes, in the night, but why are you holding a hand grenade? Is this wartime? Surely in wartime you would not be fobbed off with damp socks? A bat appears near your head, and you flinch. These marshes are known for their colonies of bats. Wisely, you sip your soup. It is piping hot. The air in the marshes is not.

Bell

Imagine you have never used a telephone before. It rings, and you pick up the receiver. You don't know that the social convention is to say “Hello?” or “Dobson here. Who's calling?” or something similar. So what do you say? One man who faced this dilemma was, of course, Alexander Graham Bell, who invented the thing, or at least got the patent on it. His preferred manner of answering the telephone was to shout “Ahoy!” This seems to me far more exciting than a dull “Hello”, and it's a pity that Bell's habit never caught on. It is, of course, never too late to overturn various social conventions. If we all started yelling “Ahoy!” when answering the telephone, the world would be just a little bit more pleasurable.

On a vaguely related note, I take this opportunity to mention that the first ever message sent in Morse code, by Samuel Morse himself, was “What hath God wrought?”

A Refutation of Some of the Less Plausible Claims Made by Dennis Cargpan in His Woeful Lecture Delivered From the Balcony of the Civic Hall at Bodger's Spinney on Thursday Last During a Hailstorm to a Gathering of Ingrates and Orphans

I wish to refute, while sipping from a glass of milk of magnesia, some of the less plausible claims made by that odious charlatan Dennis Cargpan in his woeful and, let's face it, mercenary lecture delivered from the crumbling balcony of the civic hall at Bodger's Spinney on Thursday last during the most tremendous hailstorm I have ever seen in my life to a gathering of bestial ingrates and orphans who were corralled into the square by Cargpan's team of electric-cattle-prod-wielding ruffians and forced to applaud his preposterous statements.

Chief among these statements was his contention that toads are shy, usually nocturnal animals, hiding during the day in dark, damp places and hopping about at night in search of insects, grubs, slugs, worms, and other invertebrates; that they are often brownish or greyish in colour and have warty skin, a flat head, swollen parotid glands on the side of the neck behind the eyes, bright, jewel-like eyes with a transverse pupil, and slightly webbed toes; that they are often stouter than frogs and cannot leap as far; that the tongue of the toad is attached to the front of its mouth; that the tongue is flicked forward from the mouth, and the sticky tip grasps the prey and carries it back to the mouth; that unlike most frogs, most toads do not have teeth; that the tongue produces quantities of mucus to help in swallowing; that all anurans blink when they swallow; and because there is no bone between the eye and the mouth, the eye is pushed against the roof of the mouth, forcing the food further back.

Let me just sip some milk of magnesia before refuting this twaddle.

There! I refute it, utterly. I do not refute it on the basis of scientific fact, nor on my own acute observation of the natural world, nor do I refute it because I have read many, many learned papers about toads which counter these statements. Similarly, I do not refute it in homage to my mother, who was a self-proclaimed expert on toads and passed down her hard-won knowledge to me, because my mother was bonkers and confused toads with wrens, and it should come as no surprise that all those articles about toads she sent off to the Reader's Digest and the Daily Telegraph were tapped out on a special padded typewriter from her room in the Saint Cynthia Mercy Home For The Deranged And Bewildered. No. I refute this drivel simply because I bear a grudge against Dennis Cargpan. One day he will burn in hell. In the meantime I shall not rest from my refutations of every word he utters from that pinched and slippery mouth of his. Well may he regret the day he chuckled at my bouffant!

What to Do on a Winter's Day in Tantarabim

This handy guide has been produced by the Tantarabim Tourist Board, a body riddled with corruption from top to toe, although its internal politics need not concern the innocent reader who merely wishes to spend a few joyous hours in the bailiwick of Tantarabim on a cold and blustery winter's day, swaddled in woollen garments against the elements. Let's start again. This is a handy guide to the sort of activities you and your family can enjoy in Tantarabim during the winter months, should you be unlucky enough to have your plane make a forced landing there due to storminess, surely the only reason to go anywhere near Tantarabim in the first place, given how frightening it is. Having said that, for the tourist who does not mind discomfort and privations, Tantarabim can be a source of much entertainment and interest, if the words are used loosely. So put on your hat and come with me now as we creep past the gore-splattered beasts with venomous fangs which guard all approaches to the town, and I shall list at least five things you can do when stuck in Tantarabim during a blizzard.

1. Plummet helplessly down one of the many hidden chutes which deliver you into a flaming pit.

2. Be poked at with pointed sticks by cloven-hoofed imps spitting sulphur. You will have lots of fun trying to shake them off, but we guarantee you won't succeed!

3. Take a guided tour of the choc ice factory. The price of entry includes the opportunity to taste their wares.

4. Become embroiled in a fight to the death with Bonecrusher Jim, an untamed python which has been deprived of food for months.

5. Spend a night in one of Tantarabim's many inns, where you will be entranced by the primitive gaslight, inexplicable night-time banging and crashing noises, swarms of phantom locusts, and walls and ceilings that seem to move when you are not looking. Most inns do not charge for children under sixteen, probably because they are likely to be abducted by strange amphibious monsters and dragged into the sea.

Famous Last Words

This afternoon, whim dictates that I share with readers some famous last words.

“Reynolds! Reynolds! … Reynolds!” — Edgar Allan Poe *

“I suppose I am now becoming a god” — Emperor Vespasian

“All this buttoning and unbuttoning” — Anonymous 17th century suicide

“It was I who discovered leeches have red blood.” Georges Cuvier

* NOTE : Poe was yelling out for Jeremiah Reynolds - not present at his deathbed - an enthusiastic supporter of the hollow earth theories of John Cleve Symmes. Symmes' idea that there were entrances to subterranean worlds at both the Poles was one of the inspirations for Poe's magnificent The Narrative Of Arthur Gordon Pym Of Nantucket.

A Plug Wiring Diagram

This is just one of the many plug wiring diagrams to be found on Mark Pawson's superb page, a lengthy, studious visit to which is recommended.

Pale Flapper : A Love Story

“What do you do with the drunken sailor?” is a question that has often been posed in the past. Never having been to sea, except once or twice, as a stowaway, it was not something Sidney Paste had given much thought to. Yet when he awoke on that still September morning, pale sunlight leaching into his scandalous fin de siecle bedroom, he was confronted by not one but a dozen drunken sailors, dancing a sort of hornpipe on his balconyette. It was dubbed a balconyette because it was considerably smaller than the average balcony in that fair city, so tiny in fact that it was a wonder that twelve drunken sailors had managed to cram themselves on to it, let alone to dance a sort of hornpipe.

One of the sailors had an accordion, and was drunkenly squeezing out the tune to which they danced. Sidney Paste knew that tune well, for it was The Onion Song by Ashford and Simpson, memorably recorded by Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. Although, as we have seen, not given to pondering what he should do with the drunken sailor, Sidney Paste often thought about the fact that pain and fear are the spices that make you cry, for in his life he had known much pain and not a little fear. Was it fear of the drunken sailors that found him leaping from his bed now, on this September morn? Or was it that Sidney Paste always leapt straight out of bed as soon as he awoke, eager to seize the day, like some hyperactive toddler bent on gratification?

Yes, that was it, for look at him now, filling the sink in his room with ice cold water and repeatedly plunging his head into it. But where is his towel? One of the drunken sailors has fashioned it into a piratical bandanna and wound it around his head to rein in his unruly locks, but his dancing of the sort of hornpipe is so vigorous that the towel is coming loose and within the next few seconds it will fall from his head and off the balconyette into the street so many storeys below, where it will land on a passing flapper on her way home from an all-night jitterbug party. In seeking to retrieve his towel, Sidney Paste will meet this pale and enchanting flapper, and what do you know, within the year they will be wed, and go honeymooning in the wild Arctic wastes of northern Canada, where they will befriend bears, commune with moose, and muck about like a lovestruck couple, smitten with bliss.

The Ugo-scribe

A disconcerting number of readers write to ask the origin of the brief Bulgarian folk tales assembled here featuring Ugo, his blind ma, and his pal Ulf (look under “Ugo” in the Unhelpful Index for dates). Being folk tales, their origin is of course uncertain, but by scrabbling around distractedly in the cobweb-strewn cellars of the Plovdiv Municipal Archives, our reporter has discovered evidence of the historical figure known only as the Ugo-scribe. Here he is:

In the same bundle of papers tied up with what appears to be the braided fur of an Arctic hare (Lepus timidus arcticus) is a document listing the various maladies suffered by the Ugo-scribe during his long and productive life. They include anstity, black canker, cardiagra, corn rage, eel thing, leake fever, nox, painter's colic, phlegraphy, rising of the lights, salt rheum, simtity, splints, Syrian fever, white liver and worm fits.

Further details of these and other absolutely terrifying ailments can be found at the splendid Archaic Medical Terms website, which is heartily recommended for readers with strong stomachs.

Pie Shop Deep Space Six

Hurtling at inhuman speed through the universe, the thoroughly exciting spaceship Double Pneumonia was headed for a galaxy so distant that it would take billions upon billions of generations of leafcutter ants to reach it. In command on the bridge was Star Captain Barbara Bel Geddes, accompanied by First Officer Mister Unstrebnodtalb, who was only half human. No one had ever worked out what weird extraterrestrial life-form had spawned his other half, and it was best not to ask, for therein lay madness.

And a certain madcap frenzy is what you can expect in the new science fiction drama Pie Shop Deep Space Six, currently being developed by a crack team headed by Mrs Gubbins, who has returned to Haemoglobin Towers. The elderly crone has put down her knitting and, fuelled by lots of piping hot cups of tea, is conjuring up some thrilling ideas for this new radio serial.

In episode one, for example, hostile plasmatronic aliens launch an attack on space station Epsilon Nova X-977, cutting off pastry supplies to the pie shop. Mister Unstrebnodtalb outwits them using a supersonic brain-zapping process involving lots of sparks and whooshing noises.

Mrs Gubbins has asked Sir Harrison Birtwistle to compose the theme music.

Anaxagrotax

My name is Anaxagrotax, and I am the last survivor of a vanquished horde. Like the rest of my horde, I am neither an smooth man nor an hairy man, but somewhere in between. Our vanquishment was bloody and violent, as you might imagine. It was also very, very noisy, what with the clash of steel and the roar of cannonades and the howling and wailing of the wounded. I pray to my strange gods that never again will I witness such carnage.

To my chagrin, it took only a single morning to vanquish my previously unconquerable horde. As dawn broke on that terrible Thursday, there were thousands of us, hooting and whooping, daubed in the Paint of Ferocity, sharpening our implements and grunting a lot. We were well fed, tough, fearless and bent on conquest. By noon I was the only one left, hiding in a patch of bracken, and, I confess, shuddering in terror and grief. I was also bleeding from a contusion on my forehead and possibly slightly concussed. All around me the moorland was a scene of corpses and hacked-off limbs and blood.

By mid-afternoon I was feeling a little more myself. A stray hen had wandered into the bracken, and it was good to know that I was not the last living thing on earth. Poultry can be consoling in such circumstances. I reflected that as a warrior in a barbaric and bloodthirsty horde I ought to have expected things to turn out this way sooner or later. I was quite certain that our vanquishers had now left the scene to go and vanquish elsewhere, so I stood up and, saying goodbye to the hen, began walking away from my dead and, in some cases, still dying comrades in the direction of the palace. Perhaps it was callous of me to ignore the groans of those who were still alive, whose souls had not yet been plucked from their bodies by the hideous bat-faced god Beb and placed in his capacious pouch. Try not to judge me by your own moral code, if you have one.

By nightfall I had reached the stream that runs into a pool near the palace. I sat down on a tuffet and lit a cigarette. The moon was full and there were so many stars visible that they set my brain dizzy. I looked across the fields at the palace. Reassuringly, the usual bonfire was blazing on the roof. A bold water rat came to give me the once over, but soon scuttled away. I stubbed out my cigarette and made my way towards the palace at last. Gusts of wind dishevelled my hairstyle despite all the grease I had caked it with that morning. It seemed so long, long ago. As I took my final weary steps towards the gigantic wooden gates, my heart leapt when I saw that a great golden banner had been hung from the crenellations. “Welcome Home, Anaxagrotax!” it read, in letters of vermilion and blue. As I beat my great muscular fists on the palace gates, midnight struck. Thursday was over.

Four Thefts

Last week saw the final instalment of the serial story Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars. There are four instances of outright plagiarism in the tale, and these are acknowledged in the Afterword. If you would like to try and spot them yourself, wait to follow that link until you have identified the work of Thomas Pynchon, Mary Shelley, Chris Cutler and James Hamilton-Paterson lurking in (or shouting out from) the text.

Pod Person From Porlock

For readers unfamiliar with the person from Porlock, here is the gist of the story. In 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was staying at a farmhouse near Porlock in Somerset. One day he was reading about Kubla Khan, but - having taken his habitual dose of opium - he fell asleep and had a vivid dream. As soon as he woke up, he had a lengthy poem clear in his mind, famously beginning “In Xanadu, did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure dome decree….” He started to write down the words in his head, but was “called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour.” By the time Coleridge got back to his desk, the dream was forgotten, and the visionary poem remained incomplete.

Dobson had a theory that the person from Porlock was in fact a Pod Person from some other, uncanny universe, sent as an emissary to Coleridge for reasons we can only guess at. The pamphleteer carried out a number of experiments in an attempt to summon the Pod Person, many of which ended up with him being taken to Casualty. Even when he managed to escape injury, neighbours became so vexed by various banging, hammering, wheezing, snorting, thudding and high-pitched whistling noises issuing from Dobson's hovel that the police were called to give him a ticking off.

On one famous occasion Dobson actually travelled to Porlock and accosted people in the streets, accusing them of being Pod People. He was hounded out of town by ruffians and never returned. Oddly enough, he never wrote any pamphlets about the matter, and it has been left to the octogenarian film director James Paste to bring it to wider attention. Paste's drama-documentary Dobson And The Pod Person From Porlock is currently in pre-production. Rumour has it that Ringo Starr has been signed up, but for which role - Dobson, Coleridge, or the Pod Person (or perhaps all three) - is not yet known.

The Place Where It Goes Clunk

“This is the place where it goes clunk,” said the prize-winning scientist, pointing with his stick to an otherwise dull part of the revolutionary new machine. His audience gasped. It was the climax of his lecture; all that remained were a few words of summing up, then the astonished listeners would scatter, like chaffinches from a treetop after a gunshot, and the scientist could put his stick away for another week. But not today! For lurking incognito in the group was Father Desperado Sepulveda, the so-called Milquetoast Jesuit, sent on a mission from Paraguay to ferret out the truth. He cleared his throat. “I think,” he said, in a whisper like the hiss of an asp, “I think we would all like to hear it go clunk.” The scientist's brow furrowed and his mouth felt suddenly dry. “It is one thing to be told that it goes clunk,” continued the relentless Jesuit, “But something else entirely to experience for ourselves the sound of it going clunk.” He was an empiricist. The rest of the crowd began to mutter excitedly. They had not thought to be so forward themselves. The scientist spluttered, but it was too late, for Father Sepulveda had already pressed the big yellow knob that made it go clunk. Forensic teams later recovered his rosary beads from the rubble.

Minor Rant

I read the other day that Clive James (writer, critic, and presenter of odious and patronising TV programmes) states that he is engaged on “a search for the magic sentence in a world all too real”. In his case, the “magic sentence” is probably twenty thousand years in Sing Sing, but let that pass. What makes me gnash my teeth in irritation is that this portentous comment doesn't actually mean anything, it just sounds as if it does. James wants to be thought of with high seriousness, so he spouts this rubbish, and it gets lapped up by the witless literati, who probably think it does mean something. (I seem to recall one of James' other “talents” has been fawning to the royal family, so that gives us some idea just how “all too real” his world is.) End of minor rant.

Has He Taken Leave of His Senses?

No evildoer was safe when Special Agent Rastus Blot was on the case. Never in the annals of crime and its detection has there been a more successful operative. Not for Blot the ratiocinative methods of Sherlock Holmes or Prince Zaleski, nor the pathologically violent approach of Spillane's Mike Hammer. Whether the dread deed was a polite country house murder or a lowlife robbery, Blot had a singular advantage over his rivals. Let us watch him at work, and then, children, I shall quiz you to see if you can spot the wellspring of his genius.

The crime : a bloated janitor is found done to death in the locked boiler room of the Pang Hill Spangle Factory. His recent behaviour had been irksome.

The clues : anomalous items discovered in the vicinity include an old Wishbone Ash LP, minus its sleeve; a defaced railway timetable showing signs of having been gnawed by a hamster or a vole; the bones of an osprey, picked clean; a photographic still of Gary Cooper as Howard Roark in the film of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead; and a reduced-price jar of sump oil. Witness statements indicate that during the previous night a series of banshee-like caterwaulings could be heard, coming from o'er yonder in the direction of the Place of Flapping and Rumpus up in the sinister hills.

The suspects : nobody.

Agent Blot was called in after the police drew a blank. Greasy hair plastered flat on his head, his eyes milky with some hideous optical disease, and short of breath, Blot demanded a slap-up dinner consisting almost entirely of recovered meat products. He bought copies of all the local newspapers, investigated a slab of masonry, took photographs of bees, wasps, and hornets, and devoted three days to cutting a slot into a cardboard tube using a pair of scissors and a nail file. Dust gathered on his epaulettes and he made no attempt to brush it off. He went angling in brackish streams, accompanied by a slovenly farmer's wife and her slovenly dog. Easter was approaching. Blot had a number of prolonged fits, but whether they were genuine or feigned was open to question, not least by the sheriff, a giant bear of a man whose beard was used as a floor mop. On the Saturday, eighteen townsfolk were arrested, charged with the murder of the bloated janitor, and hanged from gibbets in Midge Ure Square, where their corpses were pecked at by crows.

1. Do you think Special Agent Blot has panache?

2. Would you like to be employed as Special Agent Blot's assistant?

3. What precautions would you take before hungrily devouring recovered meat products?

Tinpot Crimestoppers Lab

As its name suggests, the tinpot crimestoppers lab was ill equipped. What crimestopping kit it did have was made of tin. In fact, the only equipment the lab had was a collection of tin pots. The pots came in various sizes, but all were made of the cheapest kind of tin, which as you know is hardly adequate for the often bruising and boisterous work involved in top level crimestopping. If, my fellow citizens, we are serious about tackling crime, root and branch, we are going to need a hell of a lot more than a lab full of tin pots, a lab with a leaking roof and an antiquated piping system, a lab which has not been patrolled at night by brightly-fanged guard dogs since the last sputtering gasps of the Eisenhower administration. Dwight was a pal of mine, but that's another story, and a peculiarly featureless one, empty of any light or shade. Listen carefully, now. The dredgers are clanking upriver, and we're going to need to hold a candle against the oncoming dark.

Idolatry

Following the huge success of TV talent shows like Pop Idol, American Idol and the imminent Lit Idol, here at Hooting Yard we are launching our own contest to find this year's Mud Idol. Entrants should be keen and aspiring primitive fetish objects, perhaps voodoo-related, possibly decorated with feathers, beads, blood, bits of bone or similar. We are particularly looking for an idol that has had a large number of nails driven into it, as in the example below (which is made of wood and is therefore disqualified). If you think you could be Mud Idol 2004, watch out for details of the auditions, to be held in the grounds of an imposing chateau during a terrifying thunderstorm. Please note: nails not supplied.

Ugo's New Hooter

Back in Plovdiv, Ugo won a hooter as a booby prize. Ugo tooted his hooter in his blind ma's ear. “Ooh, Ugo,” said Ugo's ma, “That hooter makes a din!” “It's a hooter, ma. I won it as a booby prize,” said Ugo. “And what did your pal Ulf win, Ugo?” asked Ugo's ma, shelling peas as she spoke. “Ulf won a toy wolf, ma,” said Ugo, “It's as noisy as my booby prize hooter, because when you press your thumb on its tum, the toy wolf that Ulf won roars.” Ugo tooted his hooter again and ran off to find Ulf. On a very wet Tuesday. Near the old fort. In Plovdiv.

Fangs in the Mist

Fangs In The Mist, a true crime book by T B Puddle, is sadly forgotten and out of print. Those of you with nostalgic childhood memories of having mama or papa read it to you as a bedtime story will be delighted to learn that an extract from it appears in the thirteenth and final chapter of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, which appears today. An afterword or endnote will be added next Monday.

Badger Time

A letter arrives from Poppy Nisbet:

Dear Mr. Key, Further to Mr. Décharné's fascinating item about the Dachshund's artistic abilities (7 September), I wonder if you might find work for your mystically-disgraced small badger, Little Severin, as an artist's model? I am certain he could be reasonably still-ish while being drawn, or even painted, and I feel he deserves a second chance. He is, after all, a very small badger, and it is not his fault if his behaviour was misconstrued as “mystic” by ne'er-do-well impresarios hungry for a victim to exploit. Yours concernedly, Poppy Nisbet

Well, Poppy, it's true that Little Severin the Mystic Badger turned out to be not so mystic after all, although rumours flying about at Haemoglobin Towers have it that he correctly forecast the medal winners in the recent Olympic men's polevaulting event (though not in the right order). On the other hand, maybe he was just scrubbling about in the undergrowth foraging for tasty grubs. Who can say? In any event, we have taken your advice and Little Severin is now earning his keep posing not, I am afraid to say, for paintbrush wielding Dachshunds, but as a full time model for human children at the Lancashire Badger Group. Here he is, seen twice, in a painting by Rachael Moodie, aged six.

You can see many more pictures of the newly revitalised and no longer mystic Little Severin by clicking on the link below.

How Bodger's Spinney Got Its Name

First, my friends, a potted history of Bodger's Spinney, which has, turn and turn about, and not chronologically, been the site of boar hunts, medieval skirmishes, skulking footpads, burning bushes, luminous UFO landings, dark and desperate and demented deeds, root vegetable cultivation, lovers' trysts, the world's first public telephone box, experiments with balloons, barometers, and bauxite, a short-lived pencil sharpener factory, revolutionary uprisings, torchlit pagan frenzy, subterranean explosions, dismal grey skies, uninterrupted rainfall or, as our pals in the United States of Pining and Pothorst Land call it, precipitation, thunderstorms, an Emerson Lake & Palmer concert, sudden sprouting of snapdragons, phenomena both inexplicable and tiresome, a hideout for criminal gangs, revenge in the night, fangs in the mist, and much, much else besides.

Until about 1504 it was known as “that spinney over there”, or simply “yon spinney”. In his List Of All The Spinneys In The Land published in 1507, however, the Latvian expatriate scholar Arpad of Latvia dubbed it “A Spinney of Corncrakes and Glue To The North Of Inky Black Pond”. This, like all Arpad's coinages, was far too unwieldy a title for the illiterate peasants who shuffled about the spinney in their stinking rags at that point in history. Most of these peasants were covered in boils and buboes and pustules, and had lost most of their teeth, but that need not concern us here.

A century later, Dr Tarquin Shuddery tore up Arpad's fairly useless compendium and created his own list of spinneys, and he it was who first called it “Bodger's Spinney”, naming it after someone he met while out on horseback one summer's afternoon looking for signs of trampled earth and hornets' nests for no apparent reason. This passer-by, this Bodger, was not in fact named Bodger at all, for he was a felon bent on subterfuge, and too clever by half to give his real name to a gent on horseback who dressed like a magistrate and may be up to his neck in the legal profession. As for Bodger's real name, that is not something anyone knows, nor, indeed, does anyone care, for he was a grisly wretch steeped in crime, and he came to a bad end, a very bad end. Today birds are singing in the spinney that bears his pseudonym, birds are tweeting and carolling so loudly that they can be heard for miles, even in the relentless downpour.

Source : Copse & Spinney Nomenclature : A Guide For Tiny Tots by Dobson (edition of twelve, printed on rotting parchment, hand-stitched)

The Lactose-intolerant Jezebel of Botnia, Her Impending Flu Jab, and the Howling of Wolves at Dusk

“Pins, pins, pins…” muttered Clavdia as she mooched about the hotel lobby thinking about embroidery projects. The Jezebel of Botnia needed something to take her mind off her impending flu jab, for the very thought of injections made her wince, wince and gnash her teeth, wince and gnash her teeth and shudder, wince and gnash her teeth and shudder and shake, wince and gnash her teeth and shudder and shake and sometimes even swoon, and she did not want to swoon here in the hotel lobby, so she concentrated hard on her embroidery projects.

One, a depiction of the crushing of the Fashingu! by Drubbage in 1864. Two, much ivy and elecampine twirled around a tower. Three, a set of tea-towels showing Rex Harrison with each of his wives, including additional fictional wives fermented in Clavdia's brain. Clavdia had named them Hortense, Flopsy and Gaar.

Her flu jab was imminent because Clavdia's doctor was famed throughout Botnia for her unparalleled preventative techniques. She had devised a schedule of inoculations for all her patients, not just Clavdia, and none of them had fallen victim to influenza, diphtheria, plague, tappings, the dengue or calenture for years. Clavdia had more than once asked Doctor Dacoit if there was anything she could do about her lactose-intolerance, and the good doctor was working on it. She had suggested the regular application of an experimental poultice, but that had not been a success, and Clavdia found that her temper was frayed rather more often than usual after sitting with the poultice on her brow for a few hours.

The hotel lobby was hot and had many flies in it.

Clavdia left the hotel to have her flu jab. Afterwards, she spent some time traipsing aimlessly by the canal, then picked up some groceries from the grocery, and made her way home, armed with aubergines and beetroot and custard and a disco dancing CD and eggplant and futile dreams of being plucked from her futile existence in Botnia, and as she trod the familiar path home, wolves howled, wolves howled in the night, just like wolves always do.

Four Soup Recipes

These four soup recipes are taken from The Si-Fan Book Of Fun With Soup by Fu Man-chu, no relation to Sax Rohmer's fictional villain.

Soup for the morning. Hot, clear broth flavoured with wheat-husks, celery, saffron and minnows.

Soup for lunchtime. A thick and lumpy soup, containing curd, feverfew, mocha, whelks, string, gin and blood oranges.

Teatime soup. Mostly water, into which are thrown delphiniums, muffins, tunny, pike and hake, lights, parsley, cocoa and gristle.

Soup at twilight. Make a thick paste of mugwort, lima bean pulp, ground crocuses and mustard. Dilute with boiling duckpond water and leave to stand for a week, uncovered, out of doors. Scrape off the top layer of scurf and use as a filling for tiny oat pancake rolls. Toss these into the soup, along with mayonnaise, rusks, bloaters, pemmican, tulip-roots, vinegar, an ox-head, krill, crushed bones, whey, turmeric, marmalade, groist, badgers' brains and spinach. Garnish with brazil nuts and strips of gelatine.

Blot Family News

Since we met the Blot family on 29th August, there have been developments, as they say. Elkan Blot and Ultravox Blot, shown above, were apprehended a couple of days ago by Detective Captain Cargpan and his team of wistful coppers. Granting a rare interview to the Weekly Thunderstorm, the doughty detective said: “Me and my plods found this irksome pair mucking about in a very, very weird way with a piece of cardboard down at the docks. In fact, by consulting my notebook, I can confirm that they were mucking about with two pieces of cardboard. This sort of thing has got to be nipped in the bud, and I am the man to do the nipping.” When we find out to which remote, bleak and pestilential island the Blot pair will be transported for life, we shall of course let readers know.

A Voracious Bricklayer & Other Matters

Reader Peter Ross, who drew my attention to the above advertisement, has been trawling through the index to The Times newspaper for 1785-90 and has kindly sent these intriguing entries:

Epping stag hunt ends in mangling of goat - 14th April 1789

Elopements : Dublin mechanic's daughter elopes with nimble lamp lighter - 30th July 1789

Ink : Land-surveyor faints after mistaking red ink for blood - 26th December 1789

Irish people not yet refined enough for opera - 19th June 1789

Death and Burial : Peruke maker shouts for another drink just before coffin is nailed up - 27th June 1789

Poultry : Hen supposed to be descendant of that which laid golden eggs - 1st December 1789

Man traps joker who knocks on doors and rings bells by attaching electrical shock to bell - 29th June 1789 : Report of trap set for bell ringer contradicted - 6th July 1789: Report confirmed and clarified : incident leads to challenge to duel - 6th July 1789

Funerals : Clergyman criticised for eating filberts while reading burial service - 13th October 1789

Man drops down and expires while waiter collects coat - 5th January 1789

Warning given against sending girls to boarding schools which scientifically educate young to vice - 20th October 1789

Philosophical fireworks defended - 25th June 1789

Captain's attempted adultery with farmer's wife revealed after bear is let into chamber in wife's place. - 12th January 1790

Norfolk Island Settlement : Lack of candles forces islanders to go to bed as soon as it is dark - 16th January 1790

Shipbuilder digging ground for dock discovers number of large trees and hazelnut hedge 12-14 ft below the surface. - 20th March 1790

Careers : Voracious bricklayer of St. Bride's parish undertakes profession of stay maker. - 19th February 1790

Over-hurried blind bullock enters artists' colour shop on Holborn Bridge after missing way; does considerable damage before returning to the street through the window; then goads windows at watchmaker's shop, catches string of watches on its horns and disperses them among mob in street. - 13th October 1790

Poor man kills himself with drinking in a northern borough; vestry clerk suggests that master of the workhouse should let rest of poor out to kill themselves and ease parish of them. - 6th July 1790

Gentleman who offered twopence as reward for saving lady from drowning defends seeming want of generosity by declaring lady is wife. - 23rd August 1790

Dobson's Favourite Film

Dobson was a man of words rather than images, but he had a lifelong interest in the cinema. Long after the words “film” and “movie” had become common parlance, Dobson insisted on referring to “photoplays”. He used to get all het up that he was never invited to vote in those critics' polls of the best films of all time, and once held a candlelit vigil outside the British Film Institute as a protest. It is said that he was regularly arrested for impersonating Ray Milland at seaside resorts, though this is probably one of those stories that get bandied about by mischief makers. In all the millions of words he wrote, however, Dobson had almost nothing to say on the subject of cinema, save for a throwaway remark towards the end of his essay Six Types Of Snodgrass Implement, where he writes: “without any doubt the greatest film of all time is Blue Demon Y Las Seductoras”.

Hubs

Some while ago I had cause to mention the new fad for appointing Tsars (see 28 July). Another word which seems to hold our leaders in its thrall is “hub”. I live near a hub, apparently, or at least a hub-to-be, though quite when official hubdom is to be conferred on it is uncertain. Perhaps the most preposterous use of the word in its new senseless sense is one I heard on the television news yesterday. Those places where children go to be educated will no longer be known by that fuddy-duddy term “schools” in bright new Britain… no, they will become “community hubs”. Let's hope Alice Cooper can be persuaded to release an updated Community Hub's Out. Onward and upward!

Four Aquatic Beings

Here are four strange aquatic life forms, perhaps not as eldritch as the nightmarish one mentioned in the text below.

Escape From a Ship on Fire

Escape From A Ship On Fireis a Chewist text, in which every other sentence is taken from an anonymous piece of the same title published in the Missionary Annual of 1833. Chewism is named after Dobson's amanuensis Marigold Chew, who pioneered the technique of “stitching” a new text within an existing one in this manner. Note the startlingly modern approach of our 19th century author, who ignores the outbreak of fire and launches straight in to the escape…

There were about four score of us, to use Biblical numbers. Many of the party, having retired to their hammocks soon after the commencement of the storm, were only partially clothed when they made their escape; but the seamen on the watch, in consequence of the heavy rain, having cased themselves in double or treble dresses, supplied their supernumerary articles of clothing to those who had none. I myself gave my hood made out of compressed wheat to a Jesuit priest who had been taking confessions from the stowaways when the tempest struck. We happily succeeded in bringing away two compasses from the binnacle, and a few candles from the cuddy-table, one of them lighted; one bottle of wine, and another of porter, were handed to us, with the tablecloth and a knife, which proved very useful; but the fire raged so fiercely in the body of the vessel, that neither bread nor water could be obtained. We were able to turn the tablecloth into a makeshift tarpaulin, and I chuckled at the appropriateness of its embroidered scene of ducks plashing in a pond.

The rain still poured in torrents; the lightning, followed by loud bursting of thunder, continued to stream from one side of the heavens to the other, - one moment dazzling us by its glare, and the next moment leaving us in darkness, relieved only by the red flames of the conflagration from which we were endeavouring to escape. Verily it was like unto the fires of hell, the flaming pit, and it would be no exaggeration to say that the licking flames took on the appearance of fiends armed with pitchforks to poke at the damned.

Our first object was to proceed to a distance from the vessel, lest she should explode and overwhelm us; but, to our inexpressible distress, we discovered that the yawl had no rudder, and that for the two boats we had only three oars. Those were the oars I had varnished back in port. All exertions to obtain more from the ship proved unsuccessful. The acrid stench of burning oars and rudders and tallow and chandlery assailed us. The gig had a rudder; from this they threw out a rope to take us in tow; and, by means of a few paddles, made by tearing up the lining of the boat, we assisted in moving ourselves slowly through the water. I tried to keep up our spirits by singing a shanty, but my voice was cracked and broken and I got no further than the first nine stanzas. Providentially the sea was comparatively smooth, or our overloaded boats would have swamped, and we should only have escaped the flames to have perished in the deep. Throughout my life I had suffered from nightmares wherein I was gobbled up in the jaws of some eldritch aquatic being resembling a giant squid with pulsating suckers, and now I feared that all those tossing and turning nights had been a premonition of my actual doom.

The wind was light, but variable, and, acting on the sails, which, being drenched with the rain, did not soon take fire, drove the burning mass, in terrific grandeur, over the surface of the ocean, the darkness of which was only illuminated by the quick glancing of the lightning or the glare of the conflagration. But what could account for the hissing and seething noises, like a thousand deranged baby pigs, now soft, now deafeningly loud, which seemed to be pursuing us in our hectic progress?

Our situation was for some time extremely perilous. Ach, the damnable sea! The vessel neared us more than once, and apparently threatened to involve us in one common destruction. Great crashing waves tumbled over us and we gibbered in terror; then one old salt developed a massive nosebleed which he tried to staunch with a roll of bandage he had looted from the purser's cabin just before we abandoned ship; he knew he would hang for theft, but a brute sense of survival had him pulling at an oar with one hand and fumbling with the bandage with the other. The cargo, consisting of dry provisions, spirits, cotton goods, and other articles equally combustible, burned with great violence, while the fury of the destroying element, the amazing height of the flames, the continued storm, amidst the thick darkness of the night, rendered the scene appalling and terrible.

I noticed that even in the midst of the mayhem, our ship's artist, Binnie, was scribbling frantically in his tattered and seawater-soaked sketchpad, drawings which would one day go on show at some godforsaken seaside museum, unvisited and unsung. About ten o'clock, the masts, after swaying from side to side, fell with a dreadful crash into the sea, and the hull of the vessel continued to burn amidst the shattered fragments of the wreck, till the sides were consumed to the water's edge. At five past ten, an angel appeared momentarily in the black forbidding sky, or it may have been a guillemot. The spectacle was truly magnificent, could it even have been contemplated by us without a recollection of our own circumstances. Those circumstances were perilous indeed; only once before had I been involved in a burning shipwreck, and that had been child's play in comparison.The torments endured by the dogs, sheep, and other animals on board, at any other time would have excited our deepest commiseration; but at present, the object before us, our stately ship, that had for the last four months been our social home, the scene of our enjoyments, our labours, and our rest, now a prey to the destroying element; the suddenness with which we had been hurried from circumstances of comfort and comparative security, to those of destitution and peril, and with which the most exhilarating hopes had been exchanged for disappointment as unexpected as it was afflictive; the sudden death of the two seamen, our own narrow escape, and lonely situation on the face of the deep, and the great probability even yet, although we had succeeded in removing to a greater distance from the vessel, that we ourselves should never again see the light of day, or set foot on solid ground, absorbed every feeling. Every feeling, that is, except one; and it may be that I speak only for myself, but among the jumble of terror and loss and despair and woe I yet had a vision of the pantry in my parents' pie shop, its shelves stacked with jar upon jar of pickled and jellied blubber products which remarkably, even in this ferocious cataclysm, made my mouth water.For some time the silence was scarcely broken, and the thoughts of many, I doubt not, were engaged on subjects most suitable to immortal beings on the brink of eternity. I myself took comfort in my pie shop pantry thoughts.

The number of persons in the two boats was forty-eight; and all, with the exception of the two ladies, who bore this severe visitation with uncommon fortitude, worked by turns at the oars and paddles. Good Victorians that they were, despite it being the year 1963, the ladies darned socks and cooed gentle hymns as the storm blustered around us. After some time, to our great relief, the rain ceased; the labour of baling water from the boats was then considerably diminished. Our feet, nevertheless, were drenched, except for those of the wily sailor who had smeared the lower half of his body with boar's grease. We were frequently hailed during the night by our companions in the small boat, and returned the call, while the brave and generous-hearted seamen occasionally enlivened the solitude of the deep by a simultaneous “Hurra!” to cheer each others' labours, and to animate their spirits. Throwing pingpong balls across the storm-tossed seas from one boat to the other was another way of coping with our predicament.

The Tanjore rose in the water as its contents were gradually consumed. The flames roared pitilessly. We saw it burning the whole night, and at day-break could distinguish a column of smoke, which, however, soon ceased, and every sign of our favourite vessel disappeared. Dawn was approaching. When the sun rose, our anxiety and uncertainty as to our situation were greatly relieved by discovering land ahead; the sight of it filled us with grateful joy, and nerved us with fresh vigour for the exertion required in managing the boats. I wondered if by some freak of chance we had lit upon the Island of Abundant Spinach, of which I had so often read. With the advance of the day we discerned more clearly the nature of the country.

Alas! It was wild and covered with jungle, without any appearance of population: could we have got ashore, therefore, many of us might have perished before assistance could have been procured; but the breakers, dashing upon the rocks, convinced us that landing was impracticable. Stuck in our boats, we tried to chat about mundane things; railway timetables, soup recipes, the film career of Rex Harrison. In the course of the morning we discovered a native vessel, or dhoney, lying at anchor, at some distance: the wind at that time beginning to favour us, every means was devised to render it available. By now most of us were too exhausted to row, even the sailor with the nosebleed, who had collapsed and was lying in the bottom of the boat for all the world like a felled marble statue of a magnificent god. In the yawl we extended the tablecloth as a sail, and in the other boat a blanket served the same purpose. I have not mentioned the blanket before, for reasons which even the most astute reader can only guess at; let us just say that this blanket's warp and weft were not of this earth, nor of any imaginable planet. This additional help was the more seasonable, as the rays of the sun had become almost intolerable to our partially covered bodies. Despite there being a gang of violent pagan sun-worshippers aboard, we cursed that bright and battering orb. Some of the seamen attempted to quench their thirst by salt water: but the passengers encouraged each other to abstain. It is astonishing how determined one can be if faced with a crack on the skull from a gas canister.

About noon we reached the dhoney. Every last one of us had survived that terrible night. The natives on board were astonished and alarmed at our appearance, and expressed some unwillingness to receive us; but our circumstances would admit of no denial; and we scarcely waited till our Singalese fellow-passenger could interpret to them our situation and our wants, before we ascended the sides of their vessel, assuring them that every expense and loss sustained on our account should be amply repaid. The very next day, I set sail once more, alone, bound for Greenland, little knowing that I would twice more be imperilled on the vast and thundering ocean, dashed against rocks and almost drowned in bilgewater, before I would once again step over the threshhold of the pie shop, the prodigal daughter returning to her shrivelled and infected parents, home, home from the sea.

Name That Cur

One of the most common misconceptions in the world of cur-nomenclature is the idea that many dogs bear the name Fido because its Latin meaning (I trust or I am faithful) has some bearing on perceptions of canine personality. Dobson, for one, saw through this nonsense, as he explained in his out-of-print pamphlet On The Naming Of Curs As Fido : A Stern Corrective. He wrote:

What never seems to occur to people is that there is not one single recorded instance of any dog being called Fido prior to World War II*. This stark fact alone is surely all the evidence any rational person needs to realise that dogs are named Fido in honour of the Petroleum Warfare Department's successful development of the “fog, intensive dispersal of” system, otherwise known as FIDO. I cannot be bothered to go into the details of how, in 1944, boffins managed to make mist and fog vanish, for all the world like mediaeval magicians, but they did, God knows they did. Furthermore, the connection between dogs and fog is well known, as anyone who has studied some of my earlier pamphlets will know.

* NOTE : Much as one admires the magisterial tone of Dobson's pronouncement, he is, of course, quite mistaken.

Eighteen Questions

Where are the snows of yesteryear? The snows of yesteryear have been safely bagged up in burlap sacks and placed in a frozen pit.

Am I allowed to remove one of the sacks from the pit? You may remove one sack from the frozen pit if authorised to do so.

How do I gain authorisation? You may gain authorisation by prostrating yourself before a plinth atop which stands a robot duck, the control mechanisms of which have been deactivated.

Why have the control mechanisms of the robot duck been deactivated? The control mechanisms of the robot duck have been deactivated because a bug in the program meant that the duck was prone to fits of illogical and haphazard scampering about and its great size and sharp metal feathers imperilled the people out strolling in the vicinity of the plinth, forcing them to jump into the flowerbeds. Much soil was thus scattered and strewn, and flowers would have been damaged had any remained in the beds.

Where have all the flowers gone? The flowers have been plucked from their beds with botanic pincers and removed to a place of safety.

Are you allowed to divulge the location of the flowers? The current location of the flowers rescued from the rampages of the robot duck is top secret.

Is there a blue dahlia among the flowers? There is not a blue dahlia among the flowers, for all the flowers are chrysanthemums, every last man jack of them.

Who are the people you mentioned strolling in the vicinity of the plinth? The people strolling in the vicinity of the plinth atop which stands a deactivated robot duck include two famous campanologists, an organ grinder, and many people who resemble koala bears.

Was that a full and frank answer to my question? That was a partial answer. Full and frank details of all those strolling can be accessed in a database maintained online at www.blodgettglobaldomination.com/plinths/robotduck/vicinity/passersby/list.html

What has Blodgett got to do with this? There is no fleck of human activity which has not been dangled from the fingertips of Blodgett.

How do you dangle a fleck? Flecks dangled by Blodgett were dangleable flecks.

Did Blodgett ever meet Stalin? Blodgett met Stalin on a number of occasions, either at Stalin's dacha or at Blodgett's abandoned gasworks. Their meetings were generally both convivial and fraught, veering from conviviality to fraughtness and back again within seconds. They also kept up a hectic correspondence which has not yet seen the light of day.

Did Blodgett allow Stalin to dangle some of his flecks? Stalin dangled many of Blodgett's flecks, but only after issuing a ukase which forced Blodgett's hand.

Was Blodgett still alive when Stalin died in 1953? Blodgett was still alive at the time of Stalin's death, but he died soon afterwards.

What was the cause of Blodgett's death? The cause of Blodgett's death was calenture.

What is calenture? Calenture is the name given to various fevers occurring in the tropics, especially to a form of furious delirium accompanied by fever, among sailors, which sometimes led the affected person to imagine the sea to be a green field, and to throw himself into it. That is how Blodgett died, bless his cotton socks.

Where is Blodgett buried? Blodgett's remains were interred in the same frozen pit wherein lie the burlap sacks containing the snows of yesteryear.

Does that mean that if I prostrate myself in front of the plinth atop which stands the deactivated robot duck and gain permission to remove one of the burlap sacks of snow from the frozen pit I could at the same time pay obeisance to the relics of Blodgett? Yes.

Bitterns and Badgers and Dachshunds

Sir : Idly perusing your website the other day, I couldn't help but be reminded of the time when I was trapped in a wind tunnel with an enormous bittern, having wandered in there by accident while attempting to draw badgers with my Dachshund (see cutting reproduced below). Perhaps I should have used a pencil instead? Yours amicably, Max Décharné of That Ilk

Musing About Sheds

For a few days now I have found myself preoccupied with sheds, or more particularly the kind of sheds Madame Blavatsky had in mind when she wrote those lines that appeared as our quote of the day last Thursday (see 2nd September). “A few wooden sheds being constructed,” you will recall the wily old Theosophist wrote, “for meteorological, astronomical and magnetic purposes…” The first two don't bother me particularly, but I have been wondering how to build a wooden shed for “magnetic purposes”. Does that mean simply a shed with a magnet in it? Or a shed built out of planks in which magnets have somehow been embedded, perhaps by banging them into the weave of the wood with a hammer? Or should that be the weft of the wood? Ought I consult the dictionary regarding weft and rewrite the preceding sentences? Is “a shed for magnetic purposes” the same thing as “a magnetic shed”? Whether it is or not, and assuming I have managed to build it, how does it work? Given that Madame Blavatsky was writing, if you remember, From The Polar Lands, are we just talking about compasses here? Wouldn't it be easier to use a compass than to build a wooden shed for magnetic purposes? Or is it all a lot more complicated and beyond my poor puny pea-sized brain? Does it matter what kind of wood I use? Should I concern myself with the size of the shed, and its proportion in relation to the size and/or power of the magnet or magnets? This whole business is driving me crackers. It's not easy being the editor of Hooting Yard sometimes. “Christ, you know it ain't easy,” as that John Lennon used to wail, even though he'd already met Yoko Ono by then, so he really should have known better.

Chapter Twelve

Most readers will be aware how irksome it is to be trapped in a wind tunnel with an enormous bittern, especially when a newly-developed nerve gas is being pumped into the tunnel at the same time. For the few of you who are unfamiliar with this situation, further information can be found by reading chapter twelve of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, our hugely exciting weekly serial, which appears today.

If you are unsure whether or not you have ever been trapped in a wind tunnel with an enormous bittern, this picture may help jog your memory.

Bob's Bible

Bob Drake writes with exciting news:

I opened the Bible (it fell open somewhere in Daniel) and the next nearest book (The Hounds of Tindalos by Frank Belknap Long) which opened somewhere in The Space Eaters. Folded a couple pages together and read:

“I screamed and slashed hard as iron; as iron that shatters, and the horse didn't need anything. It will crush and break before I could throw the liver”.

Summing Up the Despicable Iniquity of Curpin

Be it known that the said Curpin has confessed to the following bad, bad deeds: abnormal behaviour in the botanical gardens; bamboozlement of the grossest kind; clutching a bag of spangles in his sweaty fist; dental irregularities; employment of those given to gurgling; forging railway timetables; glowing in the dark; hooting at inelegant farmyard animals; implacable dribbling; jumping off wooden crates; knitting a balaclava; leaning against a zoo; malfeasance in a charnel-house; not paying his bus fare; oddly-laced boots; pouring forth incandescent light; quietude on a bandstand in a park; rooting about in the muck; skulking in doorways; taradiddle and ergot; uprooting foliage with his teeth; virulent infection spraying; wiggling unnecessarily; x-raying entire continents without permission; yodelling aboard a tractor; a zest for crumpled and bristly things.

In mitigation, it should be said that Curpin has suffered tortures best left to the imagination, drawn his breath in shaking sobs, turned the animals loose, and has a power that men know not. He held the boards for seven terrible weeks. He burned fish. Approaching the startled cellists, he was seen grinding the pressure ridges, smashing great blocks of ice. He did not have time to rest. At the corral, under some sheaves of oats, and very snugly wrapped, he dropped his biscuit. Soon, he was dreaming of all sorts of extraordinary things. I saw him lift a man by the seat of government, rub down his horse, and feed him apples. He even went so far as to hire a top-rig buggy to take a little spin along the banks of foreign streams, procuring big booty and professing to be a detective! It was, indeed, a wild sabbath night. Curpin was furious with rage - one foot upon the iron rail, an enormous net of steel, and his pack-pony became visible. The time of winter dog travel was now approaching. The earth, gritty and metallic, could have bidden a gondola. Living rooms flanked the peristyle, and webs of incandescent tubular lamps shone ahead of the damp, grey relics. Curpin tracked down reports of locust swarms. He honked twice, slipped beneath the sea, went to work on a huge pile of food, and tore up lettuce, his pouch unfolding. His rattling became a sizzling. Even the nearby gravel-crushers were keenly aware of Curpin's bone finger ring, embedded in mud. Gently, in order not to raise great clouds of ooze, he blocked its incredible roped sledge and ox-hoof. Caught in a fish-hook curve, or pumped into the expensive crates, he touched up the ginger façade, decked his troublesome horse, and tampered no more with the tin roof. In fear and chaos, under a bridge or a water-tower, he became dusty blue with age. Like a sheet. Like rugs. Like concrete piles driven, and steel strung. Drying hazelnuts, this evil man on a screened porch with a syrup bottle provided by his hostess punched, drilled, and reached a fine convenient perch. He clapped a boatswain's whistle to his lips, straddling the opposite slope, but his heart was seized by poisonous timber. In a modest salt-box structure of leaded casements, he brewed a big kettle of quahog berry candles, safely past rocks made incongruous by a regatta in a dying wind, their examples of restoration one wooden thumb, with left foot thrust forward, and in summer often charmless. To converse with distant sheep, Curpin thundered past burning heather. He liked it better than mealy primrose. Blown by an icy blizzard, he had been trying out hemp and its by-products, twine, matting and sacks. On the lawn, the seeming anachronism of Curpin's indigenous cable plate softened the blue invalid jetty. He placed the wire cone with its point aimed at strewn torrents and a rack-and-pinion railway, harder, rarefied, tremendous. On the Seminole, formidable enough. For Curpin, it was the end.

Gigantic Balls of Volatile Gas

Have you, or someone you know, got a great anecdote about gigantic balls of volatile gas? Why not share it with our readers? At one time or another, all of us have been confronted by unimaginably vast orbs of gas, glowing perhaps, or even pulsating eerily, as if about to explode, unleashing destruction and doom. It seems a shame to keep your experience to yourself. Perhaps you were traumatised, and begin to gibber and drool when recollecting what happened? Or maybe you have tried to shut out the memory entirely, so that only in your nightmares do you revisit the scene? Whatever your own way of dealing with monstrous, bright, spherical gas phenomena, we will be pleased to hear from you. The most riveting submissions will be collected in a forthcoming Hooting Yard anthology, for which we have already signed up Perry Como to write the preface. Some readers will be aware that Mr Como unfortunately crossed to the Other Side on 18th May 2001. He will be dictating his preface, via an angel, to a spirit medium yet to be appointed (possibly Yoko Ono)..

Pining and Pothorst

The continent of America takes its name from Amerigo Vespucci, but here at Hooting Yard we have decided to promote the case for Dietrich Pining and Hans Pothorst. Sixteen years before Columbus, this pair of roguish German pirates may well have been the first Europeans to set foot in the New World, alongside Johannes Scolnus, a Polish seafarer who may or may not have existed in the first place. Wily Dietrich and Hans kept getting chased further north by the Danes, and they regularly sailed to Greenland to be piratical. It is thought they may have accidentally blundered ashore in Labrador in 1476. Whether they did or not, the United States of Pining And Pothorst Land seems to me to be a far more evocative name than the United States of America, so that is how we shall henceforth refer to it.

Incidentally, some years after this voyage, Pining and Pothorst settled on a rock called Hvitsark, some way off the coast of Iceland. According to Olaus Magnus, Archbishop of Uppsala, in his Historia de gentibus septentrionalibus (Rome, 1555), “they lived there outlawed with their fellow-rovers and inflicted many atrocities on every seafarer, whether sailing close at hand or at a distance”, and built a lead compass atop the rock to help them in determining the shortest direction to go in their “profitable plundering forays.” This compass can be seen in the superb map of Scandinavia made by Olaus in 1539 and published, as luck would have it, in Ülm. The map, together with exciting details, and much other pleasurable material, can be visited by clicking on this small section of it below, where Pining and Pothorsts's compass is indicated by that circle about a third of the way down on the left hand side, to the west of Iceland.

Fear of Squirrels

Dobson was afraid of squirrels. Here's why. It was a damp and ruinous Thursday and he had not had any breakfast. He slapped his hand on the table and shouted “I must have marmalade! I must have some marmalade!” There was nobody to hear his complaint except for an ant which was making its way across the floor of his hovel, and the ant didn't care, being an insect. Dobson had not even noticed the ant, in any case. He leapt out of his chair, put on his big reindeer-hide anorak brought back from one of his Arctic expeditions, and trudged outside, muttering now instead of shouting.

Have I ever told you there were several important trees on the path outside Dobson's door? There was a sycamore and a yew, a larch and a pine. Dobson was fond of trees, usually, although he was unable to tell the difference between them. Gone were the days when he would festoon his hair with fallen leaves and twigs, inviting ridicule from the local whippersnappers. Dobson in the days of which I write had adopted a sober mien, indeed a gloomy one.

“Dobson, Dobson, don't look so dismayed,” his acquaintances would say, to which the out of print pamphleteer's response was to look heavenward, as if in great pain, adopting the air of an early Christian martyr, one lined up for some particularly bloodthirsty persecution. Dobson often skimmed through the pages of Fox's Book of Martyrs to pick up tips. But I digress.

On this damp marmaladeless morning, Dobson walked past the sycamore, the yew, the larch and the pine, onward past a repulsive ditch, past the post office and the pig huts and the vipers' nest and the glue factory, up the lane towards the Big Unexplained Building On The Hill. The wind howled. It always did. Back in the hovel, the ant had vanished into a crevice in the wainscot, just as Dobson arrived at the gates of the Building. These gates were enormous and forbidding and strange and rusty and locked and bolted and unnecessary, for there was a wooden door set in the base and brickish wall which skirted the building, and it was only a few feet away to the left of the gates, or to the right, I cannot remember precisely, I have never been there myself, I am only reporting this as it was told to me by Marigold Chew on the day after Dobson's death, after she had had her bath, and was sipping tea from an inelegant tin mug in the shabby parlour of a horrible hotel hard by the banks of the River Wretched in Sibodnedwabshire.

Dobson knew all about the wooden door, so why did he tarry by the strange rusty gates? Was he confused, was his mind a jumble due to lack of marmalade? Or did he have a tryst? We do not know. We do know that Dobson stood at those gates on that damp Thursday, peering intently through them, for a full quarter of an hour before turning around and heading off to Old Jack Blothead's Foodstuffs Tent, where he bought a jar of marmalade and some pastry and a pot of some kind of edible paste which Old Jack Blothead had left unlabelled. The year was 1952. Dobson and the vendor of foodstuffs had their usual argument about the pamphleteer's promissory note, a page torn from his notebook on which he had scrawled words to the effect that sooner or later he would do right by Old Jack Blothead, and if he did not then may the heavens smite him and may all his days be leavened with woe. It was advantageous for Dobson that Blothead was a man of great charity and puny intellect, and after a few minutes he left the tent through its great grimy flaps, armed with his jar and pot and a paper bag for the pastry. They would not fit in the single pocket of his anorak, so he carried them in his ungloved, unmittened hands.

What pangs led Dobson back to the strange enormous rusty gates of the Big Unexplained Building On The Hill? There was a fallen log, a log fallen from a trembling poplar, slap bang next to the gates, and Dobson sat on it and ate the pastry, and he stayed sitting there despite the fact that it began to rain heavily. He didn't even bother to pull up the hood of his anorak, although that may be because it was rife with holes made by starving moths and his head would have got wet anyway. Wet, but surely not as wet as it did get, as he sat on the poplar log in the downpour eating pastry with his pot of paste and marmalade jar beside him outside the forbidding and strange and rusty and locked and bolted gates of the Big Unexplained Building On The Hill on that Thursday morning in 1952 when he first became terrified of squirrels.

“Why,” I asked Marigold Chew as she sipped her tea in the shabby hotel parlour, “Why did Dobson become so fearful of squirrels on that particular day?” She glanced at me briefly, and I was disconcerted by the weird look in her eyes. “Those bushy tails….” she began, then fell silent, turning to stare out of the window. I followed her gaze, and saw the gravedigger walking across the lawn, toting his spade jauntily over his shoulder. “Those bushy, bushy tails…” Marigold Chew repeated. She drank the rest of her tea, put the mug down on the floor by her feet, and stood up. “I must go and have a few words with the gravedigger,” she said, and swept out of the room as breezily as a bereaved woman on crutches can sweep breezily from a hotel parlour on the day after the death of her one true friend on this magnificent and baffling planet.