Category Archives: Dobson

Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away

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“Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away”. As we have learned, this was the title of a song written by the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, one of several appalling stabs he made at the form. No one with any sense has ever listened to a Dobson song more than once, for the experience is excruciating, as I can avow. That is by no means all I avow, and if we had but world enough and time I would give you a list of every single avowal I have ever made, which I am sure you would find interesting reading. Alas, time presses, heavy as a big lump of iron, and you will have to be satisfied with that single avowal of the frankly horrifying nature of the Dobson songbook, beside which the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is like an infant’s picture book devoted to perky piglets and bunny rabbits.

“Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away” is also a line from the Book of Isaiah (Authorised Version, chapter 36, verses 16 and 17). Most of the lyrical content of Dobson’s wretched songs was taken from Isaiah, for no apparent reason. One would have thought so prolific a pamphleteer would have been capable of penning his own words, even keen to do so. Not Dobson. What he appears to have done, so far as we can tell, is to pick phrases pretty much at random from the book Peter Ackroyd has called “a series of incandescent utterances”, to shove them together with no regard for sense or metre or singability, and then to set them to music so woefully inadequate that it beggars belief. No wonder Marigold Chew took to wearing a pair of reinforced cork earplugs. Discovering that the standard earplugs sold at Hubermann’s failed to block out completely the din from Dobson’s rehearsal room, the resourceful Marigold located a cork reinforcing atelier hard by the banks of the Great Frightening River. On her first visit, she was surprised to discover the workshop populated entirely by gnomes, some Swiss, some Austrian, and some claiming citizenship of Gondwanaland. “They may have been disturbingly-proportioned little men wearing pointed caps,” she later wrote, “but they certainly knew how to reinforce cork.” As with all his fads, Dobson’s songwriting shenanigans petered out after a couple of months, and peace once more reigned in the house, but Marigold Chew, enchanted, continued to visit the little people by the river for the rest of her life.

“Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away” are the words the Grunty Man roared at a cowering tangle of orphans he waylaid one terrible Thursday afternoon. The pallid tinies were foraging for roots and scraps in a noisome ditch beyond Blister Lane when cracks of lightning rent the sky, thunderclaps boomed, and before they could run back to the safety of the orphanage, the Grunty Man was there! They had thought him a mere figment of nightmares, but here he was, all too real, solid and hairy and brutish and grunting. They trembled as the Grunty Man repeated his strange and evil plan, all except one precocious orphan who put her hand up to ask a question, as if she were in a classroom rather than in a noisome ditch. This disconcerted the Grunty Man, who was impatient for the nippers to glug down the water from their cisterns so he could carry then away to his horrible lair up in the hills, as his scheme dictated. “We did not bring our cisterns with us on our foraging expedition,” piped up the brave tot, “So may we be excused to go back to the orphanage and there to drink from them every one?” As soon as the Grunty Man had grunted his confused agreement, off they all scampered, back to Pang Hill Orphanage, where they armed themselves with pitchforks and shovels. Then they burst out through the iron gates as one, and ran back to the ditch, and chased the Grunty Man back into the hills from whence he had come. For many long years after that fateful Thursday afternoon he sat stewing in his lair trying, in his slow-witted way, to work out the flaw in his plan, which as I said before, was both strange and evil.

The Man Who Would Be Dobson

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Dobson was a great collector of coupons. Almost all coupons are redeemable in one form or another, but not in Dobson’s world. “Do not even think of urging me to redeem any of my coupons!” he shouted, more than once, when it was gently suggested to him that he was sitting on a fortune in unredeemed coupons. Curiously, for a man so attached to the written word, the pamphleteer preferred coupons with minimal or no wording, and those which were beige in colour. Another thing he used to say, or to shout, was “I cannot be doing with flimsy coupons made of paper!” He never said so explicitly, but for Dobson the Ur-coupon was a small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard.

A few years ago I was sitting in a snackbar when something curious happened. Some would say the mere fact of me sitting in the half-civilised air of a snackbar is curiosity enough, given that I am more usually to be found sprawled in a ditch or languishing louchely in a damp and derelict farmyard outhouse, but stay with me on this one, if you will. I would rather not explain what I was doing tucking into a snack in a snackbar in mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, togged out in what I have to say was a rather fetching Lord Summerisle yellow polo neck and drainpipe trousers combination. Granted, I do not have the bouffant sported so majestically by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and perhaps there was rather a lot of straw snagged in my hair, together with the odd beetle, but all I can say is that I cut a pretty dashing figure. My surroundings probably had something to do with it, as it was a bloody fantastic snackbar, all things considered.

Anyway, I was chomping my way through my snack when the man behind the counter began to sing. It was not a song I knew. The verses seemed to consist mostly of extracts from the Book of Isaiah. There was a bit that went “he is gone up to Bajith, and to Dibon, the high places, to weep; Moab shall howl over Nebo, and over Medeba” which I recognised, but it was when the snackbar tenor got to the chorus that my ears really pricked up. “Yea, and I shall wash myself in the blood of the Lamb, and plead with the Lord, to get me a small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard,” he sang.

This was extraordinary. This was a song about the out of print pamphleteer’s Ur-coupon! Could Dobson have written it himself? I choked on my potted paste pie and leapt to my feet. For a second I wondered if the gasps from an adjoining table meant that I was not the only Dobsonist to frequent this snackbar, but then I realised that my neighbours were gazing awestruck at my winklepickers. Who can blame them? I flashed a rakish smile, a beetle dropped from my hair, and I lolloped elegantly over to the counter.

“I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair,” the man was singing now, but I held up my hand and stopped him.

“Tell me,” I drawled, not wanting to sound too excited, “What is that song you are singing?” The man held up a little sign informing me that he was deaf as a post, so I repeated my question using the only sign language I know, which is a version of the Blötzmann system that I learned as a youth in the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift movement. Luckily the stone deaf singer knew it too. Later, he was to explain to me that he had not learned the system in the Kibbo Kift, but, to my astonishment, directly from Blötzmann himself, shortly before that towering figure was blown up in the Hindenberg.

If one can jabber in sign language, we jabbered. Ten minutes in, by which time I was leaning as insouciantly as I could against the counter, the better to show off my poise, the snackbar singer broke off from our conversation to harry the rest of the snackers out into the wind and the rain. He slammed the door shut as the last one left, locked it with a surprisingly enormous key, and pulled down the blinds. Then he took me into a back room, beyond the kitchen and the pantry, and we settled ourselves in for what I can only describe as a Dobsonathon. It’s not a pretty word, but I can’t think how else to describe a discussion that continued, virtually uninterrupted, for the next four days.

It turned out that my new pal was an autodidact who had, for the past decade, devoted himself to getting to the bottom of this thing Dobson had about coupons. It was a narrow speciality, to be sure, but the world needs people like him. He confessed that he was completely uninterested in the bulk of the pamphleteer’s pamphlets, had never read them and never intended to, and indeed could not care less about any aspect whatsoever of Dobson’s activities save for his coupon mania. I wondered if Guido – I learned his name eventually, on day three, I think – was himself a coupon collector. I put this to him, in my best attempt at a Terry-Thomas voice, and it was the only time during the whole Dobsonathon that he laughed. At least, I think he laughed. He gurgled, caterwauled, hooted, made noises similar to those of an enraged badger, shrieked, and spat all over the table. Something in his demeanour signalled that he expected me to fetch a mop and wipe down the formica, but I have pride as well as poise, so I spat on the table myself, repeatedly, though I forebore from the gurgling and caterwauling etcetera. That gave him pause, so much so that it was like sitting opposite a life-size wooden effigy in the back room of a snackbar. Although this was not an experience I had ever had before, or not precisely, I knew instinctively how to deal with it. I reached with a certain deftness into a pocket of my drainpipe trousers, uncapped the lid from a tiny bottle of Dr Baxter’s Cranium Agitator, wafted it under Guido’s nose, and was rewarded by the sight of him twitching back to life, just as I had suspected. And so our conversation was able to continue, though I never did find out the answer to my question. To this day, I have no idea if Guido too was a coupon enthusiast in his own right. I saw no evidence that any coupons had been amassed within the snackbar, and I had a damned good search when my host took a toilet break, but of course he may have been one of those collectors who keeps his cargo in the safety deposit box of a large and important foreign bank, just as Dobson did, if we are to believe the janitor of a large and important foreign bank who contributed a letter to the Quarterly Digest Of Dobson Studies, Volume XIV, Number 2, a letter which the editor authenticated as genuine after subjecting it to a battery of forensic tests. Such is the dedication of those who take these matters with due seriousness. It is a trait I admire, and I admired it in Guido, just as he admired my yellow polo neck sweater and my effortless social graces.

Now. Guido’s song, which had so transfixed me, and forged a bond between us, was self-penned. Dobson, it appeared, had had nothing to do with it. I can’t say this surprised me. We all know that the pamphleteer’s few attempts at songwriting were absolutely pathetic, hardly the kind of thing to worry proper songsmiths such as, to pluck a name at random, Leo Sayer. Others have written about the horrors of hearing such Dobson dirges as the godawful Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away, so I needn’t add to the brickbats. What intrigued me was why Guido, robbed of hearing by that kindergarten firework mishap, had chosen to compose a song about Dobson’s couponophilia, and not only that but a song which aped the pamphleteer’s own wailings in many respects. Of course, Guido’s work was a thing of melodic loveliness, so in that sense it differed, but even so, the whole business struck me as a bit fishy.

Over a dish of shredded cabbage and bloaters, towards the end of our long talk, my pal told me that what he was trying to do was to somehow become Dobson, the better to understand him. This was such a startling admission that I am afraid I banged my knee on the underside of the table and let out a yelp, which, let me tell you, is an unforgivable breach of etiquette when one is sharing a meal with a snackbar counter man of Guido’s eminence. I was mortified. I knew he had not heard my yelp, but he had seen it, and had probably felt its vibrations in the air around his impossibly handsome head. I let fall my napkin, with as much daintiness as I could muster, stood up leaving my bloaters half-eaten, and swept out of the room, through the pantry and the kitchen and the snackbar itself, wrenched the strangely enormous key in the lock, flung open the door as if I were at a vital moment in a Terence Rattigan drama, and hit the grimy streets of this hepcat town, wishing I had a muffler to muffle me against the wind. What I was muffled against, for weeks afterwards, was shame at my own lack of table manners. Unable to face up to the enormity of my conduct, I retreated to my usual haunts, the ditches and barnyards, and tried to blame the fiasco on Guido. On the rare occasions I was approached by a peasant of those parts, I would beseech them not to go anywhere near the snackbar, thinking to smash asunder what today would be called its customer base. I used some of the straw snagged in my hair to fashion a Guido-like voodoo doll and stuck it with pins innumerable.

But came the day I found myself first whistling, then humming, then, boy oh boy, singing lustily, from a mountaintop, that stirring chorus about Dobson’s small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard, his Ur-coupon, and tears streamed down my face as I understood how fortunate I had been to spend four days with the Man Who Would Be Dobson. He wasn’t, of course. No one could be. But Guido came closer, I think, than anyone else ever has to being imbued with the pamphleteer’s true spirit. It was a privilege to know him. I am still on that mountaintop, still singing, dressed now in the apparel of a beatnik, but minding my manners more than ever, and still attracting gasps from passers-by.

Pale And Fierce

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It was pale and fierce, gulping down a bowl of soup. I wondered if it was Jah, come to deliver me from Babylon, but I have a very shaky grasp of Rastafarianism, so I cast that thought unto the winds. Not that there was much in the way of wind that day. In fact, the air was eerily still. I held aloft the feather of a carrion crow and it did not so much as tremble. I discarded the feather on the edge of some scrub rife with gorse, and returned my gaze to the pale fierce thing. It was licking the last dregs of soup from its bowl. For as long as I can remember I have had a deep interest in soup, and I was intrigued to know what had been in that bowl. It has always seemed a great pity to me that Dobson abandoned what would surely have been his magnum opus, a compendium of all known soup recipes from around the world, throughout history.

Before taking a step towards the pale fierce thing, I reached into the pocket of my Paraguayan Man Of Destiny trousers and took out a box of Swan Vestas. It would be useful to know if it was frightened of fire before getting any closer. Bunching three or four matches together, I struck them across the sandpapery side of the box, and as soon as they lit, I flung them across the ditch which ran between me and the pale fierce thing. With no scrub or gorse to ignite, for they fell on a patch of bare earth, the matches sputtered out quickly, but not before the tiny flames had attracted the thing’s attention, with dramatic results. It let fall the now empty soup bowl and scampered away towards a copse or spinney. This is not the place to go into detail about the difference between a copse and a spinney, which would involve giving dictionary definitions, so be content with the idea that the pale fierce thing was making off, with surprising agility, towards a clump of trees. They were a mix of pugton and simnel trees, and I worried that, once within their shelter, I would lose sight of the thing, for they were heavy with budding spring foliage, fat leaves and dripping pods all enmeshed within a riot of twisting twining tendrils.

Earlier in the week, on the Tuesday, I had won a tin cup for excellence in pole-vaulting at a magnificent sports stadium in Pointy Town. Although a few days had passed without any further jumping about, I was still fit, and I ought to have been able to vault the ditch with ease. As it was, I trod on a pebble during my run up and, discombobulated, somehow managed to topple over, landing with a squelch at the bottom of the muddy trench. As with copses and spinneys, so with ditches and trenches. Just keep reading.

The ditch was deeper than I thought. When, eventually, I clambered to my feet, I saw that the mud walls loomed up much higher than my head, and days upon days of rainfall had worn them smooth. I am very good at sizing up situations rapidly and astutely, for I had been a Tantarabim Cadet, and had the cap and badges to prove it, not that I was wearing them now, of course. I trudged through the mud for at least a mile, in both directions, and was astonished at the uniformity of the ditch’s depth and featurelessness. Nowhere did I come upon a place where I might gain a foothold on some jagged shard or clump of roots. Returning to the spot where I had first fallen, which I had marked, cadet-fashion, by scraping T for Tantarabim! into the muck with a pointed stick, I reached into another trouser pocket, took out my whistle, and parped a shrill blast on it. This would, I hoped, summon the pale fierce thing back from its sanctuary in the spinney. Already, you see, I had worked out that if I was going to escape this ditch, I would need its help.

While I waited for it to come to me, my thoughts turned once again to Jah Rastafari. I wondered if my predicament was a sufferation imposed on me by Jah for purposes only He knew. This was so dispiriting that I was in danger of betraying my Tantarabim Cadetship and succumbing to tears. Indeed, I even sniffled once or twice. I wanted something to smite, to snap me back to my usual gusto, but all I could see was a ditch beetle in a puddle at my feet. It was beyond smiting, for it had already drowned. I parped on my whistle again.

All I knew of the pale fierce thing, other than its paleness and fierceness, was that it was keen on soup and frightened by fire. These were the facts I had to work with. As far as I knew, it might be deaf, and my whistling was in vain. What then? I could retrudge my steps along the ditch, going further than a mile in each direction, hoping to find that clump or shard or even a ladder. But night was falling, and I would be blundering about in the dark. Better to remain here, only yards away from the spinney, or copse. I did not know what kind of creature the pale fierce thing was, but it had a head, and arms and legs, and possibly a tail, though of that I was not certain, and I had to persuade myself that it also had a sense of compassion. Surely it would want to rescue a pole-vaulting tin cup winner who was also an ex-Tantarabim Cadet? It might even know something of Jah, though that was unlikely. Who truly knows Jah? There can be comfort in theological speculation, even for a sinner such as me. I gave the whistle a third, longer, parp, and turned my mind to the divinity, or otherwise, of Haile Selassie. As if on cue, the head of the pale fierce thing peeped down at me from the edge of the ditch. It had shockingly huge bright eyes, like those of a tamarind, but otherwise there was nothing monkey-like about that head. Somehow I knew speech would be useless. I merely gazed up at it, imploringly. Its head swivelled, left and right, with insect speed, and then returned to look at me again. In the mud, I stood to one side and pointed at my T For Tantarabim! scraping. Did I see a flicker of understanding in those big eyes? It was hard to tell.

A carrion crow swooped in to land and perched on the ditch’s edge a little way from the pale fierce thing. It might have been the same crow from which I had plucked a feather to test the wind. Bird and thing looked at each other, and I was aware of an intensity in the space between them, mesmerising, icy, alien, utterly beyond anything I could comprehend. I squelched my boots in the mud. What would Haile Selassie do? What would Jah do? What, apart from squelching, would I do? I dredged up all I had learned as a Tantarabim Cadet. Testing the wind with the feather of a carrion crow. Always carrying a box of Swan Vestas and knowing how to strike them three or four at a time. Daily pole-vaulting practice, with rest periods. Never bringing a pan of soup to the boil, and transferring the soup to the bowl with deft elegance. Never trying to eat soup with a fork. The carrion crow and the pale fierce thing were still gazing, one to the other, in an uncanny compact. Always buying soup bowls from Hubermann’s. Collecting the discount vouchers and tucking them neatly into the little Hubermann’s discount voucher wallet provided. Being spry and sprightly through the waking hours, and, on one’s pallet, lying splayed out. Checking the mercury six times a day. Never using the string that ties one’s tent pegs into a bundle as a leash for a dog. The naming of dogs to be restricted to Patch or Rags or Spot. Praising Jah Rastafari. Discarding the pips from fruit with care. Never mixing soup with fruit. The sky was black now, but in the faint starlight I could see silhouetted the carrion crow and the pale fierce thing, utterly still, utterly enrapt by each other. Knowing the difference between a spinney and a copse. Knowing a ditch from a trench. Not being reliant on maps. Marking one’s spot by scraping T For Tantarabim! in the mud with a pointed stick. Always carrying a pointed stick. Having the pointed stick threaded through one’s dreadlocks to keep the hands free. Using the hands to smite things to revive gusto. Not smiting that which has drowned. Tying knots. Keeping one’s cadet cap clean and dry. Daily polishing one’s badges with a rag steeped in cadet badge polish from Hubermann’s. Speculating upon the divinity or otherwise of Haile Selassie. Regular study of Ethiopian history. Eschewing frippery where’er it raises its unseemly head.

I had been taught that these Tantarabim Cadetship skills would stand me in good stead throughout my days in Babylon. But now two unseemly heads turned to look down at me in the ditch, in my ditch, the carrion crow and the pale fierce thing, and I knew I was lost.

Rescue Squad

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A reader who for some unfathomable reason wishes to remain anonymous sent in this very exciting picture:

rescuesquad.jpg

Dear Mr Key, wrote Anon, Can you tell me if this is (a) a contemporary item pleading for help in rescuing Dobson and his out of print pamphlets from obscurity, or (b) a piece of memorabilia dating from some point in Dobson’s lifetime when he was in need of rescue from a foe, a predicament, or a nameless and terrifying imperilment? I would be glad to know, as I am sure would other Hooting Yardists.

I suppose it is touching in a way that Anon expects me to come up with an answer at the snap of his or her fingers, but, you know, sometimes these things demand research. Prodigious research, in a case like this. There are going to be sleepless nights, long trudges through the rain to suburban warehouses, bus ticket expenditure, enjanglements of the cranium, sobbing, hysteria, unanswered metal tapping machine messages, desperate snackbar encounters, and quite possibly a lengthy period of Bewilderment Home convalescence. Nonetheless, I promise that I will do what I can to find out the answer.

Pebblehead Versus Pebblehead

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“The annotation has been carried out on a scale which is necessarily extensive but which seeks at the same time to be as economical as possible in face of the twin challenges of Browning’s wide range of curious information and his immense and flexible vocabulary. Without the prior labours of A K Cook to draw upon, preparation of the body of notes would have been an even more formidable task than it in fact was. Despite all that has been transported to the present site from Cook’s Commentary, a great deal of ore remains in that capacious mine.”

So wrote Richard D Altick in his introduction to the Penguin English Poets edition of Robert Browning’s The Ring And The Book, which appeared in 1971. Curiously, in the very same year, exactly the same words were used – with “Dobson” instead of “Browning”, and “Pebblehead” in place of “Cook” – in the first edition of the mighty Complete Annotated Dobson edited by Ted Cack. The title was a misnomer, of course, because at that time Dobson still had a few years left, during which he penned some of his most awe-inspiring pamphlets. In fact recent Dobsonian scholarship has shown that, if anything, Cack’s tome might better have been called the Thoroughly Incomplete Annotated Dobson. That is not to cast aspersions on what remains a truly engaging work, and the first serious attempt to annotate Dobson in a systematic way.

The Pebblehead Cack refers to, the author of the “capacious mine” of Commentary wherein lies a great deal of ore yet to be recovered, was the father of Pebblehead the writer of all those bestselling paperbacks you find at airport bookstalls. It is regrettable in some ways that the achievements of Pebblehead père have been roundly eclipsed by the fame of Pebblehead fils, to the point where, today, the old man’s majestic Commentary on Dobson is forgotten by all but a few, and those few all in their dotage, dribbling and drooling, brains wizened and minds twitching and shattered. Ted Cack’s work, too, which as he acknowledges draws so heavily upon the elder Pebblehead, seems destined for the scrapheap, not least because the younger Pebblehead, king of the paperback potboiler, seems bent on obliterating all printed traces of his pa. He uses the considerable wealth he has accrued from the transient guff he peddles to buy up and burn on bonfires not just his pa’s own work, but any books, periodicals, journals, chapbooks, pamphlets, videocassettes and DVDs which so much as mention his name.

It is not for me to propose a psychological explanation for this preposterous campaign of Pebblehead’s, which smacks of atavistic impulse and ancient myth. Plenty of amateurs have tried their hands at doing so, with laughable results. Only last week there was some codswallop in the Daily Unhingement, claiming that an incident from the younger Pebblehead’s infancy, involving a sewing kit, a swarm of Africanised killer bees, and a newspaper report of the Munich Air Disaster, was at the root of the matter. As usual, there was no proof, no evidence, merely the blithering of a witless hack trying to jump-start their career.

As a corrective to such drivel, I have decided to set up a fighting fund to rescue the work of Pebblehead père from oblivion, while simultaneously urging a boycott of Pebblehead fils’ bestselling paperbacks. Among those already signed up are Carlos Santana, Lembit Opik, Dale Winton, Dustin Hoffman, and some of the top names in football, including Tord Grip, Pantsil, Crouch and Kaka. I hope you will join them.

A Byword For Utter Gorgeousness

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I have had a couple of enquiries from readers asking if Hubermann’s department store (motto: a byword for utter gorgeousness) has a mail order service. Hubermann’s was mentioned in both Balsa Wood Crow and Annals Of The Frankish Kings, for those of you who need to catch up. I am slightly fretful about Tim Thurn, whose request is rather more specific.

Dear Frank, he writes, I am on the lookout for a penis-melting Zionist robot comb, not the kind of item a diffident chap like me is going to march into a shop and ask for, even in a whisper. I wonder if Hubermann’s runs a mail order service, and if so whether this is the kind of thing I might find in its catalogue?

Well, Tim, even if Hubermann’s did do mail order, this is not the kind of thing you’d find in it, for the simple reason that a penis-melting Zionist robot comb lacks gorgeousness. Only the gorgeous is to be found in that legendary department store.

The original shop was opened in 1909 by Jacopo Hubermann, and sold only cream crackers, shellac and baize. It was Jacopo’s paramour Loopy, an international woman of intrigue, who extended the range of stock to include other forms of gorgeousness. She believed firmly that the gorgeous could be found in all things, both expensive and cheap, hand-crafted and mass-produced, decorative and functional. At times, her choices – and those of the smitten Jacopo – were questionable, and stretched the definition of gorgeousness to an alarming degree. Loopy was very fond, for example, of mud-splattered gewgaws and filthy discarded things, some of which crumbled to dust when picked up. Just before the Great War, she was given the run of what became the “bargain bin basement” of Hubermann’s in its new premises, a fin de siècle monstrosity which had previously been the headquarters of a SMERSHesque cabal. There were rumours that Loopy continued the cabal’s sinister business from her hidey-hole next to the pneumatic piping system hub, but that was probably just tittle-tattle. Queer stories attached themselves to Jacopo Hubermann, too, for it was said that his limp was exaggerated, that his startling walrus moustache was counterfeit, that his penumbra of sobriety masked the looning of a madcap, and that his cakes were mere crumbs, and breadcrumbs at that. All false, of course, for the signal fact about Hubermann was that he shimmered like a saint.

Today there is no bargain bin basement, and the pneumatic piping system has been replaced by a new-fangled überpneumatic piping system, but otherwise Hubermann’s is, as it has been for nigh on a hundred years, the brightest star in the retail sector firmament. The absence of a mail order service so perplexed Dobson that he wrote a pamphlet on the subject, which is regrettably out of print. He devoted almost forty pages to worrying away at the problem, but was unable to reach a sensible conclusion. By the time he finished writing his essay, he was in such a foul temper that Marigold Chew dragged him off to the snackbar at Hubermann’s to stuff his face with lemon meringue pie.

Incidentally, the snackbar at Hubermann’s is the very same snackbar where lumbered and stalked the snackbar hooligans mentioned at the end of Cargpan And Beppo. And so we find that everything in this world is linked by loops of intricate yet unfathomable significance. Or so it seems.

They’ve Stolen Dobson’s Brain!

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Such a hullabaloo there was when they discovered Dobson’s brain had been stolen! One cub reporter called it the hullabaloo to end all hullabaloos. Initially beside herself, Marigold Chew soon grew to appreciate the peace and quiet – the unhullabaloo – in the house itself, where Dobson lay perfectly still, as if asleep, on a mattress. She painted and sang and fed the squirrels in the garden. Occasionally she tiptoed into the room where Dobson lay sprawled, and examined the sutures on his skull. The police scientist agreed with her that it looked like a professional job. Detective Captain Cargpan was convinced that the pamphleteer’s brain was being kept in a jar within a ten mile radius, and waited patiently for a ransom note. There was further hullabaloo when a picture was sent to the Daily Screech, purporting to show the brain on a platter, but painstaking analysis showed that it was just a grey lump of dough. Some wondered if a heroic pooch would find Dobson’s brain while rummaging in a hedgerow, in a curious foreshadowing of the theft and recovery of the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966, a year later. Marigold Chew listened to her Xavier Cugat LPs and tended her hollyhocks and pasted cuttings into her scrapbook. Detective Captain Cargpan filled his pipe with untreated Uruguayan tobacco and paced up and down the garden path, praying for rain. He believed that a torrential downpour would flush out the brain thieves. Time passed, and the hullabaloo died down, and the cub reporter on the Daily Screech was embedded with a different police force investigating a different case. And then, despite the weather remaining balmy and sun-battered, one Thursday morning the postie came prancing along the lane carrying a package. Detective Captain Cargpan let Marigold Chew unwrap it, for she was deft where he was a butterfingers. She said “Gosh!” as she folded aside the last layer of blotting paper to reveal the pamphleteer’s brain. It was rather muddy, as if it had been kept in a ditch, but she rinsed it thoroughly under the garden spigot and handed it to the police scientist, who scampered upstairs and reinserted it into Dobson’s head. No one ever did find out who had stolen it, or where it had been stored, or whether any experiments had been carried out on it. Detective Captain Cargpan pursued the case for another month or two, but he was a maverick, so his manner of conducting his investigations was highly idiosyncratic, and passeth all understanding.

Blötzmann Manoeuvres

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Ever mindful of the need to trim the wicks of his tallow candles, Dobson employed for the purpose a tiny pair of shears which he deployed using the so-called Blötzmann Manoeuvres.

I took against electricity from an early age, he wrote, lying shamelessly, and often found myself in a quandary because untrimmed wicks set my teeth on edge. For a long time I thought the remedy for this was to imbue my teeth with greater strength, foolish young pup that I was. I crunched nuts morning, noon, and night, nuts of many different kinds. I had no favourites in the nut world, although of course the harder the nut, and the greater the effort needed to crunch it into a digestible pap, the hardier my teeth became, and the better they could withstand being set on edge by the appearance of untrimmed wicks on the tallow candles I used to illuminate my habitat.

By his own account, a temporary nut shortage forced Dobson to readdress the problem, but official statistics give the lie to this. Indeed, at the point where the pamphleteer adopted the Blötzmann Manoeuvres, there was a nut glut in the land. According to Pocock & Gabbitas, the squirrel population had been decimated by unexpected lupine savagery, leaving millions of nuts unhidden. If there was no lack of nuts, what made Dobson nail his colours to Blötzmann’s mast? It is significant that at this time, unlike later, Dobson’s colours were cherry and dun, and that a new Blötzmann mast had been erected atop Pilgarlic Hill, not far from the pig farmer’s hut where Dobson had regular sunrise gleanings. The siting of the mast, illegal then as now, was a stroke of genius by the Blötzmannist Erno Von Straubenzee, who had smuggled himself into the country aboard a packet steamer some months earlier.

Intriguingly, no sooner had Von Straubenzee disembarked from the boat, the Googie Withers, than its captain scuppered it, set it ablaze, and promptly vanished. Some say he still haunts the warehouses down at the harbour, rattling an old tin cup and begging for alms from the rough tough sailors thereabouts. Other stories have the one time packet steamer captain retired to the countryside keeping bees, like Sherlock Holmes. All that is known for certain is that a single charred plank dredged from the quayside was all that survived of the Googie Withers, and it was incorporated into a wooden altarpiece in St Bibblybibdib’s church, where it can be seen today, if you buy a ticket from the sexton, a monkey-faced man who sits in a little canvas kiosk in the churchyard each Thursday afternoon, awaiting redemption.

From the lych-gate of St Bibblybibdib’s, looking westward, on a clear day one can see the top of the Blötzmann mast, with its cherry and dun pennants. Turning to the east, the prospect is of fields rippling with wheat and rhubarb and hollyhocks and stinkwort, punctuated by ha-has and the occasional scarecrow. No wild jabbering pigs are to be seen, for they were eradicated by the same unexpected lupine savagery which did for the squirrels during the nut glut, just at the time Dobson falsely claimed a nut shortage led to his adoption of the Blötzmann Manoeuvres as his favoured way of trimming the tallow candle wicks the untrimmedness of which set his teeth on edge so.

But why did Dobson forever deny his association with Erno Von Straubenzee? Decades later, when it was put to the pamphleteer that he and the untidy Blötzmannite had been fast friends, often cooped up together for days on end in the pig farmer’s hut on the hill, scheming and plotting and cackling and letting sawdust trail through their fingers, reading the runes, Dobson blushed as he protested that the name Von Straubenzee meant nothing to him. He came up with improbable tales to account for his whereabouts on certain days when it was suspected the Blötzmann mast had been activated. And he was never able to explain how he had learned to trim his wicks so deftly with the tiny shears essential to the Blötzmann Manoeuvres. The one time he mentions the shears in a pamphlet, he is curiously abrupt.

In Ten Short Essays On Chopping And Cutting And Hacking, he gives full vent to his thoughts on scissors and scimitars and pastry-cutters, for example, devoting over twenty pages to the latter alone. There is detail here aplenty for the student who wishes to learn from scratch how to cut up bits of pastry in hundreds of different ways. Yet not only is there not a separate essay about the tiny shears, they are only mentioned in a footnote, and in such small type that only the most assiduous of readers is likely to be bothered with it. I freely admit that I have not read it myself, and rely entirely upon the account of the footnote given in the latest issue of Marginalia Dobsonia, the scholarly journal edited by Aloysius Nestingird.

Now here’s the thing. Parish records seem to show that Nestingbird is directly related to Erno Von Straubenzee, may indeed be his grandson. If true, it would explain a lot, although I am not entirely sure what precisely is explained, and Nestingbird has never replied to any of my letters. Last week I fired off a sort of questionnaire to him, demanding what they call full and frank answers to over a dozen accusations. I wanted to know if he had copies of the construction plans for the Blötzmann mast, or for any similar mast, if he ever worshipped at the wooden altar in St Bibblybibdib’s and, if he did, what god he worshipped there, and did he worship standing up, sitting, kneeling, or sprawled prostrate on the cold stone floor. I pumped him for an answer to the important question of whether he knew the name of the captain of the packet steamer Googie Withers, and what had become of that mysterious old sea dog. I threw in a sneaky query about the accounting procedures of his scholarly journal, convinced as I am that the profits are being salted away to fund the salt mines from which far-flung members of the Nestingird clan draw their dubious salaries. I asked all this and more, but of course got nothing in return, not even the threats I have become used to from the badly-dressed buffoon. I know for a fact that it is Nestingbird, or one of his cronies, who has sullied my reputation with the electricity people, and with the gas people too, and that both utilities have cut off supplies to my seaside cabin, and that is why I, like Dobson before me, now rely upon candlelight, and well-trimmed wicks. To date, I have not had to resort to the Blötzmann Manoeuvres, for wicks not neatly trimmed have yet to set my teeth on edge. If they do, with much bluster I shall begin to crunch nuts, and Nestingbird will be laughing on the other side of his pasty face. I will crunch nuts, and cackle, and be righteous and roopty-toot.

Old Farmer Frack

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I have received a number of letters asking me to give some account of Old Farmer Frack. It is true that he was a mad old man, probably due to ergot poisoning. But he could be surprisingly lucid, too. For a time he employed a professional voice coach, more used to working with thespians, to help him develop exciting new roars and bellows. His cows were much given to bellowing, and Old Farmer Frack wanted to be able to bellow back in a way they would understand.

The voice coach was Satnav Gobgag, scion of the Bulgarian aeroplane manufacturing dynasty, whose huge hangars on the outskirts of Plovdiv were the site of tremendous aeronautical innovation during the interwar years. Satnav was a great disappointment to his parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, for despite receiving a first class education in the kinds of things that would make anyone fit to head an aeroplane-building business, he turned his back on the family firm and devoted himself to the questionable career – questionable in Bulgaria at that time, anyway – of drilling drama-struck misters and misses in the art of projecting their voices, be they dulcet or stentorian. It has been said that no one took to the stage of the Plovdiv Theatricum in the middle years of the last century who had not learned their stuff from Satnav Gobgag.

Exiled after the war to the country where Old Farmer Frack herded his tubercular cows, and by now grey and stooped and often covered in crumbs and dust, Satnav Gobgag fetched up at a ruined hotel on the seafront at Cack. He was only thirty-four, but looked to be twice that age, such had been his privations. It is well worth avoiding such privations if one can, but Satnav did not have the benefit of hindsight. Cut off without a penny by the Gobgag clan, accompanied in his exile by his pet coot, Satnav was on the point of starvation when into his hotel one day wandered Old Farmer Frack.

Q – What was the mad old man doing there, so far away from his cows?

A – He was in Cack to collect bags of sand, and stopped in at the hotel for a greasy breakfast, for he was fond of greasy breakfasts, but back at the farm usually made do with a dish of cowfeed.

Q – For what purpose did Old Farmer Frack need bags of sand from the beach at Cack?

A – To forestall, or avert, the flooding of his barns.

The pair struck up a conversation in the breakfast room of the hotel. And of what did they speak, this ill-matched duo? Why, they chattered away about the single topic that was convulsing the citizenry of Cack in those dark days, namely the invasion of an army of killer moorhens which was sweeping through the town in wave after wave of destructive mayhem. Satnav’s poor coot was cooped up in his hotel room for its own protection, and the penniless voice coach was frantic with fear what would happen to it when, as must surely soon happen, he and his coot were tossed out on their ears for non-payment. He reckoned without the lackadaisical approach of the hotel manager, Grimes, who affected a foppish disregard for such niceties as money. So long as his chef cooked up a greasy breakfast, and there were petunias in the plant pots, Grimes was happy to lean against the wall in the lobby flicking ash onto the tiles from the Norwegian cigars he had specially flown in. By coincidence, his smokes arrived once a month on an aircraft of Gobgag manufacture.

Old Farmer Frack was temperamentally blind to any animals except his cows, so his brain was perplexed by this talk of moorhens. He kept trying to change the subject, without success. After a while, he sat back in a daze, hypnotised by his companion’s mellifluous fluting, high-pitched jabbering, booming ostinato, silky whispers, and impeccable diction, for Satnav was deploying all of his vocal talents in describing the terrible sight of a thousand murderous moorhens tramping relentlessly towards the shopping arcade. It was when he made a noise like a cow that Old Farmer Frack sprang out of his seat, grabbed him roughly by the collar, and demanded that he repeat his bovine bellowing. Shortly thereafter, a deal was struck between the two men. Satnav Gobgag fetched his coot, and his paltry luggage, from his room, and accompanied Old Farmer Frack aboard his cart as they trundled off along meandering lanes to the farm.

Within days, the mad old fool was having rewarding conversations with his cows. He bellowed at them and they bellowed back. As he herded them from field to field, purposelessly, through all hours of the day and night, his voice coach reclined on a rickety sofa improving his English with a thorough reading of Dobson pamphlets while his coot plashed happily in Farmer Frack’s pond.

The idyll could not last. One autumnal day, when fallen leaves from the pugton trees so clogged the pond that the coot stayed indoors, there came a hammering at the door. Old Farmer Frack was miles away, in the furthest of his fields, though a faint bellowing could be heard when the wind died down. The coot, still nerve-wracked from its sight, through the hotel window, of lethal moorhens, trembled. Satnav Gobgag dropped his pamphlet – I think it was Dobson’s Some Remarks On The Grotesque Pallor I Encountered This Morning In My Shaving Mirror (out of print) – and strode in his brave Bulgarian way to the door. Opening it, he was astonished to find Grimes, the hotelier of Cack, florid with rage and somehow deeply threatening in a windcheater the colour of custard and a stout pair of wellington boots. All foppishness gone, Grimes had come to demand money. So much money, in fact, that Satnav pictured himself doing the washing up in the unsavoury hotel kitchen for the next forty years.

Q – Had something happened to Grimes to make him suddenly mindful of the unpaid bills of his hotel guests?

A – Yes. He received a clonk on the head from a piece of falling masonry.

Q – Had he tracked down other past guests, or did he have some sort of vendetta against Satnav Gobgag?

A – The former. Grimes now spent his days on horseback, criss-crossing the land demanding money with menaces from those who had taken advantage of his formerly lax manner.

Q – What menaces did he threaten?

A – Menaces so heinous they are unsuitable for family reading.

Q – What happened next?

A – Satnav Gobgag did the washing up in the unsavoury hotel kitchen for the next forty years. His coot remained on the farm, where he visited it every other weekend until it perished. Old Farmer Frack, having learned as much bovine bellowing as he needed, continued to be mad, and bellowing, and his cows bellowed back at him, for ever and ever, Amen.

“He Which Is Filthy, Let Him Be Filthy Still”

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“The principal function of Biblical exegesis”, wrote Dobson in jaunty mood one morning, “is for me to look with disdain upon the minnows who have trod these paths before me.”

It’s hard to know whether the pamphleteer was being deliberately muddle-headed with his image of walking minnows, but as I said, he was in a jaunty mood, and at such times his prose could be perplexing. There is no doubt, however, about the sincerity of his view that he had an unrivalled grasp of the Bible. He did not write all that much about the holy book, but he never lost an opportunity to pour scorn on scholars of the past such as Theodore of Mopsuestia, Ludolph of Saxony, Pelagius, Tirinus of Antwerp, Manuel Sa, indeed more scholars than you could shake a stick at, were you minded so to do. Dobson, incidentally, was perhaps over-fond of shaking a stick at people or things of which he disapproved, and attached an infant’s rattle to one of his sticks the better to make his point. His point was not always clear, either to him or to the object of his stick-shaking, and eventually he was able to suppress this aspect of his behaviour by attending a long course of therapy in a mountainous sanatorium where the air was pure, the porridge was plain, and the calisthenics were invigorating.

The finest of Dobson’s exercises in Biblical scholarship is his pamphlet The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse… Or Were They? (out of print). The title is a tad puzzling, but not for long, for in the very first sentence Dobson states his case. “I avow,” he wrote “that there were no horsemen of the Apocalypse, nor, if there had been, were they four in number.” In the sixty pages that follow, he argued that a combination of mistranslation, forgery, and carelessness had altered the original text, so that “four” was correctly “two”, and “horsemen” was properly Englished as “cows”, or possibly “bees”.

Challenged by the local papal nuncio after publication as to how two cows or two bees could symbolise famine, war, pestilence and death, Dobson countered with a theological sally, probably the greatest of his sallies, theological or otherwise. Sadly, there is no record of what he said, for Marigold Chew’s recently-purchased Boswellite tape recorder was out of order, having been placed too close to the toaster that morning, and consequently smothered in a particularly toothsome marmalade.

Celebrity Flibbertigibbet Attic

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Dobson could be a very prescient man. Imagine for a moment a world where the magazine racks in newsagent’s shops contain titles like Nunc Dimitis and Look, Cogitate & Learn and The Weekly Cranium, rather than Pap! and Fluffyhead! and Tat! It was like that once, in the middle of the last century. And it was in such a world that Dobson woke up one morning, went downstairs and ate bloaters for breakfast, and polished his Montenegrin hunting boots, and walked out into the rain with a surprising sense of purpose. He had had one of his bright ideas, and he was going to act on it without delay.

He did not pause by the illegal butcher’s shop, nor by the Tundist Owl Library, nor at the lido nor the pie shop nor the allotments, but strode onwards to a pond at the very edge of town where a fledging television programme making unit had set up cameras to record a documentary about swans. A Quaint, Black And White Look At Some Swans Near A Pond was planned as a primetime series for later that year, and would prove to be the most popular show of the decade. It was that sort of world.

Elbowing his way through a security cordon, Dobson identified the producer, seized him by the collar, and dragged him off to one side.

“I have an idea for a television series,” he shouted at the pipe-smoking, cardigan-wearing weakling who crumpled in awe of the out of print pamphleteer.

“I suggest,” continued Dobson, “That you immediately stop filming these confounded swans and instead take up my brilliant idea, which is as follows. You gather together roughly a dozen well-known persons, all of whom tend to be flibbertigibbets by nature, and you lock them in an attic for two months. You then film them, being flibbertigibbets in an attic. The programme would be called Celebrity Flibbertigibbet Attic, and I have absolutely no doubt that it will be a hit, a palpable hit!”

The scrawny television producer squirmed free from Dobson’s importunate grasp, and thumped back through the mud towards where his team was filming over one hundred and twenty hours of swan footage. He paused only to re-light his pipe, which had gone out after a fleck of Dobson’s spittle landed slap in the middle of the bowl.

At this point several swans who had wandered away from their allotted places set upon Dobson, whooping at him and pecking at his trousers, and he fled. On his way home, he stopped in at the early morning skiffle club milk bar, and became obsessed with the rhythmic bashing of washboards, an interest which utterly consumed him for several weeks, by the end of which time he had completely forgotten about his ground-breaking television concept. He could be, as I said, a very prescient man, but he was far too easily distracted.

Further reading : inadvisable.

Six Lectures On Fruit

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Dobson’s Six Lectures On Fruit were among the most highly-regarded of his works, held in an esteem that the contemporary reader finds unfathomable. Revisiting these pamphlets, it swiftly becomes apparent that Dobson has no idea what he’s talking about. The revised view of the Lectures is put best by one upstart young Dobson scholar, who dismisses them as “bloviating and orotund”.

Consider the first lecture, On The Putting Of Fruit Into Pies, in which Dobson challenges the accepted definitions of both ‘fruit’ and ‘pies’, not to mention the usual meanings of the verb ‘to put’. Some critics like to pretend that the essay is a precursor of what would become known as postmodernism or deconstruction, and inasmuch as it is clueless gibberish, they are correct. In his defence, the pamphleteer does not dress up his babble in needlessly complicated pseudoacademic jargon. Indeed, his language is direct, even earthy, and littered with harsh Anglo Saxon expletives, but he betrays depths of almost unimaginable ignorance. The climax of the lecture is supposed to be a recipe for what Dobson calls a ‘prune and lemon pastry explosion’, but the instructions are so befogged by witlessness that, to my knowledge, no one has ever succeeded in making it.

The genesis of the Lectures was an invitation to Dobson from the Orchard Persons Of The Port Of Tongs. Those of you familiar with the geography of this wretched seaside town will know that it is bounded on its eastern landward side by a terrific number of orchards. The Orchard Persons’ Social Club & Community Centre was situated in a clearing between a pear orchard and a persimmon orchard, and the usual entertainments it hosted were nights of oompah oompah music and freakish dancing. Perhaps that is why Dobson chose to deliver his second lecture, On The Cutting Of Grapefruit Into Segments Of Equal Size, in the form of rhyming couplets, to the accompaniment of a glockenspiel. He was not a skilled glockenspielist, nor did he have much understanding of geometry, as those Orchard Persons discovered who went home and tried to cut their grapefruit the Dobson way .

For the third and fourth lectures, Dobson resorted to anecdote and personal reminiscence, recounting a series of yarns under the headings All The Plums I Have Ever Eaten, Where I Was, And What They Tasted Like and How I Built A Coathanger Out Of Fig Stones.

Audiences were dwindling by this time, and only three people turned up to listen to what was to become the most notorious of the Lectures, the Dialogue Between A Raspberry And A Tangerine. Even those who are most severely critical of the series are forced to admit that Dobson did a tremendous amount of research for this one. He was barely out of the reading room of the Pointy Town Municipal Library for weeks on end, poring over books on topics as diverse as fruit, philately, biochemistry, aerodynamics, the Peninsular Wars, tugboats, flamenco dancing, and the Diet of Worms. But his claims to have penetrated the very essence of a raspberry and a tangerine are, quite frankly, ludicrous. Marigold Chew told him so as they ate breakfast on a hopeless veranda on the morning before the lecture. Dobson’s response was to weep great racking sobs into his bowl of Special K. He spent all day making revisions to the text, some of which have a certain Jesuitical rigour, and by the time he arrived at the clearing between pear and persimmon orchards he was brimming with confidence. Preposterous it may be, but the Dialogue Between A Raspberry And A Tangerine retains to this day a kind of magnificent declamatory brio. Lengthy extracts from the lecture formed the libretto of a concept album by prog rock titans Gratuitoüs Umlaut.

The published edition of Six Lectures On Fruit contained only the texts of the first five lectures. Some Dobsonists have argued that the sixth in the series never actually existed, that Dobson had some kind of brain spasm and that all knowledge of fruit was wiped from his mind. E V Van Voo did much to spread this story, in a foolish ‘conspiracy theory’ novel, but he overlooks the fact that the pamphleteer was never a man to let ignorance stop him expounding at length on any subject he turned his mind to.

What in fact happened was that when Dobson arrived in the clearing on the final Thursday he found the doors of the Social Club barred and bolted, and no one in sight. Even the birds had fled from their perches on the trees that fringed the clearing. Dobson took one look at the mighty iron padlock on the door, reached into his satchel, took out the notes of his sixth and final lecture – some drivel about bananas, or marmalade – and tore them into confetti, and cast them unto the winds, and then he trudged off into one of the orchards, and shook a branch until pears and persimmons came tumbling to earth, and he sat on a tuffet and gorged himself on fruit until he was bloated, and, bloated, he waddled homewards, along the lane out of the orchard, body and brain with fruit bloated.

Where Eagles Dare

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Where Eagles Dare is a 1968 film starring Richard Burton, Clint Eastwood, and Mary Ure, based on the 1967 novel by Alistair MacLean, who also wrote the screenplay. It is also the title of a late pamphlet by Dobson.

Dobson’s Where Eagles Dare was written at the prompting of Marigold Chew, who hoped that by scribbling away at length the pamphleteer could overcome his preposterous obsession with the film. Students of Dobson’s dotage will recall that he took to wearing a snowsuit and cobbled together a walkie-talkie system out of paper cups and string. For weeks on end his only communication with Marigold Chew was to stretch the string to its full extent, so that for example he was in the pantry when Marigold Chew was in the front garden, or vice versa, and to declaim “Broadsword to Danny Boy… Broadsword to Danny Boy” into his paper cup.

Dobson’s mania was given further fuel by the coincidental fact that, for many years, Marigold Chew’s party piece had been an exquisitely accurate impersonation of Michael Hordern. Her voice was of course somewhat higher pitched than that of the actor, but she used a Japanese funnel to lower it, and caught his distracted mannerisms perfectly.

As weeks turned to months, and Dobson’s foolishness showed no sign of abating – he had, for example, taken to referring to their house as the Schloss Adler – Marigold Chew became desperate. She consulted a local bird counting person who arranged for a multitude of wrens to flock around the house, thinking to simulate the conditions in The Tragedy of King Richard the third. Containing, His treacherous Plots against his brother Clarence: the pittiefull murther of his innocent nephewes: his tyrannicall vsurpation: with the whole course of his detested life, and most deserued death, where “the world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch”.

This only served to encourage Dobson, and so, at her wit’s end, Marigold Chew reasoned that the writing of a pamphlet might be the answer. It was characteristic of Dobson that his many fads and enthusiasms sputtered out once he had written about them. And so it proved, once again. But what are we to make of his Where Eagles Dare today? It is impossible to say, for not a single copy has ever been tracked down. Indeed, some think it never existed in the first place, and is a mere chimera, although a chimera of a particularly Dobsonian kidney.

One small footnote. There is an amusing note in Marigold Chew’s diary, from the same period, where she writes: “The Great Escape is showing at the local Excelsior. I have sent Dobson to a remote seaside resort for the duration of its run. One cannot be too careful.”

One In A Series Of Hiking Pickles

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Dobson lived in the era before mobile phones, of course, so when he found himself imperilled in an isolated spot he had to harness every last scrap of ingenuity to summon help. You or I would simply make a call on our mobile – well, you would, but I wouldn’t, because I do not own a mobile phone and never shall, for they are an abomination unto me – but this was not an option for Dobson, so what did he do?

Let us take a closer look at the circumstances. It was a Tuesday in February. Football fans were grieving the loss of the Busby Babes in the Munich Air Disaster, Pope Pius XII had declared that Saint Clare was to be the patron saint of television, and little blind David Blunkett was just eleven years old. Meanwhile, Dobson got lost on an ill-advised hiking expedition and found himself exhausted, in a spinney, menaced by feral goats. The out of print pamphleteer had also managed to get himself hopelessly entangled in a thicket of thorny brambly creeping greenery rife with puffy spiders and venomous beetles. That’s the kind of spinney it was, at least twenty miles from the nearest village, and with no paths nor country lanes leading anywhere close to it. There was, it is true, a big pylon a couple of dozen yards away, but it was a lone pylon, unconnected to any kind of electrical grid or other wiring system, a pylon the purpose of which was unknown, and it was a pylon of rust, suggestive of abandonment and disuse.

This was not the first time Dobson had been in a hiking pickle, and it would not be the last. Indeed, late in life he had enough material to furnish a pamphlet entitled An Anthology Of Disastrous Hiking Mishaps Cobbled Together From A Lifetime Of Ill-Starred Rustic Pursuits (out of print). What was significant about this particular pickle was the manner in which Dobson succeeded in extricating himself from it.

This was the period during which he had joined an experimental knitting circle, and as luck would have it he had in his noddy bag that day his latest project. It was an interpretation, in wool, of The Wreck Of The Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Dobson realised that, when fully unravelled, the yarn would stretch for miles. He sat down in the brambles, lit his pipe, took the scrunched-up woollen masterpiece out of his noddy bag, and unravelled, unravelled, unravelled. Two hours later he was still unravelling. The sun was setting by the time he was done, but Dobson had no fear of the night, for he was sanguine.

Frequently Asked Question : Why didn’t the pamphleteer use his portable metal tapping machine to call for help?

Answer : He was unable to use his portable metal tapping machine because there was no ground-level pneumatic hub within reach.

The wool fully unravelled, Dobson tapped out his pipe on a stone and beckoned to one of the feral Toggenbergs. The goats were still gathered in a gang on the edge of the spinney, and it is a mystery why they had not attacked the bramble-trapped pamphleteer. In the Anthology, Dobson suggested that a combination of acrid pipe smoke, unravelled wool, and his sanguine nature had deterred the goats, but it seems that for once he was being modest. Almost certainly, the decisive factor was Dobson’s eerie ability to mesmerise goats, especially Toggenbergs. It is a skill which has not been much remarked upon, possibly because Dobson himself made light of it, and – curiously – never devoted a pamphlet to it. But he had been practising goat mesmerisation since he was a babe in arms, and now his expertise paid off. Beckoning a Toggenberg, as I said, Dobson tied one end of the length of wool around one of its Satanic horns, then whispered goat-language into its ear. We do not know what he said, but presumably it was something like “Scamper away, goat, in a straight line, and do not stop until you reach a village”.

It was not a village that the goat scampered to, however. Three hours after being entranced, it came to a wire fence, chewed its way through, and, in so doing, set off a hideous caterwauling alarm system. The night was filled with noise, and the Toggenberg was caught in the white glare of a Kleig light. Within seconds, it was surrounded by a clomping troop of visored commandos armed with Simon & Garfunkel rifles. Inadvertently, the mesmerised capricorn had stumbled into a top secret military intelligence compound. A commando with a captain’s badge bundled the goat onto a bauxite cradle chained to a winch, while a second commando, this one with a cadet’s badge, untied the wool from its horn.

Miles away, Dobson was smoking his pipe and lackadaisically paying out the wool, hand over hand. Suddenly, he felt it jerk, and held on tight. And then he was yanked free of the thorny brambly creeping greenery rife with puffy spiders and venomous beetles and dragged across a wasteland of fields and gravel pits and sumps and countryside filth until he fetched up at the feet of the commandos who reeled him in, just as midnight struck.

That is how Dobson got out of a hiking pickle, only to find himself in a very alarming dilemma indeed, slap bang in the middle of a military intelligence compound that was top secret for very good reasons – reasons which, even at a distance of fifty years, I am far too terrified to divulge. He was placed in a holding cell with the feral goat and interrogated at length. The wool was returned to him and he asked for, and was given, a pair of knitting needles. Between interrogations he was able to re-knit The Wreck Of The Deutschland, although much of his woollen reimagining of the lines about the Tall Nun was gnawed into scritty by the Toggenberg. By the time the commandos released the pamphleteer, having scrambled his brain pan so thoroughly that he remembered nothing after the spinney, Richard Milhous Nixon had published his book Six Crises, Pluto and Neptune were in alignment for the first time in 403 years, and little blind David Blunkett was no longer so little.

Dobson returned home even more sanguine than before the hiking pickle. As for the feral goat, it stayed with the commandos. They adopted it as a pet, and called it Flopsy.