Category Archives: Characters

G

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G is for Mrs Gubbins, obviously

“Bathsheba Gubbins! You have been found guilty of a raggle-taggle salmagundi of crimes, some so heinous that they beggar belief and make strong men break down into convulsive weeping. Now, by dint of the awful and arbitrary power invested in me, do not ask when or by whom, I pronounce sentence. Mrs Gubbins, you shall be taken from this place, by horse and cart, during a rainstorm, and deposited none too kindly in a chamber within the sort of institution appropriate to a crone of your advancing years, and there you will remain, and there you will knit. You will knit and knit and knit forevermore, without cease. When cities burn and the planet crumbles and the sun is extinguished, still you shall knit, Bathsheba Gubbins! You shall knit tea-cosies and scarves and miscellaneous woolies, and at the very instant they are completed, they shall unravel and you will knit them again from scratch. From dawn until dusk and through the cold dark horrors of the night, you shall knit much like Sisyphus hopelessly pushing his boulder uphill. As he gaped to watch it roll down to the bottom of that hill, so shall you see your knitting unravel until all you have to show for your toil is a tangled skein of wool, wool you must knit again and again into a tea cosy or a scarf or a wooly. The only sound in your chamber shall be the interminable clack clack of your knitting needles. Knit, La Gubbins, knit! From now until the end of time, and beyond, clack clack clack! Take her down.”

Crikey! What a revelation! Until now, it has been beyond the most acute of wits to grasp why on earth the criminally-minded octogenarian crone never ever ceases to knit. Veteran of innumerable armed robberies and mystic badger abductions, La Gubbins sits clacking away, occasionally dribbling, staring into the middle distance, seemingly happy in her toil. Only the chance discovery of this dictabelt recording, in a cardboard box underneath a sink in an outhouse in the grounds of a mysterious country pile situated behind enormous wrought iron gates partly hidden at a bend in a bosky lane lined by titanic cedars and larches along which brightly coloured sports cars driven at reckless speed by raffish chaps wearing cravats and goggles zoom past, has revealed the truth of the matter. The matter being that endless knitting, which at last we can understand as Sisyphean.

Where and when the dictabelt recording was made is unclear. It is fanciful to suggest, as Van Spurtbosch does in his recently-published monograph, that it came from the same cache that yielded the dictabelt recording from the police motorcycle of Officer H B McLain whose radio microphone was accidentally stuck in the open position as he accompanied the presidential motorcade along Dealey Plaza in Dallas on the twenty-second of November 1963 and thus picked up sounds and “impulse patterns” which were to become germane to the inquiry regarding the identity of the assassin or assassins of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on that day, and in that place. Waters were muddied in that case by Officer McLain later suggesting his dictabelt was not the source of the recordings, but rather that of one of his colleagues. Equally fanciful is Van Spurtbosch’s wild claim that John McClane, the character played by Bruce Willis in the Die Hard tetralogy, was based on the Dallas police motorcyclist. One need only compare the spellings of the names to see it ain’t so. Had Van Spurtbosch done his homework, much grief, much much grief, indeed as much grief as there is Gubbinsy knitting, could have been spared.

Grief, like Gubbins, begins with G, so in this instalment of our alphabetic postage schedule, you have had double helpings. Remember that, next time you are minded to bemoan your lot.

Fictitious Sports

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It is monumentally curious, is it not, that fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol won renown in sports which are not, themselves, remotely fictional? Polevaulting and haring round and round a running track are both activities in which plenty of non-fictional athletes have taken part, in the past as in the present day. Now, the release of previously repressed passages from the Memoirs of Bobnit Tivol’s coach and mentor, the catarrh-wracked, Homburg-wearing Old Halob, show how sporting history might have taken a different path.

Unlike his protégé, Old Halob was of course all too terrifyingly real, yet he harboured a deep love for fictitious sports. While Bobnit Tivol was scampering round and round those cinder running tracks following his punishing training regime, Old Halob, we now learn, was dreaming of pitting his champion against Markus Geissler, the big Austrian, in a Guyball match. It remained a dream, for all the cantankerous trainer’s attempts to enrol the fictional athlete in a Guyball team came to naught through a series of mishaps. Telegrams went astray, railway timetables proved to be forgeries, buses crashed, the addresses on envelopes were smudged to illegibility by rainfall… those sorts of mishap dogged Old Halob.

Later in the same year, he was in secret talks with John Tetrad and Max Quad in an attempt to have Bobnit Tivol join their fennel team. In this case, it seems negotiations were far advanced, and only fell apart when nobody could find a fictional pen with which the fictional athlete could sign on the fictional dotted line of a fictional contract. This prompted the strange, almost hallucinatory passage in the repressed Memoirs where Old Halob blathers on for page after page bemoaning the non-existence of a well-stocked fictional stationery shop.

Take it from me, the Repressed Memoirs Of Old Halob is suitable reading for repressed sport enthusiasts of any stripe.

Urban House Numbers

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“Street addressing is one of the most basic strategies employed by governmental authorities to tax, police, manage, and monitor the spatial whereabouts of individuals within a population.  Despite the central importance of the street address as a political technology that sometimes met with resistance, few scholars have examined the historical practice of street addressing with respect to its broader social and political implications…  We are particularly interested in showcasing recent work that links the history of urban house numbering to broader debates concerning the interrelations of space, knowledge, and power that have animated contemporary discussions in the social sciences and humanities.”

Call for papers for a special section in the journal Urban History on the history of urban house numbering, cited in Pseuds’ Corner, Private Eye, No. 1269, 20 August – 2 September 2010.

In his days as an armchair revolutionary, Blodgett became peculiarly exercised about urban house numbering. He lived at the time at 6 Rolf Harris Mew. Most Mews are plural, but this one wasn’t. There were nine bijou little dwellings in the Mew, and with what Blodgett identified as a typically hegemonic capitalist patriarchal linear system of oppression they were numbered, consecutively, from one to nine.

Blodgett had to subject this system to a rigorous poststructuralist interrogation before he was in a position to subvert it, and this he did, strolling up and down the Mew making notes, accompanied by impossibly complicated diagrams, in his jotting pad. Across the way, crippled mendicants, brought to such a state of destitution that they were lower even than the lowest of the lumpenproletariat, wallowed in their own filth and wailed for crumbs. Blodgett occasionally went over to consult with these wretches, garnering their views on his important research.

His first step in defiance of an unconscionable tyranny was to upend his door number so that it looked like a 9 rather than a 6. For this blow against the system he was shouted at by the postie and beaten insensible with a club by the occupant of number 9. Blodgett had, of course, expected violence as the response to his supremely transgressive act. But, he asked himself as he lay bandaged in a clinic, was it transgressive enough?

When he was well enough to return home, he stole out one night and, using a screwdriver, removed the door number from each house in the Mew. He made a pyre of them and set them ablaze, using an oil-soaked rag liberated from one of the mendicants. By the light of the fire, he took a paint pot and daubed upon each door a slogan of resistance. For this, he was again shouted at by the postie, and again beaten insensible by the occupant of number 9, a person labouring under false consciousness who was joined, on this occasion, by three or four of the neighbours.

This time, upon his discharge from the clinic, Blodgett discovered that all trace of his daubings had been erased, and brand new metal numbers affixed to the doors, except his own, which now had nailed to it, in a clear plastic bag as protection from the incessant rainfall, a notice from the civic authorities. Blodgett sat on the stoep to read it. In essence, it told him that he was a fathead and an idiot.

Poor Blodgett! For a while it looked as if he might be homeless, and have to join the wretched untermenschen across the way. But then he had one of his magnificent Blodgettian brainwaves. He scampered off to the civic authorities’ oppressive brutalist headquarters and explained to an official that he was an artist. This declaration did the trick. He was welcomed back to Rolf Harris Mew as a returning prodigal, even by the bourgeois scum at number 9, and resumed his activities, talking Twaddle to Power.

Gethsemane Picnic Time

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One vile broiling August afternoon, Blodgett sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Ever the wheeler-dealer, he then immediately sold the mess of pottage to a wealthy fool for thirty pieces of silver. Blodgett licked his lips and punched the air with his hairy fist. “At last!” he thought, “I have sufficient funds to organise a picnic in the Garden of Gethsemane!”

Blodgett travelled thither by hot air balloon. He was accompanied by his next door neighbours at the time, a peevish couple who rarely spoke directly to each other but babbled incessantly at Blodgett, who eventually stuffed cotton wool into his ears. For all his faults, Blodgett was a singularly honourable fellow, and he felt a sense of obligation to Mr and Mrs Fagash for a favour done to him long ago, though he could no longer remember what it was. Thus he was able to kill two birds with one stone, as they say, by fulfilling a personal picnicking ambition at the same time as repaying a moral debt by providing a treat for an elderly impoverished couple.

The picnic hamper was an exact replica, scaled down, of the balloon basket. The wicker of which both were woven had even come from the same wicker factory. Blodgett had stocked the hamper before the voyage with much provender from his favourite picnic supplies shop. Without bothering to quiz Mr and Mrs Fagash on any dietary preferences they may harbour, he had spent some of his pieces of silver on sausages and lemonade and sandwich paste and pork scratchings and flan and jam and buns and sultanas and mashed potatoes and raw liver and meringue and plums and milk. The threesome took it in turns to keep flies away by waving fans, of the same wicker as the hamper and the balloon basket. Flies, they knew, would find a way to wriggle through the tiniest gaps in the wickerwork.

If it had been vile and broiling back at home, it was even more vile and more broiling in the Garden of Gethsemane when their balloon basket thumped to earth. Blodgett himself broke out in a sweat so deep it was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground, like Christ. Hearing a series of bangs from inside the hamper, he realised the sausages were exploding. Mrs Fagash, who was a devout Catholic, suggested they seek shelter from the sun in the misnamed Grotto of the Agony, and as they staggered towards it, she explained the misnomer, dating back to the removal of a stone in the fourteenth century. Blodgett found it hard to follow what she was saying, and resolved to consult a reference work when he returned home after the picnic. He was beginning to wonder how sinful it would be to abandon Mr and Mrs Fagash in the grotto and make the trip back alone.

In all the years he had dreamed of this picnic, Blodgett never envisaged that he would find himself sitting in a dark cave eating raw liver in the company of a pair of scowling geriatrics. Even the lemonade had gone flat, due to a bottling mishap. As he chewed and glugged and swatted away flies, he reflected that perhaps he would have been better not to sell his mess of pottage, which even now the wealthy fool would be lapping up in the cool luxury of a shaded arbour. And he further reflected that it might have been better never to have sold his birthright for the mess of pottage in the first place. For what had he gained?, what had he gained?

It was this thought, as gloomy as the gloom of the grotto, that was bloating in Blodgett’s brain when, inside the hamper, the last unexploded sausage exploded with a mighty bang. Birds scattered from the branches of the olive trees outside.

“Forgive me, Mr and Mrs Fagash, for I know not what I do,” blurted Blodgett. He stood up, flicked crumbs from his person, and sprinted out of the Grotto of the Agony across the garden to the hot air balloon. He clambered into the basket and set the burners roaring, and very soon he was aloft, and he sailed away into the blue.

Source : Picnics Of Disillusionment by Dobson (out of print)

Monkeys And Squirrels

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The super soaraway Dabbler is rapidly proving to be the one thing (apart from Hooting Yard of course… so make that one of the two things) that justifies the very existence of het internet, so it pains me to have to chuck a brickbat, but chuck a brickbat I must. Quite frankly, it passeth all understanding that a postage with the promising title Important monkey / flying squirrel insight news signally fails to mention Dobson’s ground-breaking pamphlet 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 (out of print).

We tend not to think of the great pamphleteer as the sort of chap to dispense succour to small wounded animals. After all, he was much more likely to throw pebbles at swans, or to rain imprecations down upon puppies. But painstaking research has shown that the “detailed account” he gives is absolutely factual. What happened was that Dobson took a detour through a monkey and squirrel sanctuary while on his way home from a visit to Hubermann’s, that most gorgeous of department stores, where he had bought a large supply of bandages and liniment. His purchases were made with a distinct purpose, for sloshing around in his head was the idea of writing a pamphlet about bandages and liniment as part of a projected series with the collective title Various Things You Can Smear On Wounds And Various Methods Of Protecting Wounds From The Elements. According to his notes, there were to be at least twelve pamphlets in the series, but not a single one was ever written, possibly because of the turn of events in the monkey and squirrel sanctuary.

Close to the perimeter fence, Dobson chanced upon a mewling and maimed flying squirrel, and saw a small Japanese macaque monkey scampering away with squirrel blood dripping from its gob. The pamphleteer put two and two together. Then, quite out of character, he knelt down, applied liniment to the gashes on the flying squirrel, and enwrapped it in bandages. He had a mind to take it home to Marigold Chew, as a prospective pet to replace her recently deceased weasel. Alas, so thoroughly did Dobson apply the bandages that the flying squirrel was suffocated.

The pamphleteer chose a spot close to the Blister Lane Bypass and buried the flying squirrel in a shallow grave. Every day, for weeks afterwards, he visited to place a sprig of dahlias or lupins on the plot, and he wept. He never told Marigold Chew what he had done, and it seems that she never got round to reading the pamphlet, one of the few works of Dobson to be commercially printed rather than typeset and cranked out on Marigold Chew’s Gestetner machine.

The quotation from Jethro Tull which appears on the last page of the pamphlet, by the way, is “So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?” from Thick As A Brick. Its significance to the text it accompanies has eluded every Dobsonist who has tried to winkle some meaning from it. I suppose that is one of the reasons we still read Dobson today. He continues to challenge us.

Jars And Moss

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Dobson’s pamphlet An Entirely New System Of Moss Drainage, Incorporating Flexible Leather And Lead Pipes, A Plastic Funnel, And A Dobson Jar (out of print) is chiefly notable for the inclusion in its title of the latter item. It is the only known record of this container, as, indeed, it is the single instance of the celebrated pamphleteer claiming to have an eponymous receptacle. The text itself assumes that the reader is familiar with the “Dobson jar”, as if one had a whole row of them lined up in one’s pantry, though of course neither you nor I have ever met anyone who owns such a jar, or knows anybody who has. Blank stares, and possible dribbling, meet the enquirer who haunts antique fairs, car boot sales, and jumble extravaganzas in pursuit of the chimerical container. In any case, one jar is much like the other, as you will know if, like me, you have made a study of jars, and not just any old study but a thorough, rigorous, scholarly study, the kind of study that wins you not just a postgraduate diploma in jar studies, at the awarding of which you happily sport a gash-gold vermilion cap and robe, but a badge, a badge depicting a jar, a sort of Ur-jar, the jar of jars, also of  gash-gold vermilion, which you can wear, on your tunic, or cardigan, to display your jarry credentials, in jar circles.

Dobson came late, too late, to moss drainage matters, for this important subject had already been addressed comprehensively by Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles, when he was not turning his attention to the slave trade, witches, lunacy, priests, eugenics, aeroplanes, submarines, hygiene, the action of flowers, the habits of animals, modern novels, Christian ethics, the drink question, microscopic researches, the theory and structure of language, will o’ the wisps, anemology, evolution, visible or luminous music, fogs and frosts, electricity, wooden chessmen, double-furrow ploughs, artificial birds, perpetual motion, diving-bells, vegetation and evaporation. Dobson, of course, wrote pamphlets on some, not all, of these subjects, as the fancy took him. Who has read his pamphlet on artificial birds without weeping? Well, I have, actually. I had a jar at hand, to catch my tears, should I shed any, but I did not. The jar was not a Dobson jar, as far as I am aware, for I do not know if I would recognise a Dobson jar if I saw one. As I have indicated, our pamphleteering titan gives us no clues, in his out of print pamphlet, as to what the jar named after him might look like. I suspect there never was such a jar. I think Dobson was hoping to find a secondary route to immortality, reckoning that even if all his Herculean pamphleteering efforts were swept into the abyss and forgotten, his name would live on forever, or at least for as long as people made use of jars. It was a foolish conceit, but then Dobson was a rather foolish and conceited man.

It is worth pointing out, before I close, that the system of moss drainage propounded by the pamphleteer in his pamphlet is utterly nonsensical, and fails to drain even the tiniest smidgen of moisture from any patch of moss to which it is applied. I should know, because I tried it. There is some moss on a wall I pass by often on my travels, and one gusty wet morning I set about it, following Dobson’s instructions to the letter as best I could. The upshot was a teetering wall, a broken arm, and a patch of moss if anything more moist than it was when I rolled up with my equipment just before dawn. My arm was in a cast for six weeks, during which time moss grew upon the plaster, as it will, if conditions are right, for the growth of moss. I made no attempt to drain it.

Hot Air Balloon Imperilment

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She was a plucky tot, a heroic infant, and a little fascist… but was Tiny Enid also a feminist pioneer? On the face of it, the answer to that question seems self-evident. How else would one describe the club-footed young gal, pootling about in her clapped-out jalopy, puffing away at cheroots, essaying deeds of matchless valour, and giving a variety of malefactors a good kicking? Yet such were the constraints imposed by society on what was deemed seemly, Tiny Enid oftbetimes made great pretence of being a helpless weedy flibbertigibbety waif, ready to swoon away or throw a fit of the vapours. Sometimes she put on such a show even while performing one of her brave deeds. In this picture, for example, it looks as if Tiny Enid is about to topple from a hot air balloon basket, and is being saved by a pair of tender-hearted ruffians. She is, of course, acting out the part expected of her in a patriarchal culture. What is actually happening here is that Tiny Enid is cleverly distracting the ruffians – card-carrying members of the Communist Party, no less! – for, moments after the sketch was completed, she was back in the basket, her big black boot stamping on the neck of one ruffian while the other flung himself overboard in a cowardly escape from the tot’s righteous wrath.

balloon trauma

Picture courtesy of Agence Eureka

Tiny Enid’s Unhatched God Egg

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“Now certain Nations there be that account beasts, yea, and some filthie things for gods; yea and many other matters more shamefull to be spoken; swearing by stinking meats, by garlicke, and such like. But surely, to beleeve that gods have contracted mariage, and that in so long continuance of time no children should be borne between them : also that some are aged, and ever hoarie and gray: others againe young and alwaies children: that they be blacke of colour and complexion, winged, lame, hatched of eggs, living and dying each other day; are meere fooleries, little better than childish toies.”

Pliny The Elder, The Naturall Historie, The Second Booke, Chap. 7. Of God in the 1634 English translation by Philomen Holland

One person who was very familiar with the ancient idea that an egg might serve as a childish toy, and that from the egg would hatch a god, was Tiny Enid. On the day of her birth she was presented with an egg by her mysterious, unnamed mentor, and as soon as she grew old enough for childish play it became her favoured toy. It is easy to forget, given the plucky tot’s many deeds of heroism and derring-do, that she was still but a tot, and, when time allowed, she played as other tots do. She played games such as Hide The Egg In The Pantry, Roll The Egg Down A Gentle Incline, and Balance The Egg On A Precipice Over A Yawning Chasm.

It is not entirely clear when Tiny Enid learned that her egg contained an as yet unhatched god. It is also perfectly possible that it did not, and that the venturesome little fascist simply invented the idea for purposes of self-dramatisation. Either way, we do know that one hot summer’s day she stopped treating the egg as a plaything, placed it in a carton, put the carton on her mantelpiece, and spent many hours watching over it, waiting for it to hatch.

Several writers – better to call them hacks – have devoted vast swathes of psychobabble to the suggestion that Tiny Enid was convinced, or convinced herself, that by embarking on ever greater feats of infant heroism she could somehow persuade the god to crack open its egg and burst forth into the world, ushering in a new dispensation under the cope of heaven and, not incidentally, installing the tot as its Archangel. In this reading, Tiny Enid is impelled to acts and adventures of ever greater recklessness for purely selfish reasons. The hacks who peddle this stuff never stop to consider two blindingly obvious facts. One, it makes no sense whatsoever, and two, there is no evidence that, at the end of each of her adventures, Tiny Enid dashed back to her mantelpiece to check on the egg. On the contrary, she was notorious for sticking around to receive plaudits and medals and cups and cash prizes and to watch parades pass by in her honour, and on occasions when these things did not happen, she would bash a few heads together, literally, until she considered due gratitude was displayed. These are not the activities of one who hankers for the imminent intervention of the divine, whether from an egg or from anywhere else.

Indeed, a better case could be made that a child as self-possessed and drunk on her own reputation as Tiny Enid would consider the arrival of a new god as fatally stealing her thunder. It is worth asking what sort of god she was expecting to hatch from the egg on her mantelpiece. Although she was not a religious girl, it is a matter of record that she had, like the Swiss skiing ace Woodcarver Steiner, great ecstasies. During these entrancements, did she have visions of her egg-hatched god? It is a great pity that she never left us an account of at least one of her great ecstasies in her Memoirs. The egg itself is mentioned, over and over again, at first in references to its status as a plaything, as here, on page 47:

I passed many a happy hour playing Carry The Egg Towards The Pond and other delightful pastimes

and then, from page 88 onwards, she constantly reminds us of its numinous presence:

Before revving up my jalopy to speed to the rescue of the stricken and the maimed who had been attacked by the giant lobster being, I paused to look at the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece. It had not yet hatched.

for example, and

The next Thursday was a particularly dull day without any opportunity for daring rescues of those imperilled. I spent much of my time contemplating the egg in its carton on the mantelpiece, from which no god had yet hatched.

In her lifetime, no god ever did hatch from the egg, but I suppose it is not impossible that one might still do so. For though Tiny Enid herself grew old and died, she always kept the egg with her wherever she roamed in her long life, and at her death it was found among her effects. Carefully catalogued by those who keep her flame alive, the egg, in its carton, is now kept in the Tiny Enid Museum, recently established in a cavernous hangar on a so-called “rustic industrial estate” on the edge of the mephitic marshes on the outskirts of Pointy Town. If you visit, and pay through the nose for an entrance ticket, seek out the egg in its refrigerated chamber, and who knows?, perhaps while you are there you will see the shell crack, and a god hatch out, come blind and trembling into the world.

Hay In Nosebags

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“the Knyght was a little less than Perfect, and his horse did not have a metabolism”

Preamble to A Knyght Ther Was by Robert F Young, Analog Science Fact & Fiction, July 1963

This fragment from a pulp magazine was almost certainly the inspiration for Dobson’s important pamphlet, published, as it happened, on the day of the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, entitled, somewhat inelegantly,  A Comparative Study Of The Metabolisms Of The Horses Of Three Knights Of The Realm (out of print).

Dobson begins with a bold declaration:

In this pamphlet I am going to prove, beyond all reasonable doubt and brooking not one whit of opposition, that the horse of Sir Lancelot, of the Arthurian Round Table, had the metabolism of a squirrel, that the horse of his confrère Sir Bedivere had the metabolism of a gnat, and that the horse of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, of later date, had a metabolism so extraordinary and anomalous that science has yet to account for it. My findings, which will completely overturn the accepted wisdom regarding the metabolism of horses ridden by knights of the realm, are backed up by a wealth of evidence only I have had the energy and diligence to winkle out of the documentary record, and this evidence, in the form of a vast scholarly apparatus of footnotes and citations and what have you will be published in a separate series of pamphlets in due course.

It never was – so the reader has to take on trust forty pages of wild assertion, idiotic wittering, equine ignorance, and frankly incomprehensible gibberish, all of it written, as we would expect, in majestic sweeping paragraphs. The pamphlet is remembered today chiefly for the much-anthologised passage about nosebags crammed with hay which, though factually inaccurate, has served as a model for many a novice pamphleteer. I well remember the way these words of Dobson’s transfixed me in my early, faltering stabs at composition, and how for years I was unable to write a finished piece without inserting something about hay in nosebags, no matter what my ostensible subject. It must be said that editors were kind to me. The inevitable rejection letters I received gently pointed out that I could easily delete the hay in nosebags stuff without fatally undermining my prose. But, oh!, I was young and headstrong and I would not countenance the change even of a comma to what I had scribbled so decisively with my propelling pencil on my tablet of notepaper. In those days, I cared not to pound the keys of a typewriter like Mancunian polymath Anthony Burgess. My hero Dobson was a scribbler, and so would I be.

The truth of it was, of course, that without acknowledging the fact I was being smothered under the Dobson cushion, as so many beginners have been. My salvation, and the prompt that allowed me at long last to cast the cushion aside, was a commission from a now defunct magazine, Beasts Of Barnyard And Field, to pen an article about nosebags crammed with hay. I worried and fretted at it so much that, in nervously gnawing my propelling pencil I managed to get a sliver of lead stuck in my craw, and had to be enclinicked. It was the morning of my fifty-first day there when, sprawled on my balcony gazing at the mountains, I sensed a tiny yet dramatic shifting of the integuments within my head, and knew at once that I was free of Dobson. The mighty out of print pamphleteer will always remain my idol, but on that morning in that clinic on that balcony I knew it was possible for me to plough my own furrow.

I tore up the few puny pages of prose I had written about hay in nosebags, and instead submitted to the magazine a piece about swill for pigs. Alas, later that day, listening to the news on the wireless in the clinic’s rumpus room, I learned that the skyscraper housing the offices of Beasts Of Barnyard And Field had collapsed after attack by woodworm and weevils and tiny, tiny beings that bore through cement, and the magazine had ceased publication. Ha!, I thought, I am not going to let that stop me. And it has not.

Hamstrung, Pointy & Downcast

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The rebranding exercise applied to the seven dwarves, of Snow White’s acquaintance, has by any measure been a PR triumph. Everyone is familiar with their names. Would that were so with Hamstrung, Pointy and Downcast, a trio now largely forgotten, so much so that even the cleverest brainboxes would be hard pressed to say whether they were a music hall act, a set of cartoon strip characters, or if they occupied some other corner of popular culture. There is uncertainty, too, regarding the identity of the third member, who is sometimes referred to as Downcast and at other times as Mordant.

References to them are scattered here and there in the records of the past, in biographies and memoirs, old newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, letters, official and unofficial reports, and salvaged ephemeral bittybobs. Yet Hamstrung, Pointy and Downcast somehow refuse to swim into focus. They remain impossible to pin down, each seeming “fact” contradicted, or even erased, by the next.

Consider, as one example, the nature of their living quarters. Based on a glancing and none too clear bit of footnotery in a photocopy of a manuscript by Pabstow, many people are of the view that Hamstrung, Pointy and Downcast inhabited a sweatlodge. At least, Pointy is said to have used the word “lodge” when filling in forms, and the three of them emitted copious amounts of sweat, to the extent that they collected it in sealed jars which they then tried to market as some sort of medicinal potion, though the details of that little enterprise are so disgusting that we would best not dwell upon them. Yet elsewhere (Gobbing, The Vileness Of Seaside Resorts) it is suggested that Hamstrung and Pointy, if not Downcast – whose name is given here as Mordant – lived permanently in the sand and silt and bilge beneath a jetty, and were semi-amphibious to boot. The evidence for this appears to be a scribble in the margin of a police report prepared by legendary copper Detective Captain Cargpan, but whether the scribble is in his hand or that of one of his brutish subordinates is not made clear. Like so much else in the matter of Hamstrung, Pointy and Downcast, we are left clutching haplessly at straws, straws that snap or are borne away on a gust of fierce and sudden wind.

Of necessity, we have to read between the lines, and sometimes not just between them but behind them, or at an angle to them H P Lovecraft might have described as belonging to an abnormal geometry loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours. When we do that, we may come no closer to gaining a proper conceptual grasp of the trio, but we can appreciate, I think, that there was a time when Hamstrung, Pointy and Downcast were as famous as Josef Stalin or Martin Tupper or Xavier Cugat, and as culturally significant.

Perhaps we ought to recall that passage in the Memoirs of Old Halob, the coach and mentor of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, where he writes I went out to the kiosk to buy a carton of high tar cigarettes, and as I clattered along the street it seemed to me the ground, the sky, the air, by Christ every atom in Creation, was somehow shouting out the names of that illustrious threesome, safe and snug in their sweatlodge or under the jetty, in sand and silt and bilge. It is telling that this sentence was expunged from the published version of the Memoirs for reasons never divulged to the hoi polloi.

Dobson’s Abortive Pliny

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Here is the list of contents of the tenth book of Pliny The Elder’s Natural History (c. 77-79 AD):

“The nature of birds. (i-ii) The ostrich, the phoenix. (iii-vi) Eagles, their species; their nature; when adopted as regimental badges; self-immolation of eagle on maiden’s funeral pyre. (vii) The vulture. (viii) Lámmergeier, sea-eagle. (ix-xi) Hawks: the buzzard; use of hawks by fowlers where practised; the only bird that is killed by its own kind; what bird produces one egg at a time. (xii) Kites. (xiii) Classification of birds by species. (xiv-xvi) Birds of ill-omen; in what months crows are not a bad omen; ravens; the horned owl. (xvii) Extinct birds; birds no longer known. (xviii) Birds hatched tail first. (xix) Night-owls. (xx) Mars’s woodpecker. (xxi) Birds with hooked talons. (xxii-v) Birds with toes: peacocks; who first killed the peacock for food; who invented fattening peacocks; poultry – mode of castrating; a talking cock. (xxvi-xxxii) The goose who first introduced goose-liver (foie gras); Commagene goose; fox-goose, love-goose, heath-cock, bustard; cranes; storks; rest of reflexed-claw genus; swans. (xxxiii-v) Foreign migrant birds: quails, tongue-birds, ortolan, horned owl; native migrant birds and their destinations – swallows, thrushes, blackbirds, starlings; birds that moult in retirement: turtle-dove, ring-dove. (xxxvi) Non-migrant birds: half-yearly and quarter-yearly visitors: witwalls, hoopoes. (xxxvii-xl) Mernnon’s hens, Meleager’s sisters (guinea-hens), Seleucid hens, ibis. (xli) Where particular species not known. (xlii-v) Species that change colour and voice: the divination-bird class; nightingale, black-cap, robin, red-start, chat, golden oriole. (xlvi) The breeding season. (xlvii) Kingfishers: sign of fine weather for sailing. (xlviii) Remainder of aquatic class. (xlix-li) Craftsmanship of birds in nest-making; remarkable structures of swallows; sand-martins; thistle-finch; bee-eater; partridges. (lii f.) Pigeons – remarkable structures of, and prices paid for; (liv f.) Varieties of birds’ flight and walk; footless martins or swifts. (lvi) Food of birds. Goat-suckers, spoon-bill. (lvii) Intelligence of birds; gold-finch, bull-bittern, yellow wagtail. (lviii-lxl) Talking birds: parrots, acorn-pies; riot at Rome caused by talking crow. (lxi) Diomede’s birds. (lxii) What animals learn nothing. (lxiii) Birds, mode of drinking; the sultana hen. (lxiv) The long-legs. (lxv f.) Food of birds. Pelicans. (lxvii f.) Foreign birds: coots, pheasants, Numidian fowl, flamingos, heath-cock, bald crow or cormorant, Ted-beaked or Alpine crow, bare-footed crow or ptarmigan. (lxix) New species: small cranes. (lxx) Fabulous birds. (lxxi) Who invented fattening of chickens, and which consuls first prohibited? who first invented aviaries? Aesop’s stewpan. (lxxiii-lxxx) Reproduction of birds: oviparous creatures other than birds; kinds and properties of eggs; defective hatching and its cures; Augusta’s augury from eggs; what sort of hens the best? their diseases and remedies; kinds of small heron; nature of puff-eggs, addled eggs, wind-eggs; best way of preserving eggs. (lxxxi f.) The only species of bird that is viviparous and suckles its young. Oviparous species of land animals. Reproduction of snakes. (lxxxvi-vii) Reproduction of all land animals; posture of animals in the uterus; animal species whose mode of birth is still uncertain; salamanders; species not reproduced by generation; species whose generated offspring is unfertile; sexless species. (lxxxviii-xc) Senses of animals: all have sense of touch, also taste; species with exceptional sight, smell, hearing; moles; have oysters hearing? which fishes hear most clearly? which fishes have keenest sense of smell? (xci-iii) Difference of food in animals: which live on poisonous things? which on earth? which do not die of hunger of thirst? (xciv) Variety of drink. (xcv f.) Species mutually hostile; facts as to friendship and affection between animals; instances of affection between snakes. (xcvii f.) Sleep of animals; which species sleep?”

Now, imagine the scene. It was shortly after breakfast time on a cold and storm-tossed morning in the 1950s at the home of the twentieth century’s most magnificent pamphleteer. Dobson had eaten his bloaters. Marigold Chew had something eggy. They were still sitting at their breakfast table. Outside, hailstones were pinging.

“Marigold, o my darling dear,” boomed Dobson, “I have devised a marvellous plan! Listen carefully. You often comment upon what you consider to be my breathtaking ignorance of the natural world. And though I usually swat away your charges, as a giant may swat away a dwarf, I have, this day, found within myself a reservoir of humility, and I must admit there is a certain truth in what you say.”

Marigold Chew interrupted here, to suggest she capture Dobson’s words upon a tape recorder for the settling of any future contretemps, but the pamphleteer pressed on.

“That being so,” he said, “My plan is to increase my knowledge in the best way possible, and what method could be more efficacious than to write a book about what I do not know? And not just any book. I shall take as my guide that great ancient encyclopaedia by Pliny The Elder, the Natural History, and rewrite it in its entirety! To ensure I cover the sweeping width and breadth of all natural phenomena, I  shall follow slavishly the chapter and section headings of the great work, but, subjoined to them, the texts shall be my own! Is that not a fantastic plan and a superb way to extend my knowledge of that which you claim me to be ignorant.. of, again, I think, if I am to be grammatically sound?”

“Are you sure you mean ‘subjoined’, Dobson?” asked Marigold Chew, who was in chucklesome mood.

“I am not one hundred percent certain, no, but let that pass, o my inamorata. The thing is, I have decided to begin the project this very day, not at the beginning, but plunging straight in to the tenth book of Pliny, which you will recall is the one in which he addresses matters ornithological. That is an area in which you suggest my ignorance is boundless and unfathomable, so it will be the perfect test bed. And no, I am not sure I mean ‘test bed’, but let that pass too, for the time being.”

“I am quite happy to do so,” said Marigold Chew, “For now my eggy breakfast is digested, I am going off and out to a beekeeping bonanza jamboree. Get thee to thy escritoire, and when I return I shall be happy to have you read to me the initial scribblings of your Natural History, a book I am sure will knock Pliny from his plinth.”

Dobson took this repartee in good part, scurried to his escritoire, sharpened a pencil, and flung open his dusty copy of Pliny at the tenth book. The nature of birds. (i-ii) The ostrich, the phoenix, he read. He closed his eyes and tried to summon a vision of an ostrich and a phoenix, first separately, then together. He was determined not to cheat by reading what Pliny The Elder had had to say on the subject nearly two thousand years ago. Then the pamphleteer shook his head, like a man waking from a jarring dream, opened his eyes, and began to scribble with his sharpened pencil on the first page of a brand new notepad.

Both the ostrich and the phoenix, he wrote, are birds, the one real, the other mythical. On the front of the head of the real bird, there is a beak. And, lo!, what do we find on the front of the head of the bird of myth? It too has a beak! And this is not the only feature they have in common, for the bodies of both birds bear plumage in the form of feathers.

Dobson looked upon what he had done, and saw that it was good. No doubt there would be more to say about both the ostrich and the phoenix, but he felt he had, at the very least, cracked the method he planned to employ. Pliny would be his guide, but only his guide. The grand sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose would be Dobson’s alone. He went to take a post-breakfast nap.

When he awoke, the pamphleteer’s brain was befuddled after a series of dreams, the details of which, so vivid in sleep, vanished pfft! the instant his head rose from the pillow. He opened a can of revivifying Squelcho! and poured it into a tumbler, then sat again at his escritoire to consult his Pliny. Eagles… vultures… hawks… owls… woodpeckers… it was a long, long list of things with beaks and feathers! Dobson threw his pencil across the room, donned his greatcoat and his Belgian Post Office Inspector’s boots, and went out in the teeth of the hailstorm to trudge along the towpath of the filthy old canal to clear his head. He saw a number of birds while on his trudge, not one of which was either an ostrich or a phoenix. He threw a pebble at a swan. He stopped in at Old Ma Purgative’s Canalside Lobster Hatchery ‘n’ Winter Sports Togs Bazaar, and browsed among the lobsters and the winter sports togs, but in spite of the Old Ma offering bargains galore in a special ‘hailstorm sale’, Dobson, enmired in penury as ever, bought nothing. Eventually he trudged back home, passing the puddle in which the pebble he had thrown at the swan had somehow fetched up, as pebbles do. And as pamphleteers do, he returned to his escritoire, sharpened another pencil, and, jaw set in determination, cast his eye over the Pliny. Peacocks… bustards… swans… hoopoes… partridges… goat-suckers… this last reminded Dobson that he had a goat-milk popsicle in the refrigerator, and he was about to go and fetch it, for a midmorning snack, when, towards the end of the contents of Pliny’s tenth book, he read instances of affection between snakes and a bomb exploded inside his brain.

Suddenly Dobson recalled the dream from which he had awoken befuddled after his nap. He remembered it in every last detail, for it was his recurring dream, the one that flickered in his sleeping cranium on so many, many nights, and in so many, many daytime naps, and had done since infancy. He turned to a fresh page of his notepad, and began scribbling.

When I was a tot, he wrote, I had a favourite bedtime story which I implored my ma or pa to read to me before I fell asleep. I drank my bedtime beaker of milk of magnesia and settled my little head on my little pillow, and listened, night after night, to the tale which, ever since, has haunted my dreams, and about which it is incomprehensible that I have not written a pamphlet until today. Well, thanks to Pliny The Elder, now I can address that omission. The story began as follows:

Once upon a time there was a boa constrictor named Dagobert. He was loitering on a verdant slope when he happened to spot a passing vole. Dagobert uncoiled himself, pounced, sank his fangs into the tiny vole, and gulped it down in one fangsome mouthful. But before his digestive juices could begin to reduce the paralysed but yet living vole into nourishing pulp, along came a viper named Clothgard.

“My oh my!” thought Dagobert, “What a lovely viper she is. I feel a great pang of affection for her.”

Clothgard herself was a sore vexed viper, for she had not eaten for many days.

“O boa constrictor loitering on the verdant slope, canst thee help a sore vexed viper who has not eaten for many days? My name is Clothgard,” hissed Clothgard.

So mighty were the pangs of affection felt by Dagobert that he immediately regurgitated the vole and offered it to the famished viper.

“Why thank you,” she hissed, “You are quite the most charming boa constrictor it has ever been my pleasure to meet.”

There was more to the story, much more, but it was always around this point that, as a tot, I fell into my golden slumbers, and ma or pa placed the storybook gently by my pillow and tiptoed away.

This you will recognise, I expect, as the opening of Dobson’s important pamphlet The Significance, In My Long-Ago Infancy, Of An Undigested Vole (out of print). He was still scribbling away furiously, possessed by a pamphleteer’s demons, when Marigold Chew arrived home. Thinking he was at work on his revision of Pliny, she did not interrupt him, but went straight into the back garden with the new bees she had brought back from the bonanza jamboree. Not until a few days later, when she asked Dobson if he had yet written his chapter on the nature of puff-eggs, addled eggs, and wind-eggs, did she learn that the pamphleteer had abandoned his Pliny.

“Oh that,” he said, over breakfast, “It’s just one bird after another. I can’t be doing with it.”

The Soutane-Attired Nemesis Of Sea Monsters

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Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit priest and self-styled “Soutane-Attired Nemesis of Sea Monsters” who appeared in my dream yesterday, was, I would have you know, a real historical figure. He is often thought to be fictional, probably because the only reliable biography we have of him, by Pebblehead père, was published in the form of a series of short episodes between the covers of pulp magazines such as Mildly Alarming Stories!, Yarns That Might Raise Your Blood Pressure Just A Tad, and Vaguely Disquieting Tales. That the various scattered pieces were never brought together as a proper book is one of literature’s, indeed life’s, great tragedies, and the blame must lie squarely with Pebblehead père himself. For all his learning and wisdom and panache as a biographer, he was a very bewildering person. Even just walking down the street, he left a swathe of boggle-eyed bewilderment in his wake, and the captains of ships were ever reluctant to have him aboard their pleasure steamers.

Bewildering, too, is his treatment of the life of Father Tonguelash, quite apart from its being broken up into bits and published in magazines designed for a readership of the semi-literate and the timid and the nerve-bejangled. Although what research has been done seems to confirm that Pebblehead père‘s accounts are historically accurate, indeed devastatingly so, each episode as written is almost identical. The general schema is as follows:

1. Father Ninian Tonguelash has just finished saying Mass when an urchin sprints panting into the vestry to announce that a sea monster has been sighted. Either a ship or a boat or a coastal hamlet is imperilled.

2. Without stopping to ask any questions – even something as basic as in which direction he should speed – Father Tonguelash grabs a harpoon and a crucifix and charges out into the wild and windy shoreland. It is invariably wild and windy.

3. After a little while of harum scarum scampering, the priest stops, as Christ stopped at Eboli, and, all windswept and resolute, takes from his pocket a volume of poems by his friend and colleague Father Gerard Manley Hopkins. He opens the book at random and declaims a poem, shouting into the wind. Declaiming done, he returns the book to his pocket, makes the sign of the cross, and scampers onward. The panting urchin who brought the message of sea monster peril has now had time to catch up with the priest, and sticks close to his heels.

4. Father Ninian arrives at the scene of imperilment and confronts the sea monster. He is absolutely fearless. “I am attired in the soutane of a Jesuit, and I am your Nemesis!” he cries. At this point the sea monster usually makes a gurgling sound we are led to interpret as a plea for God’s ineffable mercy. But Father Ninian shows none. He hands the crucifix to the panting urchin, telling the lad to brandish it at the sea monster. Then he launches the harpoon, with unerring accuracy, felling the sea monster instantly.

5. It is an interesting point that all of the sea monsters harpooned by the Jesuit were of the kind that, when struck, shrivel up and vanish in a puff of cloudy gaseous green vapour.

6. Father Tonguelash reels in his harpoon, pats the panting urchin on the head, retrieves his crucifix, and acknowledges the grovelling gratitude of those whose imperilment he has quashed, be they the crew of a ship or a boat or the peasant inhabitants of a coastal hamlet.

7. As the priest wends his way back to his vestry, Pebblehead père does three things. He makes note, based upon what sources he never reveals, of all the types of birds in the sky and perched upon branches which the Jesuit, were he looking, would see upon his journey. He makes some attempt, not always successfully, to elucidate various sea monster references hidden in the text of the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem declaimed by Father Tonguelash earlier in the episode. Lastly, and characteristically, he ends each piece with a flourish of distinctively bewildering prose.

As a tot, Pebblehead fils, the bestselling paperbackist, was taught this “seven-point plan of literary composition”, as his père dubbed it. Careful readers will still find traces of the technique in some of the potboilers that pour out of the “chalet o’ prose” day after day. Consider, for example, even so recent a blockbuster as The Jesuit And The Sea Serpent which follows the pattern almost exactly, despite being over a thousand pages fat, with a gold-embossed cover making it suitable for airport book kiosks.

Dobson In Dreamland

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According to Hargrave Jennings, in Curious Things Of The Outside World : Last Fire (1861), “There are moments in the history of the busiest man when his life seems a masquerade. There are periods in the story of the most engrossed and most worldly-minded man, when this strong fear will come, like a cloud, over him; when this conviction will start, athwart his horizon, like a flash from out a cloud. He will look up to the sunshine, some day, and in the midst of the business-clatter by which he may be surrounded, a man will, in a moment’s glance, seem to see the whole jostle of human interests and city bustle, or any stir, as so much empty show. Like the sick person, he will sometimes raise his head, and out of the midst of his distractions, and out of the grasp which that thing, ‘business’, always has of him, he will ask himself the question, What does all this mean? Is the whole world awake, and am I asleep and dreaming a dream? Or is it that the whole world is the dream, and that I, in this single moment, have alone awakened?”

That great twentieth-century pamphleteer, Dobson, woke up in this state of mind every single morning of his adult life. And that was not the end of his confusion, for Dobson was a great one for naps, he took a nap daily, very often more than one, plural naps, as it were, and each time he woke from his naps he likewise asked himself the questions posed by Hargrave Jennings, as he had already done on the morning of the day, when first he awoke.

“Do you have the slightest idea,” asked Marigold Chew, one blustery blizzardy Monday in the late 1950s, “How tiresome it is to have you lumbering about the place like a dippy person, asking the kinds of questions most sensible people stop posing when they outgrow their years of teendom?”

Dobson’s reply to this perfectly reasonable query was most annoying.

“Are you really speaking, Marigold, or am I just imagining this conversation within the wispy mysterious mists of mystery?”

Marigold Chew was holding a handful of pebbles, and proceeded to throw one at the pamphleteer. No, that’s not right. Marigold Chew was holding a Pebblehead paperback, and it was this she threw across the room. The book was Pebblehead’s latest bestselling potboiler, The Interpretation Of Breams, a guide to foretelling the future using a combination of fish and recordings of lute music. Luckily, the book missed Dobson’s head by an inch.

“I am going to go about my business in the real, palpable world, Dobson,” announced Marigold Chew, “If you choose to waft about the place in a moonstruck daze, that is up to you. But it won’t get any pamphlets written!” and she swept out of the house into the blizzard, bent upon her real and palpable business, whatever it might have been that day.

Dobson picked up the Pebblehead paperback from the floor and leafed through it, distractedly. He read a few lines here and there, and decided to go out to the fishmonger’s and the record shop. But he got no further than the chair on which he sat to don and to lace up his Canadian Snowplough Mechanic’s boots, for, yet enmired in his dreamy daze, he wondered if the chair, the laces, the boots were but figments. “Figments” made him think of figs, and then of Fig Newtons, a type of biscuit of which, at this period, he was inordinately fond, and, with his right foot encased in a boot the laces of which were not yet tied and his left foot merely ensocked, he rose from the chair and made for the cupboard wherein the biscuits, and similar snack items, were stored. When he stood, he was, in boot and sock, necessarily lopsided, and this being so, Dobson lost what balance he had, and toppled, bashing his bonce on the wainscot.

He was unconscious for some minutes, during which time he really did dream, of the glove of Ib and of his weak Bomba, whatever that might mean.

And of course, when he woke, sprawled on the floor, the pamphleteer’s swimming brain was yet again prompted to ask the Hargrave Jennings questions. Round and round we go, in an endless cycle, akin to the orbit of the planets around the sun.

Marigold Chew was still out and about, so Dobson was alone in his daze. Now wide awake, but still unable to gain a foothold in the real, palpable world, he mooched about the house as a person might blunder about in a thick fog, what they used to call a “pea-souper” because of the supposed similarity of the cloudy density of the air to the consistency of soup made from peas, not to be confused with pease pudding, which is, as its name suggests, a pudding, not a soup. Dobson was thinking neither of soup, nor of the Fig Newtons, which he had utterly forgotten. He was doing things such as tapping the walls with his fingertips, peering carefully at curtains, opening and then closing doors, or in some cases leaving them ajar, as he tried to grasp what was real and what was not. Stumbling past an airing cupboard into the bathroom, he was astonished, in a bleary way, to come face to face with a monster of the deep, wallowing in the tub. It was bloated, lascivious, coarse, and repulsive, rather like Gertrude Atherton’s vision of Oscar Wilde, except that it had fins and hideous trailing tendrils, like those of a jellyfish. One such tendril now lashed out and struck Dobson across the face, leaving, not just a vivid crimson stripe, but droplets of an unbelievably aggressive toxin which seeped in seconds through his pores and began ravaging his innards. The pamphleteer toppled once again to the floor, this time of his bathroom rather than of his kitchen, still wearing one boot, but now he was convulsed by fits, as if he were Voltaire’s officer with pinks in his chamber alluded to in another passage from Hargrave Jennings’ very sensible book, and, like the officer, Dobson lost his senses.

In the tub, the sea monster now began to gurgle, and to splash about. Suddenly, through the bathroom window crashed Father Ninian Tonguelash, the Jesuit priest and self-styled “Soutane-Attired Nemesis Of Sea Monsters”, clutching in one gloved hand a harpoon and in the other a crucifix. Then…

Then…

Then… I awoke, and I realised that all I have just written was a dream. Of course it was! Dobson did not become the titanic pamphleteer he was by faffing about the place all muddleheaded. When he woke up, every day of his adult life, he knew exactly where he was, and if perchance there was a smidgen of doubt in the matter, he would in any case plunge his head into a bucket of icy water, just to be on the safe side. How foolish of me to confuse the hallucinations of my sleeping, pea-sized brain with the iron truth!

Eggs, Stick

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It is quite some time since I have heard from Dr Ruth Pastry, but at last she has broken her silence. Here is her letter:

Dear Mr Key : Last week I read your postage Poultry Yards Of The Grand Archdukes and, though I was not impressed, I could not help but be intrigued by your reference to a breakfast recipe which involves, and I quote, “more eggs than you can shake a stick at”. How many eggs is that?, I wondered. The only indication you give, and I quote again, is “a goodly number of eggs”. This is less than helpful. “A goodly number”, in and of itself, is not a measurable quantity. A writer with more concern for his or her readers would be precise in these matters, and tell us plainly how many eggs we would have to assemble before we were no longer able to shake a stick at them.

Because of your laxity, I was put in the position of having to find out for myself. I went for a walk in the woods and came back carrying a stout and sturdy stick. I think it was a branch from a hornbeam. It was a very shakeable stick, as I ascertained by shaking it experimentally a few times while still in the woods. Squirrels scattered as I shook it, and there was movement in shrubbery as if a small woodland creature had been startled. Had I had with me my net, I would have used it to entrap the creature, whatever it was, and then rained blows upon it with the stick until ’twere dead, and taken it home with me to boil for a snack, garnished perhaps with a tomato and some basil. As it was, I was netless, so I returned home with just the stick.

I then set to preparing my test area. You know, I think, how thorough I am. I shoved the kitchen table back against the kitchen wall, thus creating sufficient space for me to be able to shake the stick without risking damage to my many and various kitchen appurtenances. Next, I opened my refrigerator, and removed from it every single egg currently in my possession, placing them, in their carton, on my countertop. I was somewhat dismayed to note that I had only five eggs, from the carton’s original complement of six. My instinctive thought was that five was unlikely to be the “goodly number of eggs” you prescribed. However, instinct is one thing, and empirical evidence is another thing entirely. It was clear to me that the absolute minimum possible indicated by “a goodly number of eggs” was a simple plurality, in other words, two eggs.

Before continuing, I fetched from a cubby a fresh ledger, dozens of pages of creamy paper divided by faint blue lines into squares. In this, I would tabulate my results, using several different coloured pencils, which I duly sharpened with a pencil sharpener. I then removed two eggs from the carton and placed them on the table, taking care to position them in such a way that they would not roll off the tabletop and smash to squelchy ruin upon the floor linoleum. I had already made certain the tabletop was level, using a Van Der Hoddle Levelometer, a splendid device which I find far more effective than the common spirit level, and which uses no spirits whatsoever.

With the two eggs in place upon the table, as they would be were I to be embarking upon my breakfast preparation, I shook the stick at them. I suffered no hindrance, and could have gone on shaking the stick for hours upon end, had I been so minded. But I shook the stick only for long enough to become convinced beyond any shade of doubt that two was not the “goodly number of eggs” defined as “more eggs than I could shake a stick at”. I noted the results in the ledger, painstakingly, and then removed a third egg from the carton and placed it next to the original brace of eggs on the table, proceeding to shake the stick once again.

You will, I suppose, have worked out that soon enough I tried four, then five, eggs, with identical outcomes. Pleased as I was with the severe beauty of the tabulation of results in my ledger, I had now exhausted my supply of eggs. For a madcap moment, I considered propping a mirror upon the kitchen table, thus doubling the visible number of eggs, thinking by doing so I could somehow “trick” the stick. Two immediate objections to such tomfoolery rapidly presented themselves. First, the positioning of the mirror would be enormously complicated if I were to be able to present the appearance of the intermediate egg numbers, from six through nine. Second, the stick was just a stick, from a hornbeam, probably, and did not in itself have sense perception, visual or otherwise. The impossibility of shaking a stick at “a goodly number of eggs”, whatever that number might be, was, I felt sure, dependent not upon the stick itself, but on the quantity of eggs one was attempting to shake it at. And in turn, that surely meant they had to be real eggs, not mirror images nor any other eggs of illusion.

Now, I was reluctant to march off to my nearest egg shop to buy the extra eggs I would need. For one thing, I had no idea how many eggs that might be. Also, what was I going to do with them all when my experiment was done? One can only eat so many eggs before becoming disgusted at the prospect of yet another egg-based meal, and it would be a terrible sin, and a waste of money, to let them rot uneaten. I thought it unlikely that the proprietor of the egg shop would be willing to allow me to return any bought but unused eggs, for he is not the most amiable of shopkeepers. Indeed, more than once I had had blazing arguments with him, and not always on the subject of eggs.

Then I recalled that there had been recent tidings from the farmyard of Mad Old Farmer Frack. It was said that he was no longer devoting himself exclusively to his bellowing cows, but had installed a hen coop, with hens in it, on the farm. Where there’s hens there’s eggs, I said to myself, not wholly grammatically, but memorably. I wondered if it was an old country saying. I resolved to ask Old Farmer Frack if this were so, although the main business of the visit to him I now embarked upon, without delay, was to borrow from him as many eggs as possible.

“Hail to thee, Old Farmer Frack,” I cried, within the hour, leaning against his fence, “I was wondering if it would be possible for me to borrow from you as many eggs as possible? I will bring them back before nightfall.”

The mad old farmer was standing in the middle of one of his fields, looking mad and farmerly, doing something with a spade. When he heard me, he looked up, let fall the spade, and came bounding over to me at inhuman speed. His eyes were bloodshot and his hair was a tangle of filth.

“My eggs are not for borrowing,” he said, “Under any circumstances. But for an old friend like you, Dr Pastry, I might consider renting them out.”

And so we haggled. We had done so many times before, over the years. The thing is, I have advanced haggling skills, whereas Mad Old Farmer Frack is hopeless and inept in this area as in so many others. Within a few minutes, I had him agreeing to let me take away hundreds upon hundreds of eggs in return for a photocopy of my bus pass and a sprig o’ myrtle. Of course, I then had to scoot off to town to get the photocopy, and pop in to Myrtle Sprigs R Us® to get the sprig, but that was soon accomplished.

When I returned to the farm, Mad Old Farmer Frack was nowhere to be seen. I thought he might be herding his bellowing cows from field to field, pointlessly, and went a-roaming to see if I could spot him, and them. I found the cows, all of them, without their farmer, standing around in a distant field beyond a drainage ditch, in the rain. I trudged back through muck and puddles to the hen coop, and poked my head in for a look-see. Lots and lots of hens, but no farmer, and, more to the point, no eggs. A couple of the more savage hens made moves to attack me, but I remonstrated with them in a sort of screechy hensprache I picked up from a hen person I met on my travels, long ago, and they were immediately pacified, and not just pacified but put into comas, from which they will only awake when next it is time for them to lay an egg.

That done, I wandered aimlessly around the farm for a few hours before giving up and going home, cursing Mad Old Farmer Frack and throwing pebbles at crows in my annoyance. I unlatched the door of Pastry Cottage, and there, in my kitchen, was the mad old farmer himself, waving a stick at the kitchen table upon which teetered a gigantic pile of eggs. He looked around as I came in.

“Ah, there you are, doctor,” he said in his mad voice, “I was so interested in what you were telling me about your egg experiment during our haggling process, I thought I’d carry on where you left off while you were fetching the agreed rental. Speaking of which, do you have the photocopy of your bus pass and the sprig o’ myrtle?”

Nonplussed, I handed over the items without a word.

“So far I am up to a hundred and sixty-two eggs,” said Old Farmer Frack, “And still nothing is impeding me from shaking the stick at them.”

“Have you been tabulating the results in the ledger?” I asked, not unreasonably.

“Oh… I forgot to do that bit,” he said. At least he had the grace to look shamefaced.

“Then we must begin again, from six upwards,” I said, “Otherwise the experiment will not have been conducted with sufficient rigour.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” said the mad old farmer, and I was delighted to see that he immediately began to remove a hundred and fifty-six eggs from the table, one by one, with surprisingly dainty movements, placing them hither and thither about the kitchen wherever he was able to find space among the many and various kitchen appurtenances I mentioned earlier, only a few of which he had broken or dented when clumping about before suddenly remembering his daintiness upon my arrival home.

I have to say that tackling this as a two-person job has been a marked improvement. I can concentrate on the majestic sweeping penmanship of my ledger entries, while Mad Old Farmer Frack shakes the stick. As a farmer, he is able to shake a stick with much more conviction than I can muster, for of course he shakes a stick at something most days, whereas I only rarely do so. We are taking it in turns to move the eggs from their temporary storage places, one at a time, to join the eggs accumulated upon the table.

I am beginning to worry if the legs of my kitchen table will continue to support the ever-increasing weight of eggs, and, as I write, have sent Mad Old Farmer Frack off to fetch lengths of titanium cut to size, from Old Ma Purgative’s Cut To Size Titanium Reinforcement Rods Shoppe. I scribbled a note for him to take, explaining to Old Ma Purgative that the table is currently supporting six hundred and forty eggs, and asking that she supply titanium rods sturdy enough to support twice that number. I added, of course, the relevant measurements, of both my table legs and the approximate weight of eggs.

Fairly soon, however, we are going to run out of eggs. Between us, I am sure we will work out how to get more, by hire or theft or, as a last resort, cash purchase. Meanwhile, I am beginning to wonder just how many eggs we will have piled on my reinforced table before I pause, coloured pencil held steady over my ledger, and the time comes when Mad Old Farmer Frack raises the hornbeam stick, to shake it yet again, and finds – oh! sweet mystery of life, or rather of egg-numbers – that he is completely unable to do so. When that time comes, Mr Key, I will write to you again, requesting further details of your eggy breakfast recipe, which I have no doubt is both succulent and toothsome.

Yours waiting for Mad Old Farmer Frack to come crashing through the door,

Dr Ruth Pastry