The Cow & Pins was a singularly squalid tavern, much frequented by human scum. Once, long ago, it had been a coaching inn, but the construction of an efficient canal system destroyed the coach trade, and bargees passing by aboard their barges upon the canal were a salubrious lot who drank tea from flasks and read improving literature. The Cow & Pins stood crumbling and forlorn on the lane parallel to the towpath of the canal, and soon only the crumbling and forlorn, the indigent and misbegotten, the violent and the psychopathic ever set foot upon its rotten sawdust-covered floor.

One psychopath who became a tavern regular, the ferocious Babinsky, took over as the landlord after chopping up the existing incumbent with an axe and feeding him to the pigs. The pigs, who lived happily in a pig sty a little way down the lane from the tavern, did not of course know their swill that day contained the ground-up remains of their pal from the Cow & Pins, who used to commune with them, in a hearty man-to-pig way, whenever he got the chance. With Babinsky at the helm, things changed. Babinsky hated pigs, and after that first feeding, he shunned the sty, some said in fear that the spectre of the man he had chopped up and then ground up and then stirred in with the pigswill lay in wait for him there, to wreak revenge from the realm of death. It is more likely, however, that Babinsky was too busy being mad and bad and dangerous in the tavern where he now held sway.

He tore down from the walls the showbiz memorabilia that had most recently adorned them. Gone were the photographs of the previous landlord arm in arm with Rolf Harris and Val Doonican and Edith Sitwell. Gone were the autographed portraits of Ken Hom and Tammy Wynette. Gone were the posters advertising pantos with Keith Chegwin as Buttons and George Galloway as Pol Pot. In their place, Babinsky pinned up his weird, hand-written screeds, pages and pages ripped from the exercise books which he filled with gibberish. Out went the barrels of ale and the bottles of champagne and liqueurs and rare expensive brandies, out went the soft drinks and the mineral waters, and in their place was installed a single vast trough, into which was poured, and out of which was ladled into dented tin beakers, disgusting bilge made of god knows what. Its taste was foul, but it was cheap, and just a beakerful or two sufficed to ravage the drinker’s brain to zombiedom. Babinsky himself allowed no other fluid into his body, which probably accounted for what one might charitably call his eccentricities.

Under his predecessor, there had been a jukebox in the Cow & Pins, well-stocked with the gems of prog rock. Babinsky smashed it up with his axe and sharpened the edges of the discs inside so he could use them as missiles, slicing through the air to hit and sever a jugular or other important vein through which the blood relentlessly pumps. Then he dug a deep, deep pit and fed wires down it, wires at the end of which were microphones that picked up the constant agonised howling and screaming of sinners being tormented for eternity in the pits of Hell, amplified and blaring at ear-splitting volume from speakers placed all around the tavern. It was a rough and raucous place, perilous for the weedy toper who might once have sat in the snug watching coaches rattle by. The snug itself had been demolished by Babinsky and the space it had occupied was now a charnel-ground stacked with the bleached bones of those he slew, when he was in the mood for slaying, which was most days. Sometimes the villain would pole-vault across the canal, like Spring-Heeled Jack, for the sole purpose of setting upon a poor innocent orphan or cripple plucking flowers for a nosegay from the canalside shrub beds. Babinsky carried out his killings with impunity, for a type of amnesia stalked the land, and even the police officers blundered about in a hypnagogic daze.

The one law that was rigorously enforced in this land of efficient canals was that which regulated the licensing hours of taverns. Even Babinsky, yes, Babinsky himself, was terrified of the Tavern Time Trio, three brutes who patrolled on horseback to ensure that every tavern was locked and bolted and dark and silent as the clocks struck the witching hour. Their horses were as brutish as the trio themselves, gigantic fierce beasts with repulsive fetlocks and manes matted with muck, whose merest whinny was a thousand times more hideous than the infernal muzak of the Cow & Pins. Freeman, Hardy, and Willis, the horses were called, but nobody knew the names of their riders, for nobody ever dared to ask, just as no taverner ever dared to let his tavern stay open for one second past closing time. Nobody could even remember when the law had been broken, so nobody knew what punishment would be meted out by the Tavern Time Trio. The sheer size of the horses, and their rank stink, and the thunder of their hooves as they galloped from tavern to tavern, and the brutishness of the trio themselves, in their gold lamé tuxedos and snow white spats, and the piercing whistles they blew as they rode, and the official documents poking out of their pockets, these things were enough to cow each and every tavern keeper, Babinsky included.

So it was that in spite of the clamour and uproar of the Cow & Pins, easily the most exciting part of the day was chucking-out time. Human scum, their brains and bodies jangled by whatever it was they’d been gulping down from Babinsky’s trough, would be startled by the sudden cessation of the amplified agonies of the netherworld, their ears assailed instead by Babinsky’s hooter. Those of you familiar with this contraption will know that it was the most powerful hooter that ever existed on earth, or on any other planet in any other universe, a hooter par excellence, the ne plus ultra of hooters, a hooter the like of which we shall never hear again, for which, in truth, we should be thankful. Babinsky parped his hooter just once, to signal that the Cow & Pins was closing for the night, and once was all that was needed. To imagine hearing that hooter hoot twice in succession is more than the mind can bear, whether the mind is sane and sober or blasted to fuddlement by dented tin beakerfuls of disgusting bilge. Not that the sane or the sober would be found among the human wreckage who, hearing the hooter, drained the last drops of bilge from their beakers and tossed the beakers into the trough. Then out of the tavern they tumbled, a jumble of chaos, many of them toppling into the canal, others falling and lying flat on their backs where they fell, in the mud, where they would remain insensible until the Cow & Pins opened its doors the next morning.

And inside the tavern, Babinsky, who never slept, filled with bilge all the beakers that had been tossed into the trough and lined them up on the counter. He put on his superloud Bang & Bangbangbang quadrophonic headphones and switched his subterranean microphones back on. As he listened to the shrieks of the sinful, he worked his way through the line of beakers one after another, and when he was done he wrote one of his weird screeds and pinned it to the wall, and then he lumbered out into the dead of night in search of something to slaughter.

The Cow & Pins was, of course, Dobson’s preferred tavern, but by the time the out of print pamphleteer came to patronise it Babinsky was long dead, and it was once again the kind of place where a weedy toper could sit in the snug and scribble a pamphlet. Not that Dobson was weedy, exactly. He occasionally got into fights, and acquitted himself with aplomb. As for Babinsky’s hooter, when the new landlord took over the tavern he had it dismantled by specialists from a hooter dismantling squadron. To be on the safe side, they buried the parts separately, in deep lead-lined wells, unmarked, and scattered across six continents. Foolishly, though, the captain of the squadron made a map pinpointing the locations, to keep as a souvenir, and last week it was reported in The Daily Hooter that the map had been stolen. Yes, friends, it is a horrible possibility that even now, somewhere out there, a madcap genius is hard at work putting Babinsky’s hooter back in one piece! You may well say “Eek!” I know I did.

It is a frozen place, where I come from, and very far from the sea. The first word I ever spoke was “icicle”, and I was in my late twenties before I ever heard talk of tugboats and barnacles and offshore gas fields. The idea that solid ice could simply melt away was so foreign to me that when I first saw it happen it really fried my wig, Daddy-o, as the hepcats would say. Not being a hepcat, I screamed and swooned.

My ghoulish Uncle Lars grabbed me by the mitten one day and dragged me off with him on one of his jaunts. We wore snow-shoes to negotiate our way across the freezing frozenness. Resting awhile in the shadow of an immense ice mountain, Uncle Lars clamped his pipe in his jaws and took from a pocket of his enswaddling furry wrappings a box of matches. After lighting his pipe, he held the still-lit lucifer against a crag of ice and I watched as it melted and dripped and vanished away, as if it had never been there at all. It was as if the world I had grown to understand had no underpinnings, was mere figment, and so my brain collapsed and I screamed and swooned.

So severe was my trauma that I was chained up in what we called a “mad cabin” for months on end. My recuperation was slow, but I gradually began to understand the concept that ice and water and steam were but different forms of the same substance. I cannot overestimate the importance to my recovery of a pamphlet I was given on the day when one of my chains was removed. It was called Child, Be Thunderstruck As Your Tiny Brain Copes With The Notion That Ice And Water And Steam Are But Different Forms Of The Same Substance! The author’s name, I learned, was Dobson. Sadly, the pamphlet has long been out of print.

Such was my first encounter with the twentieth century’s titanic pamphleteer, an encounter which led from initial enthusiasm to wild overexcitement to monomania. I became so demented about Dobson that I risked being kept in the mad cabin for years and years. Fortunately, on a visit one day, Uncle Lars taught me to hide my light under a bushel, not literally of course, for that would have been a very foolish thing to do and despite his clumping weirdness, Lars was no fool. But I learned to temper my Dobson-zest when the warders were lurking, and went so far as occasionally asking to take delivery of works by other writers, such as Zadie Smith and Colm Tóibin. Needless to say, I never actually read such unDobsonist trash, but made use of the books as pamphlet-camouflage or as handy things to chuck at the wall with my free hand. Chucking things at the wall was my other great leisure activity in those days, and remains so. It is a great pity that Dobson had so little to say on the subject.

And yet there were so many, many topics to which the pamphleteer turned his attention. I found that, as I worked my way through the canon, I became obsessively interested in whatever Dobson was writing about, to the exclusion of anything else, even of the subject of the pamphlet I had been reading the day before. That being so, I often wonder how different my life might have been if, on the day I was eventually unchained and ejected from the mad cabin into the frozen wastes of my homeland, I had been reading something other than Dobson’s short, strange, brilliant pamphlet Why Those Let Loose From Mad Cabins Should Immediately Up Sticks And Settle At A Seaside Resort.

Before I upped sticks and settled at a seaside resort, I said farewell to Uncle Lars. For old time’s sake, we went on a jaunt. He was more ghoulish than ever, and had exchanged his pipe for some sort of newfangled smoking contraption into which he crammed fistfuls of disgusting blackened vegetable matter and sent out blooming coils of miasmic fug. We stopped again beneath the great ice mountain, and Uncle Lars again struck a match for his smoke, and again he held the match against the ice and I watched it melt away. But I neither screamed nor swooned, for I had read my Dobson, and I knew what was afoot. Uncle Lars knew that I knew, and he flashed me a conspiratorial grin. For an instant I thought I might scream at that, for the Grin of Lars, seldom seen, is never forgotten, and has sent many a poor gibbering grinee to the mad cabins. I quailed at the sight of it, certainly, but it did not utterly undo me, not only because I had seen it once before, and was thus inoculated against it, but also because yet again I could call on Dobson, having read his pamphlet on terrifying facial expressions. I grinned back at Lars, as best I could, knowing that I might never see him again, and he puffed the match out and handed it to me, as a memento.

Look, there, on the mantelpiece of my seaside chalet. Between the toy binnacle and the heap of sand, you see that half-burned match? That is the match that was my parting gift from Uncle Lars. Sometimes I put it in my pocket, and I go down to the promenade, and I lean upon the railings and stare out to sea. As I stare I hold the match delicately in my fingers, and the whole world makes sense. I know that all the water I can see was once ice, until it was made hot by untold billions of matches lit and aflame, whereupon it became the sea. And the sea too will vanish, it will boil and seethe and become vapour, just as Dobson foretold.

[This piece first appeared in December 2004. How things change. Four years ago it appears that a contraption called the telephone was still in use at Hooting Yard, rather than the more familiar, and much groovier, metal tapping machine.]

Throughout his life, Dobson ignored Christmas, but he loved to celebrate Boxing Day. Every year, he made a point of marking the occasion differently. Here is his journal entry for one year during the 1950s.

Ah, Boxing Day at last! What a glorious day it is. This year there is snow on the ground, robin redbreasts hopping about, and Dickensian scenes of wassail and carousing over by the old thatched tavern. That being the case, I have nailed fast the shutters and am sitting in the gloom. I wired up a microphone next to the indoor wasps’ nest, so hectic buzzing drowns out the intolerable sound of carol-singing and suchlike torments.

I breakfasted upon a platter of boiled leeks and steamed viper-heads. I will spend much of the day in the kitchen, boiling more leeks and steaming more viper-heads for my supper. I had a new telephone installed last week, and I intend to take a break from boiling and steaming to call the police. I am going to read out my new pamphlet to the desk sergeant, or whoever answers the telephone, for it concerns police matters, specifically the legal position regarding the theft of leeks from the greengrocers’ and of vipers from the zoo. In the pamphlet, which I wrote in pig Latin, just to show off, I make a full confession to having used thievery to obtain my Boxing Day foodstuffs, and justify doing so with reference to certain historical and/or mythological figures, including Hildegard von Bingen, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and the Warrior King Anaxagrotax. I also make mention of the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire as a way of throwing the coppers off the scent, should they determine to prosecute me.

At sixty pages, it may take some time to read the complete text to the police officer, so I will attach an extension cord to the telephone and drag it into the bathroom, and make my call while nestling in a tub of hot milk of magnesia. Over the past year I have bought a couple of those little blue-glass bottles every week, and should have enough to fill the bath. I will heat the milk of magnesia using Professor Tadaaki’s Submerged Iron Filament contraption, the label on which claims it can boil a few gallons of any known liquid within thirty seconds. Of course, I do not need to boil my bath, far from it. Tadaaki does not provide a thermometer, but I have one somewhere, in a cupboard, and as soon as I have completed this journal entry I shall go in search of it.

After the telephone call, the bath, and my supper, I will put the thermometer back in the cupboard and set a roaring fire in the grate. As I have no coal, nor wood, I will burn the beheaded vipers, for there are many of them and I suspect they will ignite well. I dried them thoroughly by putting them in the airing-cupboard under a pile of blankets. The blankets, incidentally, were not stolen. I wove them myself, when I was a child, and capable of weaving at the loom for hours upon end, humming old Latvian folk tunes to myself. In those long ago days I could never remember the words to the songs, except for one, and that only partially. In papa’s translation, it went like this: “There is a shepherd in the hills / There is a [something] green / But black is the crow in the [something] tree / And lightning blasts the sky / The shepherd’s lass has golden hair / She [something something] milk / But the crow has flown away, my love / And the ducks have left the lake”.

It’s time I made that telephone call.

Some of the prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire, gesticulating.

“How now, Holofernes,” said Judith.

Holofernes put down his sack of grubbings on the floor and leaned to kiss the back of Judith’s hand.

“Your moustache is very bristly, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I fear it has raised tiny scratches on my hand.”

“Plunge it into a tub of ointment and it will be as right as rain, woman!” shouted Holofernes. Holofernes always shouted, he was that kind of general.

“Oh, never mind, Holofernes, I am fond of your moustache. It suits you. It is, how shall I say, decisive,” said Judith.

Holofernes picked up his sack of grubbings again. He was blushing slightly.

“I must take this sack of grubbings to my encampment, woman!” he shouted, “It will not do for me to dilly dally with a widow woman such as yourself.”

“What a pity, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I have just borrowed some interesting pamphlets by Dobson from the mobile library, and I thought you might like to join me in browsing through them. We could go and sit upon a municipal park bench, and take a picnic with us. I have some radishes and coleslaw and a jug of potato pulp diluted with rainwater.”

Holofernes was a sucker for pamphlets, particularly ones written by Dobson, and he needed little persuading to join Judith in the municipal park. The clouds were louring, however.

“See here, woman!” he shouted, after swallowing a mouthful of coleslaw, “If it begins to rain these pamphlets will get soaking wet and when you return them to the library on or before the due date there may be ructions!”

“I am sure you know a thing or two about ructions, Holofernes,” said Judith coquettishly, “But don’t worry, I have a tarpaulin here in my pippy bag and in the event of a downpour I can take it out and unfold it and place the pamphlets underneath it. Here, have another radish.”

Holofernes furrowed his massive forehead, as if deep in thought, but then seemed to relax and, taking the proffered radish, popped it into his mouth and crunched it. Judith caught a glimpse of his teeth.

“Have you had a recent dental checkup, Holofernes?” she asked.

“That, woman, is between me and my dentist! It is unseemly for a widow woman from Bethulia to pry into such matters,” shouted Holofernes.

“Forgive me, Holofernes,” said Judith, “I was forgetting my manners there for a moment. But I was a little concerned that you may need an appointment with the hygienist, for I clearly saw scraps of raw meat and carrots and cake-crumbs stuck between your teeth. You have not been flossing, have you?”

Holofernes’ temper flared. He stood up, picked up his sack of grubbings, and was about to stomp off out of the municipal park when there was a cloudburst and the rain began teeming down.

“Quick, Holofernes, help me to unfold the tarpaulin!” said Judith.

Two minutes later the Dobson pamphlets were safely covered up but both Judith and Holofernes were sopping wet.

“When the rain stops we ought to find a little boatman’s hut in which to dry off and get a nice cup of tea,” said Judith, “Just like Laura and Alec do in Brief Encounter after he falls into the boating lake. Come to think of it,” she added, “You remind me of Alec’s friend Dr Stephen Lynn, played by Valentine Dyall, except that Stephen didn’t have a decisive moustache and he was a bit of a prig. And you’re not a prig, are you, Holofernes?”

“I am a general in Nebuchadnezzar’s mighty army, woman!” shouted Holofernes, “And that is all you need to know!”

“Oh, you’re such a grumpy general, Holofernes,” said Judith, “You know what I think would be good for you? Some aromatherapy. But you strike me as more of a sweat lodge kind of chap.”

“Enough, woman!” shouted Holofernes, “You may seek out an humble boatman’s hut if you wish, but I must return to my encampment with my sack of grubbings. I shall dry off in my tent, which is a tent fit for a general!”

“Well, I shall come with you,” said Judith.

Holofernes grumbled, but he was secretly delighted, for there was something about this widow woman that intrigued him and inflamed his passions. They set off across the plains together.

“Tell me about Babylon, Holofernes, where your king Nebuchadnezzar lives. I have heard it is full of Rastafarians smoking ganja and moaning on and on, rhythmically of course, about their misery,” said Judith.

“As a general in the army, woman, I pay no heed to such countercultural doings,” shouted Holofernes, “I have enough on my plate keeping my troops on their toes and smiting mine enemies with a big sword.”

“Ooh,” said Judith, “You’ll have to let me see that big sword when we get back to your encampment, Holofernes.”

Later, of course, when they were in Holofernes’ tent and he showed Judith his big sword, she used it to slice his head off. Then she went back to Bethulia, carrying the head of Holofernes, and was received in triumph by her people.

There was once a woodcutter who had a burning sense of injustice. He dwelt in a cottage deep in the forest, where there was plenty of wood for him to cut. A day’s walk to the west was the cottage of a charcoal burner, and a day’s walk to the east was the hovel of a drink-soaked ex-Trotskyist popinjay. These were the woodcutter’s neighbours, and they worried about his burning sense of injustice and sought what they could do to alleviate it, but the woodcutter was a very taciturn woodcutter and he never answered either the charcoal burner or the popinjay when they asked him to explain, as they did on Thursdays when their separate foresty routines took them both past the woodcutter’s cottage where they dropped in in the hope of being offered a mug of piping hot cocoa. Sometimes they dropped in at the same time, so it could be a cosy threesome huddled in the unrelenting gloom of the woodcutter’s cottage.

On one such Thursday, the woodcutter was as reluctant to speak as ever, but he happily poured out cocoa for his neighbours. The charcoal burner had brought some charcoal to burn to keep him occupied, and the popinjay was reminiscing about his Trotskyist days when he spent much of his time standing at the entrances to railway stations handing out pamphlets to passers-by. The woodcutter neither watched the charcoal being burned nor listened to the slurred anecdotage of the popinjay. He sat in his chair glowering at the embers in the fireplace, nurturing his burning sense of injustice.

Now, the charcoal burner and the popinjay had hatched what they thought was a very clever plan to get the woodcutter to spill the beans. They reasoned that if they each claimed to have a burning sense of something, and babbled on about it in confessional mode to the woodcutter, he might well tell them of the injustice gnawing at his soul. So the charcoal burner pretended to have a burning sense of righteousness, and the popinjay assumed a burning sense of indigestion. They were waiting in the gloom for an opportune moment to launch into an account of their counterfeit burning woes.

This clever plan was not the only thing that was hatched on that Thursday. In the cellar of the woodcutter’s cottage, in a crate packed with straw, there nestled a clutch of eggs that, as the charcoal burner burned charcoal and the popinjay wittered, began to crack. The beings inside the eggs were grown too large to be confined any longer. They were ready to be born. And what beings they were! Startling forest creatures, crinkly and crumpled and covered in hoar-frost. Tiny now, when full grown they would be as tall as the trees and as broad as a barn. Their fur was matted, and the feathers that sprouted from their foreheads were of colours beyond the known spectrum. Their many bulbous eyes, unlidded, stared from quivering stalks with a look of tragic reproach, the tears that dripped from them sulphurous and boiling hot. They had collapsible lungs and sharp fangs and great thumping hooves and a milky pallor and beaks and ears and elbows and pot bellies. When they crawled upon the earth, they turned the soil to muck teeming with maggots, and when they reared up on their hind legs and roared, they blotted out the sun. They had enormous brains, and enormous shovel-like paws, and enormous ill-will. They fed on everything, living and dead, and vomited most of it up again, making disgusting, deafening noises. Their antennae picked up signals from outer space, their inability to understand which caused them such fury that they ripped and tore and savaged whatever was in front of them with their long pointy claws. When they were not roaring they made a tremendous buzzing sound, and when neither roaring nor buzzing they howled and whimpered. A continuous stream of steam and smoke poured out of each of their numberless orifices, poisoning the air around them. They were hunchbacked. They moved with inhuman speed. They left a trail of filth and pus in their wake. They stank of beer and gin and sweat and death. Nobody, not even the weird mad people who dwelt in the weirdest, deepest parts of the forest, kept them as pets, or wove pretty wicker baskets for them to doze in, or cosseted them, or loved them.

In his pamphlet on the forest beings, which is out of print, Dobson described them differently. But he had never seen one, and he was working from unreliable sources. Indeed, he did not know they were hatched from eggs, believing instead the mediaeval superstition that they were formed from the breath of seagulls blown upon the excrement of ladybirds. Where such a fancy originated is unknown.

The sound of the eggs cracking open was loud enough to be heard in the room above the cellar, and both the charcoal burner and the drink-soaked ex-Trotskyist popinjay cocked their ears and gave quizzical looks, first at each other and then at the woodcutter. The woodcutter remained as taciturn as ever, slumped in his chair, taking great gulps from his mug of cocoa. He had sprayed himself, that morning, with half a canister’s worth of Hengist, “the scent for men of the forest”, and there was an aura of indestructibility about him, as well as a burning sense of injustice.

It was that sense of injustice which had led the woodcutter to steal the eggs from the nest of a forest being matriarch. His mind had gone loopy long ago, and he thought that he would be able to train newborn forest beings, put them on leashes, and have them do his bidding. First he would whet their appetites by letting them rend and slash and gobble up the charcoal burner and the popinjay, and then he would set out with them on a long, long journey, tracking down Benny and Bjorn and Agnetha and Anna-Frid, one by one, and wreak vengeance upon them for having, so many years ago, sacked him from their pop group on the day they signed their first recording contract.

He had reckoned without the matriarch, of course. She, too, heard the cracking of her eggs, and now she loomed huge and hideous over the woodcutter’s cottage, deep in the forest, where no one with any sense would ever dwell, for it is a weird and eerie place and it is teeming with monsters.

Yesterday, as I was bumbling about town, I was waylaid by a wild-eyed chap who dragged me down an alleyway, trapped me between some bins and a wall, and demanded of me that I answer his question.

“And what might your question be?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, in a shaky and somewhat unhinged voice, “In the midst of the crunch de la credit and the Armageddon brought on by the collapse of the global banking system, is there anything – anything at all – we can grasp at, as at a straw, from the out of print outpourings of the pamphleteer Dobson?”

Now this was not an unreasonable question, and it is one I had been steeling myself to answer at some point, as each day brings news of further ruination and collapse, particularly in Iceland, the least populous and second smallest of the Nordic countries, a volcanically and geologically active island on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Many fjords punctuate its extensive coastline, and there are many geysers. Its native beasts include the Icelandic sheep, Icelandic cattle, Icelandic chicken, Icelandic goat and the sturdy Icelandic horse. Polar bears occasionally visit the island, travelling on icebergs from Greenland. Birds, especially sea birds, are a very important part of Iceland‘s animal life. Puffins, skuas, and kittiwakes nest on its sea cliffs. Yet in spite of such interesting features, nothing, it seems, can stop the destruction of Iceland’s banking system.

I managed to persuade my wild-eyed assailant to unhand me, and suggested that we could talk more productively away from the noisome pong of the bins. He agreed, and we decamped to a churchyard rife with sycamore and larch and laburnum, in the shade of which we leaned against a couple of tombstones, each to his own tombstone, and I was about to begin my reply when my waylayer declared that he had a great thirst upon him and that he intended to scamper hotfoot to a nearby grocer’s to obtain refreshments. He would, he said, be back in a jiffy, and off he went.

I was pleased to be given an interval in which to collect my thoughts. I had been ransacking my brain for nuggets, indeed for jewels, to scatter into the plainer mulch of my reply. We can use all sorts of metaphors to help us picture the mind, and I am fond of the one that fancies it as an attic crammed with packing cases and trunks and cardboard boxes. We haul ourselves up a ladder into the attic and pick our way by torchlight among the crates, opening this one and that as we go, and sometimes we find what we are searching for and sometimes we hit upon the unexpected. Blather blather. I have, as you know, an extensive knowledge of Dobson and his works, but in order to answer the question I had been asked I would have to prise open some of the most securely nailed-down packing cases of all, in the furthest corners of my cerebral attic. I had a vague memory that the pamphleteer had had much to say about the German Dax, and if I could recall where he said it and in what context I felt sure it would lead me to remember, with blinding clarity, all sorts of other Dobsonisms regarding not just the Teutonic stock market but other stock markets, and by extension other financial gubbins, no doubt including the banking system, and then I would have a thorough and sparklingly intelligent response to declaim unto my alleyway abductor. Dax, Dax, Dax… I kept repeating the word in my head, hoping to stumble upon the mental cardboard box I sought, but before I did so my waylayer returned, armed with a couple of cartons of Squelcho!, one of which he tossed to me in a casual, loose-limbed fashion, as if we had been friends from childhood. I thanked him.

“Think nothing of it,” he replied, “The cost of a carton of Squelcho! is a small price to pay for what you are about to tell me. As the value of stocks plummets around the world, a man can have no surer guide than Dobson. Given your encyclopaedic knowledge of that titanic pamphleteer, those of us who have only a glancing acquaintance with him can come to you and be given the balm and succour we so desperately need. So you need not thank me for a mere carton of Squelcho! In fact I have a mind to fetch you something to eat as well as to drink. Wait here while I get you some crinkle-cut oven chips in a cardboard cone!”

And off he went again. I redoubled my fuming mental activity, which I am afraid consisted of simply repeating “Dax, Dax, Dax” over and over again. This time I said it aloud, and became aware of a rustling in a clump of graveyard shrubbery. “Dax, Dax, Dax” I babbled, and out of the foliage bounded an enormous hound. I think it was a mastiff. Whatever it was, it sprang at me and sank its gleaming fangs into my cravat. It was going for the flesh of my neck, of course, but I wear densely woven cravats designed by the cravattist Elspeth Banshee, and even the most savage of pooches would have trouble getting its fangs clean through one of her creations. The weight of the dog knocked me over, however, and as I fell I banged my head on the tombstone upon which I was leaning. Before I lost consciousness, I was aware of a dreadlocked scapegrace emerging from the shrubbery in pursuit of the mutt. I remember thinking that the laws of nature demand that lanky stringy-bearded white Rastas keep their dogs on the ends of lengths of string, and that I had thus been felled by an anomaly.

I came to thinking I was covered in blood, but it was just the spillage from my carton of Squelcho! To one side of me stood the indigent with his unleashed hound, to the other my earlier assailant clutching a cardboard cone of crinkle-cut oven chips. I sat up.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. Turning to the bedraggled wretch, I asked him to confirm that his dog was called Dax and that this had occasioned its flying leap at me. He nodded. “And you,” I said, turning to the other, “Have brought me a cardboard cone of oven chips which have yet to see the innards of an oven and thus remain frozen and will doubtless take quite some time to thaw out in the crisp autumn chill of this October morning. Correct?” And he nodded too.

Sometimes I wonder why it is that as I wander this fair city the only people I come into contact with are the feckless and the desperate and the seedy and the sick and the stupid. I rubbed the back of my head where it had taken a tombstone clonk, pulled my Elspeth Banshee cravat into a particularly fetching cravatoisement around my neck, stood up, plopped my drained Squelcho! carton into a municipal waste bin, and strode away out of the churchyard, whistling magnificently, witnessing civilisation crashing around me, and as happy as a pig in a mudbath.