Category Archives: Dobson

On Fools

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The pamphleteer Dobson had an idée fixe that anyone born on the first of April needs must be a fool, and an incorrigible and irredeemable fool at that. (It is pertinent to note that Dobson took great pains never to divulge his own date of birth and seems to have destroyed all records of it.) Challenged to provide evidence for his theory, Dobson embarked on the writing of a pamphlet. Putatively entitled A Compendium Of Foolishness, its subtitle gives a succinct summary of what we could have read had he ever written it: A Bumper Collection Of Anecdotes Regarding Acts Of Foolishness Committed By Fools Born On All Fools Day. As far as we know, he got no further than scribbling the title with his propelling pencil on a sheet of notepaper, at which point he sat gazing out of the window for hours, trying to think of appropriate tales of foolishness. Rummaging around in that capacious pamphleteering brain, he drew a blank.

Dobson was reluctant to abandon the project so soon, but felt unequal to conducting any research. He had only recently recovered from an attack of the spraingue, had one arm in a sling, was temporarily blind in one eye, and spent the best part of his waking hours with his feet submerged in a bowl of jelly water. Such was my pitiable condition, he wrote, That the very thought of conducting fool research risked a recurrence of the spraingue. I was at my wits’ end, and could only gaze out of the window for hours on end in hopeless despair, munching cake.

One wet Thursday morning during this period, Dobson was disturbed by a hammering at his door. He removed his feet from the bowl, slipped on a pair of Argentinian Public Baths Attendants’ pantoufles, and went to admit his visitor. It turned out to be the radio broadcaster Gilbert Viperhead, the very man who had demanded, on air, that Dobson prove his theory about fools. He was brandishing a horsewhip.

“You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!” cried the radio host, “And unless you provide me with conclusive proof that those of us born on All Fools Day are fools, I shall give you a damned good thrashing with this horsewhip I am brandishing!”

“As you can see,” replied Dobson, “I am a sick man. Allow me time to recover from my recent attack of the spraingue and I shall furnish you with so much evidence it will be pouring out of your ears.”

In spite of his florid face and the demeanour of an enraged retired colonel, Viperhead was a reasonable man. He unbrandished the horsewhip and accepted the cup of tea Dobson offered him. They spent an hour in almost pleasant conversation, discoursing on topics such as the spraingue, radio broadcasts, fools, jelly water, and horsewhips.

But when he had gone, Dobson realised his dilemma. Sooner or later, he was going to have to justify his fool theory, or remain in permanent convalescence. And then he had what was to prove a fateful idea. He scurried back to his escritoire, took off the pantoufles, plunged his feet back into the bowl, took his propelling pencil and some notepaper, and started scribbling away.

Dear Cicely Courtneidge, he wrote, You were born on the first of April and are therefore a fool. Please reply by return of post with two or three anecdotes of incidents or episodes in your life which demonstrate your utter foolishness. Yours sincerely, Dobson.

He stuffed this missive into an envelope, scribbled Cicely Courtneidge’s name and last known address on it, sealed it, and affixed a stamp. He then wrote identical letters to Emperor Go-Saga of Japan, William Harvey, John Wilmot, Otto von Bismarck, Ferruccio Busoni, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Edgar Wallace, Lon Chaney Senior, Wallace Beery, Whittaker Chambers, Lor Tok, Toshiro Mifune, Milan Kundera, Debbie Reynolds, Ali McGraw, Samuel R Delany, Annie Nightingale, Ronnie Lane, David Gower, Susan Boyle, Philip Schofield, and Dennis Kruppke. He would not need to track down anecdotes of foolery – the anecdotes would come to him! Dobson was not so foolish as to think that some of his correspondents were still alive, but he hoped that, by cleverly pre-dating some of his letters, their heirs might feel duty bound to reply. What he did not take into account was the fact that some of the living recipients might take exception to being called a fool by an obscure and penurious scribbler.

So it was that, on a wet Wednesday morning shortly after shoving all these letters into the postbox at the end of the lane, Dobson was disturbed by a hammering at his door. He removed his feet from the bowl of jelly water, slipped on a pair of Peruvian bordello keeper’s pantoufles, and went to admit his visitor. It turned out to to be Jack Hulbert, star of stage and screen and husband of Cicely Courtneidge. He was brandishing a horsewhip.

“You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!” he cried, “How dare you insult my dear wife by calling her a fool? I am going to give you a damned good thrashing with this horsewhip I am brandishing!”

“As you can see,” said Dobson, but before he could get another word out Jack Hulbert began thrashing him with the horsewhip. The pamphleteer learned that day that not all outraged gents are as amenable to reason and cups of tea as Gilbert Viperhead. It was not the only visit he received that week that left him battered and bruised and bewailing his own foolishness.

He never did write the pamphlet.

On The One-Eyed Crossing-Sweeper Of Sawdust Bridge

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Cyclops With A Broom!, Dobson’s pamphlet on the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge, is one of his very few efforts to address the subject of one-eyed crossing-sweepers. With Sawdust Bridge, of course, he was on more familiar turf, having written a full account of this crumbling yet still majestic structure in A Full Account Of Sawdust Bridge. It is a tragedy of colossal proportions that both these pamphlets are now out of print.

My own pamphlet-in-the-works, A Tragedy Of Colossal Proportions, is an attempt to come to grips, once and for all, at long last, without fear or favour, in the nick of time, huncus muncus, no holds barred, warts and all, in sickness and in health, do or die, with all due respect, up to a point, now or never, come hell or high water, with the precise lineaments of the pamphleteer’s working methods during the composition of the first mentioned pamphlet, the one about the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge, the one entitled Cyclops With A Broom!

I have been fortunate enough to gain access to certain papers, once thought consumed in the conflagration which laid waste the Potato Building at exactly the same time as, yet decisively unrelated to, the Tet Offensive. The authenticity of these papers has been questioned by preening young Dobsonist Ted Cack, on a number of television chat shows, some of them still available for viewing on the iTarbuck and similar devices. I have addressed every single one of his pernickety little fiddle-faddles, in the pages of several journals, learned and unlearned, and also by employing a trio of rough tough ne’er-do-wells to lie in wait for him at dusk and to have at him with clobberings. It was perhaps somewhat mischievous of me to arrange for this twilit ambuscade to take place on Sawdust Bridge. I wanted to leave young Ted Cack in no doubt as to who had engineered his clobberings, without him having any proof. I wanted, as politicians are so fond of saying, “to send a message”, and equally, I wanted to ensure that for young Ted Cack, and as politicians are also so fond of saying, “lessons would be learned”. I think I succeeded in these ambitions, for there has been not a whisper from within the walls of the clinic wherein the upstart Dobsonist languishes, hovering in that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death.

It was that very realm Dobson was to probe as he struggled with the writing of Cyclops With A Broom!. His first encounter with the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge came about when Dobson was skim-reading an article in Monocular Factotum magazine, a back number of which he found discarded in a dustbin near a splurge of lupins on the towpath of the filthy canal. Sprawling on a bench to rest his weary legs, the pamphleteer leafed through the tatty, damp pages to pass the time. He describes what sparked his interest in one of the papers I have access to, and which Ted Cack says is counterfeit, a scrap torn from a seed catalogue in the margin of which Dobson scribbled

Sawdust Bridge crossing-sweeper. One eye. By all accounts hovered in that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death. If true, of brain-numbing significance. If not, pish! Investigate with a view to writing a pamphlet.

The story of the one-eyed crossing-sweeper of Sawdust Bridge which appeared in the magazine, and which Dobson was to plagiarise, fatuously, in his pamphlet, was one which had apparently transfixed the citizens of Pointy Town for a few short weeks in the nineteenth century. This “Cyclops with a broom”, as Dobson dubbed him – though why he added an exclamation mark is anybody’s guess – was a shabby yet sinister figure who appeared on the southern side of Sawdust Bridge, armed with a broom, sweeping, sweeping, on a muggy summer morn in 1861. He neither spoke nor responded to others’ speech, seemed impervious to the heat, was unresting, and swept the crossing by the bridge, back and forth, from dawn until dusk. He appeared again the following day, and for a further six days thereafter. On the next day, there was no sign of him, nor did he ever appear in Pointy Town again.

Again, in the papers, this time on a shred of Kellogg’s cornflakes carton, Dobson pinpoints the nub of the matter, as he frets with the best way to approach the tale, short of outright plagiarism, a temptation he was, alas, unable to resist.

This broom-wielding Cyclops business. Alive or dead? Man or spectral being from that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death? How to winnow wheat from chaff? Enter realm myself, via sortilege and traffic with wraiths and mumbo jumbo? Or could just copy out magazine article word for word, and change some of the adverbs.

As we know, Dobson chose the latter course. It was his unmasking as a plagiarist, and his insistent denial of guilt, that led directly to that whole sorry interlude in the pamphleteer’s career popularly known as the time of “the watercress infusion”, not to be confused with the Robert Ludlum potboiler of the same name.

But as I have pored over the scrap torn from a seed catalogue and the shred of a Kellogg’s cornflakes carton, I have become ever more convinced that, before resorting to copying out verbatim the Monocular Factotum article and changing some of the adverbs, Dobson did actually enter into that unfathomable realm betwixt life and death by means of sortilege and traffic with wraiths and mumbo jumbo. It is an astonishing tale, of pamphleteering on the brink of reason, and one which I hope to present with great flourish in my own forthcoming pamphlet. The world is waiting.

There is a possibility that young Ted Cack may be restored to health and discharged from the clinic before my pamphlet hits the airport bookstalls. If so, I want to announce here and now that there will be neither a jot nor scintilla of truth in the charge the callow upstart will lay at my door, that I have plagiarised entire, changing some of the adverbs, every last word of my pamphlet, by simply copying out his own unpublished research paper.

On Having The Prize Within One’s Grasp

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Thump thump thump. What is that sound? It is the sound of a human heart, stimulated by excitement, beating harder and more rapidly than it is wont to do when the body or the brain is at rest. I am sure you can think of dozens, if not hundreds, of circumstances in which the human heart will go thump thump thump, but today I wish to concern myself with but one. Interestingly, however, it is a circumstance which can take wildly divergent forms. The thumping result on the human heart is the same – the outward appearances could not be more different.

It may be easier for you to cotton on to what I am blathering about if we devise a couple of vignettes, as illustrative of my point.

Let us first consider fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, sprinting as fast as he can round and round and round a running track. He is, in this instance, competing in the second qualifying heat to gain a place in the semi-final of the Pointy Town All-Comers Super Duper Athletico Jamboree. No, scrub that. My argument falls flat on its face if it is a qualifying heat. So we must imagine fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol has already qualified for the semi-final, and not only that, but he has whizzed his way triumphantly through that semi-final, egged on by his redoubtable coach, catarrh-racked Old Halob, there at the side of the cinder track in his raincoat and Homburg hat, and our vignette is actually of the spindly Wunderkind sprinting round and round and round in the final itself. The sky is grey, there is a mild breeze, meteorologists have forecast a blizzard later. Certain birds are perched on the branches of certain trees, singing their tiny birdy hearts out. The birds’ hearts too may be going thump thump thump, but that will be for a different reason, one that need not concern us here, id est avian metabolism. The trees line one side of the field commandeered by the organisers of the Pointy Town All-Comers Super Duper Athletico Jamboree. Usually, cows loiter here, but they have been driven away, with shouting and sticks, to a neighbouring field. Once the cows were gone, at the crack of dawn, a fellow wheeled a canister filled with whitewash round and round the field, painting the lines of a running track, and other athletically significant lines, by releasing whitewash from the wheeled canister through a nozzle. While he was about this business, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol was already limbering up, puffing and panting in the lee of a pavilion, wherein sat Old Halob smoking his way through his first pack of gaspers of the day. Now all that limbering up and puffing and panting and triumphant victories, or at least placement in the top three, in several qualifying heats and in the semi-final, have led the baggy-shorted sprinter to the moment caught in our vignette. He is whizzing towards the tape. His heart is pounding thump thump thump. He has the prize within his grasp.

Our second vignette could not be more different. There are no trees, no birds, no cows, no whitewash. There is no fictional athlete nor his Stalinist coach. We are not outdoors, in a field, but indoors, in what might best be described as a hovel. The interior is gloomy, lit by sputtering tallow candles because the electricity bill has gone unpaid. There are several eggs and a packet of breakfast cereal in the larder, but little sign of other food save for a discarded toffee apple wrapper in the waste paper bin. The wrapper sits atop a heap of similarly discarded sheets of paper torn from a notepad, crumpled and scrunched up and tossed to oblivion. There is scratchy writing on each sheet, but we shall never read it. The waste paper bin rests on rotting linoleum next to an escritoire. Sitting at the escritoire, slumped, despairing, blighted by miseries unnumbered, is Dobson, the twentieth century’s titanic pamphleteer. He has come to a stop in the composition of his latest screed, stricken with vacancy-between-the-ears. He takes a gulp from a smudged beaker of aerated lettucewater and peers dispiritedly out of an even more smudged window at nothing. Where in our previous vignette we had speed and motion and activity, to the point where one might consider it suitable subject matter for a Futurist painting, here all is still, silent, beige, crumpled, woebegone. But of a sudden the silence is shattered by an ungodly buzzing. The pamphleteer’s metal tapping machine is processing an incoming message. Dobson stirs on his stool and gropes his way through the gloom to the worm-eaten sideboard upon which the metal tapping machine sits. The message is quite astonishing. It is a tip-off that Dobson is to be announced as the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Economics. Dobson is perplexed, for he knows nothing of economics, yet the source is trustworthy, and unimpeachable. Well, that is what Dobson believes, for he does not realise he is being twitted by a mischief maker. Instead, mistaking the sender of the message for his most trustworthy and unimpeachable pal, his eyes shine brightly, and he pictures himself, besuited and natty, being given a cheque for a vast amount of money by some Norwegian persons. His heart is pounding thump thump thump. He has the prize within his grasp.

It is instructive, is it not, that two such shockingly dissimilar vignettes can yet end with identical sentences? Were we to stay with our two protagonists, and to follow them through the next minutes and hours, we would find that, though they had the same thump thump thump stimulation to their hearts, for the same reasons, when the thumping subsided their destinies were as different as their vignettes. For fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol won his race, and grasped his prize, but Dobson learned that he had been made a fool of, and had never even been shortlisted for the Economics Nobel, and so he did not grasp his prize.

It would be well to reflect on this, next time your human heart goes thump thump thump, whatever the cause of the stimulation that makes it thump so.

On Potatoes

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“And what should they know of potatoes, who only potatoes know?” asks Dobson, in the title of one of his pamphlets, which is sadly out of print. It is a dazzling tour de force, noted for containing an eerily accurate description of crinkle-cut oven chips, written before such things existed.

It is worth noting that the dazzling nature of the pamphlet is less to do with the quality of Dobson’s prose, which might better be described, in this instance, as hysterical and incoherent, and more to do with the then fashionable far out groovy psychedelic typeface employed by Marigold Chew when setting the text. Indeed, so dazzling is the appearance of the multicoloured swirly maelstrom of type that one is advised to wear sunglasses when reading it, or attempting to read it. Peter Hitchens has claimed, not without reason, that Marigold Chew was probably “high on pot” when producing the pamphlet, but she also may have thought that its far out groovy psychedelic look would increase sales in “head shops” and free festivals and other such excresences of the era. If so, she was horribly mistaken, for “That Potato Pamphlet”, as it is commonly known, sold only half a dozen copies in toto, and three of those went to a wandering proto-crusty who pitched his tent in Dobson’s back garden for the duration of the summer of love.

The pamphleteer himself might also have been “high on pot” when he wrote the text, for as I said, his prose is hysterical and incoherent. A weedy wannabe Dobsonist would have tossed the pamphlet aside, or even set it on fire, but I am adamantine in my devotion to the great man, so I enrolled in a special study group. Each weekday evening for three whole years, we met in an abandoned pavilion to pore over the pamphlet, eight of us, trying as best we could to eke some sense from it. What follows, then, owes as much to the contributions of Messrs Clapper, Shrublack, Inspip, Squelch, Dalewinton, Boggis and Globb as to my own insights.

Dobson seems to have conceived of the idea of the crinkle-cut oven chip as the ne plus ultra of space age food. This, he says, describing a then imaginary frozen sliver of reconstituted potato-based mush shaped with some sort of wiggly-shaped jig-slicer, will be the staple foodstuff of space travellers and cosmonauts as they venture through galaxies yet unknown. He asks if any alien beings they might meet would comprehend that the crinkle-cut oven chip and the ordinary potato, a tuberous vegetable buried in soil back on planet Earth, were in any way related to each other. And he answers “no” to that question. No matter, he asserts, how advanced and superintelligent the beings were, they would never be able to grasp the human ingenuity that turned the one into the other.

Dobson then posits the idea that it is the potato that has evolved from the crinkle-cut oven chip, rather than vice versa, and in a prescient passage written some years before Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001 : A Space Odyssey (1968), he invents a scene where a primitive ape picks up a crinkle-cut oven chip and tosses it into the air, where – pfft! – it is suddenly transformed into a potato. Annoyingly, Dobson does not specify the variety of potato. Or perhaps he does, and we were simply incapable of deciphering a particularly far out groovy psychedelic section of the text.

Quite what point he is trying to make with this topsy turvy twaddle is unclear, even when one is “high on pot”. I speak not of my own experience but that of Messrs Squelch and Globb, who often huddled together in the corner of the abandoned pavilion before our study group meetings, indulging in what I think in some circles is known as “reefer madness”.

For all that, And what should they know of potatoes, who only potatoes know? is a fascinating curio. Dobson does actually answer the question posed in the title, but in doing so raises a blizzard of further questions, the answers to which perhaps will not become apparent until the true space age is upon us.

140 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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It is traditional, at the turning of the year, for reader Mike Jennings to update his exhaustive bibliography of out of print pamphlets by Dobson. “It’s all a matter of diligent rummaging,” writes Mr Jennings from the pompous land of his banishment. Since we last heard from him, yesterday, he has managed to track down a further title, and he is yet again to be commended for his thoroughness, not least in assigning that pesky, but lovely, Blötzmann Number to the pamphlet he has unearthed. One day we might be able to work out its significance.

Please note that the listed title is currently out of print.

140. Library Clown Traumas – What They Are & How To Shake Them Out Of Your Head Good And Proper Using Bleach & A Dog Whistle

139 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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It is traditional, at the turning of the year, for reader Mike Jennings to update his exhaustive bibliography of out of print pamphlets by Dobson. “It seems that 2011 has been a lean year indeed for Dobsonian scholarship,” writes Mr Jennings from the pompous land of his banishment. Nevertheless, he has managed to track down eleven, or rather twelve, previously unidentified titles, and he is once again to be commended for his thoroughness, not least in assigning those pesky, but lovely, Blötzmann Numbers to the pamphlets he has unearthed. One day we might be able to work out their significance.

There are earlier listings for pamphlets numbered 1 to 104, and pamphlets numbered 105 to 128. Please note that, unless stated otherwise, all titles are out of print.

129. The Dredging Of The Canal At Gaarg On The Eve Of The Batcake-Akido Conference.

130. Ducks And Criminals And Well-Maintained Reservoirs.

131. Eleven Essays On Reservoir Maintenance, By One Who Knows.

132. Things Beginning With B.

133. On The Inadvisability Of Taking Daytime Naps During The Unfolding Of Cataclysmic World Events.

134. How I Witnessed The Sight Of A Wild And Bearded Mobile Librarian In Hand To Hand Combat With A Snarling Gaggle Of Brain-Bejangled Peasants.

135. How Many Cormorants Are There In The Bible?

136. Omni-Encyclopaedia Dobsonia.

137. How To Fill Your Brain With Arcane Legal Precepts Through Simple Will-Power And Osmosis.

138. The Case Of Prince Fulgencio.

139, 139a. The Funnel, Volumes 1 and 2.

Biblical Cormorants

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In that piece from seven years ago reposted yesterday, I quote from the Book of Isaiah (King James Version). It is there we meet the so-called Isaiah Cormorant, one of four cormorants to be found in the Bible, the four most culturally important cormorants ever to have existed. Anybody who is serious about cormorants, and about culturally important cormorants in particular, ought to be familiar with them. It may well be true, as Charles Bradlaugh (1833-1891) observed, that the books of the Bible had their origins in the ravings of “illiterate half-starved visionaries in some dark corner of a Graeco-Syrian slum”, but few would deny that those ravings have had profound resonance, especially, but not exclusively, in cormorant-world.

What of the three other Biblical cormorants? Well, there is the Leviticus Cormorant, which appears in this passage:

These are they which ye shall have in abomination among the fowls; they shall not be eaten, they are an abomination: the eagle, and the ossifrage, and the ospray, And the vulture, and the kite after his kind; Every raven after his kind; And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, And the little owl, and the cormorant, and the great owl, And the swan, and the pelican, and the gier eagle, And the stork, the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you.

The Deuteronomy Cormorant is not dissimilar, as we learn here:

Of all clean birds ye shall eat. But these are they of which ye shall not eat: the eagle, and ossifrage, and the ospray, And the glede, and the kite, and the vulture after his kind, And every raven after his kind, And the owl, and the night hawk, and the cuckow, and the hawk after his kind, The little owl, and the great owl, and the swan, And the pelican, and the gier eagle, and the cormorant, And the stork, and the heron after her kind, and the lapwing, and the bat. And every creeping thing that flieth is unclean unto you: they shall not be eaten. But of all clean fowls ye may eat.

Then there is the Isaiah Cormorant, which we met yesterday, and finally the Zephaniah Cormorant:

Ye Ethiopians also, ye shall be slain by my sword. And he will stretch out his hand against the north, and destroy Assyria; and will make Nineveh a desolation, and dry like a wilderness. And flocks shall lie down in the midst of her, all the beasts of the nations: both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows; desolation shall be in the thresholds: for he shall uncover the cedar work.

So similar are the Leviticus Cormorant and the Deuteronomy Cormorant, on the one hand, and the Isaiah Cormorant and the Zephaniah Cormorant, on the other, that some theologians and cormorantologists have argued that there are only two cormorants in the Bible, not four. The cultural and historical implications of this view are immense, even world-shuddering. If your brain is made dizzy by just thinking about it, I recommend a thorough study of Dobson’s pamphlet How Many Cormorants Are There In The Bible? (out of print).

Dobson And The Pit

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“I think,” said Dobson, at breakfast one foul and rain-sodden Tuesday morning, “It is time we had our own mosh pit.”

Marigold Chew raised an eyebrow.

“Do you actually know what a mosh pit is?” she asked.

“Not exactly,” replied the twentieth century’s greatest out of print pamphleteer, “But I suspect it would be a good use of that part of the garden overhung by laburnum and sycamore and larch. You know that patch o’er which hangs leafage so dense that it is forever in shadow, and is home to brambles and nettles and dockweed. I cannot even remember the last time I sat or stood in it nor even walked though it, nor can I recall ever seeing you doing so, O cherished one. It is unused ground, and no ground ought to be unused on this earth, according to some authorities.”

“Which authorities might they be, Dobson?” asked Marigold Chew.

“I think there is a maxim to that effect in the Maxims of Bombastus Dogend, or I could be thinking of Listerine Optrex, also a great one for maxims. I can check later.”

“So let me get this straight,” said Marigold Chew, marshalling with her fork the last few caraway seeds on her breakfast plate, “You intend to dig a pit in a shady arbour in the garden, and dub it a mosh pit, without any clear understanding – without any understanding at all – of what a mosh pit is?”

“I shall look it up in a thick and exhaustive reference book,” said Dobson, mad with cornflakes.

“So you will be going to the mobile library?” said Marigold Chew.

“That is my plan,” said the pamphleteer, and he got up from the table and proceeded to don his Andalusian Sewage Inspector’s boots.

“Today is Tuesday,” said Marigold Chew, “So the mobile library is in quite a different, and distant, bailiwick.”

“And you think I am going to let that stop me?” shouted Dobson melodramatically as he crashed out of the door into the downpour.

Untold hours later, Dobson came crashing back through the door, sopping wet, with a gleam in his eye and a thin, pained smile playing about his lips, as if he were Ronald Colman shooting a scene for Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942).

“Well, Dobson, what news?” asked Marigold Chew.

Dobson took his pipe from his pocket, crammed into it a thub of Rotting Orchard Fruit ‘n’ Conkers Pipe Tobacco from his other pocket, lit up and puffed, and said:

“I had a deal of difficulty finding the thick and exhaustive reference book I sought. Actually, before that I had a deal of difficulty finding the mobile library itself. There is a new mobile librarian, of wild and untrammelled mien, with an unruly beard, whose grasp of the schedule is weak. He had driven the pantechnicon to quite an unsuitable bailiwick, near cliffs, where the native peasants, having never seen the mobile library before, stood in a ring around it, holding aloft their pitchforks and sticks tipped with tarry burning rags, gawping. I think they may have had it in mind to sacrifice the mobile librarian on a pyre.”

“Gosh!” said Marigold Chew.

“Be that as it may,” continued Dobson, “I barged my way through the seething peasant throng and climbed into the pantechnicon. The wild beardy person was engaged in some sort of haphazard reshelving exercise, oblivious of the peasants outside. The mobile library holdings, including several thick and exhaustive reference books, one of which was critical to my research, lay scattered about higgledy-piggledy. Oh! I was sorely vexed. But I found what I wanted eventually, under a pile of paperback potboilers by Pebblehead. And – “

“You have created a puddle on the floor, Dobson,” interrupted Marigold Chew, “So soaked you are from rainfall. Finish your pipe and mop up the puddle and then you can continue your tale over a nice piping hot cup of ersatz cocoa substitute.”

And it was during the subsequent conversation that the out of print pamphleteer revealed to his poppet that he had indeed discovered the nature of a mosh pit.

“Apparently,” he said, “A mosh pit is an area where gaggles of frenzied teenpersons hurl themselves about in an uncoordinated and rambunctious manner to a soundtrack of improbably loud and thumping and often discordant electrified racket played from an adjacent stage or platform by persons not dissimilar to the denizens of the mosh pit.”

“Yes, I know,” said Marigold Chew, “I could have told you that this morning over breakfast. I assume that now you know what a mosh pit is you no longer want one in your own back garden.”

“Quite the contrary, my sweet!” shouted Dobson with unnerving zest, “I am all the more determined to dig one! Hand me that spade!”

And though it was now dark, and the rain was pouring down more heavily than ever, Dobson was soon enough out in the garden, under the dripping leafage of laburnum and sycamore and larch, digging a pit. Positing that he had taken leave of his senses, Marigold Chew retired to her boudoir to listen to Xavier Cugat And His Orchestra on the wireless.

At some point in the small hours of the morning, Dobson came back indoors. He was covered in mud, as if he had been toiling in the trenches of Flanders fields during the Great War, the cause of the shellshock suffered by Smithy, alias Charles Rainier, the character played by Ronald Colman in Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy, 1942). Marigold Chew was fast asleep, but she was woken by a repetitive dull thumping noise, as of bone cushioned by flesh bashing against wood, over and over again. She went downstairs to find Dobson slumped at the kitchenette table, repeatedly thumping his forehead against its polished wooden surface.

“Whatever is the matter, Dobson?” she asked.

Dobson looked up.

“The mosh pit is dug, my dear! It needs but a complement of frenzied teenpersons to be deposited within it. That is my quandary, that the reason for my despair.”

“Please explain Dobson, you have me utterly befuddled. Though it be the middle of the night I am going to put the kettle on for a nice piping hot cup of powdered milk slops enriched with filbert nut flavouring. Pray continue.”

“Well,” said Dobson, “It was only when I had finished digging the mosh pit, and clambered out of it, and stood back to admire my work in the brilliant illumination of Kleig lights, that I realised the fatal flaw at the heart of my design.”

“Which is?” asked Marigold Chew.

“We have not space in the garden sufficient to erect a stage or platform next to the mosh pit,” moaned Dobson, “Thus nowhere to assemble a grouplet of persons to provide the necessary soundtrack of improbably loud and thumping and often discordant electrified racket to which frenzied teenpersons so minded will mosh.”

“Look on the bright side,” said Marigold Chew, “We may not have our own mosh pit, but now we have an all-purpose pit. There is a myriad of usages to which it could be put. I can think of several immediately, but I will refrain from telling you right away. I think you need a disinfectant bath and a good night’s sleep.”

“Perhaps you are right, buttercup,” said Dobson, “And in any case there may be such an activity as moshing for the deaf, or moshing to the sound of a lone piccolo, or other types of moshing yet unimagined by frenzied teenpersons, and by unfrenzied teenpersons too. Tomorrow I shall go the mobile library again, assuming it has not been shoved over the cliffs by the baffled and menacing peasants, and I shall undertake further and more rigorous research..”

“That is an excellent idea, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, “But before plunging into your disinfectant bath, just tell me one thing. Why on earth did you want to have frenzied teenpersons hurling themselves about in an uncoordinated and rambunctious manner to a soundtrack of improbably loud and thumping and often discordant electrified racket in your own back garden in the first place?”

Alas, whatever Dobson said in reply was drowned out by the piercing shriek of the now boiling kettle.

Some days later, Marigold Chew hoicked the spade and filled in the pit under the leafage, still dripping with rain, of laburnum and sycamore and larch, and strewed over it brambles and nettles and dockweed. Never again did the word “mosh” ever pass Dobson’s lips. Other matters had attracted his attention, as related in his pamphlet How I Witnessed The Sight Of A Wild And Bearded Mobile Librarian In Hand To Hand Combat With A Snarling Gaggle Of Brain-Bejangled Peasants (out of print).

Goatherd In Residence

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In the same publication where Dennis Beerpint saw a classified advertisement for the post of Poet In Residence at Beppo Lamont’s Travelling Big Top Circus, there was a similar item inviting applications for a Goatherd In Residence at an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. This was the very same evaporated milk factory where, many many years ago, Dobson served as a janitor, though during the out of print pamphleteer’s janitorial tenure the post of Resident Goatherd did not exist.

The advert has led to conjecture that at least some of the milk used for the manufacture of evaporated milk at the factory is goats’ milk which, as we know from H S Holmes Pegler’s article on goat-keeping in The Listener, Vol I No 16, 1st May 1929, has a “peculiarly goaty flavour”. In Winnipeg, then, we would expect the resultant product to have a peculiarly evaporated, goaty flavour. Taste tests are to be carried out, with the participation of a volunteer panel, to ascertain if this is indeed the case.

Meanwhile, a second body of opinion has emerged, positing the possibility that it is not the peculiarly goaty flavoured milk that is evaporated, but the goats themselves. But is it likely, or even feasible, to effect the evaporation of a goat, a creature of flesh and muscle and goaty sinew? A goatherd, charged with the care of the goats, would hardly stand idly by, chewing a piece of straw, while his goats evaporated before his startled eyes, would he? I suppose he might, if he were complicit in their evaporation, if indeed he had been employed for the very purpose of evaporating them, one by one, by fair means or foul. This might go some way to explain the placing of an advertisement for the Goatherd In Residence in an obscure and arcane academic journal, almost all the subscribers to which are beardy postmodernist fatheads with little grasp of life in the raw, rather than, say, in a cheaply photocopied newssheet for rustics, distributed by hand at peasant gatherings and barn dances.

One way to find out what is really going on at that evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg would be to undertake close observation and regular, systematic counting of the goats. Thereagain, the goats may be corralled at some ancillary goatstead at some distance from the evaporated milk factory, on the outskirts of the city, even outwith Winnipeg itself. Such an arrangement, of course, would necessitate the transportation of the evaporated goats from goatstead to factory. It is difficult to imagine precisely what form of transport one would use, to contain securely the evaporated essence of goat in transit across the cold wastes of the state of Manitoba, without that peculiarly goaty vaporous essence dispersing upon the winds. Are there canisters for the purpose, made of matériel with properties such as will not contaminate the vapours and thus sully the peculiarly goaty flavour of the tinned product eventually to find its way on to the shelves of our favourite evaporated milk retail outlets? We would need to station observers along all the main freight routes into Winnipeg, road, rail, and river, hoping to spot a telltale canister aboard a lorry or cart or truck or train or barge, to follow its progress, and then to slink by subterfuge into the unloading bay at the evaporated milk factory, to watch events unfold. Dobson, during his janitorship, would have made the perfect “inside man” for the job. It is yet another example of an opportunity lost in his long and ultimately tragic career.

I have tried to find out who, if anybody, applied for the post of Goatherd In Residence, but the Winnipeg evaporated milk factory’s Human and Capric Resources Department did not respond to my enquiries. I am tempted to drop the matter, and instead embark upon urgent and overdue pillow research. Tempted, but not yet decided. First I shall fix a tumbler of cocoa, made with evaporated milk. I shall be alert for the peculiar flavour of goat, evaporated or otherwise.

The Pillow Pamphlets

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Capacious and pulsating it may have been, but Dobson’s brain contained many, many pockets of ignorance. He was in his mid fifties, for example, when he first came upon the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, a work of which he had no previous inkling. He did not read it, merely noting the title on the spine of a copy lodged on the bookshelf of his friend Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the Sino-Dutch artist and mountaineer.

Back at home later that day, he mentioned it to Marigold Chew.

“Did you know that an eleventh century Japanese bint wrote an entire book about pillows?” he asked.

“Yes, Dobson, of course,” said Marigold Chew, “I have borrowed it from the mobile library more than once, and read it from cover to cover.”

“Speaking of the mobile library,” said Dobson, and he embarked on a long-winded and pettifogging digression upon the mobile library, which in that place at that time took the form of a cart pulled by an elegant yet tubercular drayhorse, the cart piled high with hardbacks covered in greaseproof paper jackets, the drayhorse chivvied on its way by an equally elegant and equally tubercular librarian-carter, a man of grim countenance and terrible personal habits who bore a distinct resemblance to the actor Karl Johnson, noted for his roles as elderly peasant Twister Turrill in Lark Rise To Candleford and as Wittgenstein in Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein. In fact, it may even have been Johnson himself, moonlighting as a mobile librarian to supplement his thespian earnings. Dobson posited this possibility, but doubted it was true, as we, too, must doubt it until all the evidence is in.

So implacable was the pamphleteer’s babbling that Marigold Chew was unable to get a word in edgeways, and was thus given no opportunity to point out to Dobson that the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, like all pillow books, was not actually a book about pillows, but a collection of lists and aphorisms and observations and jottings and poems and opinions and anecdotes. Had he ceased prattling for but a moment, Dobson would have learned this, and not, when eventually he exhausted the topic of the mobile library and the greaseproof paper jackets and the drayhorse and the librarian-carter and the actor and the fictional peasant and the non-fictional philosopher, gone scurrying off to his escritoire to sit and scribble the following:

I have learned that a thousand years ago, a woman from the land of Yoko Ono wrote an entire book about pillows. Such is human progress that in the intervening millennium there must be much, much more to be said on the subject. Clearly I am the pamphleteer to take on this daunting task. I shall set to work on the Pillow Book of Dobson as soon as I have taken a nap. NB: The nap will of course be research for my Pillow Book, as I shall be resting my head upon a pillow while I nap, and present my findings as soon as I wake up.

As far as we know, the promised “findings” were never written down. So refreshed was Dobson by his nap that, upon waking, he immediately put on his Iberian duck hunter’s boots, grabbed an Alpenstock in his fist, and set out for a jaunty hike that took him past the electricity pylons and the abandoned swimming pool and the badger rescue station and the allotments. All the while he hiked, he concentrated his mind on pillows – a thousand years of pillows! His brain reeled as he struggled to comprehend the sheer amount of material he would have to marshal in the making of his Pillow Book. What advances mankind must have made in the field of pillows since the eleventh century! How many heads had rested on how many pillows in that time? How many dreams dreamt during pillow-assisted dozes and naps and even comas? Pausing for a breather outside the bolted and shuttered off licence, Dobson suddenly felt intimidated by the scale of the task before him. He watched the skies for swifts and sparrows and starlings and other birds beginning with S. He rattled the bolts on the off licence door. He chucked his Alpenstock into a ditch. And then he turned for home, resolved to write, not a Pillow Book, but a whole series of Pillow Pamphlets, each to tackle a single, manageable subsection of his vast unwieldy subject matter.

“Marigold!” he announced, bustling through the door, “I have had a brainwave with regard to my working methods on the pillow project!”

“I did not know you had embarked upon a pillow project, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, “And what have you done with the Alpenstock?”

“Oh, I chucked it into a ditch,” said Dobson, “I shall go and retrieve it later. But first I must write out the plan for my Pillow Pamphlets, updating a thousand years of pillow history since Sei Shōnagon wrote her book about pillows long long ago in far Japan!”

But so exhausted was the pamphleteer by his hiking and his brain activity that before sitting at his escritoire he took another nap. He thus set a pattern for what was to follow. Every time he determined to set to work on the Pillow Pamphlets, he convinced himself that further practical pillow research was necessary, and lay his head upon a pillow, and fell asleep.

The project was eventually abandoned when the pamphleteer’s attention was distracted by cataclysmic world events, and he turned his energies to writing his famous pamphlet On The Inadvisability Of Taking Daytime Naps During The Unfolding Of Cataclysmic World Events (out of print).

About The Funnel

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I should perhaps give some explanation of the postages headed The Funnel, Volumes One and Two. They comprise the lists of contents of the only two editions of a decisively obscure magazine entitled The Funnel, conceived and written by Dobson and edited and published by Marigold Chew.

Dobson was insanely jealous of the success of the Reader’s Digest, every single issue of which sold more copies than even his most popular pamphlets. Trudging along one morning past the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing, it occurred to him that whereas his pamphlets tended, in the main, to address one subject at a time, the great attraction of the Reader’s Digest was its variety. Each copy came packed with diverting disquisitions on topics as various as John’s kidney, escapes from imperilment, Jane’s liver, Aztec antiquities, anticommunist hysteria, and astrological flummery.

“To hell with pamphlets!” shouted the pamphleteer, at a siskin perched upon a bough. The siskin is, in the words of one ornithologist, an attractive little finch, but it has no understanding of human speech, so Dobson’s words were wasted. But when he arrived home, having plodded around the edge of the eerie marsh, he repeated his imprecation to Marigold Chew.

“Gosh,” she said, adding “You could just staple four or five pamphlets together, and that would provide the variety you seek, Dobson.”

“Have you actually seen the Reader’s Digest?” shouted Dobson, “It covers far more than four or five topics. It is so packed with prose that its binding needs a spine, unlike virtually ever other magazine available at this point in the twentieth century!”

“So staple ten or a dozen pamphlets together, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew.

“No staple is big or sturdy enough for the popular magazine I envisage!” shouted Dobson, and he began pouring milk into a bowl.

Over the following weeks and months, the pamphleteer and his inamorata thrashed out the details of a publication Dobson was convinced would have the editor of the Reader’s Digest either grovelling piteously at his feet or banging his head repeatedly against the damp stone walls of an oubliette in a secure facility for lunatics. Each issue of the as yet untitled magazine would contain not ten, not a dozen, but thirteen articles, penned by Dobson but with titles provided by Marigold Chew. She would enter into a shamanistic trance-frenzy, cavorting dizzily around a bonfire in the back garden, twigs and bones and feathers entwined in her hair, and summon from eldritch tonybuzanities a set of two-word titles based on the alphabet (issue one) or the qwerty keyboard layout (issue two). Fuelled by plentiful tumblers of aerated radishwater, Dobson would write all the articles in one marathon scribbleathon, the reams and reams of dazzling prose typeset and Gestetnered by Marigold Chew, and untold millions of copies piled high in a convoy of container lorries revving their diesel motors outside the house, ready to fan out across the land to doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and other carefully selected distribution points.

On a Thursday night in November, Marigold Chew induced a shamanistic trance-frenzy and delivered forth twenty-six titles for Dobson to crack on with. At dawn, brandishing the flayed skin of a wolf on which the titles were daubed in her own blood, she went looking for the pamphleteer, who was nowhere to be found in the house. She found him beyond the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing, slumped in the muck, weeping.

“Here, Dobson,” she cried, still in a partial frenzy, “The contents of issues one and two of The Funnel are ready for you, wrenched from realms beyond sense!”

But Dobson continued to weep, clawing at the mud.

“All is hopeless, hopeless,” he whimpered, “I have just been apprised, by Sputnik or some such space age contraption, of the latest Reader’s Digest circulation figures. I must be mad to think I could ever match them. No, Marigold, I am afraid it is back to the drudgery of pamphleteering for me. Tell the convoy of container lorries to drive away. I shall weep and claw some more and then I shall come home and pour milk into a bowl.”

“Right-o, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, brightly, “And I shall put the kettle on and pop the smokers’ poptarts into the toaster.”

And thus dawned a Friday morning in November. Far far away, in Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald woke from an uneasy sleep, got ready for work, and before leaving the house, plopped his wedding ring into a pale, translucent, blue-green china teacup with violets and a golden rim that once belonged to his wife’s grandmother.

Things Beginning With B

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Dobson’s pamphlet Things Beginning With B (out of print) is chiefly remarkable for the paucity of things beginning with B to which it attends. After a few ill-tempered prefatory remarks in which the twentieth century’s titanic pamphleteer gets off his chest certain moans and grumbles about rain and mud and swans, he embarks upon a surprisingly knowledgeable account of bees. This display of unlikely learning puzzled Dobsonists for many a year, until Aloysius Nestingbird discovered that the passage is copied out in its entirety from a Victorian work of natural history entitled Everything A Sickly Victorian Infant Needs To Know About Bees, Wasps And Hornets by Mrs Lachrima Baste.

Dobson next announces that he is going to give the most thorough account of breakfast ever attempted in English prose. He does not. Following a short paragraph about eggs, containing nothing that the average hen coop observer would not learn in a morning, the pamphleteer asserts that the “breakfast of the future” will be smokers’ poptarts, a product at that time newly introduced to the ever-burgeoning breakfast food market. While admitting that he has yet to try this toothsome savoury himself, Dobson sings the praises of the smokers’ poptart to so ludicrous an extent that one suspects he was in the pay of the manufacturers. As indeed he was. It was Nestingbird, again, who winkled out the embarrassing truth. Facing a large gas bill and a fine imposed upon him for an offence described as “throwing pebbles, with menace, at swans”, Dobson was more than usually desperate for cash, and it seems that when a representative from the smokers’ poptarts manufacturers’ association came a–calling, the pamphleteer struck a shabby deal. As hairy persons in the 1960s might have put it, he “sold out to The Man, man”.

Thus it is that the bulk of Things Beginning With B is nothing more than an extended paean to smokers’ poptarts, for having exhausted his flights of wittering guff about the breakfast product, Dobson brings the pamphlet to an abrupt close with the preposterous claim that, bees and breakfast aside, there is nothing much of any interest that begins with the letter B.

It is not known how much money Dobson received for his poptart puffery. The records show that, although the swans-and-pebbles-related fine was paid in full, his gas supply was cut off on St Creak’s Day of that year, and not reinstated until the first day of Vice President Nixon’s visit to Venezuela, as recounted in Six Crises (1962).

The Maintenance Of Reservoirs

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My attention was drawn to a letter in today’s Grauniad:

Brian Simpson (Obituary, 2 February) was indeed a gifted raconteur. At a British legal history conference many years ago, his presentation on 19th-century case law on liability for reservoir maintenance wasn’t just learned and lucid, it was also one of the best stand-up comedy routines I’ve ever seen or heard. – Dr J B Post, Castletownbere, County Cork, Ireland

The good doctor Post does not give the precise date of the legal history conference to which he refers, which is a pity, as it leaves us unclear whether the late Brian Simpson was inspired by the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, or vice versa. For nineteenth-century case law on liability for reservoir maintenance was, as any Dobsonist knows, a pet subject, even a Shandean hobby-horse, of the pamphleteer’s. His antipathy to public speaking meant that he would never have had an audience rollicking in the aisles, as Simpson did, and not even the most enthusiastic Dobsonist would call his many pamphlets on the subject funny, or even mildly amusing. If anything, the Dobsonian brow was beclouded by a mist of deathly seriousness whenever he addressed the issue of reservoir maintenance, from any angle. For he was fascinated not just by nineteenth-century case law on liability, but by the minutiae of reservoir maintenance in other centuries, and in fields other than the legal, such as general water management, engineering, geography, geology, history, archaeology, and the by-ways of fanatical and hysterical religion.

It has been said that Dobson’s interest in reservoir maintenance began after he toppled from a dam into an ill-maintained reservoir one St Mungo’s Day in a year no scholar has ever been able to pin down with any certainty. What he was doing atop the dam in the first place is one of those ineffable mysteries that drives sensible persons to the brink of madness if they cannot be persuaded to drop the matter. One is reminded of the tragic case of F X Spray, who lost his wits after thirty years of increasingly monomaniacal research, without ever having ascertained which dam Dobson toppled from, in which country, on what date, in what year, and whether the boots he was wearing at whatever time it was had any role to play in his topplement.

Adding to the tragedy of the Spray case is the possibility that the pamphleteer’s interest in reservoir maintenance was not occasioned by his own experience at all. New research into his benighted infancy suggests that among the few periodicals to which his parents subscribed was Annals Of Reservoir Maintenance, bound copies of which were found in a dustbin about a mile from the pamphleteer’s childhood home, at least one volume carrying on its reindeer-hide cover a thumbprint almost certainly belonging to Dobson père. But these are matters of conjecture, and conjecture is the enemy of blinkered certainty, as well we know.

Wearing our blinkers, we are able to assert that Dobson wrote no fewer than a dozen pamphlets on the subject of reservoir maintenance, each of them, alas, now out of print. With equal certainty, we can say that the most important of these pamphlets, the one which will be read a hundred, nay, two hundred years hence, if of course anybody sees fit to reprint it, is the one in which Dobson posits a correlation between the types of ducks disporting themselves in a reservoir and the number of criminals drowned in the same reservoir, after being convicted of their crime or crimes, bound hand and foot with hemp, inserted into a burlap sack, and flung into the reservoir by a pair of executioners each paid in poultry for their services. Such were the ways of judicial mercilessness, at one time, in certain districts. One might think that drowned wretches from the past and present-day ducks had no connection whatsoever. One might even continue to think this after reading Dobson’s pamphlet. For it must be said that, for all its statistical tables and graphs and bold illustrations, Ducks And Criminals And Well-Maintained Reservoirs (out of print, as previously indicated) is written in a sort of hysterically overwrought prose, possibly inspired by hypnagogic visions, which make the thrust of Dobson’s arguments extremely difficult to grasp. There is also the point, of course, that the pamphleteer could hardly tell one type of duck from another, even when armed with an illustrated field guide suitable for nippers. His ignorance does not deter him, and he makes what one gathers, if read several times to wring some sense out of them, are sweeping pronouncements about matching tallies of pickpockets and pochards, forgers and mergansers, murderers and teal.

The other eleven pamphlets on reservoir maintenance are somewhat easier to understand, written in plainer prose, and were collected together in a sort of überpamphlet entitled Eleven Essays On Reservoir Maintenance, By One Who Knows (out of print). The cover featured a spectacular mezzotint by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint, showing a mezzotintist sitting on a camping stool atop a spectacular dam, executing a mezzotint of a spectacular reservoir, in which pochards, mergansers and teal bob about on the surface, while patches of shading and cross-hatching hint at a number of soaking wet sacks many fathoms deep, containing the soaking wet corpses of pickpockets and forgers and murderers, bound with soaking wet hemp.

Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste

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Sometimes, though rarely, Dobson’s heart would swell with a charitable impulse, and on one such occasion he hatched the plan of inventing a novelty sandwich paste, the profit from sales of which he would donate to his local otter sanctuary.

“I shall call it Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste,” he explained to Marigold Chew, “The better to fix in the minds of my customers the eventual destination of their pennies.”

“It is a capital idea, Dobson,” replied Marigold Chew, “But it has a fatal flaw.”

Dobson’s face soured.

“Oh? And what might that be?” he asked.

“We do not have a local otter sanctuary,” said Marigold Chew. And she tossed a pebble off the bridge across which they were ploughing, into the tumultuous river below.

Later, back at home, the out of print pamphleteer racked his brains for a way to salvage his scheme, for the charitable impulse was still throbbing. After a prolonged bout of pencil-sharpening, which he found conducive to concentrated thought, Dobson made a Eurekaish grunting noise and ran out into the garden, where Marigold Chew was busy with a pair of pruning shears.

“Who says the otter sanctuary need be a local one?” he cried, “I can divert the profits to a remote otter sanctuary!”

“All well and good,” said his inamorata, “But consider something else, Dobson. Is there not a danger that your potential customers, otter-lovers every man jack of them, might construe that a paste called Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste is actually made out of pulverised otters? Even if they are wrong, I suspect sales would suffer, simply due to the misunderstanding.”

Dobson retreated indoors and sharpened dozens more pencils. An hour later he was back in the garden.

“Each tub of Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste would bear a label, a bold and bright label, on which would be emblazoned the slogan ‘Does Not Contain Otters’. That would set the otter-lovers’ minds at rest, would it not?”

“It would,” said Marigold Chew, snipping a sprig from a shrub, “But what ingredients would your sandwich paste contain, if it is to be, as you suggested while we were ploughing across the bridge earlier, a novelty sandwich paste?”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Dobson, airily, “I will think of something.”

Dobson now had two immediate tasks to accomplish, which we can summarise for the slow-witted reader as follows.

1. To identify a remote otter sanctuary deserving of the out of print pamphleteer’s largesse.

2. To concoct a novelty sandwich paste the recipe for which must contain not a trace of otter nor of the by-products of otters.

To facilitate his thinking on these critical matters, Dobson would need to sharpen a goodly number of pencils. Yet every pencil in the house had been sharpened to its utmost pointiness, as a result of which the blades of the Dobson-Chew pencil sharpener were blunted, and needed either to be honed upon a whetstone or else replaced with new blades. Thus, in addition to the tasks enumerated above, the pamphleteer faced two further challenges, viz:

1. To obtain a fresh batch of pencils.

2(a). To have sharpened the existing blades of the pencil sharpener, or

2(b). To replace the blades with brand new ones, gleaming and lethal.

A moment’s thought was all Dobson needed to realise that he could accomplish both these aims by paying a visit to the stationery department at Hubermann’s. In spite of the fact that it was pouring buckets of rain, he donned his Belgian Railway Official’s boots, lacing them so tightly he was in danger of cutting off the blood supply below his ankles, and clattered out of the house into the downpour.

One thing it is important for the reader to understand about Dobson is that, in spite of his bookish erudition, he was a man profoundly ignorant of the natural world. His witlessness in ornithological matters is well-attested. But did you know that, if you were to line up for him, as at an identity parade, an otter and a stoat and a weasel and a vole and a shrew, Dobson would have a deal of difficulty telling you which was which? He had never paid proper attention to his small mammal lessons at school, and forever after in life was lumbered with bafflement about such creatures.

Knowing this, we can grasp an understanding of what happened next. Trudging along the towpath of the filthy old canal on his way to Hubermann’s in the rain, Dobson was set upon by a trio of savage and starving small mammals roused by the smell of his Belgian Railway Official’s boots. They had, you see, recently been smeared with a protective coat of some sort of dubbin-substitute by a wizened and scrofulous pedlar who came a-knocking at Dobson’s door hawking his wares. Whatever this substance was, and however well or ill it protected the boots, it was absolutely irresistible to certain small mammals. Thus it was that, in their frenzy about Dobson’s feet, his tiny attackers caused the pamphleteer to lose his balance, and he toppled over the edge of the towpath into the canal.

The rain had reduced to a drizzle by the time Dobson, sopping wet and with bits of canal-water vegetation sticking out of his bouffant, came crashing through the door and slumped in a chair. Marigold Chew gave him a quizzing look. He told her of his mishap.

“That remote otter sanctuary won’t get a penny from my sandwich paste!” shouted Dobson, “In fact, to be on the safe side I am not even going to make any sandwich paste! That will show them!”

“But was it a trio of otters that attacked your boots, or could it perhaps have been stoats or weasels or voles or shrews?” asked Marigold Chew.

Incapable of a sensible response, Dobson fell into a sulk.

A few miles away, on the outskirts of another town, a wizened and scrofulous pedlar hawking his wares knocked upon another door. In his punnet, he had jars and jars of paste for sale. Each was labelled, but the labels were hard to decipher. In one light, they read “Dubbin Substitute”, but then, seen from a different angle, “Novelty Sandwich Paste”. The pedlar was dressed all in green, and when he spoke, the timbre of his voice cast a spooky spell, as if he were a figure from a fairytale.

128 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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It is that time of year when reader Mike Jennings, from his exile in a pompous land, supplies us with an update to his comprehensive Dobson bibliography. A further twenty-four pamphlets have been added to the earlier list, which you can find here. Mr Jennings has once again applied those terrifying, and terrifyingly significant, Blötzmann Numbers. Please note that, unless otherwise stated, all the listed titles are currently out of print.

105. Ivan Clank, The Bailiff, O Is He Dead Then?

106. Pancakes : Food Of The Gods?

107. Pancakes : Food Of The Gods

108. My Pancake Ineptitude : A Heart-Rending Confession In Sixteen Bursts Of Hallucinatory Prose.

109. Hell, Its Bells

110, My Terrifying Encounter With A Tiny Lethal Phantasmal Poison Frog.

111. Every Lace Has Its Own Boot.

112. Fifty Pages Of Prose About Daytime Naps In Theory And Practice.

113. The Hidden Wealth Of Werewolves.

114. The Mythical Island Where Werewolves Think They Come From.

115. A Pedestrian Memoir Of Hiking Holidays Accompanied By Noted Daubist Rex Daub.

116. A Thousand Breakfasts In Five Hundred Days.

117. Flight-Patterns Of The Common Shrike, With A Tremendously Accurate Diagram by Marigold Chew.

118. This Year’s Summer Reading.

119. Chucklesome Fripperies From The Bowels Of Hell.

120. The Poultry Yards Of The Grand Archdukes.

121. Tantalising Paragraphs About The World O’ The Future.

122. The Significance, In My Long-Ago Infancy, Of An Undigested Vole.

123. A Comparative Study Of The Metabolisms Of The Horses Of Three Knights Of The Realm.

124. An Entirely New System Of Moss Drainage, Incorporating Flexible Leather And Lead Pipes, A Plastic Funnel, And A Dobson Jar.

125. A Detailed Account Of How I Provided Emergency Medical Assistance, Despite Having Not A Jot Of Training, To A Flying Squirrel Exhausted And Maimed After Being Pursued And Attacked By A Small Tough-Guy Japanese Macaque Monkey Which Mistook It For A Predatory Bird, With Several Diagrams And An Afterword Quoting A Jethro Tull Song Lyric.

126. Picnics Of Disillusionment.

127. The History, Theory And Practice Of Jiggery-Pokery, From Ancient Times Up To Yesterday Morning, With Practical Tips And Cut Out ‘N’ Keep Cardboard Display Models For Your Mantelpiece.

128. Popular Games And Pastimes Suitable For Those Marooned On Remote Atolls Pending Rescue By A Ship Of Fools.