Bring Forth, Devil, Your Elks is the title of a history of hunting in Finland noted in the latest issue of the splendidly-named periodical Books From Finland (reviewed here).

Interestingly, the out of print pamphleteer Dobson once planned a series of bestiaries for children to which he gave almost identical titles. They included Bring Forth, Devil, Your Moose, Bring Forth, Devil, Your Stormy Petrels, and Bring Forth, Devil, Your Common House Flies. Unlike the Finnish volume, none of Dobson’s works ever saw the light of day, for he abandoned the writing of them when it was pointed out to him that he could make more money by churning out a potboiler about decorative cardigan buttons, a subject on which he was an acknowledged expert.

Unfortunately, a glut of decorative cardigan button books appeared on the market just as Dobson was finishing his manuscript. His money-making scheme shattered, the pamphleteer was forced to take a job as janitor at an evaporated milk factory. As we now know, this experience was pivotal in his pamphleteering career.

Further Reading : “Dobson’s Pivotal Experience As A Janitor At An Evaporated Milk Factory” by Petula Clark, in The Journal Of Evaporated Milk Studies, Vol XLVI, No 7 (out of print).

Dear Mr Key, writes Tim Thurn, Please look very carefully at the attached photograph. I have been staring at it constantly for about five hours, and I have convinced myself that the person we see here depicted is the out of print pamphleteer Dobson. You may wish to assert that a) the image is not a photograph and b) Dobson would never have allowed himself to be caught on camera while so preposterously engarbed. You are of course fully entitled to express such objections, but bear in mind that I am a man of mighty optical acuity and I know what I am talking about. Call me a deluded idiot if you must. I am now going to go on an Easter picnic event. Yours sincerely, Tim.

Committed Dobsonists often turn their minds to the perplexing question of how the out of print pamphleteer would have coped with the 21^st century. It is difficult to imagine him in our world o’ bleeping digital flummery ‘n’ pap, is it not? But now I think I have stumbled upon something which clearly calls out for the great man’s talents.

According to this piece about the red tape by which our doughty coppers are being strangled, “some constabularies have a 44-page booklet for recording collisions between two cars”. Of course, as soon as I read this, my immediate thought was “O Dobson! If thou wert with us now!” Rather than subsisting in penury, the pamphleteer could make a pretty penny offering his services to these police constabularies. He was capable of scribbling a 44-page pamphlet about any subject under the sun as easily as you or I could freeze to death in an Antarctic blizzard, and with considerably more aplomb. Alas, he passed over to the ethereal realm before getting the chance to add to the canon such potential masterworks as An Essay Upon The Unfortunate Collision Between A Skoda And A Trabant, or How I Learned About A Terrible Road Accident In Which Two Cars Smashed Into Each Other At Inhuman Speed.

Still, next time I am invited to play the parlour game What Would Dobson Do Today?, I think I have a good chance of winning top points.

This piece, entitled Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, appeared in Hooting Yard three years ago today, on 30^th January 2005.

Hark! The herald angels are singing the song of Stakhanov, the heroic worker. The herald angels are legion, but there are only two Stakhanovs. That’s right, two. One Stakhanov is busy at the forge, just like Felix Randal the farrier*, busy in his bellowing room, smelting iron or hammering a huge sheet of steel with implacable industry. The other Stakhanov is a pale aesthete. He has a bow tie, luxuriant locks, a thin Ronald Colman moustache, and is lounging in a buttercuppy meadow, propped on one immaculate elbow, reading a book of poetry. It is the collected lyrics of some forgotten noodling progressive rock group. What will become of the two Stakhanovs? Hark! Let us listen to what the herald angels are singing.

The hero worker at his forge / The aesthete in a meadow / Lampblacked one and the other in serge / But both end on the gallows

Gosh! So, according to the herald angels, both Stakhanovs will come to a sticky end. We must assume that they can accurately predict the future, being herald angels. When they had finished their song, we sent one of our reporters to interview them. They were not happy about this, but put forward one of their number, an angel named Angerecton, to act as their spokesangel.

Now you and I know that Angerecton is a fumigating angel rather than a true herald angel, so it should be no surprise that the interview was unsatisfactory. In any event, our reporter found that his tape recorder malfunctioned, and all he could hear when he played back the tape was the sound of mighty and glorious angelic hosannahs, not unlike Spem In Alium by Thomas Tallis. As Dobson once wrote, in another context, “Angels sing, and devils make a din, but the heroic worker pounds his hammer and the poet praises Stalin”. I think that before too long, you and I and both Stakhanovs will be deafened by the devil’s din.

* O is he dead then?

Somewhere in today’s papers I came across the phrase a vast and chilly gasworks, and this reminded me that for ages now I have been meaning to write about the Blister Lane Gasworks. More specifically, I wish to address the time that the manager of the gasworks approached Dobson, the out of print pamphleteer, asking him to write an instruction manual for the gasworks janitor.

The words vast and chilly certainly describe the Blister Lane Gasworks to a T. They describe, too, the manager, a man of huge bulk and cold disposition named Istvan Pan. His moustache was of the Kaiser Wilhelm type, and his eyes were glacial. Interestingly, no one could ever recall seeing him off the gasworks’ premises, and how he lived and fended for his everyday needs was a complete mystery. Equally perplexing was the fact that in his left hand, at all times, he carried a hammer, almost as if it were an extension of his arm. Perhaps it was. So chilly was his manner that no one had the temerity to ask him about it.

Janitors came and went at the gasworks with bewildering rapidity. Some left voluntarily, after a few days or weeks, and others were fired by Pan, often within minutes of their appointment. Curiously, not a single ex-janitor would speak of their experience, remaining steadfast in their silence even when badgered for a scoop by bumptious reporters from The Daily Shovel.

It is against this background that one needs to consider Dobson’s response when he was summoned to the gasworks by Istvan Pan. Unfortunately, we do not know how the pamphleteer reacted, because there is a gap in his journals covering this period. He may have crowed with delight, or he may have shuddered with queasiness, but we are unlikely ever to know, so let’s just crack on and find out what happened next.

Dobson presented himself at the gasworks gate promptly at six o’ clock in the morning on a Monday of blustery gales and drizzle. He was met by a woman so tiny that he mistook her for a female homunculus, and wondered if she had been created according to the Paracelsian recipe of burying a bag of bones, semen, skin fragments and hair in the mud for forty days. Tactless as ever, Dobson wondered this aloud, and had his knee slapped by the tiny woman. Had she been any taller, no doubt she would have slapped his face, but his knee was as high as she could reach. She introduced herself as Mrs Pan, wife of the gasworks manager, and bade Dobson follow her down a very long corridor hissing with gas-jets, at the end of which was Istvan Pan’s office.

As enormous as his wife was minuscule, Pan towered above the pamphleteer as he coldly outlined what he wanted Dobson to do for him. Before appointing a new gasworks janitor, he explained, he wanted to have an instruction manual clearly setting out the janitorial duties, and he wanted it to be written in sweeping, magisterial prose so that whoever took on the job would be properly awestruck. As he said this he flailed his hammer in the air. He went on to say, in a voice redolent of Antarctic desolation, that Dobson had been recommended to him as a writer of sweeping, magisterial prose, and as a man who knew a thing or two about janitordom. Dobson was curious to know who might have made such a recommendation, but just as he was about to ask, Mrs Pan rushed into the office with a stricken look on her tiny face. The pamphleteer was astonished to see Istvan Pan’s cold imperiousness crumple into uxorious solicitude as he swept his tiny wife into his arms and, without dropping his hammer, comforted her, chirping into her ear softly, like a linnet.

Eventually becalmed, Mrs Pan explained why she was stricken. There had been a pile-up on the Blister Lane Bypass, she said, just beyond the gasworks, and fumes and flames were being blown by the blustery gales in their direction. Unless they took action, the whole place could explode in a conflagration like the one that engulfed the Potato Building just after the war. Istvan Pan looked Dobson coldly in the eye and told him that this was just the kind of circumstance where a competent janitor would be a boon, and the pamphleteer could only nod in agreement. Then the gasworks manager turned around and depressed a knob upon his desk and Dobson felt a sudden lurch in the pit of his stomach. It took him a few seconds to realise that the entire vast and chilly gasworks was descending, via the thrumming of some incredible and complicated engine, below the surface of the earth, into a subterranean vault as vast and chilly as the gasworks itself, while above ground, the firestorm created by the Blister Lane Bypass pile-up raged, and raged for days and weeks and months..

For many years now, Dobsonists have hunted high and low for a copy of the legendary “missing pamphlet”, How I Spent Six Months Underground In An Amazing Subterranean Vault Built To House The Blister Lane Gasworks, Together With Mr And Mrs Pan And Their Cat Hudibras. If ever a copy can be discovered, we might learn what happened in that time and, more importantly, why, when Istvan Pan at last pressed the knob to return the gasworks to ground level, his plans to have a janitorial instruction manual written in sweeping and magisterial prose by Dobson seem to have been utterly abandoned. We might learn, too, whether it was giant Istvan Pan, or tiny Mrs Pan, or even perhaps Dobson himself who managed to train Hudibras the cat to carry out all the tasks the manager expected of a vast and chilly gasworks janitor.

There is a toyshop I know of where they sell toy squirrels made of tin. I do not mean the sort of clockwork toy tin squirrels you probably had when you were a tot, the ones you wound up and set down and that then skittered haphazardly across the floor before crashing into the wainscot. No, the toys of which I speak are tin squirrels plain and simple, with no clockwork mechanisms nor moving parts. They do not skitter. They come in a variety of sizes, the smallest being about the size of a leaf-cutter ant and the most enormous roughly on a par with a squirrel-shaped variant of a double-decker bus.

There are countless ways of having fun with a tin squirrel. You can place it in a crate and cover it with shredded newspaper or excelsior and pretend that it is hibernating. When you want to bring the hibernation to an end, you can point the beam of an anglepoise lamp at the crate, to mimic that mighty orb worshipped by the islanders in The Wicker Man, and bring your tin squirrel blinking into the light. Being a toy of tin, your squirrel will not actually blink, but with the power of your mind you can imagine that it does. If your mind lacks the power to summon up this simple fancy, it is a good idea, before switching on the anglepoise lamp, to do a brain exercise specifically designed to increase the imaginative faculties. You will need to be familiar with the song Imagine, written and performed by John Lennon, the man memorably described by Kenneth Williams as “that Beatle who got married to an Asiatic woman”, although Williams initially confused him with Ringo Starr. Actually, you need only know the tune, to which you should sing the following words:

Imagine there’s a squirrel / A squirrel made of tin / It’s in a crate of newspaper / Hibernating / Imagine you unpack it / And place it in the light / Imagine it is blinking / If it wasn’t made of tin it might

In nature, hibernating creatures emerge due to an increase in temperature rather than to sunlight, but we are talking here about a tin squirrel in a crate in your living room, so some license is allowed, unless you are happy to turn your heating off for as long as the tin toy remains packed in newspaper.

Another thing you can do with your squirrel is to tap it with your fingernails to elicit a tinny sound. If you have bitten fingernails, this may not be such an easily-achieved pleasure, so you may wish to experiment by tapping the toy with different utensils, such as a spoon or a fork or a whisk.

Real squirrels, ones not made of tin, are noted for their devotion to nuts of all kinds, and you can entertain the family by creating a tableau. Place your tin toy on, say, a windowsill, and attach some twigs and leaves to the window with sticky putty. Then scatter some nuts around your squirrel. It doesn’t much matter whether they are hazelnuts, Brazil nuts, or macadamia nuts, or indeed whatever nuts you happen to have bags of in your cupboard. Just cast them upon the windowsill, and gasp as a scene from the savage world of nature comes to life before your eyes.

Speaking of savagery, it may amuse you to set a predator upon your tin squirrel. Owls are particularly fond of sinking their fearsome talons into real squirrels and ripping them to pieces, but no owl I am aware of is likely to take the slightest interest in a squirrel made of tin, for reasons I hope are too obvious to need pointing out, particularly if you have been doing that recommended brain exercise, which ought to have pepped up the buzz and spark inside your cranium. A tin squirrel would be the quarry of a tin owl, so you will need to go to a toyshop that sells such a thing. If you have difficulty finding one, you can always fashion a toy owl out of a used baked bean tin, by bashing it into shape with a hammer and giving it the appearance of an owl with modelling paints or découpage. Clearly it will only make a believable tin predator if your toy squirrel is one of the smaller ones available. If you splashed out on the double-decker bus-sized tin squirrel you would be advised not to attempt to have it preyed upon by a tin owl, unless you have access to a scrap metal merchant and are skilled in the shaping of tin into birdlike shapes.

For more ideas on having fun with your tin squirrel, rummage through your local secondhand bookshop and see if you can find a copy of Dobson’s out of print pamphlet How I Conquered My Fear Of Googie Withers, Together With A Few Tips On The Limitless Possibilities For Entertainment Afforded By A Toy Squirrel Made Of Tin.

Recently discovered shoved into a potato sack in an outbuilding on a dismal farmyard, the manuscript entitled An Essay Concerning A Bird Perched On A Promontory has been authenticated as the work of Dobson. Why it was never published as a pamphlet is anybody’s guess. Still, it would be out of print by now, so it hardly matters. We are very pleased to have been granted permission, in the form of a grubby piece of paper pinned to an equally grubby piece of cardboard, to reprint an extract from the essay here. So without further ado:

Correct praxis in the matter of the observation of a bird perched upon a promontory is a matter of the utmost importance. When I told people I was going to make this the subject of a pamphlet, I was startled by the vituperation of their reactions. I had, it seemed, touched a nerve.

“For crying out loud, Dobson!” said one acquaintance, “Whatever other qualities you may possess, in terms of ornithological knowledge you are a profoundly ignorant man. Why, I doubt you even know the difference between a coot and a moorhen, let alone more exotic birds such as fork-tailed storm petrels, anhingas, blue-crowned motmots, godwits, loons, noddies, bobolinks and buff-collared nightjars. To save yourself from humiliation at the hands of the avian establishment you should abandon this project and instead write an essay on something you know about, such as the construction of yurts.”

This was fairly typical of the hostility I met with, but I laugh off such ill-informed abuse. I laugh it off melodramatically, as if I were a villain in a nineteenth century Italian operetta, Count Guido perhaps in Boffo’s La Scrappizziettante, my waxed moustachios twitching as I cackle and plunge a stiletto into the breast of the Cardinal in Act II, Scene 4. Such invective from those who doubt my ornithological expertise sways me not one jot from my path. It is worth mentioning at the outset of my essay, however, for reasons of both vanity and revenge. Well do I know the sound of the clanking chains of vengeance, for I have heard them often and anon. As for vanity, well, that is a dish I have gobbled up with gusto, like a particularly toothsome soup enriched with gourmet croutons. I regret to say that my pamphlet The First In A Series Of Twenty-Six Bagatelles Devoted To A Celebration Of The Humble Crouton is now out of print. I have not yet written the subsequent twenty-five pamphlets, for it seems more urgent to address praxis in the matter of bird-stroke-promontory observation.

Why should this be so? The plain fact is that, as I wander about the coastline of my bailiwick, I am often struck by the incompetent manner in which this activity is carried out. I dare say if we were dealing with a more trivial matter, such as, say, the buffing with a rag of a bobsleigh championship medal, or the invocation of an Aztec god, I would not bother my ugly large head about it. But what could be more important than observing birds perched upon promontories? Friddle your brain for as long as you wish, but I suggest you will, in the end, be forced to accept that the answer to that question is “Nothing”, or, better, “Nothing, Dobson, you are of course correct as always”.

So let us start from first principles. I am talking about trousers. If you are going to set out to look at a gull or a coot or a bufflehead by the edge of the vast and inexplicable sea, wear corduroys. It matters not if they are ill-fitting, baggy, big in the bottom, or even stained with stains of immoral besmirchment. You can’t go wrong in corduroys. While we are on the subject, it is widely believed that the textile is so named from the French “corde du roi”, that is, the cloth of the king. Utter twaddle. This and many other myths about fabrics are comprehensively exploded in my pamphlet A Disquisition Upon The Various Types Of Cloth From Which Trousers May Be Woven, Together With Some Pictures Of Hume Cronyn (out of print), where the corduroy question is addressed in a footnote on page 44, and again in the Envoi, where I quote liberally from the catalogues of textile manufacturing concerns from over sixteen different countries, so prodigious was my research when I buckled down to it after years of procrastination. I cannot count the number of ways I found to keep putting off doing the work I knew I was born to do. I took up hamster husbandry. I took needle and thread and darned things which did not need darning. I studied maps, my brow furrowed, with no intention of ever visiting the places so mapped. I trampled through gorse. I worked my way through the canon of traditional nursery rhymes and baked each pie mentioned therein. But eventually I saw sense and got down to work and went to the library and obtained a key to the basement where were kept all the textile manufacturing catalogues from many lands, and I read each and every one, making notes in my little notepad with my little note-making pencil, soon worn to a stub, alas, but not before I had garnered a mass of facts, and not just facts but unassailable facts, as if there is a difference when one considers the strict definition of a fact, as I did, and do, usually, unless I have not eaten enough breakfast and thus am prey to becoming a tad light-headed, as can happen on a Wednesday, for reasons I shall not go into here.

Thus tucked comfortably into a pair of corduroy trousers, the keen observer of birds perched upon promontories is ready to take the next step in the praxis. This involves combing one’s hair. It will be argued that there is little point combing one’s hair if one is to stride, hatless, out to the coast, where howling sea winds and squalls of spray will dishevel even the most carefully preened hairstyle. Such arguments hold no water with me, for I confess that in this area of personal grooming I am fanatical. It is true that I have not combed my own hair since I was ten years old, but that does not mean I cannot hand down absolute rules to the seething mass of humanity from aloft my Dobsonian perch, much like a Tsar issuing a ukase, and as mercilessly. For the purpose of moulding your mop into a neat and tidy state before going off to the promontory in hope of spotting a peewit or a swift or a Temminck’s lark, I recommend the use of a tortoiseshell comb with a decorative handle of filigree and bippety bip. I suppose, in extremis, a cheap plastic comb, one given away as a free gift with a cheap pair of socks, will do, if you are the sort of person who wears cheap socks. I know I am.

Earlier I said that I have heard the chains of vengeance clank. I repeat that here, for emphasis.

Stage three is, it has to be said, critical, and not for those faint of heart. With your ornithological kit stowed in your ornithological kitbag, you need to propel yourself from the homely comforts of your hearth out into the wilds, continuing on until you reach a suitably bird-haunted promontory. This may involve passing through fearsome and spooky forest, or across mist-enshrouded moors riddled with wolf-packs, or negotiating a big and busy motorway the underpasses of which have been flooded by recent tempests, or avoiding roadside bandits armed with staves and blunderbusses, or other such ordeals of the journeying soul. For all your patina of modernity, you might as well be a grunting savage toiling through the wastes ten thousand years ago, preparing to cast your uncomprehending eyes upon an elemental sight. For what could be more suggestive of the primitive, the pre-human, than a raven on a rock, or a bittern on a boulder, or an osprey on an outcrop, at the edge of the land, at the rim of the world, battered by the winds and staring out to sea?

I do not want you to answer that question, for it may be you have up your sleeve competing images, possibly involving oozing slime and pterodactyls, which render my own less than fab. That would never do. Remember who is the pamphleteer here, and who the reader.

I will assume you have reached a promontory, and that there is a bird perched upon it. Some swivel-eyed members of what we might call the bird-obsessed community will insist that you be able to identify what sort of bird you are looking at. They will want you to take in at a glance such features as the beak or bill and colouration and thickness of feathers and size and shape of head and wingy bits and arrive at a snap, if informed, judgement regarding bird type. God knows there are thousands upon thousands of specific bird types for your puny brain to compute, in that at-a-glance moment, and I suppose we can admire to some extent the person with impeccably-combed hair and corduroy trousers who announces “That is a cassowary” or “Oh look! Yonder upon the promontory perches a sandpiper”, but at the same time we should be aware that they are showing off, and are very likely the kind of bumptious birdy know-alls who would cut us dead at a cocktail party in an elegant drawing room. I hasten to add that I am not speaking from personal experience here, as I have never been treated with contempt by an ornithologist at any kind of party, cocktail or otherwise.

The only important thing, once you are standing near the promontory looking at a perching bird, is that you are clear it is a bird and not, say, a squirrel, or a lugworm, or a pebble. I have known many who, through incorrect praxis, have made such errors, and I cannot really blame the authorities for displaying giant photographs of them, with their names and addresses printed in big block capitals, on billboards and hoardings throughout the capital city, as part of the five year plan dubbed We Must Ridicule Citizens Lacking Knowledge Of Birds. This has been one of the most successful campaigns so far devised by the regime, and though its long term benefits, and indeed its short term benefits, are unfathomable, I for one would rather live on a diet of prunes than see it reversed.

I have had a few letters from readers asking me to explain the rules of the board game Dentist’s Potting Shed, which was mentioned in the piece Blodgett And Trubshaw. Now, I hate to disappoint, but I simply can’t be bothered to write pages and pages about what is, after all, a spectacularly dull game. Believe me when I tell you that if I started trying to explain to the beginner how to play Dentist’s Potting Shed, we would be here all day, and probably tomorrow too, and even then we would have got little further than the first chubbgut. I would of course have to try to explain the meaning of a chubbgut itself, and that is only one of numberless terms a player has to understand before the dice are even thrown. So I am afraid that on this occasion I am going to ignore my imploring readers. If you want to play Dentist’s Potting Shed, go and buy a set and read up on the rules yourself.

You might want to wait until next year, however, when a special edition is being released. On the sixth of February 2008, Hubermann’s will have in stock the Dentist’s Potting Shed Commemorative Edition Marking The Fiftieth Anniversary Of The Munich Air Disaster. This special set will include small plastic figurines of Duncan Edwards, Geoff Bent, Liam Whelan and the other “Busby Babes” who perished as a result of the crash. The figurines are not an integral part of the board game, so I think the idea is that you can display them on your mantelpiece, if you have a mantelpiece, or elsewhere, such as on a shelf, if you do not have a mantelpiece, and arrange them so that they appear to be watching the game of Dentist’s Potting Shed you will then proceed to play with your pals. Some may think it eerie to be watched over by footballers’ ghosts, in which case the figurines can be left to languish in the little thrum dimity bag provided.

Given the complexity and tedium of the game, it is hard to account for its popularity. Last year at Bodger’s Spinney, an international tournament attracted competitors from as far away as the Port of Tongs, and tickets to watch the final sold out within seconds. The tickets themselves have become collectors’ items, and I have to say they are very beautiful, as tickets go, cardboard and beige and cut just so. I have managed to amass six so far, at unholy cost, one from a beekeeping acquaintance, one abandoned in a nest of thorns, one sold to me by a ragamuffin, one stuck to a decoy duck in a pond, one I suspect to be a forgery and one I found being used as a bookmark in a secondhand copy of Dobson’s pamphlet What Planet Does Jeanette Winterson Live On? I did not go to the Dentist’s Potting Shed tournament myself, partly because as I have made clear I find the game unremittingly boring, but partly because I am terrified of ever going near Bodger’s Spinney again. It is almost three years to the day that last I lumbered towards the spinney, and still I shudder every time I recall the gigantic hobgoblins that jumped down from the trees and pursued me all the way back to Blister Lane. They were not only gigantic but crumpled and toothless and stained with vinegar and covered in arrowroot biscuit crumbs and sweat. Should you ever find yourself being chased away from a spinney or a copse by hobgoblins, pray it is not the ones who chased me on that grim November day.

Although I did not go to the tournament, I read every single press report I could find. I was less interested in the board game than in the possibility that the hobgoblins would disrupt things, scattering the dice and counters and cards and terrifying the players. But no matter how thoroughly I scoured the papers I discovered nothing hobgoblin-related. I could only assume that they had clambered back up into the trees and remained hidden in leafage, allowing the Dentist’s Potting Shed tournament to play itself out in the wind and the rain. I was perplexed by this until I read, the following spring, a lengthy article in the Bulletin Of Bodger’s Spinney Hobgoblin Behavioural Studies, written by an academic panjandrum, which explained everything in prose so crisp it took my breath away. If you want to read it too, look out for the issue of the Bulletin with a picture of Celine Dion on the cover.

I mentioned that I obtained one of my six tickets by buying it from a ragamuffin. What, you might think, was a ragamuffin doing in possession of such a prized piece of beautifully cut beige cardboard? I was certainly tempted to assume that the nipper had pickpocketed it. He was tiny and bony and as skinny as a pipe-cleaner, and it was easy to imagine him skittering, uncatchable, through busy city streets, dipping and snatching. Was I committing a crime by paying the ragamuffin for stolen goods? I did not like to think of myself as a fence, and I remained troubled until, a week after the exchange had taken place, I tracked him to the travelling circus of which he was an unlikely veteran. I learned that, from the age of just five months, he had been known as Howler Monkey Boy, and that his daredevil acrobatics, performed without a safety harness, were famed throughout the circus world. Ragamuffin he may have been, but he was no thief. He explained to me that one of his colleagues, a moustachioed nincompoop known as The Human Pencil Sharpener, was a besotted devotee of Dentist’s Potting Shed, had attended the tournament when the circus was encamped nearby in Scroonhoonpooge, and had given the ticket to the ragamuffin as a birthday present. Satisfied by this tale, relieved that I was not a fence, I stayed around to watch that evening’s circus performance. It was bloody fantastic, especially Howler Monkey Boy himself, at whose antics I gasped. I even got to have one of my own pencils sharpened by The Human Pencil Sharpener, whose teeth-marks can still be seen upon it, for I have not written with it since, instead keeping it in a little tin display crate on my mantelpiece, for I have a mantelpiece. If, next year, I succumb to the fad and buy the special edition of Dentist’s Potting Shed, I may have to move the tin crate to make room for the Busby Babes figurines. That will be a quandary, but I shall deal with it as best I can. What I might do is obtain a wooden panel and nail it up as a sort of mantelpiece extension. It would not look pretty, but it would create more display space, and who knows what further baubles and gewgaws I will want to add as the years pass?

And the years will pass, of course, and I am glad of that, for as each year passes I hope and pray that the memory of the Bodger’s Spinney hobgoblins pursuing me across the fields will one day begin to fade, and that there will come a time when I might sleep through the night without waking in terror, shuddering and screaming and scaring the wits out of my cat, Jeoffry. For I will consider my cat Jeoffry.

Another thing that happened when I was trudging around the autumnally glum seaside resort was that I received an unsolicited pancake hint. I had stopped to tighten a loose shoelace, near an ice cream kiosk. The kiosk was shut, it being blustery and cloud-louring and out of season. A biddy with a demented number of bags passed me by, stopped, and turned just as I was straightening up from my shoelace-tying exertions. In a mournful voice, she offered me a pancake hint, then went on her way.

This was not the first time I had been given a pancake hint at a seaside resort, and as I headed off towards the steep steps up to a lawn and a crazy golf facility, I cast my mind back to an earlier occasion. It was a different seaside resort, and a different pancake hint, but the weather was similar, and so, curiously, was the biddy, though this previous biddy had fewer bags about her person and we were nowhere near an ice cream kiosk.

That made two seaside-based pancake hints. You might think the making of pancakes is a simple matter and that I have been given two hints too many, but I disagree. Whenever I make pancakes I like to mull over the hints I have received, both that pair of seaside ones and other pancake hints given in wholly different circumstances, far inland. I would not claim always to act upon the hints, for I think we all tend towards our own habitual pancake-making techniques without really giving them much thought. Dobson was a glorious exception. He never made his pancakes in the same way twice. He would take a conscious pause as he approached his skillet, and summon to mind one of the numberless pancake hints stored in his throbbing cranium. How he selected the hint he was about to use is the subject of one of his most engaging pamphlets, On The Judicious And Non-Repeating Deployment Of Pancake Hints (out of print). Intriguingly, Dobson mentions in a footnote (page 9) that he also received one of his pancake hints at the seaside, though maddeningly he does not inform the reader at which resort. Mind you, nor have I, and in my case there are two seaside resorts you will be thumping your forehead against a solid panel in frustration that I have failed to divulge. But one day I plan to write my own pancake pamphlet, a sort of hommage to Dobson’s, and until then I am keeping mum.