Category Archives: Dobson

Blodgett And Trubshaw

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Blodgett had a certain militaristic cast to his character, so when he was given command of a pocket battleship it was understandable that he got slightly carried away. He fretted and fussed over his epaulettes and other trimmings of his uniform to a somewhat embarrassing degree, so much so that he neglected more critical aspects of his duty such as keeping a proper log. Thus it is that we do not have a reliable record of his one and only voyage.

This was a time of gunboat diplomacy, and Blodgett’s mission was to anchor his ship in a faraway bay, train his guns on the coast, and to threaten to blow the township there to smithereens unless certain conditions were met. All very straightforward, or it would have been had the ship not had for its navigator a man who had lost his wits. This fellow’s name was Trubshaw, and it is a wonder that he still had the confidence of the Admiralty, for he had been bonkers for years. Instead of steering the ship towards the faraway bay, Trubshaw pored over his charts and barked instructions through a pneumatic funnel that led to the ship becoming encased in pack ice thousands of nautical miles away from its proper destination. There was no township upon which to train the guns, leaving Blodgett at a loss what to do, other than to preen his epaulettes and other trimmings with a little brush.

Trubshaw, meanwhile, was following his own demented star. He took to pacing up and down the poop deck shouting at the sky. Icicles formed on the brim of his navigator’s cap, but he seemed impervious to the cold. Not so the rest of the crew, huddled below decks wrapped in blankets and keeping their spirits up by playing board games and eating sausages. Blodgett kept to his cabin, using his log as a pad for doodling. He had lost radio contact with the Admiralty weeks ago. There was nothing for it but to sit the winter out and wait for the ice to melt.

At this point, I expect the majority of readers will be avid for further details of the board games and the sausages, and I will not disappoint. However, before dealing with those crucial topics, perhaps it is wise to say a few more words about Trubshaw. His insanity was not in doubt, but what has never been established is whether he deliberately stranded the ship in Antarctic waters, or whether within the vaporous murk of his mad brain he honestly believed the ship was heading for that faraway bay. There may be a clue in the words he was shouting at the sky while pacing the poop deck, and by chance we do have a record, albeit fragmentary, of what they were, or some of them at least. By chance an airship packed to the gills with the very latest magnetic cylinder recording technology passed overhead one day, and some of Trubshaw’s shouting was picked up by its monitors and etched onto a cylinder, preserved forever. If you get a special coupon for entry to the sound recordings rooms of the Museum At-Or-Near-Ack-On-The-Vug, you can listen to this bewildering caterwaul. Dobson once planned a pamphlet on Blodgett’s voyage, and transcribed part of Trubshaw’s tirade, but abandoned the essay in favour of his justly famous Bilgewater Elegies. Thanks to Dobson, though, we can reprint the shouting, and gain an eerie insight into the crackbrained navigator pacing the poop deck of that ice-girt pocket battleship so many, many years ago.

“Wheat! Bulgar wheat!” begins the Dobson transcription, “Wheat and gravel and sand and grit! Powdered paste! Paste in puddles! Gravel and sand a-criminy! Pitch and tar and globules of black, black, blackened goo! Cracking pods squelching underfoot! Pods of ooze and glue! Pitted black olives in a jar, pitted and black like a black pit! Cracked bulgar wheat and cracking sand! Black pudding! Vinegar down your throat! Malt and muck underfoot in vast paste puddles of goo!”

It is difficult to know precisely what to make of this, except to conclude that Trubshaw was completely off his head and that, charts and barked instructions to the crew notwithstanding, navigation was not uppermost in his mind. That being so, we can get on to the more diverting business of the board games and the sausages, as promised.

The ship’s cook was a follower of the dietary theories of Canspic Ougat, and that being the case there was little if any animal flesh in his sausages. One might, when munching, occasionally sink one’s teeth into a fragment of pig or goat or starling, but only a tiny fragment, often so tiny as to go unnoticed. The cook made his sausages from an Ougat-approved compaction of mashed up turnips and marshland reeds and grasses, leavened with some sort of secret curd. They came in two sizes, jumbo and cocktail, although the latter were not served on cocktail sticks due to Ougat’s stern prohibition of sausage-piercing. Holes, even the very wee ones made by the average cocktail stick, were anathema to the dietician, for reasons propounded in the preface to his magisterial Codex Sausageiana. Even if you are not particularly interested in sausages, this book is a fantastic read, and I cannot recommend it too enthusiastically. I try to read a few paragraphs every day, much as some people dip daily into the Bible, or into Prudence Foxglove’s Winsome Thoughts For The Dull-Witted. Much of the ship’s cargo hold was occupied by the cook’s crates of sausage ingredients, and he was forever puffing and blustering about his galley, kneading the turnip and marshland reeds and grasses and secret curd and occasional bits of pig and goat and starling into the sausages in which he took such pride, inspecting every single one with a powerful microscope to ensure that it was free of even the most minuscule hole. And of course, the crew gobbled them down greedily at mealtimes, both jumbo and cocktail varieties, for they had nothing else to eat. That’s quite enough about sausages.

Blodgett had made it a condition of his command of the pocket battleship that it be stocked with lots and lots of board games. And so three entire cupboards below the orlop deck were stacked with them, from family favourites such as Plutocrat!, Dentist’s Potting Shed and To The Finland Station to more obscure games like Treat The Dropsy With Leeches, Butcher’s Shop Railings, and Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol Cement Running Track Challenge Cup Heat Four. On the rare occasions he popped his head into the cabin where the crew huddled together for warmth through that freezing polar winter, Blodgett was always pleased to see that they were kept fully occupied by one board game or another. The gang of sailcloth patchers took particular pleasure in Patch That Sail!, a fast and furious yet at times slow-moving game involving equal measures of cunning and luck. The board itself represented a piece of sailcloth, and indeed was made of sailcloth, and the players took it in turns, by throwing dice and moving their counters, to patch up the various rips and rents in the cloth with needle and thread. Meanwhile, over in one corner of the cabin, Blodgett was sure to find the crows’ nest men playing a sprightly game of Groaning Widow, a contest so fiendishly complicated that only the superior brainpans of the crows’ nest men had a chance of understanding it. Other, less bright sailors would watch, gawping, for hours, as counters flew around the board, spinners were spun, card-packs consulted, and little plasticine models of characters from The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann were put in place, knocked over, taken to pieces, remodelled, repainted, and had the heads pulled off them and substituted with special bonus tokens. Only a fresh pan of sausages from the galley would interrupt the crows’ nest men’s concentration, when they would sulkily take a break to feed, having taken snapshots of the board from several different angles to prevent cheating.

And so the winter wore on, until one day the ice melted away and the pocket battleship sailed home. Trubshaw had abandoned ship by this time, stomping off across the ice floes in curiously subdued fashion, no longer shouting at the sky, his face barely visible behind the thick row of icicles dangling from the brim of his cap, stooping occasionally to pluck some kind of primitive edible life form from the cold, cold sea with his fur-bemittened fist. Blodgett watched from the prow of the battleship as his navigator vanished into the white nothingness. Weeks later, they began the return voyage, guided by the stars, which one of the crows’ nest men knew how to read.

Blodgett was of course hauled before an Admiralty Star Chamber to account for himself. Why had he failed to sail to the faraway bay for a spot of gung ho gunboat diplomacy? He burbled and babbled and preened his epaulettes and other trimmings, but at no point did he ever mention Trubshaw. He had even expunged the navigator’s name from the list of crew pinned up on a post at the entrance to the Star Chamber, and inevitably there was no reference to Trubshaw in Blodgett’s hopelessly inadequate captain’s log. Which, I suppose, begs the question: did Trubshaw ever actually exist? Or was he a wraith or phantom, or even a ghoul, of the kind known to haunt ships of the line as they ply the oceans, sailing round and round and round, into the maelstrom?

Readers’ Letters

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Dear Frank, writes Jonathan Coleclough, I recently attended an illustrated lecture at the History of Reading Society on the subject of chalk mining in Reading. I was delighted to see that the first screen of the presentation was a quote about brick manufacture with the single-word attribution “Dobson”. From that point on I was confident I would have a good evening. I wasn’t disappointed.

The subject of chalk mining is of interest in this area, as the enclosed photo illustrates.

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Dobson’s SWAT Team

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One wintertime, in a period when he was watching far too many action films, Dobson decided that he wanted to have his own SWAT team, to deploy as the fancy took him. Marigold Chew pointed out to the pamphleteer that this latest notion of his was particularly demented. She asked him where he expected to billet his team, how he proposed to pay them, in what delusional circumstances he might order them out on a mission, and, crucially, what resources he had to ensure they were given a thorough debriefing, with access if necessary to post-traumatic stress disorder counselling. Dobson replied with a series of low grunting noises, before clambering into his new oversized Uruguayan fair trade kagoul and crashing out into the downpour. The kagoul was second-hand, stained and rent in many places, but it was new to Dobson and he thought he cut a dash in it, though of course he did not, for Dobson rarely if ever cut a dash, and then only by accident.

As he trudged along the canal towpath into town, Dobson composed in his fuming brain the advertisement he planned to place in the “Situations Vacant” column of the Evening Sofa & Last Trump. It duly appeared, remarkably free of misprints, a few hours later.

Wanted. SWAT team to carry out engagements on behalf of out of print pamphleteer. Some of the missions may be perilous. Applicants should be armed to the teeth and preferably dressed from head to foot in black, with big black boots and shiny black helmets with visors. You will be able to give a full account of the vitality of your pneuma, in the ancient Greek sense of the fiery essence in the air, the creative and animating spirit drawn into the body through the lungs and generating your innate heat. Benefits include free pamphlets and lots of smoking breaks.

It did not escape Marigold Chew’s notice that the advertisement failed to address any of the questions she had raised with Dobson earlier. That evening, on the way to a peasant theatre adaptation of Airport Chaplain, she tried a different tack.

“Assuming for a moment that a sufficient tally of persons with vibrant pneuma apply to be on your SWAT team, Dobson,” she said, “What sort of missions do you intend to send them on?”

“SWAT team missions!” replied Dobson, excitedly, as their tram ploughed through a puddle of ice, “Missions that will test their valour and grit as well as their pneuma!”

Pressed to supply just one tiny example before they arrived at the dilapidated barn that had been converted by goateed trust fund gits into a “performance space”, Dobson suggested that he would deploy his SWAT team in the event of a calamitous tram collision resulting in dozens of dead and injured tram passengers. Marigold Chew pointed out that as there was but a single tram that plied the tram tracks of the town, no such collision could take place. Dobson countered that the tram might collide with a bus. Marigold Chew pointed out that the timetables and routes of the tram and the bus had been designed with just such a calamity in mind, and so clever had the planning been that a collision of bus and tram was both theoretically and physically impossible. Dobson thought she said “implausible” and clutched at that straw for a few seconds until corrected. He then aired the idea that the tram might collide with wild roaming cows. Marigold Chew was forced to admit that wild roaming cows did sometimes roam wildly through the town, and could conceivably roam wildly into the path of the oncoming tram. Dobson looked smug. Marigold Chew then landed the killer punch by asking Dobson pointedly what his pneuma-inspired SWAT team would do if sent to intervene in a scene of smashed-up tram and the tangled and bloody bodies of tram passengers and wild roaming cows dead, dying, wounded, scarred, fractured, and hysterical. Dobson had not thought beyond the excitement of his SWAT team descending on cables from their whirring helicopter, and had no ready reply. But at the very moment that he was going to improvise some unconvincing flimflam, the tram clanked to a halt next to the dilapidated barn, and the conversation was forgotten as both Dobson and Marigold Chew alighted in the snow and rummaged in their pippy bags for their Airport Chaplain tickets.

Remarkably, in the ensuing weeks, Dobson received several applications from SWAT team wannabes. It is to his credit that he granted each one a lengthy interview, less so that irrespective of what they said he rejected them all on the grounds that their pneuma was deficient. One hopeful felt crushed by Dobson’s decision, called on him armed with documentary evidence of absolutely fantastic pneuma, and became belligerent. Marigold Chew set the crows on him and he fled. The following spring, he and Dobson passed each other in the street. They spat at each other.

Toffee Apple Wrapper Saved From The Flames

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It is almost four years since the Hooting Yard website made its debut, and in that time it is fair to say that I have built a reputation as something of an authority on the out of print pamphleteer Dobson. As a result, I find myself fielding a bewildering number of messages on my metal tapping machine from Dobsonists around the world. The range of enquiries is quite astonishing, and evidence of the continued relevance of this towering figure of 20th century pamphleteering. On more than one occasion I have been asked to provide a digest of the calls that come in, and my replies, but I am afraid that is not possible, for after scribbling on the back of a toffee apple wrapper each query and my learned response, I dispose of them in a cauldron of flaming pitch. Otherwise I would be up to my ears in toffee apple wrappers, and lack dignity.

As a special treat, however, I decided to save one sample enquiry from destruction, and duly present it here, together with my reply.

Dear Mr Key, wrote a correspondent from the picturesque Essex seaside resort of Jaywick, I wonder if you can set my mind at rest regarding a biographical detail. Was our Dobson the Dobson of the financial services consultants Pricewaterhousebaileydobsoncoopercooperhateful which, as is well known, attempted an unsuccessful leveraged buy-out of Hubermann’s department store in 1971?

The simple answer to this is : No, he was not. In fact, the very idea of Dobson obtaining a position for which even a vague knowledge of finance was desirable has me laughing like a drain. Interestingly, however, the pamphleteer may have been as qualified as anyone else to adorn the boardroom of the company. I always research my replies to correspondents with thoroughness and rigour, and in delving into this one I discovered some striking facts. Note that the bid for Hubermann’s was unsuccessful: therein lies a clue. What I found, toiling away in the cuttings library of the Pointy Town Bugle & Cruncher, was that neither Pricewater, nor House, nor Bailey, nor the Dobson who was a different Dobson, nor Cooper, nor the second Cooper, nor Hateful had the faintest idea what a “leveraged buy-out” was. Half of them were scurrying about looking for a lever, one like Hazel Blears’ central lever, while the other half were tapping sap from a pugton tree in Bodger’s Spinney. They collected the sap, each in his own pail, and carted it back to their headquarters in time for an important meeting with the Hubermann’s people. As one of the Coopers remarked later from his prison cell, “We couldn’t find the damned lever, our bank accounts were empty, and the police dogs were snapping at our heels, but we had plenty of pugton sap!” Much good it did them.

Well, there you go. I think now you can understand why I burn all those toffee apple wrappers.

Plotinus, Porphyry, Dobson, Chew, Willis

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Plotinus, the philosopher of ancient Greece who gave us the six Enneads, had atrocious handwriting, did not properly separate individual words, and did not bother himself with the niceties of spelling. His student Porphyry, who edited, polished and arranged the Enneads for publication, had the thankless preliminary task of transcribing Plotinus’ shoddy and near-illegible scribbles. That was almost two thousand years ago, yet in many ways it describes perfectly the working relationship that obtained between Dobson and Marigold Chew. The out of print pamphleteer had an abysmal scrawl, possibly because of the unusual way he clutched his pencil, like a monkey with a pin-cushion. It may be difficult to make sense of that simile, but go and lie down in a darkened room and screw your eyes tightly shut and everything will become clear. For salvaging any clarity at all from Dobson’s notebooks, we have Marigold Chew to thank. Without her, not one of those majestic pamphlets would ever have been tucked lovingly on to the shelves of a motorway service station or airport bookstall.

Among much that they had in common, Porphyry and Marigold Chew were excellent proofreaders, capable of spotting the tiniest error and correcting it. This is not a job you would give to the American cinema player Bruce Willis. Mr Willis is apparently a keen contributor to blogs and chatrooms, and when other readers pointed out his many infelicities of grammar and spelling, he issued the immortal retort “proofreading is for pussies”. He will not be considered for a work experience placement at Hooting Yard.

Colossus

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It has been said that Dobson, the out of print pamphleteer, bestrode the 20th century like a colossus. This claim was first made by Dobson himself, when still a young man. At the age of twenty, he published a pamphlet resoundingly titled Why I Shall Bestride This Century Like A Colossus. It is a curious work, out of print of course, a thin tract with a picture of a whooper swan on the cover. It begins thus:

I shall bestride this century like a colossus. My name will ring out like a clarion. In years to come, whenever two or three are gathered together to discuss pamphleteers, there will be but one name on their lips: Dobson!

Such self-belief, in so callow a youth, is touching. Looking back, in his dotage, Dobson found it touching too, and he took to sitting with his one remaining copy of the pamphlet clutched to his chest, sobbing uncontrollably for hours on end. When Marigold Chew found him thus, she flung open the windows, whatever the weather, and stamped around the room singing loud, tuneless sea shanties, ones that involved pirates, cutlasses, bilgewater, tattered sailcloth, salt, seaweed, hard tack biscuits, foghorns, sirens, rigging, anchors, and shipwreck. Invariably, Dobson’s self-pitying lassitude would be broken, and he would hurl the curiously pristine pamphlet towards the fireplace, wipe away his tears, don his Bolivian military boots and his Stalinist cardigan, and crash out of the house to go on one of his jaunts.

Dobson’s jaunts, in the latter part of his life, usually took him to the nearest pig sty, but there was one occasion when he headed off in a different direction. He walked so far that day that he came upon a shining city on a hill, a city where all the streets had two names, one both illegible and unpronounceable, and the other devised by Yoko Ono as part of an art project to promote world peace. Postal delivery persons in that city were required by law to learn all the double street names by heart, or to face summary dismissal if they failed. Often, those who did fail – and there were many – would flounce around on the outskirts of the city warning travellers away. It was a paltry sort of revenge, and seldom succeeded, for the delights of that shining city on a hill attracted wayfarers from near and far, daily, in their thousands. It is a wonder that Dobson had never been there before this particular Tuesday.

A dismissed postal delivery person stopped the out of print pamphleteer as he was about to cross a pontoon bridge that would take him in to the most boisterous quarter of the city.

“Go no further, old man,” said this vengeful figure, whose yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath. His hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and his straight black lips. His voice was booming and monotonous, empty of human expression and lacking any variation in tone or cadence. “This city you approach is no place for out of print pamphleteers.”

Ever sensitive to warnings from spooks and wraiths, Dobson turned around and went home. He found Marigold Chew in the back garden, drilling holes in an enormous sheet of corrugated cardboard.

“I was warned away from a shining city on a hill,” he said, “Is it a city you have visited?”

Marigold Chew stopped drilling, reset the safety catch, and removed her protective goggles.

“You are a foolish old man in your dotage, Dobson,” she said, though there was kindness in her voice, “And it is well you were warned away, for that city you think you saw is illusory. Some say the hill it sits atop is hollow, and harbours within it heaven, and some say hell. Either way, I am pleased to see you home. Let us clear the nettles from the vegetable patch.”

That was what happened on that Tuesday towards the end of the 20th century. Did Dobson indeed bestride it as a colossus? He was not the only person to think so, but the names of the others escape me for the time being. When I remember them, I will tell you.

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That piece, an earlier version of which first appeared last year, has been chosen as a set text for the entrance examinations to Bodger’s Spinney Infant School. Here are some sample questions likely to be faced by the tiny candidates:

1. Imagine you are the dismissed postal delivery person who encounters Dobson by the pontoon bridge. Would you have handled the situation in the same way? Think about what you would have said to the out of print pamphleteer, then translate it into Latin.

2. Do you think Yoko Ono’s unnecessary double-naming of the streets in the shining city on the hill would make a significant contribution to world peace? Give reasons for your answer in terse, cogent prose, then translate that into Latin too.

3. Give a brief account of the career of David Blunkett, with special reference to his second resignation speech and tearful use of the phrase “the little lad”. Or was that the first resignation speech?

4. If you could bestride a century like a colossus, which century would you choose so to bestride, and why? Extra marks will be awarded if you turn pale, gnaw the end of your pencil in desperation, and crumple to the floor, twitching and shattered.

The Tale Of The Boffin And The Guttersnipe

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A boffin was pouring bleach into a funnel when along came a guttersnipe.

“How now, boffin,” said the guttersnipe, “I am but a poor guttersnipe and for raiment I have only rags, as you can see. If I become a boffin’s assistant I can cover these rags with a fine white coat and then I shall not be spat upon by citizens as I toil along the lanes of this shining yet merciless city. Can I pour that tinted bleach into the funnel for you? Then you would be free to go and take a nap, or to think higher thoughts.”

Now as it happened, the boffin had been thinking how useful it would be to have an assistant. Yet the words of the guttersnipe set him atrembling, and he had to steady his hands as he continued to pour the blue tinted bleach into the funnel.

“Your offer is most welcome, young scalliwag,” he replied, mistaking the guttersnipe for a scalliwag, “But I fear I must decline. Let me explain why, while I pour the rest of this cobalt blue tinted bleach into, or rather through, my funnel. I had a very privileged upbringing. I grew up in a castle on the coast. Gulls, guillemots and stormy petrels perched on the windowsill of my nursery. My parents employed numerous servants. As a boffin’s assistant, you would be a sort of servant. Ma and Pa were unfailingly kind to me, but they mistreated their valets and maids and pages and cooks and chauffeurs and biddies etcetera etcetera terribly. One was confined to an oubliette and fed with contaminated lemon curd. One was thrown into the sea in a sack. Another had his head kicked in. A butler named Jarvis had his reputation sullied through gross defamation of his character. One of the maids was trampled under the huge thumping feet of Pa’s robot brontosaurus. All of them were regularly beaten with shovels. One was forbidden ever to wash his hair. One was made to sprint back and forth to the post office, repeatedly, despite being in the desperate stages of an ague. None of them were permitted raincoats. A Cyclopean page was ridiculed. Another page was torn limb from limb, tied to a quartet of wild stallions. The underbutler had his shoelaces destroyed. One was burned with flaming tongs. They were all made to sleep in a dank and dingy cave at the foot of the cliffs. Ma hacked into one parlourmaid’s computer and left it riddled with viruses. Another was upbraided in the presence of a priest. One was cast adrift in rough seas in a boat made of concrete. A hairy gardener was sent off to a zoo. When any of the servants died, their corpses were hung on gibbets and left to rot. No cruelty was beyond Ma and Pa. I vowed, when I reached adulthood, that I would never have a servant of my own, for fear of what I might be capable of. That is why I am pouring this thick cobalt blue tinted bleach into the funnel myself, even though my towering intellect would be better engaged cogitating upon the deepest profundities of existence, as you so judiciously suggest.”

The guttersnipe nodded, and limped sadly away. Later, by a pond, he wept, for in his short and brutish life he had never encountered a boffin of such moral rectitude.

Source : Mawkish Fables Of Punctilio And Rectitude For Tiny Tots by Dobson (out of print).

Modern Snipe

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Now, where was I? Away in a haze, probably. But I really must tell you about the time Dobson wangled himself a job on Modern Snipe magazine. It is a wonder that a pamphleteer with so shaky a grasp of ornithology should seek employ on such a title, but Dobson had his reasons. Well, reason. In the course of a conversation with a regular down at the Cow & Pins, Dobson learned that the name of the editor of Modern Snipe was an anagram of Marigold Chew, and he chose to see in this some sort of mystical significance. Ten minutes later, he was hammering in a decidedly non-mystical manner on the office door of Grimlaw Chode.

The offices of Modern Snipe were at that time a suite of rooms on the top floor of a massive and efficient laundry building. Steam billowed from open windows and pipes and ducts, and an overpowering odour of boiling shirts and soap powder pervaded the neighbourhood. Never the most observant of men, Dobson did not look up as he approached to see if any birds perched on the roof, but had he done so he would have seen but a solitary crow, and not a snipe in sight.

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We do not know how Dobson convinced Grimlaw Chode to take him on at once as a special rapporteur, but we do know that Chode, like the United Nations, was given to bandying about the word rapporteur rather than reporter. There was no element of pretension in this. Chode came from a family of international diplomats, and had modelled the editorial structure of Modern Snipe on that of a mixture of huge transnational organisations, of which the UN was only one. OPEC and CAFCON and SMERSH were in there, too. He gave Dobson a blue helmet to wear, and told him to go away and write something exciting about snipe.

It is tempting here to veer off into a digression about Dobson and hats, a topic of endless fascination to some of us. But I fear things would get out of hand, particularly if I began to babble on about Dobson’s Homburg, itself a single hat that evokes a world of allusions and references, from James Mason to Procol Harum. Better that we address such matters at another time, and content ourselves now with the image of the pamphleteer trudging home along the towpath of the canal, a gleaming blue helmet atop his cranium, and the brain inside that cranium throbbing with an inchoate tangle of cerebral gibberish, at the dim centre of which lurked the signal fact that Dobson knew nothing whatsoever about snipe.

Marigold Chew was in the back garden, training bees at the trellis, when the pamphleteer arrived home. He tossed his blue helmet onto a hat-peg with surprising aplomb, and sat down immediately at his escritoire. Pencil sharpened and with a fresh notebook open before him, he wrote:

How fine a bird the snipe is! But first, consider this: he who wishes for the cloths of heaven may find his hopes dashed and his garb but rags and tatters. Yet there be not woe in this, for is it not the stamp of such a man that he looks out upon a darkling plain and pitches forth his wishes into a well where one day pennies will be spilled?

At this point Marigold Chew came in from the garden. She had one of her trained bees on her shoulder, like a pirate’s miniature parrot. “What on earth is that blue helmet hooked on to the hat-peg?” she asked. Dobson explained.

Marigold Chew was aghast. “I have nothing but admiration for your talents as a penny-catch-all pamphleteer,” she announced, as her trained bee swapped shoulders, “But the job of special rapporteur on Modern Snipe will prove your undoing!” And she swept dramatically out of the door, and headed off in the rain to Huberman’s department store, to make enquiries about bee baskets. Dobson returned to his notebook.

As your special rapporteur, he scribbled, it is my job to bring to readers new and unexpected perspectives on the travails of the modern snipe. That much I shall do, without fear. I once had custody of a clairvoyant pig, and in a very short time it taught me many things. One lesson I recall was sweet indeed. At that time I was fond of wearing my Homburg hat. It was the hat I wore when studying the Hittites, and now I wore the hat to study the pig. One day, walking across a field with the pig in tow, I stopped to mop my brow, and removed my hat and placed it on a stone. At once, out of the sky swooped a big-beaked bird and perched upon my Homburg. Was it a snipe? It may have been. I looked at the bird, and then I turned to look at the pig, and I realised with a start that the pig saw neither me nor the bird, for being a clairvoyant pig it could see only the future, centuries hence, when where we stood was a darkling plain, and the spot where I laid my hat was a deep dark well, at the bottom of which was a mountain of pennies chucked in hope by generation upon generation of the disappointed. And I further realised that all that hope was embodied in the form of the bird perched on my Homburg. And I affirm that, yes, it was a snipe.

The last sentence was a complete lie, of course, as Dobson could affirm no such thing. But he was extremely pleased with his initial foray in to the heady world of contemporary ornithological journalism. Slapping the blue helmet back on his head, he stuffed the notebook into his satchel and crashed out of the door. On the canal towpath, he met Marigold Chew. She was carrying half a dozen bee baskets and the evening newspaper.

“Look at this,” she said.

Dobson read the headline on the just-published Evening Dachshund. He was not a man who often goggled, but he goggled now. SNIPE MAN SLAIN, it read. Within the last hour, Grimlaw Chode had been shot dead. By a sniper. And so ended Dobson’s career as a birdy rapporteur.

Up In The Mountains

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Dobson and Marigold Chew were up in the mountains. Dobson was wearing an ill-advised cravat, while Marigold Chew sported a leopardskin pillbox hat. They were in pursuit of a murderer, reported to have taken refuge in the mountains. Their purpose was to persuade the murderer to repent his killing spree. They had no interest in bundling him back down from the mountains to face earthly justice. They simply wanted him to repent.

The murderer was Babinsky. Heavy of moustache and lumbering of gait, he had prowled the streets of Pointy Town in darkness before a botched slaying panicked him and he took to the mountains. The mountains were teeming with bears. Many, many, many of the bears were afflicted with lupus, a particular form of ursine lupus common in that mountainous region. You might think that lupine animals like wolves would be more prone to lupus than ursine animals like bears, but as I just pointed out, this was a strain of ursine lupus, not lupine lupus. There were few wolves in the mountains, but they were for the most part tremendously hale and healthy wolves.

Lupus, neither ursine nor lupine but human, is an unaccountably popular disease in the television medical drama House M.D. Intriguingly, Dobson and Marigold Chew had arranged their trip to the mountains by buying tickets from a travel agency named Foreman, Cameron & Chase. These are the names of Dr House’s young assistants. In a further twist so improbable that it could almost be fictional, the conductor on the train that brought them to the station at the mountain foothills was a man called Cuddy Wilson. Cuddy and Wilson are, as it happens, the other two main characters in House M.D. Not only that, but with his huge lugubrious moustache and lumbering gait, the train conductor’s resemblance to the killer Babinsky was startling. There had been an unfortunate incident on the train, in the dining car, when a gung ho Dobson had removed his ill-advised cravat and tried to shove it into the conductor’s mouth to incapacitate him and place him under arrest, thinking he was Babinsky. This was despite the warning words of Marigold Chew, alert to one or two subtle features of Cuddy Wilson’s physiognomy which differed from that of the fugitive maniac. Dobson was lucky not to be thrown off the train, for it so happened that the conductor was an adept of Goon Fang, and he had no trouble at all disarming Dobson of the ill-advised cravat and crumpling him into the helpless posture known as Pong Gak Hoon, in which he spent the remainder of the journey. Thus, upon arrival at the mountain foothills, the pamphleteer was unable to think straight because he had missed his breakfast, and valuable hours were lost as he insisted on stopping at a snackbar where he stuffed himself with bloaters and Special K and sausages.

Let us treat ourselves to a bird’s eye view of the terrific mountains. If we imagine we are hovering directly above them, hundreds of feet in the air, at cloud level perhaps, we can draw a triangle between three points. Call them A, B and C. At A, we have the snackbar in the foothills, wherein we find Dobson and Marigold Chew. At B, we have an encampment of mountain bears, many stricken with ursine lupus. And at C, the killer Babinsky, taking shelter in a declivity that might be a crevasse, high in the mountains, examining the contents of his knapsack, packed in a panic as he made his getaway from Pointy Town. Had Babinsky read Dobson’s uncharacteristically useful pamphlet Never Pack A Knapsack In A Panic (out of print), he would not have been in the pickle in which he now found himself. Dobson did not write the pamphlet specifically to advise homicidal fugitives from earthly justice who had fled into the mountains, and the majority of tips in its twenty pages have a more general application. Indeed, one of the few positive reviews the pamphleteer ever received in his lifetime came from a notice in Big Sturdy Boots, the journal of the Bodger’s Spinney Hiking Club, whose anonymous critic praised the pamphlet for its “judicious good sense and greaseproof paper wrapping”. The writer’s only caveat was Dobson’s exclusive use of the word knapsack, which it was felt could cause offence to those who preferred the terms haversack and rucksack. Younger readers should note that in those days the barbaric backpack had not yet sullied the language.

So there at point C, the disconsolate Babinsky rummaged among the items he had packed panic-stricken into his knapsack. Instead of useful things like a compass and pemmican and string, he found that he had a paperback Gazetteer Of Basoonclotshire, a tattered pincushion innocent of pins from which half the stuffing had fallen out, a photograph of a pig, two corks, an unpaid gas bill, a badge from Richard Milhous Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign when he ran against Hubert Humphrey, several small and purposeless cloth pods, a rusty whisk, a paper bag full of bent or otherwise damaged fountain pen nibs, the packaging from a black pudding he had eaten just before he killed the toothless vagrant of Pointy Town, hair dye, a plasticine starling, much dust, a cardboard tag or tab or label on which some unknown functionary had scribbled the word pointless, a beaker caked with mould, another beaker with a gash in its base, a sleeveless and warped 12” picture disc of Vienna, It Means Nothing To Me by Ultravox, whittled twigs, scrunched-up dishcloths, the gnawed bones of a weasel, or possibly a squirrel, feathers, a pictorial guide to cephalopods, someone else’s illegible address book, an empty carton of No Egg, more dust, more feathers, more bones, and a syringe containing a goodly amount of ursine lupus antidote. Having neatly laid out all this rubbish on a ledge in the declivity or crevasse where he squatted, Babinsky stuffed it all back into his knapsack, made the knapsack a pillow, lay splayed out on his back, and fell asleep.

Meanwhile, over at point B on our triangle, the many, many, many bears, both those with ursine lupus and those without, were also fast asleep, and had been for some hours. It was as if they had been engulfed by some sort of narcoleptic gas, but those with knowledge of the mountains, and of the mountain bears, would tell you that there was nothing to worry about. It was simply a case of an encampment of sleeping bears, high in the mountains, who would eventually wake up. Down in the foothills, village folk might tell stories about the mysterious experiments going on in the Pneumatic Institution for Inhalation Gas Therapy, but they knew not whereof they spoke, for they were peasants rather than scientists, and thus their expertise was in such matters as slurry and pigswill and barnyard maintenance rather than in exciting gas activity. In any case, by skipping along to point A, one would find Dobson and Marigold Chew in the snackbar, wide awake and intently planning their next steps in tracking down the killer Babinsky and making him repent.

Ever resourceful, Marigold Chew had brought her Ogsby Steering Panel to facilitate the search. Neither she nor Dobson could be said to be natural mountaineers, both of them more at home on flat surfaces such as ice rinks and tidal plains. Yet they had a sense of overwhelming duty to make the killer repent, preferably on his knees, or sprawled on the ground in a posture of abject grovelling, not unlike Pong Gak Hoon, from which Dobson was only just recovering with the help of the tremendous snackbar breakfast menu. So enthusiastically was he stuffing his gob that Marigold Chew began to wonder if her paramour would be too bloated to clamber in sprightly fashion up into the mountains before nightfall. She was well aware, even if Dobson was not, that at night-time these mountains were both eerie and perilous, for all those years ago she had paid attention in the prefabricated schoolroom when Miss Hudibras taught the important Key Stage 4 Sprightly Clambering In Mountains At Night learning module.

And it will be night, star-splattered and moonstruck, before the three corners of our triangle are each set in motion, and begin, ever so slowly but implacably, to converge upon each other, the triangle twisting, warping like Babinsky’s Ultravox record, shrinking. Dobson and Marigold Chew, the killer Babinsky, and many, many, many bears, including those stricken with ursine lupus, will meet, in the most desolate hour of the night, up in the mountains, at a spot we can call point D. And here at point D, as if awaiting them, bashed firmly into the hard compacted snow, stands an upright cylinder of reinforced plexiglass, sealed with a rubber cork. It is one of a number of cylinders placed here and there in the mountains by boffins from the Pneumatic Institution for Inhalation Gas Therapy. And as the peasants down in the foothills could tell you, as they pause in their doings with slurry and pigswill and barnyard maintenance, only the devil knows what some of those boffins are up to. And as I can tell you, even though I am no devil, there were rogue elements among the boffins, bad boffins, and one such boffin had, just yesterday, filled the cylinder at point D with a new and terrible and loathsome gas which, when uncorked, would fell all living things within a twenty yard radius, crumple them as if they had been placed in the Pong Gak Hoon posture beloved of Goon Fang adepts like the Babinsky-double train conductor, and their brains would be modified in gruesome and unseemly ways. And then, as the gas dispersed into the clear mountain air, as dawn broke, each of them would awaken, Dobson and Marigold Chew, the killer Babinsky, and many, many, many bears, including those stricken with ursine lupus, and to each of them the world would seem raw, different, alive with new tangs and hues and vapours, and the three points of the triangle would slowly move apart, relentlessly, forever, as if they had never, ever converged.

Tidy Is As Tidy Does

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Dobson was an excessively tidy man. He firmly believed the old saw which insists there is a place for everything, and everything in its place. Thus, he kept sweets in jars, and jars on shelves in cupboards. This despite his loathing of confectionery. When asked why he stored so many sweets, including humbugs, toffees and jammy teardrops, in labelled jars on labelled shelves in labelled cupboards, Dobson blustered and tried to change the subject.

“Oh look,” he might say, pointing out of the window, “A mother shrike with her shrikelets,” or “What would you say were the chief causes of the Boxer Rising?” In the latter example, he would not bother pointing out the window, but might furrow his brow, as if he had been pondering the topic for some time.

This sneaky yet transparent technique worked surprisingly often. Few people, other than Marigold Chew, felt confident enough in the pamphleteer’s presence to challenge Dobson. The explanation for this lies not in any personal magnetism or force of personality. In fact, for the life of me I cannot think why he got away with his preposterous behaviour.

Cutlery alignment in cutlery drawers was another type of tidiness which exercised the great man. At particularly fraught times he was known to align and realign the cutlery in the cutlery drawer ten times an hour. Sometimes he would be halfway along the path to the pond to commune with swans, then turn on his heel and stamp back into the house to attend to the knives and forks. Nowadays, of course, some pop psychologist would make a television documentary asserting that Dobson suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder, but I think we can safely reject such a notion. It is not as if he was washing his hands every five minutes, or going doolally at the sight of glitter. Indeed, he ought probably to have washed his hands more often. They were invariably ink-splattered and grubby in other ways, particularly if he had been down by the pond with the swans. No, I think we can rely on Dobson’s own account of the cutlery issue, which he addressed in a pamphlet entitled Keeping Cutlery Aligned Tidily In The Cutlery Drawer As An Absolute Imperative If One Aspires To Be Fully Human (out of print). For reasons I need not go into here, hardly anybody has ever bothered to read this middle-period work. The prose is clogged and clunky, the views expressed idiotic, and when typesetting it Marigold Chew chose so tiny a font that the average reader needs an extremely powerful magnifying glass to decipher the text.

Oh, forgive me, I just went into the reasons why hardly anybody has ever bothered to read this middle-period work. Dobson would ascribe that little slip to the fact that the cutlery in my cutlery drawers is chaotic and askew. Am I not, then, fully human? And if not, what am I? Partly ape? Perhaps I would be able to answer those questions if I myself had read the pamphlet, but I confess I have not done so. My eyesight is not up to it. I could, perhaps, employ some bright-eyed literate youngster to read it to me, a perky little brainbox uncowed by Latin tags and arcane references and paragraphs that go on and on and on for twelve pages or more, by clogged and clunky prose and idiotic views, but where would I find such a creature? I suppose I could take a stroll in the rain down to the nearest community hub, but that would be the act of a desperate man. Better by far, surely, either to accept my semi-human status, to give vent to my inner ape and to stuff my face with bananas and nuts, or conversely to go and align the cutlery in the cutlery drawer with Dobsonian precision and thus destroy the ape that lurks within me. It is a simple choice, and one I shall not shirk from making.

Soap Flakes In A Box

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Dear Mr Key, writes Tim Thurn, I couldn’t help noticing that in the piece about fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol’s training regime, Dobson repeatedly refers to “soap flakes in a box”, without telling us which brand of soap flakes the champion sprinter used. This is a pity. I cannot be alone among your readers in having world-shuddering sporting ambitions, and I try to replicate the fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol approach in every particular. I have gone so far as to make my coach wear an East European raincoat and to chain smoke at the side of the track while I scamper round it. I grant you that she looks absolutely nothing like Old Halob, and is about half a century younger than he was at his peak, but you’d be surprised how effective the illusion can be, especially when she starts hawking up gobbets of phlegm just like the cantankerous old rogue.

Incidentally, I am on the lookout for a black Homburg she can wear to make her look even more like Old Halob, so if any of your readers know where I might get a genuine 1940s Homburg, perhaps they could contact me through your Comments section. I’m afraid I do not know my coach’s hat size, and nor, I suspect, does she. Gone are the days when people were as familiar with their hat size as with their shoe size. It is all chips and PINs now, but that doesn’t wash with me. I still sprinkle cash about, whenever I go roaming, not that I have much time to roam given my busy fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol-like training schedule.

Which brings me back to the matter at hand, namely those soap flakes in a box. Was Dobson leery of advertising a brand name, or what? I am aware that he was, or at least tried to be, a pamphleteer of considerable moral fibre, but that seems to be taking things a bit far. I am sure his legion of fans would have thought no less of him if he had bandied brands like Omo or Daz in his pamphlets. When you consider that towering intellectual figures of our own day such as Isaiah Berlin regularly turn up on television to peddle Twinings tea… no, that’s wrong, it’s Stephen Fry, isn’t it? So easy to confuse two such rigorous überbrains. Anyway, it is time for me to pound around that running track like a mad pursued thing, so I’ll stop there. But if you can winkle out of the archives any information about those soap flakes in a box, I would be extremely grateful. Passionately yours, Tim Thurn, “going for gold!”

Rummaging In An Abandoned Satchel

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The other day I had some harsh words to say about the out of print pamphleteer Dobson’s song-writing skills. “No one with any sense has ever listened to a Dobson song more than once”, I wrote. Well, it seems I was mistaken. I was rummaging in a satchel that I found abandoned on a canal towpath, and I came upon indisputable evidence that at least one sensible person admired a Dobson song so much that they recorded a cover version of it. The song in question is one of the pamphleteer’s settings from the Book of Isaiah.

Hooting Yard readers are a wise bunch, and I would not be surprised to be deluged with letters accusing me of making up the whole satchel-rummaging incident in some foolhardy attempt to chivvy up Dobson’s reputation. I therefore arranged for a local snapper to take a snapshot of what I found, as proof.

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I am now going to have to go and lie down in a darkened, cork-panelled room while I mull over what this extraordinary artefact tells us about (a) Dobson, and (b) Tiny Enid.

Thanks, by the way, to boynton.

Boot Bath

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He washed his boots in the bath with a scrubbing brush. That is what he did when he got mud on his boots. He took off his boots and placed them on a mat and he filled the bath with boiling water. Then he plunged his boots into the bath. He put on a pair of gloves before he plunged his boots so the flesh on his hands would not burn. When the boots were in the bath he sprinkled soap flakes from a box on the surface of the boiling water. Then he went to fetch the scrubbing brush. The scrubbing brush was nowhere near the bath, he had to go up and down stairs to get it from its hook. There was a hole drilled in the handle of the scrubbing brush so it could be held by the hook. The hook was fixed to the wall. It was a fixture and fitting. The scrubbing brush was not. It was an appurtenance. He neither knew nor cared which was a fixture and fitting and which was an appurtenance. His only concern was to get the mud off his boots. He scrubbed his boots with the scrubbing brush while the boots were submerged in the bathwater to which he had added soap flakes from a box. The mud came off his boots in chunks. When the last flecks of mud had been scrubbed off his boots he took the boots out of the bath and placed them back on the mat. The mat was made of rubber. He pulled the plug out of the plughole in the bottom of the bath and the bathwater drained away. While the water drained he took the scrubbing brush up and down stairs and put it back on its hook. He tore off his gloves and threw them down a chute. At the bottom of the chute was a pile of other gloves and such things as shirts and socks and tunics. Once a week the pile was swept into a hamper and taken off to be washed. But not today. He went up and down stairs to the room with the bath in it and looked at his boots on the mat until they were dry. Then he put on his boots. Just in time! He heard the toot of a whistle. He sprinted up and down stairs and past the place where the scrubbing brush hung on its hook and carried on out of the door and through the garden gate and he sprinted round and round the running track until the whistle tooted again. He stopped and panted and looked expectantly at the whistle tooting person. The whistle tooting person was studying his stopwatch. O how he hoped that this time he had sprinted round and round the running track faster than the last time he had sprinted round and round the running track! Then he had had mud on his boots but now he had washed them in the boiling hot bath with a scrubbing brush and soap flakes from a box and there was no longer any mud on his boots. A nod from the whistle tooting person told him he had sprinted round and round the running track faster than before. He was O so happy!

From The Happy Sprinter : An Eye-Witness Account Of The Training Schedule Of Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol Under The Direction Of His Coach, Old Halob by Dobson (out of print)

Name That Boy!

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I read somewhere last week that Mohammed is now the second most popular name for newborn boys in the UK. It strikes me as a bit odd that you can get beheaded for drawing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed, but it’s perfectly fine to attach his name to your son. Still, there is much about Islam that I find perplexing, such as a recent fatwa in Egypt which allows an unmarried woman to work in an office alongside men so long as she breastfeeds each of them five times to create a familial bond. Now there’s a sensible idea.

Anyway, I was prompted to think about boys’ names, and more particularly what name I would ideally like to see in the number one spot above Mohammed. Readers will know that I am very keen on Sebag, but my current choice to become the most popular boys’ name is Suetonius.

Not only is it a splendid, resounding name, but of course it also commemorates the author of The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius – whose full name was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus – can be seen as a kind of Dobson-like figure, in that many of his works are terminally out of print. That is, they are lost, possibly forever. We know that he wrote, among other things, Physical Defects Of Mankind, Lives Of Famous Whores, and an essay on Critical Signs Used In Books, but no trace of them survives. Luckily, we do have the rattling good read that is The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars.

George Costanza, in Seinfeld, favoured the names Soda and Seven, neither of which holds a candle to Suetonius in my opinion. So if there are any expectant parents reading this, and your newborn is a boy, do the decent thing and name him after the Roman Ur-Dobson. And mothers please note! While I would recommend breastfeeding, it would probably be a good idea to limit the milk supply to little Suetonius, rather than sharing it out among those unprepossessing gits in the accounts department.

Tacky To Goo

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If you spend a bit of time thinking about the matter, it becomes apparent that human ingenuity has created a myriad of pastes. At one end of the spectrum are thick pastes, tacky to the touch, and at the other are pastes so runny that they are akin to goo. There are other ways of thinking about the variety of pastes other than the thick-to-thin or tacky-to-goo spectrum, but they have less appeal. Why is this? Not surprisingly, it is a question to which Dobson once turned his magnificent pamphlet-writing brain.

It has to be said that the resulting fourteen-page essay is one of his less engaging works. Fancying that he might win some kudos with the scientific community, Dobson splattered his text with technical terminology of which he had no grasp whatsoever. It has been reported that up and down the land laboratory cafeterias rang with laughter as boffins digested a Gestetnered draft of the pamphlet which Dobson had circulated ahead of publication. In the event, Tacky To Goo : Some Frightfully Complicated Thoughts On The Consistency Of Manufactured Pastes was only ever issued in this scrappy format, cranked out in the potting shed by Marigold Chew as an act of kindness to the increasingly beleaguered Dobson.

A pauper with a barrow was employed to trundle copies of the pamphlet around various market squares, but he lacked the mouthy bumptiousness required of a true salesman, and returned with the entire print-run intact. Downcast and hopeless, the pauper trudged along the winding lane towards chez Dobson & Chew heaving the pamphlets in a filthy frayed sack. His barrow had been stolen by cutpurses.

A less determined pamphleteer may have thrown in the towel at this point, but, as has often been remarked, there was an edge of steel in Dobson. After taking a turn around the pond, and pelting pebbles at swans, he crashed back into the house and immediately fired off a letter to Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist. Ordinarily, of course, so celebrated a mezzotintist would have had nothing to do with a pamphleteer on his uppers, but there was between the two men a special bond. It was a bond forged in childhood, in an orchard, in the teeth of a summer thunderstorm, a bond redolent of the hit single Two Little Boys by the bearded Antipodean Renaissance man Rolf Harris. Neither a wooden horse nor, later, trench warfare were involved in the Dobson-Tint Pact, but you get the general idea.

Dobson’s inspiration on this gusty Tuesday was to bind his scientific pamphlet anew, with a really terrific Rex Tint mezzotint on the cover. Sales, he felt sure, would go through the roof, even when handled by the pauper. Shoving the hastily-scribbled letter into a pre-stamped jiffy bag, and enclosing as a memento of the pact a couple of hazelnuts, Dobson roared back out and headed for the postbox at the top of Pang Hill.

There is a long-running quiz show on the BBC called A Question Of Sport. One of the regular features is a round called “What happened next?”, in which the footage of some unusual sporting event is stopped just before the crucial moment. Let us imagine that a phantom cinematographer, taking grainy black and white film of the swans of Pang Hill Pond, turned their camera on the excited pamphleteer, and followed him up the hill. Now, freeze the imaginary film with Dobson just a few paces from his goal. Why did that jiffy bag never plop into the postbox? Something happened to stop the pamphleteer in his tracks, something that meant the letter and the hazelnuts were never sent, that Tacky To Goo was never rebound with a terrific Rex Tint mezzotint cover, that not a single copy of the original Gestetnered pamphlet was ever sold, and that Dobson, in despair, never again tried to worm his way into the core of the big forbidding world o’ science.