Category Archives: Dobson

Dobson’s Dinghy

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For a long time, for years and years and years, I have been meaning to write about Dobson’s dinghy. It is a subject which I am convinced will be hypnotically fascinating to my readers, and yet whenever I settle to the task, as I did yesterday morning, with the nib of my pen polished to a gleam and a fresh stack of blank rectangular paper, I found myself once again baffled and plaintive. It is not that the contents of my skull seized up, like a polar ship in pack ice, for I had done my usual crack-of-dawn brain exercises, flexing the synapses using a set of techniques culled from a Victorian Everyday book. Some might say that synapses are not things you can flex, and they may be correct, but I am sure you understand what I am driving at. The point is that I was in tiptop writing condition, hunched over my desk, nib gleaming and paper stacked and blank, and outside my window crows were stalking across the grass, fat and black and Ted Hughesy, and the sight of crows seldom fails to inspire me, no matter what I am writing about. Sometimes I have filled pages and pages blathering on about crows, and then cleverly crossed out every mention of the bird and substituted it with another noun, for example windscreen wiper or bazooka, or even with a dozen different nouns, whimsically, in a great creative outpouring the like of which would put Dobson himself to shame, were he still with us. I have tried this technique over the years when trying to write about Dobson’s dinghy, as a weapon against my bafflement, but it never quite works, and those pages are turned into scrap or made into paper aeroplanes or paper hovercraft or paper Hindenburg airships, depending on my mood of the moment. It can be very relaxing to fold one’s abandoned manuscripts into toy forms of transport. Once, I was so thoroughly relaxed after folding half a hopeless novella into a paper fleet of milk floats that I fell into a coma. Other writers find different uses for their discarded scribblings. The poet Dennis Beerpint, I learned, tears his disjecta into thousands of pieces, with untold savagery, cursing and fuming as he does so, while Pebblehead, the bestselling paperbackist, binds all his up into a bundle with butchers’ string and carries it down to the beach and throws it into the sea. Frankly, I am surprised that a writer as successful and prolific as  Pebblehead ever has aborted works to so dispose of, but I am told that he is seen upon the sands at least once a week, casting his bundles upon the briny. Dobson never launched his dinghy into the sea. On very rare occasions, when the fancy took him, he would push it into a pond and clamber in and paddle it across, alarming any ducks, such as teal and coots, who got in his way. The dinghy was yellow, and made of rubber, and Dobson bought it at a closing-down sale from a ruined ship chandler’s. There. There is the essence of my bafflement and my plaintiveness. I have just told you everything I know about Dobson’s dinghy. Every time I have a mind to write about it, I reach the same impasse. I have exhausted the topic, and have nothing else to say. Give me a week, or a month, and no doubt I will wake up one morning and feel impelled, yet again, to try to write dozens of pages of vigorous and impassioned prose about Dobson’s dinghy. I will mention the pond, the yellow colour, the rubber fabric, and the ruined ship’s chandler, and that will be that.

Hoistings

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I have been thinking a lot recently about hoistings. Well, when I say recently, I mean this afternoon, and when I say hoistings I mean more particularly Dobson’s hoisting and Blodgett’s hoistings. The pamphleteer, as is well known, was once hoist by his own petard, an incident which is the subject of an illuminating essay by Aloysius Nestingbird. Blodgett, on the other hand, was repeatedly hoist by a variety of petards, none of which he could call his own. This says much, I think, about the difference between Dobson and Blodgett, not just in terms of hoistings and petards but in all sorts of other ways. If only I could be as illuminating as Nestingbird! But alas, you will have to be content with something which, if it can be said to illumine at all, is the prose equivalent of a sputtering Toc H lamp hanging on a hook in an immensity of darkness, compared to the incandescence which Nestingbird sheds whenever he puts pen to paper.

Indeed, I am so cowed by the sheer damned splendour of Nestingbird’s essay that I have considered abandoning this puny attempt to address those hoistings myself. And abandon it I would, as decisively as a decisive sea captain maroons a mutineer on an arid sea-girt rock, were it not that Nestingbird concerns himself solely with Dobson’s hoisting by his own petard, and has not a word to say about Blodgett. So it may be that, in spite of the weediness of my own scribblings, they can yet fill a gap in the record.

Or, to be more precise, gaps, for as I have said, in Blodgett’s case we are dealing with repeated and innumerable hoistings. The puzzle, of course, is that each and every one of these hoistings was upon someone, or something, else’s petard, and the question that cries to heaven for an answer is: how did Blodgett manage to get himself into so many scrapes, and each scrape so similar? One would have thought that, after being hoist upon the petard of an undertaker’s mute at an impressionable age, he might have learned something. At the very least, he might have learned to avoid undertakers’ mutes with petards. But it was not so. Barely a fortnight after that first hoisting, we find the young Blodgett once again hanging around in the vicinity of a funeral parlour, idly tugging at his incipient goatee, and dressed flamboyantly in cerise and dandelion yellow. He is lurking, inasmuch as one can lurk in cerise and dandelion yellow, in a fetid alleyway at the back of the funeral parlour, a parlour owned by an old family firm of funeral directors founded by Ferenc Fafflefoff in the eighteen-fifties. And it was upon the petard of a Fafflefoffian mute that Blodgett was hoist at two o’ clock on that September afternoon, an afternoon of squalls and drizzle and abnormal bird phenomena. Not until three-fifteen did he manage to clamber from the petard and descend to the pavement, a picture of befuddlement and the laughing-stock of a gang of Fafflefoff employees, mute and otherwise, who had gathered to witness his hoisting.

Over the next several years, Blodgett was to be hoist on the petards of Dutchmen, tugboat captains, spinettists, mezzotintists, old cloth of gold dustup pan-pot men, squirrel stranglers, shove ha’penny maestros, indentured and goitred peasants, shifty knaves, chunky pockers, Marina Warner readers, fudgers, beanpoles, harum scarum tidewater mappers, dishcloth makers, farmyard freaks and sundry other petardists. Time and again, the hapless Blodgett made the same mistakes, fell into the same traps, blundered into the same emblunderments. The only person who seemed to see anything odd about this was Blodgett’s mother, a ghostly white speck of a woman, who by turns remonstrated with him, sobbed, laughed, hid away from him in crannies, prodded his head with surgical implements, sent him into the mountains, and tried to marry him off to a foreign contessa. Blodgett himself just continued with his hoistings, on an almost daily basis.

Things levelled off eventually, with no more than one or two hoistings a year, particularly after his mother’s death. Blodgett did not attend her funeral, which was organised by the Fafflefoffs, with many ribbons and a horse, but without an undertaker’s mute. Tim, the Mute of the Day, was due to lead the procession through the hopeless rain-soaked streets of Blodgett’s mother’s horrible home town, but an hour before the coffin was shoved on to the funeral cart he was hoist, not by his own petard, but by Blodgett’s. As far as we know, this is the only evidence we have that Blodgett had a petard of his own, and it remains an inexplicable mystery why he was never hoist upon it himself. Such are the perplexities of the human comedy.

Diaries Of The Dead

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I would like to pin a medal on the person who first realised that the blog format was a perfect way to republish notable diaries of the dead. Now we can read Samuel Pepys, Gilbert White, and George Orwell, among many others, day by day, often with annotations. I know it is entirely possible to do this with a paper edition, but the experience is not quite the same. Somehow, reading a long ago diary as a contemporary blog gives it new life. (Incidentally, in a related move, an admirable maniac is currently posting Moby-Dick; or, The Whale line by line, hour by hour, on Twitter.)

One dead diary yet to appear online is the journal of Dobson, the out of print pamphleteer who bestrode the twentieth century like a colossus. As one of the most indefatigable Dobsonists of the day, I have often been approached by people asking if I will undertake such a project. Sometimes these pleas come in the form of polite emails, sometimes as mad screeds scrivened in blood over dozens of tatty pages, and once I was set upon by men wielding cudgels as I sat upon a picnic rug at a Mendips picnic spot eating a picnic. No sooner had I popped a sausagette into my mouth than a group of Dobson-fixated fanatics hove into view from atop a Mendip hill and bore down upon me, screaming their heads off and demanding that I transcribe the Journals and post them on a dedicated website on a daily basis. In view of such continued entreaties, let me explain why I have neglected to do so.

On the face of it, the pamphleteer’s mostly unpublished journal would be a magnificent addition to the interweb. When you consider the seething mass of clotted twaddle that does appear online, the absence of Dobson seems somehow insane. And just how hard would it be for me, or for anybody, to type up a few lines of Dobsonia every day and to share them with the world? However, as I said to the cudgel-wielding nutcases at my Mendips picnic spot, as they rained blows upon my thankfully well-cushioned balaclava, things are not as simple as that.

The great attraction of the dead-diary-as-blog is what I could dub calendrical integrity. So, what X scribbled in his diary on September 3rd 1847 is posted online on September 3rd 2008. We are always aware that we are reading a snapshot of X’s life on precisely this day many years ago. There is no express requirement for it to be this way, but that is how it is, and how we want it to be. Of course, few transcribers will take account of anomalies such as the change, in Britain, from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar in 1752, when September 2nd was followed immediately by September 14th. Unfortunately, the anomalies thrown up by Dobson’s journal are far more complicated.

Dobson, you see, used neither the Julian nor the Gregorian calendar, but one of his own devising. This in itself would not be problematic were the calendar itself not ludicrous, absurd, and senseless. Even the pointyheads at the Pointy Town School Of Dobson Studies Dobson Calendar Study Group have thus far been defeated in their exhausting efforts to elucidate it. Indeed, the leader of the Study Group, a ferociously intelligent bluestocking with a brain the size of several planets, has been seen wandering the hills around Pointy Town, drooling and mumbling, glassy-eyed and chewing on sticks, and will soon be carted off to a House of Befuddlement far away. Those of her team who remain working at their benches, deploying their slide rules and astrolabes and weird tungsten algebraic rolling pins, are fast losing their wits.

It is worth looking at Dobson’s calendar very briefly, to see what has driven these pour souls to the brink of mental ruin. To begin with, the Dobson “year” is divided either into fifteen or sixteen months, and those months have a variable number of weeks, from three to twenty, and the weeks themselves may be of seven, seventeen, or forty days. The names of the months and weeks and days follow no identifiable pattern, and one wag has even suggested that Dobson was making the whole thing up at whim. For example, in the “year” he insisted was 1967, in the month of Topple, there were three weeks, named Barn Owl Biscuits, Potting Shed and Ray Milland. The latter was a week of seven days, Lamont, Pepinster, Hopton, Baxter, Preen, Flap, and Tentacle. Quite how one is meant to correlate this farrago of drivel to the standard calendar is a mystery, which, I suppose, was Dobson’s point. It would appear that he did not want later readers to know on which particular day he clumped along the canal towpath in his ill-fitting Ivory Coast Postal Service boots on his way to an ice cream kiosk, stopping along the way to pluck a petunia for his buttonhole, nor did he wish history to know the exact date on which he inadvertently dropped a handful of pebbles on to the head of the infant Sarah Palin during that mysterious day trip to Alaska he wrote about in his pamphlet My Mysterious Day Trip To Alaska And What I Did With A Handful Of Pebbles While I Was There (out of print).

One looks in vain, in the journals, for mention of any newsworthy events which may help us identify specific dates. In any case, such a find would be of limited use, as the journal’s millions of words were scrawled by Dobson with a blunt pencil on the backs of cardboard sheets torn savagely from cartons of Kellogg’s cornflakes. These sheets were stuffed higgledy-piggledy into filthy greaseproof paper bags and the bags themselves tossed into a series of sheds and outbuildings. The idea that it is possible ever to arrange the extant sheets into any kind of coherent order is preposterous.

An intriguing addendum to the whole sorry business recently came to light. In a tape-recorded interview with a reporter from the Bodger’s Spinney Pest & Bugle given shortly before her death, Marigold Chew denied emphatically that Dobson had ever kept a journal. Every word he ever wrote, she insisted, was destined for his pamphlets. If that is indeed the case, who wrote the oodles and oodles of words on those torn cereal packets in those teeming thousands of bags that are stored now in a temperature-controlled sanctum in the lead-lined cellar of a monstrous building in the very heart of Pointy Town?

To Knit Knots, Peradventure

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Much has been written, in the past, by people who knew of these things, about the knitting of knots. Knots, we learn, have been knit from cord and twine and rope and string and wool, among other materials. While it is true that more knots have been tied rather than not, without the aid of knitting needles, it remains the case that the knitted knot has its own special place in our hearts, whether our hearts flutter like a bird’s or a squirrel’s heart, or pound like a drum. For with the knitted knot we see a true craft, whereas it can be argued that the mere tying of knots, while sometimes requiring deftness and digital agility, can as well be done by a brute in a hurry. Not so the knitted knot.

Hurrying brutes, particularly those whose tails thump upon the ground as they rush headlong to the scene of their next enormity, are most unlikely to have the patience and wit necessary for the knitting of a knot. Nor are their paws likely to be dexterous enough to handle knitting needles, or even crochet hooks. Crochet is not knitting, of course, and the crocheted knot is a different creature to the knitted knot, and one with its own literature, exemplars, and paragons.

There exist pattern books containing instructions for knitting knots, and depictions of knots so knitted, but it would be a mistake to think that one needs such a pattern before embarking upon the knitting of a knot. Some of the finest knitted knots have been the work of improvisers, brave, adventurous souls who begin to knit with no other aim in mind than the knitting of a knot, its final form unimagined, not even a blurred wisp in the mind’s eye of the knitter.

Even improv knot knitters, however, need a degree of foresight, for they will wish to avoid the act of knitting being interrupted by a hurrying brute. Such interruptions can prove fatal, if not to the knitter then almost certainly to the knot. A brute in a hurry, coming upon a knitter, will tear and shred and rip and rend, all the while roaring its brute cries as its tail thumps the ground. Thus the knitter of knots is advised, in many of these books of the past, to find a secluded haven in which to knit. To be hidden behind a clump of brambles, or snug in a concealed nook in a cave, or safe behind the ramparts of a mighty and towering fortress, each of these has been recommended. A knitter’s choice of refuge will depend to some extent on the nature of the brutes who hurry through the lands in which they knit. There are single brutes who roam alone, and pairs, and occasionally trios, but by far the most common, and the most frightening, are those who hurry about in packs.

Various writers have pointed out that the knitter of knots can use the knots they have knitted as part of the apparatus to bind and immobilise a hurrying brute. This is undoubtedly true, but these same writers tend to neglect the inconvenient fact that, before such binding and immobilising and judicious use of knitted knots can occur, the hurrying brute must first be overpowered. In most cases, at least those cases that bear examination, the overpowering of a brute in a hurry requires inhuman strength, and the kind of musculature rarely found in the average knot knitter. Even more important, then, to ensure that before the very first clack of needle against needle, the knitter has located a place of safety in which to knit.

Perhaps the finest of the books I chanced upon when researching this article is actually more a pamphlet than a book proper. It is How To Knit Knots While Remaining Invisible To Hurrying Brutes by Dobson (out of print), and contains a plethora of terrific mezzotints by the mezzotintist Rex Tint. Dobson claims to have invented a so-called “enshrouding spectral ether-cloak” which, when activated, renders the knot knitter invisible, thus obviating the need for a time-consuming search for clumps of brambles, nooks in caves, or mighty and towering fortresses. It also silences the clack of knitting needles, or at least drowns out the clack, by generating a noise like the buzzing of a million hornets, audible only to a brute hurrying past, its tail thumping the ground. I suspect that Dobson’s “cloak” is wholly spurious, but the pamphlet is worth it for the mezzotints alone.

Denktash Fugue Syndrome

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Mrs Gubbins, the octogenarian crone given to knitting and villainy, has recently come under the supervision of a doctor. It will not be too long before she becomes a nonagenarian crone, and though she is in terrifyingly tiptop health for one so aged, there have been signs that all is not well. First there was the abduction of Little Severin, the Mystic Badger, after which she went on the run for several months, holed up in a dank cave guarded by bats and owls. This was followed by her becoming smitten by the unlikely figure of Mark E Smith, and her habit of playing the complete works of The Fall at ear-splitting volume on a brand new Bang & Olufbangbangbang hi-fi system, with her windows open, at all hours of the day and night. A dawn visit from Blunkett and Blears, respectively sightless and diminutive, and somehow all the more minatory for being so, set her back on the straight and narrow.

A couple of weeks ago, La Gubbins’ knitting circle invited Rolf Harris to give a talk. Unable to attend, yet honoured to be asked, Harris instead sent a tape recording of an entertaining address in which he spoke for some hours about various Rolfs and Ralphs and Rafes and Raufs. Fatefully, at one point he mentioned the name of Rauf Denktash, the one-time President of the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. Hearing those two syllables, denk and tash, together, Mrs Gubbins was propelled into a fugue state, from which she has yet to emerge.

Denktash Fugue Syndrome is a thankfully rare condition, so rare that Mrs Gubbins is only the second person in history to display the symptoms. It was first identified by the Victorian mountaineer and eccentric Dr Henry Hyde Hargreaves Hopton Hibbingdibhoondoon during a sojourn in Tashkent. The journals in which he wrote of his discovery have long been lost, or disfigured by potato mould, depending on who you believe, but the basic facts were retailed by Dobson in one of his early pamphlets. Atop a Tashkent mountain one day in 1862, the doctor’s brain was ravaged by mysterious fumes, and, when he tried to say “Tashkent” it came out as “Denktash”. With him upon the peak was a dumpy, bearded sage, a man not unlike the Beatles’ pal the Maharishi in appearance, who, when he heard the word “Denktash”, was sent into a fugue state. In his journal, Hibbingdibhoondoon spelled it “foog”, but it is clear what he meant.

What remains unclear is for how long the sage remained so affected. Dobson’s account simply peters out, in that annoying way he had, and which can make his early works such a trial to read. Also unclear is the nature of the fugue itself. In Mrs Gubbins’ case, it appears to take the form of dribbling, staring vacantly into the fireplace, and absentmindedly unravelling not only the tea cosy she has herself been in the midst of knitting but also those of her compañeros in the knitting circle.

Doctor Drainditch, who has been called in to treat the loveable yet spiky crone, claims to be the only living expert on Denktash Fugue Syndrome. Unfortunately, the treatment she recommends consists of a two-week retreat in a dank cave guarded by bats and owls with an abducted badger for company, followed by a therapeutic course of listening to the complete works of The Fall at ear-splitting volume. So round and round we go, it seems.

If you, or anybody close to you, is suffering from Denktash Fugue Syndrome, there is a helpline number available. Premium rates apply, and if you manage to get through you might be lucky enough to hear a pre-recorded message from Rolf Harris telling you not to worry yourself sick. All callers are entered in a raffle, with the chance to win one of Mrs Gubbins’ tea cosy knitting patterns. You must tell your parents before placing the call, and if your parents have passed to the ethereal realm beyond our puny understanding, there is a range of ouija boards and ectoplasmic goo on special offer at Hubermann’s department store.

All Around My Hat

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All Around My Hat is an English folk song, popularised in the 1970s by folk rock titans Steeleye Span. Their version was very similar to the one published in A Garland Of Country Song by Sabine Baring-Gould in 1895. Apart from folk song and folklore collections, Baring-Gould wrote hymns, a sixteen-volume Lives Of The Saints, many novels, a study of werewolves, grave desecration and cannibalism, and a biography of Robert Stephen Hawker (1803-1875), the eccentric country vicar who spent much of his time smoking opium in a clifftop hut made from driftwood, talked to birds, dressed up as a mermaid, excommunicated his cat, and had a pet pig.

“All around my hat” are also the opening words of one of Dobson’s more curious pamphlets, in which he describes wearing a hat lined with lead to deflect weird invisible rays aimed at his brain. It is not clear who, or what, is sending these putative rays, nor why the Dobsonian cranium needs to be protected from them.

“All around my hat” writes the pamphleteer, “the air is a site of constant barrage from weird invisible brain rays!” Note the exclamation mark, an uncharacteristic touch which has convinced some critics that Dobson was fooling around. The idea that this pamphlet is an unserious blotch on the canon has gained ground in recent years, with Nestingbird, for one, going so far as to claim that Dobson did not even write it, but simply copied out random paragraphs from a booklet given away as a free gift with a packet of breakfast cereal. This argument loses a certain force when Nestingbird has to admit that he has not managed to identify the said booklet, nor the breakfast cereal. In any case, as upstart young Dobsonist Ted Cack has pointed out in a series of increasingly aggressive letters, Dobson usually ate bloaters for breakfast.

The Nestingbird-Cack correspondence is a perfect example of the way in which the minutiae of Dobson studies can be magnified to the point where common sense is blotted out, much as the bulk of a pig the size of Robert Stephen Hawker’s pet pig would blot out the sun if you were sprawled in a particular patch of muck in its sty. It was a very large pig. Thus, the senior critic floats the idea of the breakfast cereal booklet, the upstart counters with the point about bloaters, the elder counters that the packet of breakfast cereal may have been purchased by and munched by Marigold Chew, the youngster replies with a computerised database of known breakfast cereal free gift booklets for the period in question, the old man picks out flaws in the research, the rookie lets loose a vituperative attack on his opponent’s atrophied brain sinews, and before long the columns of a reputable literary journal read like the ravings of H P Lovecraft in his more hysterical passages. All of this can be great fun for those entertained by Dobson-related pap, but sober-minded scholars are, I think, ill-served. There is a great temptation to take both Nestingbird and Ted Cack by the scruffs of their necks and crack their heads together. Hairline fractures in the skulls of both might just allow in thin shafts of light, akin to the weird invisible rays Dobson feared may be beaming towards his own brain. Or, I should say, the weird invisible rays Dobson possibly feared, unless of course he was just fooling around for reasons which must remain obscure to us.

Without wishing to generate further controversy over what is, in any case, a pointless and trivial matter, I should add that I have recently completed a lengthy work, at fifteen volumes just one book short of Sabine Baring-Gould’s Lives Of The Saints. It is a comprehensive study, with lots of illustrations and diagrams, of all Dobson’s known and suspected hats. I conclude that not a single one of them was lined with lead.

Janitor

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For a long time, I used to go to bed early. I was exhausted from long days working as a janitor in an evaporated milk factory. There are those who think that being a janitor is an easy life, little more than a matter of rattling a set of keys, sloshing a mop along a corridor floor, and glaring reproachfully at all who pass by. There may be janitors of that kidney, but I was not that kind of janitor, and never had been, neither in this nor in any of my earlier janitorships. It is a curious fact that the buildings in which I have been a janitor have all housed milk-related activities. Before being appointed to my post in the evaporated milk factory, I worked at a condensed milk canning plant, a milk of magnesia research laboratory, and a milk slops sloppage tank.

When I was younger I lacked application and was frequently reprimanded, on a carpet, as is usually the case, by my superiors. The overseer of the sloppage tank was particularly rancorous, as I recall. But by the time I fetched up at the evaporated milk factory, I took my duties seriously, excessively so, and that was why I was exhausted at the end of the day. To be precise, I was exhausted before the end of the day, hence my going to bed early.

There is a pamphlet by Dobson, entitled Tips For Janitors (out of print), which helped to mend my ways. One boiling hot summer Sunday, at a loose end, I went to visit a dying janitor in a Mercy Home. His brow was beetle and his jaw was lantern, and he was slowly perishing from a malady which had set in after an attack of the bindings and which he could not shake off due to his advanced age. It was not entirely clear just how old he was, for his birth certificate had been destroyed by worms. He certainly looked unbelievably ancient when I went to see him on that boiling day. Propped up in a sort of collapsible medical chair, surrounded by dripping foliage, like General Sternwood in The Big Sleep, he had made a vain attempt to mask his decrepitude by dyeing his hair black with boot polish and by sporting the type of tee shirt worn by young Japanese trendies. Neither ploy fooled me. I knew I was looking at a janitor who had begun his career in the age of gas mantles and steam.

My visit was prompted by a plea from the Charitable Board For Janitors Close To Death, seeking volunteers to pay social calls on janitors close to death to brighten their last days. I thought myself too lugubrious to be suitable for such a good deed, but the Board’s director, an ex-flapper by the name of Mimsy Henbane, said that this particular dying janitor rejoiced in the lugubrious and funereal and bleak and that my presence would lift his spirits.

Like the Italian castrato opera singer Luigi Marchesi (1754-1829), who, irrespective of the part he was playing, insisted on making his stage entrances on horseback, wearing a helmet with white feathers several feet long, I liked to cut something of a dash when entering a Mercy Home. On this particular Sunday I was ensmothered in fine kingly raiment, complete with the pelt of a wolverine (Gulo gulo, the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family), a burnished golden helmet Marchesi would have died for, and a bauble or two. It was stiflingly hot, of course, but my blood is ice cold, and I had achieved a temperate equilibrium as I strode majestically into the greenhouse wherein the dying janitor awaited me. I am unable to tell you his name, not because I do not know it, but because I found it completely unpronounceable. He was of Tantarabim parentage, and bore one of those impossible, and I must say foolish, names they are so fond of in that land. He was also wearing a pair of dentures which had been designed for a mouth much larger than his, so it was not only his name I failed to catch. I had brought with me, as a gift, a bag of Extra Crunchy Hard Crunchable Crackers, and it looked to me as if those gigantic teeth would be more than a match for their crunchiness. Indeed they were. For a few minutes, as the dying janitor shovelled the crackers gratefully into his gob, it was like being in a hot damp greenhouse with a snapping turtle. He crunched his way through the whole bagful so rapidly that I wondered if he was ever fed. I had not seen any staff in the Mercy Home, not even a janitor. In fact, I had not seen any other patients. There were some pigs in a sty between the greenhouse and the main building, but otherwise the place seemed deserted.

One of the things I have always liked about people from Tantarabim is that they are so easy to rub along with. After he had scoffed his crackers, the dying janitor sat there smiling weakly but, I supposed, contentedly, while I loomed above him lugubrious and funereal and bleak, just as Mimsy Henbane had suggested. I decided to stay until his smile faded, and propped myself against a pane of glass, having first twisted the dying janitor’s neck round slightly so I was still within his sight. It felt good to be doing something selfless for one who had trodden the path of janitordom before me. I pondered if this was what being a boy scout was all about. My only connection with the toggled tribe had been a single incident, in the year of the Tet Offensive, when I failed to stop a snackbar hooligan pushing a puny boy scout into a lake. I would have intervened, but I was preoccupied at the time with recalibrating a mechanism, one of my leisure pursuits in the days when I was an indolent janitor rather than the indefatigable one I became at the evaporated milk factory, when I no longer had time nor energy for leisure pursuits of any kind. Despite his puniness, the boy scout had passable swimming skills, and he managed to avoid drowning in the lake, a lake in which many had met a watery death. I knew this because their names were inscribed on a plaque affixed to a post at the edge of the lake, and I had bashed the post into the mud myself, with a hammer, one day many years before when I had nothing else to do. I used to roam the lakes and ponds and thereabouts with my hammer, looking for posts to bash into the muck. If I could not find any posts I became disconsolate and squatted on the nearest available tussock, sobbing, until it was time to wend my way home.

I had plenty of time to dwell upon my past as I leaned against the pane of glass in the hot greenhouse, for the dying janitor’s smile never wavered. It seemed that he was so pleased with the crackers and with my lugubrious presence that he had entered a state of transcendent bliss. I was determined, however, to keep to my plan of staying with him until he was no longer smiling. I knew Mimsy Henbane would approve, and in a sense it was also a way of assuaging the guilt I still felt about failing to prevent the snackbar hooligan shoving that puny boy scout into the lake. That had happened many years before, as I have indicated, but as time passed my conscience gnawed at me with ever increasing ferocity. In those days, far from going to bed early, often I never went to bed at all, instead marching up and down countryside lanes all night, incapable of sleep. I was keeping the same hours as owls, and if nothing else that fraught insomniac period helped me to extend my ornithological education. If I was a pamphleteer like Dobson, rather than a janitor, I am sure I could churn out innumerable essays on owls and other nocturnal birds. As it is, I make do by buttonholing the occasional evaporated milk factory employee and sharing my bird-learning with them, whether they like it or not. It was a pity that the dying janitor was from Tantarabim, and wearing dentures far too big for his mouth, and thus would have been unintelligible to me were he to be prodded into speech, for there was something in his demeanour which told me that he, like me, was an erudite janitor. I could not guess what his area of expertise was, of course, so I made a mental note to ask Mimsy Henbane when next I called into the Charitable Board For Janitors Close To Death HQ.

Mimsy’s journey from flapper to charitable board director was an extraordinary one. Her story has inspired poets, novelists, composers, film makers, and creative titans in just about any field you can think of, not least the designers of tee shirts worn by young Japanese trendies. Dennis Beerpint wrote a series of Cantos about her. Anthony Burgess struggled for years with a novel based on her life, but was forced to abandon it when he concluded that such a work was beyond his imaginative powers. An opera bouffe by Boof was inspired by her. Dan Brown is apparently working on a potboiler called The Mimsy Henbane Code. Before his untimely death, Rainer Werner Fassbinder planned a film about her set in a tough foreign dockyard full of tough homosexual sailors. The list goes on. Yet intriguingly, not one of the works based on her life ever addressed the root of her devotion to janitors close to death. There is always plenty about her flapperhood, and about the Antarctic expedition, the beekeeping, the shipwreck, the surgical interventions, the gladsome spring and the buffets of autumn, the postage stamp mystery, the years of crime, the gutta percha interlude, the bittersweet romances, the collapsed lung, the other collapsed lung, the delicate little fists beating hopelessly against wooden panels in the hut in the forest, the evil chickens, the gaudy boudoir, the Karen Carpenter incident, the vandalism, the scuba diving, the pitfalls, the obelisk, the gravel pathways, the euphonium band, the pint of milk, and the gruesome business in the tough foreign dockyard full of tough homosexual sailors. Yet of janitors, dying or otherwise, not one word. I know, because I’ve checked. Before I started working myself to exhaustion in the evaporated milk factory, I was able to spend some of my leisure time making a thorough study of all the Mimsy Henbane-related books and films and plays and opera bouffes and trendy Japanese tee shirts etcetera. From Beerpint to Burgess, from Boof to Brown, no creative titan deems janitors worthy of a mention. I try not to take this personally, and deny that I have poked pins into miniature wax effigies of any of those named, or of any others, such as Harrison Birtwistle and Salman Rushdie and the paperbackist Pebblehead, during spooky midnight ceremonies where I have been joined by jabbering chanting hooded bloodsoaked wild-eyed whirling drooling drugged-up maniacs. In any case, whatever lugubrious dismay I may feel towards those who have ignored my profession is more than outweighed by the fact that Mimsy Henbane herself devoted her latter years to my kind. And she did so selflessly, apart from the excessive fees she charged to those lucky enough to find a haven in one of her Mercy Homes, or in one of the greenhouses next to the pig sties in one of her Mercy Homes, and the extra charges she levied on the relicts of those janitors who, dying, died, and passed into the realm of which we know naught. So despite my hours of study, I am as clueless as the next janitor as to Mimsy’s motives. All I know is that she fully deserves my gratitude, and that is why I stood leaning against a pane of glass in that greenhouse while a dying janitor propped up in a collapsible medical chair, his hair slathered in boot polish and his dentures too big for his mouth, smiled at me for three whole days. I did it for Mimsy.

I think what wiped the smile off his face at last was that he felt pangs of hunger for more crackers. He mumbled something at me in that weird, impossible Tantarabim accent, and pointed a bony finger at the empty cracker bag he had dropped on the floor. I told him that I would go to Old Ma Purgative’s clifftop superstore, a lengthy hike away, to get another bagful. I wondered if he would still be alive when I returned. As I turned to sweep out of the greenhouse as dramatically as I had entered, in my kingly raiment, he rummaged in a little wooden cupboard next to his chair, took out the Dobson pamphlet Tips For Janitors, and pressed it into my greedily outstretched hands.

Over the next few days, as I made my slow lugubrious funereal bleak way towards the coast and the clifftop, I stopped from time to time to sprawl on bright summertime lawns and I read the out of print pamphlet from cover to cover. When I had finished it, I started again from the beginning. I was thunderstruck. In spite of my various milk-related janitorial posts, I felt I was reading about an entirely new and different calling, one of which I was profoundly ignorant. Between them, the dying janitor and Mimsy Henbane and Dobson changed my life.

Eager as I was to become a reborn janitor at the earliest opportunity, I was mindful of my promise to the dying janitor in the greenhouse next to the pig sty. I had made him so happy with that bag of Extra Crunchy Hard Crunchable Crackers, and had vowed to fetch him another bag. Torn between duty and desire, I spent a miserable morning sobbing on a tussock. Then Fortune smiled upon me, just as the dying janitor had done, by sending into my path a boy scout. As puny as the one who, years before, I had seen pushed into a lake by a snackbar hooligan, the child appeared at the side of my tussock and inquired if I had a job for him to do in exchange for a shilling. I took his coinage and sent him off towards Old Ma Purgative’s clifftop superstore, having armed him with full instructions and a map, and his shilling back to pay for the crackers. Then I turned my face towards Pointy Town and headed for the evaporated milk factory, and a new life.

A Talk On Dobson

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I have been speculating of late on how Dobson would have fared in the age of blogging. The common view is that the great pamphleteer would have flourished in this medium, but I wonder if that is true. He would not, of course, be “out of print” as is so regrettably the case, and I suppose most of us feel a pang when we imagine how tremendous it would be to log on to our computers to find fresh blog posts from so fecund a writer. And how piquant it would be to be able to add our own comments to whatever he had to say for himself on any particular day, rather than, as we must do, simply scribbling private marginalia in the few battered and dog-eared pamphlets we may have managed to scavenge from junk shops and rummage sales and community hub bazaars and compost heaps.

Yet the more I think about it, the more I remain unconvinced that Dobson would have taken to blogging as effortlessly as a swan to a pond. The reasons for my hesitancy are threefold. As I am sure you are aware, dealing with three folds all in one go can cause nervous overexcitement and lead to the vapours and the jangles, so I am not going to talk about the first two folds. The third fold, however, is something I feel sufficiently robust to attend to this evening.

As it happens, a few weeks ago I was asked to give a talk on Dobson to the inmates of a Crucifix School. It was an outdoor event, taking place in a field adjoining the main block, a building with a base and brickish skirt. Fortunately, the weather held, and we were not rained upon as I had feared might be the case earlier in the day, when I had become distracted and missed the prognostications of Mr Daniel Corbett, the eminent forecaster. Usually on these occasions I like to pick my own topic, whether it be Dobson and clunking noises, or Dobson’s use of novelty pipe-cleaners, or the textual implications of Dobson’s fear of squirrels. Sometimes I make my choice based on what I think will appeal to any given audience, sometimes I act on mere whim, and sometimes I just blather. But this time I had been asked to address the specific question “If Dobson Were Alive Today, Would He Be A Blogger Or Would He Continue To Churn Out Pamphlets?” It was a rather unwieldy title for a talk, but I accepted the invitation, not least because it came from an endearing flibbertigibbet. I speak of the Provostette of the Crucifix School, Maud Sprain, for whom in my youth I once carried a torch.

Arriving at the field, having been debouched from a charabanc, I was somewhat upset to find that Maud was not there to welcome me. In fact, so shredded were my nerves that I let out a great cry of grief. I was hurried into a tent by some sort of aide de camp, who gave me a reviving brain tonic and explained that Maud had been called away to an important meeting. Apparently, there was a to-do about the Crucifix School’s preferred biscuit supplier, with Huntley & Palmer’s and Peek Frean’s locked in unholy combat. Maud had gone to parley with representatives of the two titanic biscuit makers, although I have to say that from my memories of her I did not think it was a role to which she was suited. As well as being a flibbertigibbet she was given to going doolally and throwing breakable items, such as jugs, against walls. I wondered if the biscuit people had been warned.

Having swallowed my second helping of brain tonic, I was led by the aide de camp back out of the tent and across the field to where my audience of sparky tinies was waiting. It was a terrific field. Apart from mud and grass, it was rife with field bindweed, Convolvulus arvensis, with its pink and white flowers, with wayfaring trees, Viburnum lantana, deciduous shrubs – not trees, despite the name – close to wild guelder, all red and black berries, with common or redleg persicaria, Polygonum persicaria, a weed with blotches on its leaves, allied to the bistorts, and with lady’s smock, Cardamine pratensis, a white or lilac flower often found in damp meadows and fields such as this. Those, at least, were the four plants I was able to identify before I was bundled, none too gently, down into a ditch and from there into a subterranean tunnel. Most tunnels are subterranean of course, it goes with the territory, but I am using the words of the aide de camp, who, as she shoved me in the small of my back, hissed “Come! Come! We must enter this subterranean tunnel!”

I was perplexed, for as far as I was aware the pupils eagerly awaiting my Dobson lecture were sitting on a tarpaulin in the field above. Equally perplexing was to see that the tunnel was lit by lanterns dangling from hooks hammered into its ceiling, and that interspersed with the lanterns dangled birdcages in which perched blind thrushes and sparrows. I stuck my heel into the muck underfoot and rounded upon the aide de camp, demanding an explanation.

“This is where we bring the blind birds,” she said.

I accepted that at face value, and she persuaded me to continue ahead until we reached a cavernous underground storage facility. It was enormous and chilly. I do not think I have ever seen so many packets of biscuits stacked so neatly in one place. There were piles and piles and piles of them, creating a narrow passageway in the centre. I noted that to one side, all the biscuits were Huntley & Palmer’s, and to the other they were Peek Frean’s.

“You may pick a packet as your payment,” announced the aide de camp.

Now, Maud and I had not discussed my reimbursement for talking to the tinies about Dobson and blogging. There are some people – there are even, I regret to say, some Dobsonists – who insist upon cash when delivering talks upon the great out of print pamphleteer. Naturally, I am not averse to a fistful of readies, but it seems to me that spreading the word about Dobson is too urgent an activity to depend necessarily upon the receipt of grubby banknotes. Thus it is that, in the past, I have accepted payment in various kinds, including a plastic siphon, a pochette stuffed with the hair of a hanged criminal, a torn and besmirched copy of Old Cackhead’s Almanack, a share in the ownership of a lame pig, several towels and rags, glue, pips, lemon curd, a picture postcard from Innsmouth, and a cake fork. You might think, then, that I would happily snatch a packet of biscuits from this vast underground pantry and return to the surface ready and willing to give my talk. On any other day, I may well have done so. But now I was overcome with pangs of pity for the blind birds in cages dangling from hooks in the tunnel, so I told the aide de camp that I would forego my Huntley & Palmer’s or Peek Frean’s, and instead wanted her to release the thrushes and sparrows and to return them to the blue overarching firmament.

She looked at me as if I were bonkers and explained that, being blind, the birds would surely be savaged by other, bigger, predatory birds, such as hawks and vultures and modern pterodactyls within minutes of being allowed to flap away into the sky. This sounded like a pretty cogent argument, but I questioned her about the so-called “modern pterodactyls”, birds I had not heard of before and ones I felt sure she had made up on the spur of the moment as a way of persuading me to take a packet of biscuits as Maud originally intended. The aide de camp told me something new to me, that the British actor Richard Attenborough ruled as a potentate over a remote island where he reared modern pterodactyls and other primeval beasts, and should any of the blind thrushes or sparrows manage to get that far before being pecked to pieces by hawks or vultures, they would surely come a-cropper in the fierce razor-sharp talons of one, or more, of Attenborough’s avian brood. I happened to have the numeric protocol co-ordinates for the aged thespian embedded in my portable metal tapping machine, and considered directing a transmission requesting confirmation of this startling yet somehow credible information from him, until I recalled that Maud Sprain had deliberately sited her Crucifix School in a so-called “metal tapping machine mufflement zone”. She could be such a caution! I was left with no alternative but to accept, graciously, that the savagery of nature outweighed my sentimental impulses, and plumped for a packet of Peek Frean’s Bite-Size Oaty Choc Marzipan Water Biscuits. As we made our way back along the tunnel, the aide de camp pointed out to me the gleaming tungsten piping system through which birdseed and nutritionally-enhanced water were supplied to the blind birds. I felt reassured.

For some reason I could not fathom, the tunnel’s exit opened upon a different part of the ditch from where we had entered. As we emerged, I saw that in order to get back to the surface we would have to fight our way through a tangle of gooseberries, goosegrass, and goosefoot. The gooseberry is a low, spiny bush with globular green fruits. Goosegrass, also known as cleavers, is a close relative of bedstraws, which straggles over vegetation, clinging to it and to clothing with the tiny prickles on its stems, leaves, and fruits. Goosefoot is a genus of weeds with tiny green flowers in leafy or leafless spikes, the commonest being Fat Hen, Red Goosefoot, which often has reddish leaves, Many-seeded Goosefoot, and Good King Henry. The ditch, though, was entangled with Stinking Goosefoot, which smells repulsively of stale fish. Earlier, when I told you about the field bindweed, the wayfaring trees, the persicaria, and the lady’s smock in the field, I gave you the Latin names. But time presses on, so if you want to know the Latin for the gooseberry and goosegrass and goosefoot you will have to look them up yourself. I recommend a reference work such as The Penguin Dictionary Of British Natural History by Richard and Maisie Fitter (1967). As well as telling you about plants named after geese, this invaluable book is packed with hundreds of entries on birds, butterflies, fish, flowers, fungi, insects, moths, reptiles, and trees. It even tells you the difference between a stoat and a weasel, if that is the kind of thing you need to know.

The tinies were sat upon their tarpaulin, awaiting my talk, but getting to them was clearly going to be a struggle. According to the bells clanging from the old bell-tower, I was due to speak in five minutes time. The aide de camp was fossicking in her pippy bag, so I asked her what she was looking for.

“One of two things,” she said, “Either a scented linen rectangle to hold over my nose to counter the overwhelming stench of stale fish, or a big sharp slicing implement, as sharp as the talons of one of Richard Attenborough’s modern pterodactyls, with which to slice and hew through these plants named after geese. I am sure I must have one or other in my pippy bag, if not both.”

I could see why Maud had made so resourceful a woman her aide de camp, and wondered what else might lurk in the pippy bag, but I was far too polite to ask. I drummed my fingertips against my temples as the rummaging continued, conscious that time was ticktocking away on the clock on the old bell-tower, and that we were in grave danger of being late for the tinies. Maud had stipulated that I had to begin my talk on time, for only by doing so could I hope to placate the strange gods who loomed over the Crucifix School, always quick to anger and, in their anger, to smite the building and blast it to ruin. Much good would my packet of Peek Frean’s do me if I allowed the cataclysm to occur. Like the weeds choking the ditch, the looming gods were goose-gods, aggressive, webbed of foot, and with feathers of whitish hue, differing from mortal geese in that they were doubly aggressive, doubly webbed, doubly white, of immense size, and spectral. I watched them now, looming with menace over the school, ready to strike, to be assuaged only by my talk to the tinies on the tarpaulin. And still the aide de camp was scrabbling in her pippy bag, like a badger in bracken.

There were scarce forty seconds to go when she shrieked a triumphant cry, slapped a scented linen rectangle over her nose and sliced at the gooseberry, goosegrass and goosefoot with a big sharp slicer, and with one bound we jumped free of the ditch and pelted towards the tinies. A second aide de camp had given each of them a tumbler of purple pop and a radish to keep them quiet, so I was met with absolute silence as I took my place on the speaking mat. I glanced up, and allowed myself a small wrinkly smile as I saw the goose-gods flock away into the aether, and then I tapped my fingertips upon my cuff and cleared my throat.

“Greetings, tinies,” I boomed, my spine straight and my bouffant unruffled, “I am here today to talk upon the topic If Dobson Were Alive Today, Would He Be A Blogger Or Would He Continue To Churn Out Pamphlets? I am sure some of you think you know the answer. Well, I have thought long and hard about this question, and my conclusion may surprise you. You see, I don’t think Dobson would ever have become a blogger, for one simple reason. Bloggers type on computer keyboards, but Dobson always wrote in a little notepad, with a pencil. I rest my case.”

And that, in a nutshell, is the essence of the third fold in my threefold argument. If you are avid for the details of the first and second folds, I may be tempted to tell, but only if you send me some biscuits. I leave it up to you whether you send Huntley & Palmer’s or Peek Frean’s.

Mr Key’s Postbag

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A letter arrives in Mr Key’s postbag:

Sir : I find it promptly tricky that during your latest musings on the life of Danny Blanchfowler, you failed to mention Dobson’s seminal pamphlet on the history and origins of the Fred Jessop Cup On the history and origins of the Fred Jessop Cup (out of print).

I happened upon this pamphlet by chance in the August of 1987, whilst attending a car boot sale in Swivenhoe, as my life then mainly consisted of scouring car boots in the vein hope of unearthing a Penny Black. I was, anyway, passing uninterested by tens and tens of jalopies full to their brims with tat their owners were peddling: old lampshades, coloured rock, Ladybird books, copper barometers, worn out bicycle tyres, Clarice Cliffe, rusty automata, dog-shaped humidors, dirty vestas and assorted treen. One car boot though was devoid of tat, save for a box filled with yellowing paperbacks and crumpled ordnance survey maps. Having a penchant for ordnance surveys of the Upper Mendips, I had a rummage, and there, sandwiched in between The Viper of Hunstanton: A Grant Panama Mystery and Ordnance Survey Map number 216: Statton-on-Fosse to Lydford-on-Fosse, lay Dobson’s out of print pamphlet.

I snatched it from the box with great gusto, and upon examination of its condition, promptly haggled the slovenly oaf manning the car boot down to thruppence and a glimpse at my prized Cuckoo’s egg, for purchase of the pamphlet.

Upon returning to my hovel, I quickly consumed the contents of the pamphlet – savouring every moment, as respite from the squalid little life I led at the time. It is what I then unearthed, ‘neath its tattered pages, for which I am bothering to pester you.

Quoth Dobson:

“the Fred Jessop cup, awarded once a year to the winners of the Fred Jessop Cup association football competition, has several peculiar mysteries surrounding it – not least, the matter of it’s disappearance in 1966, the year it was won by Crackling Northwich. The 1965/66 season had gone splendidly well for Crackling Northwich, a team made up of workers from De Bruuin’s bulb factory. This small town club used to the monotonous pinch and shove of the Rumbelow’s Division Four (North) had, under the guidance of Keswick De Bruuin, who acted as their team coach, chairman, janitor, physiotherapist, coach driver, notary and keeper of the club mascot (a rather disgruntled Kittiwake called Margaret), achieved a miraculous cup run. Keswick’s team had battled their way past the Wigan Black Bull, Alsager Fare, and Hove Young Offender’s Institute in the early rounds.

Then, after drawing a plum tie away to Tooting Mantrap (one of the larger teams in their day), Crackling Northwich won through into the Semi-Final of the Fred Jessop Cup. Winning eighteen nil, with champion booter Carlo Weinnacht scoring a personal best of two. On the day of the draw at the football association headquarters in Sloane Square, withering old twit and head of the association, Herbert Drutt, took to the stage with an air of discomfort and a startled look upon his chelonian features. He proceeded to announce to the watching masses that the pride and joy of the association, the Fred Jessop Cup, had been pilfered from its resting place in the boardroom, betwixt the case demonstrating the various plumage phases of the mallard in eclipse and the portrait of the Prime Minister remonstrating offside with the bosch during the annual World War One Recreational Trench Warfare and Football picnic.

Suspicion fell immediately upon Keswick De Bruuin, who had previous for the theft of an elderly Boltonian twenty years hence, and for whom the Fred Jessop Cup represented a golden opportunity for some scrap metal smelting. Keswick, naturally in denial, retreated to his hotel room with the entire Northwich Crackling squad, and was not heard from again until three days later when the news broke that the cup had been found. A part-time bomb disposal officer, Wally Sandwich, had been walking his collie, Sniffles, around the outskirts of a disused children’s recreational area, when the dog had indicated the need to answer nature’s call by giving Wally an uncomfortable glance. Hurrying over to a swing, Wally saw metal glinting and gleaming from underneath a climbing frame. When he went to investigate, there, crudely wrapped in a soiled copy of Razzler, was the Fred Jessop Cup in all its unerring glory.

Three weeks later, Crackling Northwich were to defeat Rutland Water three goals to two, allowing their captain, Nobby Blanchfowler to lift the Fred Jessop Cup in front of his adoring audience and the onlooking paparazzo. To this day, no one has ever solved the mystery of the Fred Jessop Cup snatch, and Keswick De Bruuin never spoke of it again, meeting his untimely death at the hands of a fraudulent psychic some two years later.”

I wonder Sir, whether the Nobby Blanchfowler referred to therein is a relative, however distant, of footballing prometheus Danny Blanchfowler?

I eagerly await your reply.

Yours, in the bath,

Colonel Philomena Crow

 

Well, Colonel, I can confirm that Nobby Blanchfowler was indeed the twin brother of Danny Blanchfowler. Indeed, so close were the twins that they shared the same neck. Further information on this rare medical condition can be found in the song “Charlie And Charlie” on Slapp Happy’s album Acnalbasac Noom. I ought to point out, however, that the Fred Jessop Cup bears no relation whatsoever to the similarly-named Fred Jesson Cup, as mentioned in Danny Blanchfowler : A Life In Football. The latter trophy, of course, bears the name of the fantastically exciting husband of Laura Jesson, played by Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter (1945).

The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo

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This piece first appeared in July 2006.

Intriguing news from the world of letters, where weedy poet Dennis Beerpint has turned his hand to a work of prose fiction. We have received a review copy of the novel, entitled The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo, presumably on the basis that we will give it a favourable notice and thus boost Mr Beerpint’s bank balance, albeit flimsily.

“An immense mass of clotted nonsense”. That was the verdict of the magazine Teachers’ World upon the first publication of Ulysses* by James Joyce, and I am tempted to say the same about this Beerpint book, and leave it at that. Astonishingly, however, this thousand-page tome has already been made a set book for schools, colleges, and orphanages throughout the land, which means that your tots, if you have any, or you, if you are a tot, will have to become familiar with it. When examination time comes round, everyone’s knowledge of Dennis Beerpint’s fictional farrago will be tested to the full. And so, public-spirited as ever, I am going to try to save you from wasting your precious time actually reading the damn thing, by telling you what you need to know.

Plot : Tadzio Gobbo is a princeling in a fictional Renaissance city state, clearly meant to remind us of the setting of a Jacobean drama such as The Courier’s Tragedy by Richard Wharfinger. As the novel opens, Gobbo is pristine, even, and uncreased. “If he were a piece of cardboard,” writes Beerpint, “he would not be of the corrugated kind.” Chapter by chapter we watch as the princeling becomes ever more becrumpled in a variety of unspeakably squalid ways, until at the end there is a deus ex machina and he is unfolded and ironed out.

Characters : Tadzio Gobbo is a crude self-portrait of the author, sharing his weediness, neurasthenia, predilection for twee verse, and hypochondria. Many of his becrumplements are accompanied by the onset of an imagined disease, such as yaws, the bindings, ague, flux, black bile, bitter colic and the strangury. Beerpint attempts to play up a certain devil-may-care foppishness, but this is never convincing. In fact it is laughably inept.

There is a host of secondary characters, the most important being Lugubrio, the princeling’s mad, stiletto-wielding uncle. Beerpint is constantly harping on about his “frantic black eyebrows”, which soon becomes tiresome. Lugubrio’s sole motive for all his actions, from eating his breakfast to murdering a crippled beggar, is revenge, but what or whom he is avenging is never made clear to the reader.

Other characters in the novel are a mixture of fictional, legendary, and real historical figures. Among the latter are Anthony Burgess, Edward G Robinson, Emily Dickinson, L Ron Hubbard and Veronica Lake. Beerpint thinks he is being clever by setting some of the scenes in a so-called ‘Scientology tent’ on the banks of ‘Lake Veronica‘, but the effect is simply witless, and the reader will struggle not to throw the book into the fireplace.

Imagery : As a poet, Beerpint has been praised for his imagery (although I cannot think why) and The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo is jam-packed with all his old favourites. Crows, cows, burnt toast, pencil-cases, weather systems, the blood-spotted handkerchief of a tuberculosis patient, chaffinches, hedgerows, the horn of plenty and the Garden of Gethsemane, mud, chutes, Mudchute, potato recipes and pastry fillings, starlings, pigs, more starlings, more pigs, a nightmarish albino hen and the Munich Air Disaster are all evoked at one time or another in imagistic ways, as the princeling become ever further becrumpled.

Does the book have heft? : Yes it does.

Structure : The book is divided into forty nine chapters, fairly uniform in length. Each chapter ends with a reminder, as if the reader needed one, that a further stage of unspeakably squalid becrumplement has taken place, except for the last chapter, to which I have already referred. Beerpint is clearly fond of the practice found in the picaresque novel of summarising the plot in his chapter headings. To take a random example, Chapter XXVI is titled: “In which the becrumpling of Tadzio Gobbo proceeds apace, as his mad uncle Lugubrio unleashes a swarm of killer bees into the sports arena during a wrestling contest, and a false eclipse of the sun leads to rioting and flux; together with some notes on the flocking of chaffinches and the nesting habits of starlings, an aside in which a missing punctuation mark spells doom for an apothecary, and the reappearance of Lugubrio’s lobster.”

Plagiarism or quotations : Certain passages in the book appear to have been copied verbatim from novels by Barbara Taylor Bradford, Elias Canetti, Dan Brown, and the sociopathic ex-jailbird Jeffrey Archer. Dennis Beerpint presumably considers this to be postmodernist irony, a dangerous medical condition best treated by having one’s brain sluiced out with a violent purgative.

Narrative sloppiness : Untold oodles of it. It is a sloppy, flabby and slapdash book from first to last. At its core is a burning jewel of flummery and poppycock.

Brow : Neither high, middle, nor low. Not even no-brow. This book’s brow is frantic and black (see above).

Bookcase location : Finding the right spot for this volume on your bookcase or bookshelf is likely to be fraught with difficulty. Dobson’s invaluable pamphlet on the shelving of books, which is sadly out of print, will not help you, even if you manage to track down a copy, for as the titanic pamphleteer readily admits, “There are certain books, especially those written by twee poets such as Dennis Beerpint, which resist proper shelving on even the most well-ordered of bookcases. Top left corner? No. Squeezed in among the drivel and tat on the bottom shelf? Hardly. Shoved behind the collected works of Edward Upward and quietly forgotten? Certainly not, because you will always remember that it is there, and its hidden presence will reproach you every time you go anywhere near the bookcase, and you will be as the lowest worm or beetle or that which creepeth on its belly in the foulest muck of the earth.” Maddeningly, Dobson goes no further, he leaves us in the lurch, he refuses to say what I think he means – set fire to the damn thing in your garden, just as Burgess biographer Roger Lewis was tempted to do with a rival Life of the absurd Mancunian polymath.

Marketing ploy : Each copy of The Unspeakably Squalid Becrumplement Of Tadzio Gobbo comes with a free gift, viz. a paper bag of badger food. For that reason alone, I recommend that you buy a copy at once.

*NOTE : James Joyce always pronounced it as “Oolisiss”.

Letter Of Complaint

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Dear Mr Key : As someone with sausages on the brain, I was dismayed to note that you listed this condition as among the characteristics of the contemptible scoundrel who stole Dobson’s blotter. We are no more likely to turn to criminality than any other common or garden person you might encounter among the teeming masses, and to suggest otherwise is deeply unhelpful. I run a support group for people with sausages on the brain and am proud to say we do a lot of good work. We have organised sponsored archaeological digs, for example, and also other sorts of digging, with spades and shovels and special little forks, in loose soil, with prizes donated by wealthy television personalities, some of whom are newsreaders, who give their time freely, or almost freely save for small administrative fees, for the greater good. It might surprise you to know that some of these magnetic personalities have sausages on the brain themselves, and they are proving successful in life rather than languishing in prisons after being convicted of blotter theft. Digging up the ground in pursuit of archaeological knick-knacks, or just for the fun of it, is not the only activity we sponsor. Last month we held a fund-raising event at the perimeter of a remote airfield. There were balloons and ice cream wafers and clay pigeon shooting and a bran tub and scale model trench warfare novelty sing-songs and inflatable cloud chamber daredevil rides and all sorts of other things, hosted by Jimmy Savile, and the whole event passed off without any police involvement whatsoever, apart from a couple of cases of moral besmirchment. You can check the police log for yourself, and you will find not a scintilla of evidence that anyone with sausages on the brain thieved as much as a scrap of blotting paper, let alone an entire blotter. It is true that the stationery department at Hubermann’s has installed a state-of-the-art electronic security system with bleepers and klaxons and magnetic resonance panels for the exclusive detection of people with sausages on the brain who might find themselves wandering in a footloose and shabby manner therein, but that is just a sensible precaution in this disgusting world. Our support group was happy to provide advice to Hubermann’s management team, when a delegation visited our headquarters here on the atoll. Our single rowing boat plies back and forth to the mainland twice a week, by the way. Stories that the boat’s captain has to be bribed with frankfurters are completely baseless, as is the vindictive tittle-tattle suggesting there is a leak in the boat and that constant baling with buckets is required in order not to drown. The sea hereabouts is not always wild and dangerous, and attacks by shrieking demented guillemots have become much rarer, with only a handful of lacerations to passengers’ heads reported last Thursday. Uninvited visitors to the atoll are never beaten insensible with heavy cast iron frying pans, as has been reported in the scummy end of the press. We abandoned this custom some weeks ago after a plenary vote. Of course, if a wayfaring stranger turns up without a gift of boil-in-the-bag sausages for the welcoming committee, that is construed as unforgivable bad manners and the culprit simply gets what’s coming to them. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and sometimes you just have to be cruel, cackling like a maniac as you enact your cruelties. That has always been my motto. In fact, I had it tattooed across my chest and my back, in vivid empurpled Gothic lettering, with flamboyant curclicues and bloodstains. Just try telling me I am wrong, and I will meet you at dawn at a place of your choosing, somewhere out on the moors, to engage in hand to hand combat, providing you do not try to enhance your musculature with chemical boosters. Here at the sausages on the brain support network we fight ferociously but fairly, as you will be able to see at first hand if you attend one of our daily rehearsal bouts. Daubed with the blood of goats and wearing special contact lenses to give them hallucinatory visions, the best of our warriors would curdle the fluids of the most jaundiced observer. Even Jimmy Savile swooned when we laid on a display for him, and I am not sure he has ever fully recovered. So by all means make your spiteful little remarks about us, but be warned that our vengeance will be immediate and savage and utterly, ridiculously disproportionate. Yours faithfully, Sausages On the Brain Person.

Dobson’s Blotter

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Dobson was very fond of his blotter. Whenever he wrote about it, which was more often than considered normal for a grown man, his prose attains a pitch of purple enthusiasm modern readers can find uncomfortable, not to say distressing. It has been said that the pamphleteer even had a pet name for his blotter, as if it were an animate being, like a puppy or a hamster, but nobody claims to know what it was. Citation needed, as they say on the Wikipedia. There has been some debate, of crushing tedium, as to whether Dobson’s attachment was to the blotter itself or to the sheets of blotting paper he inserted under its four leatherette corner flaps. He made something of a ritual of this, changing his blotting paper every Thursday afternoon at about four o clock, just before he had a cup of tea and a plate of bloaters. He seems to have inserted a fresh sheet irrespective of the state of the one to be discarded. As often as not, his blotting paper remained pristine, as he almost always wrote in pencil. The used sheets he kept in a cardboard box shoved underneath the sink in an outbuilding. Each time he filled the box, he secreted it somewhere, like a squirrel, and went to Hubermann’s Department Store to get a new cardboard box. To date, nobody has ever discovered where he hid all those boxes of slightly-used blotting paper. It is one of the enduring mysteries beloved of Dobsonists.

The blotter itself was unexceptionable, as blotters go. It was a flat leatherette rectangle with corner flaps under which the four corners of a sheet of blotting paper were tucked. Several witnesses have noted that, contrary to what one might expect, the blotter was not always in place on the pamphleteer’s escritoire. Sometimes he left it leaning, upright, against the wainscot. At other times he put it in a bag and carried it around with him for no apparent purpose. It was not unknown for him to eat his bloaters off it, or to use it as a bird table. Dobson was fantastically ignorant of the diet of birds, though, and would place his blotter on top of an upright stick in the garden and then scatter hard toffee marbles upon it. Such confectionery was avoided by any little birds alighting on the blotter bird table, for rare is the bird which can digest hard toffee. They would also risk breaking their little beaks on it, for Dobson’s preferred toffee marbles, which he bought in paper bags from a pedlar, were the hardest known to humankind, and he gave them an extra bake in his oven, for hours at a time, to make them harder still.

In a new, as yet unpublished book, Pamplog and Gloveages tell the story of how Dobson’s blotter was stolen and later recovered. Melodramatically, the pamphleteer once described this as “the worst week of my life”. On a rambunctious Wednesday, when the zodiac was in a meaningless alignment, the pamphleteer decided he needed to stiffen the back of his blotter to restore its rigidity. He filled a pail with starch and carefully lowered the blotter into it, and then he strode off full of vim to Blister Lane Lido for water polo practice. Dobson was a keen if inept player of that most thrilling of aquatic team sports, and he wrote a number of pamphlets about it, the best of which is probably A New And Improved Method Of Drying Your Puck With A Towel (out of print). In standard water polo, of course, pucks are not used, but the Blister Lane Academicals was no ordinary water polo team. Nor was this an ordinary practice, on this fateful Wednesday, for the coach wanted the team to try out a new tactic which involved distracting their opponents by imitating the calls of loons and shoveller ducks and grackles. By the time he returned home, Dobson was hoarse and exhausted. He went straight to the room in which he had left his blotter steeped in a pail of starch and was distraught to find it gone. The pail itself had been knocked over, and the starch had soaked into the floorboards.

Here is how Pamplog and Gloveages describe what happened next:

Dobson cried out. Dobson sobbed. Dobson crashed about the house. Dobson called Detective Captain Cargpan. Dobson told Detective Captain Cargpan that his blotter had been stolen. Dobson sat in a chair and waited for Detective Captain Cargpan to arrive. Dobson drank a tumbler of milk from a goat. See Dobson sit. See Dobson drink.

This sort of thing becomes tiresome after a few dozen pages, but I admire the authors’ attention to detail. Apparently they won a medal for an earlier book about the Watergate Hearings. What we learn in this new work is that the thief was a contemptible scoundrel with a pencil moustache, the look of a startled rabbit, a fixation upon blotters, a cheap pair of gloves, a corrective boot, a skewed sense of morals, a weak chin, a hacking cough, a sordid past, the wit of a drainpipe, a collapsing lung, a dubious parentage, odd socks, an odder cravat, bats in his belfry, shares in the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, corks on his uppers, plums in his pockets, catastrophic measle scars, rent arrears, vinegar in his ears and sausages on the brain. Detective Captain Cargpan tracked him down four days after the theft of Dobson’s blotter, hiding out in a House of Miscreants hard by the banks of Lake Foofy.

Dobson’s first words, when one of Detective Captain Cargpan’s henchmen returned the blotter to him at a rendezvous in a dismal canteen, were “Thank you so much for retrieving my natty blotter!” Studious Dobsonists will recognise that as the title of a dirge the pamphleteer composed for the Second International Anthony Burgess Festival Of Uncompromising Dirges, in Ṻlm, where it won fifteenth prize.

Three Examples Of Uncontrollable Flapping About And Twitching

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Our first example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching took place in a pantry cluttered with jars in much disorder. Some of the jars contained goo or curd or pips or suet, in varying quantities, and some of the jars were empty. None were clean. All the jars had a coating of grime, as if they had lain untouched for many moons, as indeed they had, for this was an abandoned pantry. The lids of the jars would not have been easy to loosen had a determined person entered the pantry bent upon loosening the lid of any one of the jars, perhaps to eke out some goo or curd or pips or suet, or perhaps to pour into one of the empty jars a new and exciting substance. And hark! Here comes such a person, a wheezing person stomping down the passage towards the pantry and kicking the door in. He is a liveried attendant gone to seed and become a brute and he is holding a hammer. He has come to smash all the jars in the pantry for he has lost all sense of decorum. And then an Angel of the Lord appears, all a-shimmer, and commands him to lay down his hammer and leave the cluttered jars untouched. This is when the person begins flapping about and twitching uncontrollably, for about thirty seconds, in fear and shame, before fleeing the abandoned pantry. That happened on a Thursday.

The second example involves a peasant and a cow and many bees. It was a Saturday. The peasant had trudged into the field to take a close look at the cow, for the cow had been fractious and the peasant was concerned. Though unlettered, the peasant had a goodly store of country wisdom and was confident that if the cow was sick he would be able to identify the nature of its malady and cure it. Like many a tragic hero in fiction, the peasant sought redemption for an enormity in his past, an enormity committed due to a character flaw. Careful study of tragic heroes will reveal that they often have such a flaw. One thinks of Coriolanus, for example, or Dobson. Neither the nature of the peasant’s fatal flaw, nor of the enormity for which he sought redemption, need concern us here, for this is not a tragedy, it is just an example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching. In any case, it is reportage rather than fiction. That being so, the reader is entitled to hard facts, rigorously researched, and the winnowing out of all fluffiness. That is why I have employed a Hooting Yard Fact-Checker so you can be absolutely sure that what you read here is the pure and unvarnished truth. Obviously you need to have confidence in the person charged with the fact-checking, and that is why I fought hard to get someone for the job who I know can be relied upon. Yes, it is easy to laugh at an ex-schoolteacher pushing sixty who still wishes to be known as “Sting”, but this was the man, remember, who first pointed out to the world that “Russians love their children too”. It is just such acuity of insight that makes him perfect for the job I have employed him to do, and for which I pay him a pittance each month. “Sting” has promised to set up a separate Hooting Yard Fact Check website, so we can all look forward to that.

I ought to point out here that, just as you can rely on me (and “Sting”) to provide you with big tough facts, so in return I expect a degree of attentiveness from you. Toe-tapping, head-scratching, and sloshing out of the ears with some sort of wax-crumbling fluid, these can surely wait until my report is done. That is the bargain we strike.

Now we’ve got that cleared up, like a rash, we can return to the peasant and the cow and the bees. But wait! You will want to be sure that they are bees, and not hornets, or wasps. Wait for a minute while I fire off a quick instruction to “Sting” to check up on that. Hmm. I have just realised how apposite his absurd nickname is for such a task.

OK. I have sent my missive and imagine that, as I write, “Sting” is checking his encyclopaedias and databases and whatnot. Unless I tell you otherwise, you can assume that the bees we are about to encounter in our second example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching are indeed bees.

So the peasant with the tragic flaw trudged into the field to look at the cow, hoping to ascertain the nature of its sickness. Because it was a Saturday, the field was muddier than usual. The cow was standing more or less in the centre of the field, gazing at nothingness in a cow-like way. Its hocks had lost their shine, and the cardboard tag stapled to one of its ears was smudged. In this day and age, it is quite common for cows to have pieces of cardboard or plastic stapled to their ears, serving a number of purposes, and the staplers used are not so different from the staplers used in offices up and down the land. “Sting” told me that.

As he approached the cow, the peasant tried to dredge from his brain some of the folk wisdom with which it had been crammed since infancy. He remembered “If your cow is sick on a Monday morning / Go and spit upon a spade just as the day is dawning”, but that was no use to him, as it was Saturday. He remembered “Cow, cow, blotchy and stiff / Spray it with a bottle of Jif”, but that particular spell lost its efficacy when Jif products were renamed Cif as part of a marketing exercise early in the 21st century. And he remembered “Your cow is sick, it’s got bird flu / But the Russians love their children too”. As a piece of countryside lore this was useless, of course, as it did not suggest any remedies for the sick cow, but it is evidence of the extent to which the terrific profundities spouted by my fact-checking employee have entered the collective wisdom of the world.

Be that as it may, before the peasant got a chance to inspect the cow, a swarm of bees came in from the west, and buzzed menacingly about his head. Cue his uncontrollable flapping about and twitching, perfectly understandable in the circumstances. The bees harried the peasant until he turned tail and fled the field on that Saturday morning. The cow, by the way, had only a minor ailment, from which it recovered without human intervention, although I understand that it is currently in a cow-based twelve-step programme in an adjoining field. As for the peasant, he would have to await a new challenge to redeem himself from the peccadillos of his past, whatever they were.

We move on now, breathlessly but with vigour, to the third of our examples of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching. Forget pantries, forget peasants, this is a case of unearthly sci-fi stuff, set on a spaceship roaring through galaxies unimaginably distant, on a Tuesday evening. Captain Biff Bucklebim is at the controls on the deck of the USS Milquetoast Jesuit. He is a bit like Captain James T Kirk from Star Trek, but has a larger head and a speech impediment. As he likes to joke, it has been no impediment to his rise through the ranks of Starship Command, which has been meteoric. Captain Biff is still only twelve years old, although such are the warps and wefts of intergalactic travel that he is simultaneously ten thousand years old, and yet unborn, and akin to a god. Hard to get your head round, I know, and probably too much of a challenge for “Sting”, who is still working on those bees.

The USS Milquetoast Jesuit is sponsored by L’Oreal, and is powered by light-reflecting booster technology, just like Andi MacDowell’s hair. Captain Biff is contractually bound to use various L’Oreal hair products, but if he had his way he would smear his ginger mop with grease from the engine room. He is that kind of captain. When danger threatens, as it often does, he tousles his mop with one hand while punching the starship’s complicated control panel expertly with the other, all the while barking out commands to his crew. His accent is a curious mixture of Wyoming, Luxembourg, and vampire. He is extremely fond of Janacek’s String Quartet Number One, “The Kreutzer Sonata”, and likes to have it played by the starship band at moments of high peril. When they are otherwise engaged, for example if they have been beamed down to a newly discovered planetoid to give an impromptu concert of Thomas Beecham Lollipops, Captain Biff loses his rag and flies into a temper tantrum, with much uncontrollable flapping about and twitching.

I hope you have found these three examples helpful. Please add your own in the Comments. And please note that as soon as “Sting” gets back to me about the bees, I will add his findings here as a post scriptum.

Crushed And Squashed

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For many years, Dobson worked intermittently at a taxonomy of crushed things and squashed things. He kept two notebooks, one with a blue cover, on which SQUASHED was written in big black bold capitals, and one with a yellow cover, on to which he stuck a Dymo-Tape® strip punched out with the word CRUSHED. Asked once by a bespectacled devotee if there was any significance in the blue and yellow colouring of the notebook covers, Dobson’s reply was drowned out by the screeching of a flock of linnets. Ornithologically alert readers will say “Oi! Hang on! Linnets don’t screech”, and they would of course be correct, but the linnets in question were rare screeching linnets, a flock of which Dobson had corralled in an annexe to the room in which he granted an interview to the bespectacled devotee, in Winnipeg, or a suburb thereof. It is important to be precise about these things.

Had the rare screeching linnets not screeched, the bespectacled devotee would nevertheless have been disappointed by Dobson’s reply, for the colour coding of his crushed and squashed taxonomy notebooks was the sort of thing the pamphleteer preferred to keep under his hat. I can reveal, however, that when he bought the notebooks, Dobson was under the spell of the colour symbolism theories of Faffington.

Herne Bay, Herne Hill, and Hoon were the places Faffington trod, though which one was the site of his breakthrough discovery is not known. But in neither the Hernes nor Hoon does he have any commemorative plaque, probably because his theories have been utterly discredited. If Faffington is remembered at all, aside from Dobson’s short-lived championing of him, it is as a deluded monomaniac. He insisted on publishing his magnum opus in a stodgy German translation, thinking that this would give it more heft with beetle-browed intellectuals. Having no German, Dobson had the ludicrously dense and lengthy text Englished for him by a distressed polyglot he met on a sandbank. The polyglot was grubbing for worms, while Dobson had got lost on his way to the post office.

Dobson had something of a knack for finding himself on sandbanks, in tar pits, or stranded in drainage ditches, without ever knowing quite how he got there. Marigold Chew had suggested that he get himself a pair of shoes with a compass concealed in the heel, such as were once worn by venturesome tinies, but the pamphleteer was far too fond of his padded Bulgarian Security Police hiking boots to contemplate a change of footwear. In any case, it was one of Dobson’s physical peculiarities that he emitted violent magnetic discharges, so that compasses in his vicinity went wildly spinning. By all accounts, Faffington too was subject to anomalous magnetic phenomena, although it is mere myth that the popular cartoon character Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet was based on him.

During the period of his infatuation with the muddle-headed colour symbolist, Dobson considered writing a potted biography of Faffington, but found facts hard to come by. After a fortnight of tough and grizzled research, all he could say for certain was that Faffington had an extremely large head. Hatters were known to have baulked at his approach, and more than one practising phrenologist had been driven to fits and vapours when attending to him. That much gave Dobson about half a page of material, not nearly enough for a pamphlet, however potted it might be. He scrunched up the page on which he had jotted his notes and tossed it into a canal, an act of wanton littering which earned him withering looks from the lock keeper for the next twenty years.

The lock keeper, by coincidence, was the brother of the distressed polyglot Dobson encountered on that sandbank. In infancy, they had been briefly famous as a variety theatre act known as The Diminutive Cavorting Brothers. The future lock keeper cavorted sideways, and he who would a polyglot be cavorted up and down. They earned a small fortune before the elder one was six years old, but every penny was frittered away by their ne’er-do-well parents, a pair of rascals who came to a deservedly sticky end. Polyglot and lock keeper drifted apart in their teenage years, and were completely estranged by the time Dobson employed the one and disgruntled the other.

Had Dobson carried out a bit more research on the subject of his abandoned potted biography, he would have learned that Faffington also had a sibling from whom he was estranged. His sister was by turns a flapper, a bluestocking, an aviatrix, and the president of a small republic rich in bauxite and tin, and she was potrayed on film by both Mabel Normand and Constance Binney.

Dobson was watching the hoofing of a horse in a blacksmith’s yard one Wednesday morning, when an anvil toppled from its temporary hoist, weakened by rainwater, and fell into the mud, crushing an encampment of goldenback beetles. It was this incident which led to his interest in crushed things and squashed things, the project to create a proper taxonomy of which remained incomplete at his death.

Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind The Panel

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Dobson wrote extensively during the period when he was hunkered down in a janitorium. The key pamphlets from this time were collected in a compendium and published as a thick paperback with a garish cover design suitable for sale at airport bookstalls. It is thought to be the only instance where Dobson’s name was embossed in gold. Alas, this failed to impress the reading public, and very few copies of the book were sold, although we should bear in mind that I write of a time before mass commercial aeroplane travel, so there were fewer airports, and even fewer airport bookstalls, and only a handful of customers frequenting those that did exist.

One early airport bookstall worthy of note was that opened at Tantarabim Rustic Airfield by Marigold Chew’s cousin Basil Chew. Basil was a peg-legged pear-shaped man with tremendous Ruritanian moustachios, a fuddle-headed entrepreneur whose every business scheme failed. He simply had no grasp of reality, his view of the world being at once mistaken, hallucinatory, and plain wrong. If one were unkind, one would call him a blockhead. But he had charm, and winning ways, and when he twirled those fine moustachios people swooned with besotment. Thus he was able to convince a few foolhardy financiers to back his airport bookstall, where, under the delusion that aeroplanes flew at the speed of a peasant trudging along a muddy country lane and that passengers would need extremely fat books to keep them occupied, he stocked only mighty tomes of great and forbidding length. Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy Of Melancholy, Boswell’s The Life Of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. Comprehending An Account Of His Studies And Numerous Works, In Chronological Order; A Series Of His Epistolatory Correspondence And Conversations With Many Eminent Persons; And Various Original Pieces Of His Composition, Never Before Published: The Whole Exhibiting A View Of Literature And Literary Men In Great-Britain, For Near Half A Century, During Which He Flourished, and Henry Darger’s The Story Of The Vivian Girls, In What Is Known As The Realms Of The Unreal, Of The Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused By The Child Slave Rebellion were, in fact, the only books available at Basil Chew’s bookstall until, under pressure from his cousin, he agreed to carry the gold-embossed Dobson compendium. During the six months the business lasted, he did not sell a single book, and was kept afloat only by his sideline in toffee apples, in-flight pastry novelties, and moustachio wax.

A compelling reason for the lack of success of Dobson’s big fat book is not so much its preposterous length but that, curiously, he did not include an account of the most interesting thing that happened during the janitorium period. This was the series of events that have elsewhere been described as Dobson And The Disquieting Ploppy Noises From Behind A Panel, the title given to a ravishing essay by ravishing essayist Maud Glubb. A close reading of La Glubb’s text reveals many fascinating details, but is far from complete. Most annoyingly, we have no idea of what the panel, from behind which Dobson heard disquieting ploppy noises, was made. Was it teak, or tin, or mahogany, or lead, or hardboard, or deal, or zinc, or beaten gold, or corrugated cardboard, or iron, or papier maché, or bauxite, or empacted goat hair, or plastic, or balsa wood, or formica, or stitched-together pelts from slaughtered wolves, or bronze, or marble, or dough, or gases suspended in a solid state? Glubb does not tell us.

What we do know is that, sprawled upon the floor one Tuesday morning in April, the pamphleteer was disquieted by ploppy noises, the source of which he soon traced to behind the panel, whatever the panel was, and whatever function it played within the janitorium. We know, too, that as a result of his disquiet he rummaged in a drawer for a chisel with which to prise apart the panel from whatever it was fixed to, in order to ascertain the nature of the ploppy noises and to staunch them. We know that he failed to find a chisel nor any chisel-like tool with which to accomplish the task. That nothing in the nature of a chisel was to be found in the drawer, within a janitorium, is perplexing, and it is a point to which ravishing essayist Maud Glubb returns later in her ravishing essay. We know that Dobson leaned against the wall and lit one of his acrid Paraguayan cigarettes and puffed upon it as he bent an attentive ear to the continued ploppy noises, and we know that anon the ploppy noises petered out and that Dobson stamped out the butt of his Paraguayan cigarette with his boot and that he clumped out of the janitorium into the April morning and took a turn around a nearby pond. We do not know what the weather was like, and we do not know whether the pond was populated by ducks, or geese, or swans, or indeed if it was home to a grampus or a kraken. Unlikely as the last two may be, remember that the pond in the grounds of the janitorium was no ordinary pond, as you will know if you have read Dobson’s pamphlet Some Arresting, Diverting, And Frankly Sensational Factoids Regarding Certain Ponds I Have Had The Pleasure To Take A Turn Around, In All Weathers, Arranged In Alphabetical Order By Pond Name. Some have pointed to the pamphleteer’s use of ‘factoid’ rather than ‘fact’ to cast doubt on the veracity of this pamphlet, but it should be borne in mind that it was written at a time when Dobson was beset by benign seizures in his cranial integuments and he was not his usual self.

The next time Dobson was disquieted by ploppy noises from behind the panel was a fortnight later. It was now May, the month in which the Dutch observe the Remembrance of the Dead and the Norwegians celebrate their Constitution. Being neither Dutch nor Norwegian, the pamphleteer had no reason to mark these events, yet he did so, loudly, with bellowing and strangulated cries, tears streaming down his face, and picnics. He was that kind of man, sometimes. It was on another day in May, however, when, shifting his writing desk from one side of the janitorium to the other, he again heard the disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel. He had not forgotten his fruitless search for a chisel in the drawer, and was not so foolish as to repeat it. Instead, he shoved his writing desk aside, leaving it halfway across the janitorium, tiptoed up to the panel, and pressed one of his ears against it. For some reason, La Glubb insists on telling us it was his right ear. She can be given to such unnecessary detail – presented without a shred of evidence – and yet remain silent on matters of greater import, which makes her essay as infuriating as it is ravishing. Be that as it may, note that on this second occasion Dobson’s attention to the disquieting ploppy noise from behind the panel was much more focussed. In April, after failing to find a chisel, he had leaned insouciantly against one of the walls, smoking while he listened, whereas in May, look, he is crouching, the side of his head flattened against the panel, and his gob is innocent of a fag. Maddeningly, we do not know how long he remained in this creaky posture. Perhaps he was there all day, growing increasingly disquieted. What is beyond doubt is that the very next day he wrote a note in his journal. His tone is tetchy and bespeaks grumblement rather than disquiet, and it is clear that the ploppy noises are “getting to him”, as they say. Soon enough, however, the subject is dropped, and the following sixteen pages of the journal are filled with a draft version of a pamphlet upon Chumpot Patent Soap bars he was later to abandon, together with a few notes on gale force winds, Hedy Lamarr, and that dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea.

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Shortly after completing that journal entry, Dobson took an evening stroll. We do not know what phase the moon was in and, being quite staggeringly ignorant of celestial orbs, nor did Dobson. We do not know the precise route he took, once he left the grounds of the janitorium, although it is likely that he would have passed the canal lock and the tobacconist and the badger sanctuary and the recently-demolished community hub. Had he been eating cream crackers there would have been a trail of crumbs for a sleuth to follow, for the pamphleteer was a messy eater at the best of times, and especially so when in motion. We know, however, that he had sworn off crackers of all kinds at this time, mistakenly believing them to be the cause of the benign seizures in his cranial integuments. This idée fixe of his had caused a monstrous and prolonged argument with Dr Raymilland, and it was to be many years before their relations were mended. It is significant that Dobson never felt able to discuss his disquiet at the ploppy noises from behind the panel with his physician, for Dr Raymilland was a man with much medical experience of unaccountable noises, ploppy and otherwise, and he may well have been able to recommend a course of action, probably involving muffling, and cushions. All we know for certain is that, upon returning to the janitorium in darkness, Dobson poked his head around the door for a midnight check and heard again the disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel. It is unclear what made him snap, but he made a sudden dash across the room and gave the panel a resounding kick with his boot. We do not know if he cried out as he did so, but afterwards, in the darkness, there was silence. The pamphleteer lit one of his acrid Paraguayan cigarettes and waited. His toes throbbed, for his boot was old and floppier than it had once been. He waited in the darkness, in the janitorium, in the silence, flicking the ash from his cigarettes on to the feng shui monkey puzzle carpeting system, until dawn broke.

Maud Glubb’s ravishing scholarly apparatus collapses at this point in her essay, and the next thing we know it is September, the month in which the Zulu commemorate King Shaka, after whom, of course, bestselling paperback author Pebblehead was named. Had Pebblehead been writing at the time Basil Chew opened his ill-fated airport bookstall, the peg-legged and pear-shaped entrepreneur would no doubt have thrown out his Prousts and Burtons and Boswells and Dargers, and stocked his shelves with the countless fat glossy potboilers churned out by that most indefatigable of authors. Apparently, at every minute of the day, somewhere in the world, someone is reading a Pebblehead paperback. Glubb is a very different kind of writer, and while we suspect that Pebblehead would never let his apparatus collapse, and we would never forgive him if it did, it is the kind of thing we expect from the ravishing essayist, and we do not let it trouble us. So, when we skip from the scene of Dobson on a night in May, having successfully silenced the disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel with a flying kick of his boot, to a torrential downpour in October, and the pamphleteer slumped scowling in a bus shelter, smoking a mentholated Bolivian stogie, we simply press on, agog.

We soon learn that little had changed except the weather and Dobson’s preferred brand of cigarettes. He was waiting for a bus in the rain because he had been summoned to an appointment with the official in charge of the janitorium and of several other outlying facilities. This official, a preening autocrat of many hats, had been inundated with letters from the pamphleteer begging to be transferred from the janitorium on account of the disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel. After that night in May, the noises had returned, insistently, and no amount of kicking the panel made them cease, as Dobson discovered to his cost. He had even gone to the expense of a brand new pair of sturdy boots with toughened toecaps, the better to kick the panel, but to no avail. So began his written pleas to the official. Dobson knew that among the outlying facilities attached to the janitorium was a cow byre, and it was to this dilapidated rustic hideyhole that he hoped to be sent. He did not confess, in his many missives, that he was unpractised in the niceties of cow care, and this may have been his undoing. As it was, the preening autocrat ignored all of Dobson’s letters, until they began to arrive at a rate of two or three per shift. The disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel were steadily driving the pamphleteer crackers, and the tone of his letters was growing ever more hysterical.

As Maud Glubb observes, it would be instructive if we could compare the unrestrained prose of these desperate pleadings with the overwrought and majestic style of the middle-period pamphlets, but to date no Dobsonist of any standing has taken on such a task. There would, of course, be difficulties with the handwriting, for when Dobson’s brain was fuming his already crabbed and blotted scrawl became almost illegible. He is not alone among the greats in challenging the eyesight of those wishing to decipher his manuscripts. According to Jerome B Lavay, in Disputed Handwriting : An Exhaustive, Valuable, And Comprehensive Work Upon One Of The Most Important Subjects of To-day (1909), “Charlotte Bronte’s writing seemed to have been traced with a cambric needle, and Thackeray’s writing, while marvelously neat and precise, was so small that the best of eyes were needed to read it. Likewise the writing of Captain Marryatt was so microscopic that when he was interrupted in his labours he was obliged to mark the place where he left off by sticking a pin in the paper. Napoleon’s was worse than illegible, and it is said that his letters from Germany to the Empress Josephine were at first thought to be rough maps… Byron’s handwriting was nothing more than a scrawl. The writing of Dickens was minute, and he had a habit of writing with blue ink on blue paper”.

We must assume that, at some point in the first week of October, the preening autocrat smacked his forehead in despair at the tottering pile of letters arriving from the janitorium, for he took the unusual step of summoning the complainant to his headquarters. Fang Castle was situated high on a crag around which bats skittered and swooped. The bus from which the pamphleteer alighted in the teeming rain stopped at the foot of the crag, and Dobson had many, many steps to climb before he would reach the entrance to the castle. He was less than half way up when his ill-advised pink and yellow and polka dot Kennebunkport cap attracted the attention of several bats, and a passing crow. Startled, the pamphleteer lost his footing, sprained his ankle, and plunged into a clump of buttercups. He lay there helpless for three days, hidden from the bus route by a row of lupins and hollyhocks, Fang Castle looming above him high on the crag.

We know that Dobson was dismissed from the janitorium before the end of October, for there is a journal entry, clearly written on Hallowe’en, where he refers to his relief at no longer having to suffer the disquieting ploppy noises from behind the panel. What we do not know is whether he was writing from the cow byre. In a particularly ravishing passage in her ravishing essay, Maud Glubb drops hints that she has identified the precise location where Dobson was hunkered down on that Hallowe’en, going so far as to claim that she may even have it pinpointed on a map, but she does not say if she is talking about the cow byre or somewhere else entirely. Nor do we know what Dobson did at the end of his three days in the buttercups. When the sprain in his ankle eased, did he clamber up those many, many steps and confront the preening autocrat in Fang Castle, or did he shuffle to the bus stop and return to the janitorium? Meteorological records indicate that it was still raining heavily, so the pamphleteer would have been sodden through. Indeed, he may have been so soaked that he would have been forbidden to board the bus for fear that any puddles he created may have dribbled into the underfloor electrical wiring and caused the bus to explode or crash. Researchers other than Maud Glubb have pored over the records of bus mishaps for the relevant period, and there is a tantalising clue in a report in the St Bibblybibdib Parish Newsletter And Fold-Out Raffle Ticket which alludes to an exploding bus crashing near Fang Castle due to an underfloor electrical wiring fault during a torrential downpour, but the newsletter was only published twice a year and the date on this copy is unreadable, due to smudging.

In this morass of Rumsfeldian known unknowns, it is an unexpected delight to chance upon solid, incontrovertible fact. Here, reproduced without comment, is a passage from Digby Hoist’s memoir Out And About With Pebblehead:

That leap year, on the twenty-ninth of February, I joined the bestselling paperbackist on a hike. We roamed o’er hill and dale for mile upon mile, snacking on berries and weeds and drinking milk we eked from unattended cows in the fields. It should not have surprised me that Pebblehead had an enviable milking technique when presented with an udder. He is, after all, a man of parts. We investigated knots of furze and vetch and certain unnatural topiary sites as catalogued by Drain & Huffington. I demonstrated to Pebblehead a method of vaulting across rivers using a stick and a paperclip, and he showed me how to lure a badger from its sett with blandishments. Oh how we chuckled in a wry, manly way as we pranced across the loam! Scudding clouds overhead threatened drizzle, so in mid-afternoon we took refuge in a ruin. As we crouched on what looked to me like the ragged remains of a feng shui monkey puzzle carpeting system, once so unaccountably popular, I noticed that Pebblehead grew quiet. His moustache bristled, and his ears emitted wispy fumes. When I made to speak, he hushed me by wedging a shard of slate in my mouth and bashing the side of my head with his fists. The drizzle turned into a violent shower that lasted less than a minute, and then the sun blazed down on us again. I was all for leaving the ruin and continuing with our hike, for I was keen to show Pebblehead a pig enclosure I knew to be nearby, where the pigs were fantastic, but something in his demeanour gave me pause. He seemed strangely disquieted. Eventually, he began to speak, in a voice that was not his own. Instead of that familiar high-pitched, reedy squawk, like a drugged-up corncrake, his words boomed out, deep and deafening. I spat out the shard of slate and shoved my hands over my ears, but still that voice penetrated my soul as if I were in the presence of some ancient, terrible god.

“Behold the realm of Gaar!” said the Pebblehead who was not Pebblehead, “It is ruin now, but once, not so long ago, it was the place where dwelt my fiend. That spot where you crouch, puny specimen of humankind, was my panel, and behind my panel my fiend paid obeisance to me. To the imperfect ears of you earthly pipsqueaks, the horrifying and insane and magnificent and berserk ritual jabberings of my fiend sounded as but ploppy noises which caused disquiet rather than paralysing terror. One day my fiend shall return, and all shall be swept away. It will be swept away and gone.”

The voice ceased. Somewhere a linnet tweeted. The wispy fumes from Pebblehead’s ears dispersed, and his moustache stopped bristling. He looked at me, as if nothing had happened, and piped up “The rain has stopped, Digby. Let us go and take a cold hard look at those fantastic pigs you were telling me about!”