Category Archives: Characters

The Star On The Vest

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Dear Mr Key, writes Dagmar Glossop from Shoeburyness, I recently came upon this terrific photograph at My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck By Lightning (where a much, much larger version can be seen), and I fell to wondering if it might be a rare snapshot of fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol. Please enlighten me.

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Dear Ms Glossop, I can see immediately why you thought this might be fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol. It’s that star on his vest. The whizzo sprinter and pole-vaulter never appeared in public without such a star, on the instructions of his catarrh-wracked coach, Old Halob, for whom it had some kind of mystical quality. Unfortunately, however, the dashing young chap in the photograph is not fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol. I say this with due authority, based on two unarguable points. One, fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol, being fictional, was never snapped by any camera wrought by human hand. Two, it is common knowledge that fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol’s athletics kit, as well as being emblazoned with a star, was much baggier than the kit seen here. In fact it was inordinately baggy.

Pebblehead Goes To Porlock

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Some years ago, I wrote about Dobson’s foolish theory that the person from Porlock who fatally interrupted the composition of Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge was, in fact, some kind of pod person from a parallel Porlock beyond the stars. I noted at the time that Dobson had never seen fit to devote a pamphlet to this twaddle, leaving us in some doubt as to the nature of this pod person, and in utter ignorance about the Porlock from whence it came.

Most people who have studied the matter conclude that the person in Dobson’s theory was a flesh-eating space zombie hatched from a pod, the pod itself brought to the vicinity of the Exmoor cottage in which Coleridge was staying by a primitive interplanetary cargo ship, intentionally or otherwise. But if this were so, and one such pod person came bashing upon the cottage door, how did the poet survive such an encounter? Survive it he did, of course, going on to live a long(ish) and fantastically talkative life thereafter.

Other questions surround the matter of Porlock, whether – in the theory – the pod-packed cargo ship crash-landed in the Somerset village of that name, or whether there is, somewhere in the mighty universe, a planet Porlock where are bred pod persons.

The latest writer to turn his attention to this fascinating business is Pebblehead, whose brand new bestselling paperback is entitled Person From Porlock! Note the missing Pod prefix. Pebblehead’s book is a first-person narrative, as if recounted by the “person on business from Porlock” himself, beginning a week before he strides o’er the loam to the cottage where Coleridge is ensconced, and ending, years and years later, as he faces death in a Victorian Porlock workhouse, his business, and his wits, having failed. In a tremendously exciting passage, Pebblehead has the raving and babbling person from Porlock imagining, on his deathbed, an encounter with his pod-doppelgänger who, it transpires, has been skulking about in his wake, like the familiar in the story by J Sheridan Le Fanu, ever since the fateful day in 1797 when he rapped upon Coleridge’s cottage door.

Several readers have pointed out the efforts Pebblehead takes to emphasise that this part of his narrative is, in his own words, “the hysterical drivel of a brainsick maniac”, and taken this to be a barb aimed at Dobson. Could it be that the paperbackist is limbering up for his long-rumoured unauthorised biography of the out of print pamphleteer, a work in progress which, it is said, will topple Dobson from his plinth in the pantheon of pamphleteers? No word comes from Pebblehead’s “chalet o’ prose”, only the sound of the indefatigable hammering of his fat fingers upon his battered and bloody keyboard.

Person From Porlock! by Pebblehead is published by Hefty Airport Bookstall Paperbacks Ltd, and is available from all good airport bookstalls.

Pancake Day

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[This piece ought to have appeared on Tuesday. Mea culpa.]

Dobson adored Pancake Day. Every year, in the weeks leading up to Shrove Tuesday, he grew ever more hot-brained and excitable, gathering sacks of flour, carrying out repeated Orwellian egg counts, and begging Old Farmer Frack for churns of milk from the mad old rustic’s cow collection. Every year, too, he revised, polished, embroidered, and sometimes even rewrote from scratch his pamphlet Pancakes : Food Of The Gods? (out of print).

In the complete Dobson bibliography, this title appears both with and without that question mark, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s fatuous Soviet Communism : A New Civilization?, written in 1935 at the height of Stalin’s terror, which lost its question mark between its first and second editions. Why Dobson ever phrased his title as a query in the first place is unfathomable, for he was absolutely convinced that all divine beings subsisted on pancakes and nothing else. A glance at any sacred text or compendium of myths quickly disproves the pamphleteer’s theory, if we can call it that, though “delusional idée fixe” would express it better. Dobson spent a preposterous amount of time working his way through the foundational texts of all major religions, Tippexing out all mentions of foodstuffs and, as soon as the Tippex was dry, scribbling in the word “pancakes”. At one point he commissioned Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist, to create a mezzotint showing the Greek gods atop Mount Olympus, stuffing their faces with pancakes. The work was never completed, or even begun, because Dobson wanted to pay the mezzotintist in eggs, flour, and milk, and Rex Tint, famously, was a “cash only” mezzotintist.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that in spite of his enthusiasm, Dobson was a hopeless pancake maker. He could never get the mixture quite right, and his tossing technique was laughable. He tried to divert attention from his pancake ineptitude through a combination of bluster, weeping, and pointing out of the window at an imaginary flock of chaffinches. Only late in his life did he face up to the truth, in the remarkable pamphlet My Pancake Ineptitude : A Heart-Rending Confession In Sixteen Bursts Of Hallucinatory Prose (out of print). In the sixteenth and final text, Dobson makes his most compelling case for the divine nature of this simple aliment, although the prose is so hallucinatory that not even the most diligent, pancake-focused reader can work out what in heaven’s name he is babbling on about.

ADDENDUM : A better, and more accurate title than Soviet Communism : A New Civilization would have been Soviet Communism : Enemy Of Orchards, as Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti reminds us.

Impenetrable Mysteries

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There are certain impenetrable mysteries which tug at our imaginations and allow us no peace of mind. I am sure I am not the only person to be kept awake at night, tossing and turning, chewing the pillow, my brain fuming as I ponder in perplexity for the umpteenth time whether, for example, Badge Man was a living, breathing, armed maniac or merely a trick of the light, whether the Loch Ness Monster truly exists or is just a figment in the minds of socially inept men in anoraks who like to spend their time sitting in the lochside drizzle with Thermos flask and binoculars, whether it is permissible simply to wipe over one’s socks when performing wudhu. These are all terrifically mysterious matters, and there are many more, so many more it is a wonder we are not stunned into mental collapse.

Every now and then, we stumble upon some fragmentary clue which promises to shed light where previously there has been only darkness, ignorance, and numbing stupidity. One of the greatest puzzles gnawing away inside my head has long been to find an answer to the question: what did Tiny Enid do, once she had grown up and was no longer tiny? Though I am still unable to give a full account of her adult doings, I can, today, say one thing with a modicum of confidence – she dressed up as a bat.

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There remains some doubt whether this really is Tiny Enid. It may be an impostor, or even a hallucination brought on by a surfeit of lampreys. I am clutching at straws, dammit, but sometimes that is all we can do.

Epigone

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According to the art critic Cosmo Hoxtonwanker, “few things boost the ego of the great artist as much as the emergence, and failures, of their epigones, talentless imitators whose own work never cuts the mustard, but clearly owes everything to the example of the master. The opportunities for preening are legion.”

One might have hoped that the egos of the truly great would need no such puffing up, but Hoxtonwanker is surely right in this (as he rarely is in anything else). One thinks of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, convinced at an early age that he would bestride the twentieth century like a colossus, but at the same time forever riven by doubts and insecurities. Marigold Chew has recalled how happy Dobson would be when some neophyte pamphleteer would blunder onto the scene, publishing a handful of hand-stitched copies of a tract with a title like Gosh, How I Wish I Was Dobson!, in prose that curdled as one read it. The bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead is reported to be equally gleeful when he sees the shelves stacked with pathetic imitations of his own tremendously thick glossy potboilers, so much so that he invites their authors round to his “chalet o’ prose” for cocktail parties, lording it over them and taunting them, often physically, by poking at them with a stick and dropping beetles into their drinks.

It is, of course, only the supreme talents, in any creative endeavour, who provoke the slavish and witless efforts of epigones. The rest of us must continue to plough our lonely furrows, keeping our spirits up as best we may, our egos fragile and subject to the vicissitudes of a world of pap.

Until now. For it is with possibly preposterous overexcitement that I can report the latest innovation from Blodgett Global Domination Cyber Enterprises GmbH. For the past couple of weeks, this brand new company, operating from an allotment shed near Sawdust Bridge, has been seeking ways to crush the likes of Google and Microsoft under its singularly decisive boot. Their first product is designed to appeal directly to persons of a creative bent who wish like hell they had an epigone, for just the kind of ego-boost Hoxtonwanker identifies.

The E-Pig One is a tiny robot pig that can be plugged in to your computer with a USB cable or a bit of fusewire knotted to a magnet. Once initialised, synched, and prinked, the circuit boards in the E-Pig One start buzzing away, creating copies of your most recent creative projects – whether they be novels or paintings or three-hour slabs of improv racket – and then cleverly draining all the spark out of them (if any). The resulting mess is then belched out on to the E-Pig One’s so-called “sty”. It has all the hallmarks of your own work, as it might have been imitated by a lesser being without access to the empyrean peaks of creative genius you inhabit. So you can bask and preen, while the E-Pig One whirrs to a standstill, charging up for its next task.

Such has been the industry buzz, Apple are apparently already working on an iPig. It won’t succeed. The beauty of the E-Pig One lies almost entirely in its spelling. That is what the punters will pay for.

The Blind Man As Poultry Inspector

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Jorge Luis Borges’ tenure as a blind inspector of poultry, while brief, was not without precedent. We recall the case of Pimty, two decades earlier and far, far from Buenos Aires. It may be an exaggeration to dub him, as did Pebblehead in the title of his bestselling paperback biography, The Illustrious Pimty, but that there was a lustre about him cannot be denied, unless you want to start a punch-up. Pimty’s blindness was more Blunketty than Miltonic, he was the sort of man who enraged cows, when he trespassed in their fields, at weekends, carrying a picnic basket, under a thunderous sky, escaping the poultry market with its tin roofs and yelling merchants, his prison in the week, the inspector’s hut, the braille calendar hanging tattered from a nail and the nail rusted, pricking him if he wasn’t careful, blood on his fingers as his hands fumbled delving into a hen’s croup, prodding, inspecting, as he was paid to do, oh and more than generously, he got a fair whack, and he spent it on booze and floozies, they haunted the poultry market, like figures from an early Kirchner, gaudy, angular, themselves sozzled on bathtub gin, sometimes they clucked just like the hens, particularly in the early afternoon, poor Pimty fuddled but up to his duty, tape measure round his neck like a tailor shifting schmutter, god knows why, it wasn’t his job to measure the hens, nor their eggs, they joked he thought it was some kind of loose cravat, as if being blind he wouldn’t know, they should have learned from their failed tricks, those mischievous poulterers, shoving a ball of dough stuck with feathers on the inspector’s table, his rage was as terrible as the cows when he opened the gate of the field with one hand, holding tight to the picnic basket with the other, out in the mist, oblivious of it, but not of the cows that bore down on him, on Saturdays and Sundays when the poultry market was closed, shuttered, a deserted patch of concrete and cement, stray feathers scattered, neglected by the janitor’s broom, the janitor Pimty’s pal, some said his half-brother, deaf as a post where the inspector was blind, they made quite a pair even without the blood tie, always playing card games at lunchtime, rummy and spite and my lady’s bonnet and Croesus, no money ever changing hands, the table rickety, sawdust everywhere, the stove in the corner, rain on the roof, birds pecking grain from the floor, shadow in the hut door of the inspector of inspectors looming, come for the rent and a check up, Pimty defiant, spitting out his words, hair standing on end as if he’d seen a ghost, half these hens are sick, man, what do you expect me to do, have a tot of gin while you tally my ledgers, I have to go and have a word with a man about a Buff Orpington and a Dutch Hookbill, and off Pimty goes, weaving across the familiar yard, sniffing the air, a storm brewing, better put on his sou’wester, yellow as a duck in a nursery book, shiny cardboard pages, stiff, buckled here and there, as you’d expect, he remembered gazing and gazing, rapt, when still so tiny with eyes that worked, before the operation, the surgeon cutting the useless withered nerves and then the blur black, the new life, the hard study, the Poultry Inspection Board, such an easy examination, what’s this, what’s that, this is this sir and that is that sir and a badge for merit, he still wears it, polishes it and buffs it, daily, after breakfast, kippers or bloaters, Schoenberg cassette, Transfigured Night, day too, thinks Pimty, day too, transfigured and transformed, weekday poultry market and weekend picnic, when he gets out, humming as he approaches the gate in the field, beyond which angry cows await him, and he pacifies them, sweet nothings, try the same thing on the hens and there would be mayhem, that much he discovered, one awful Thursday, it was raining then too, and he slipped on straw or grease and gashed his leg, you won’t find a better tourniquet than a tape measure, believe you me, still there was much blood spilled before it was taut, Pimty’s gore, like a rare expensive wine, metallic bouquet, and something in it irresistible to ducks, dozens of them falling upon it like starvelings, splashing about in his blood, the inspector deafened by clucking, thinking I better find out exactly what it is that’s in my veins, I may be a miracle of medical science, who’d have thought, hens maddened by the blood-splattered ducks, shrieking tangles, add in the sirens from the emergency services and you have complete havoc, but Pimty back at the poultry market next morning, behind his table, sticking his fingers up a duck’s fundament, the sense of touch unerring, even through the rubber glove, bright yellow like the rainhat, like the ducks in the nursery book, so much yellow, it was Pierre Bonnard who said you can never have enough yellow, no more yellow for Pimty but the yellow in his brain, remembered yellow, bright enough when he strains the synapses, you can almost hear them ping and twang, if you listen carefully, and Pimty does, he’s all ears, that’s why he hears the enraged cows in the field even before they are enraged, before his thumb clicks open the gate, on picnic days, in sunshine or mist, or once, when his watch stopped, in the middle of the night, high wind, cattle in slumber, owls hooting, Pimty with his rug and hamper, jam sandwiches, fishpaste, cocoa, a drowned beetle in the flask, the janitor never joins him, Greb the janitor, he goes instead on organised picnics for the hard of hearing, to the grounds of castles and stately homes, not cow-strewn fields, always in daylight, light Pimty doesn’t see and hasn’t seen for years, though he senses it on his eternally closed lids, heat and cold, damp and haze, he no longer bothers with the sunglasses he used to sport, frames too heavy on the nose, he smashed them underfoot in a temper, drunk to hell at the time, swigging as he smashed, at the poultry market but off duty, on a Tuesday afternoon, with a floozie on his arm, giggling, egging him on, a bit batty if truth be told, or dotty, that’s the word, fond of the poultry, too fond maybe, in an unseemly way, kept trying to abduct a hen or a duck or a goose, take it home as a pet, oh go on Pimty nobody will miss it, I can call it Flopsy or Clytemnestra and make a pond for it in my bathtub, feed it grain or whatever it eats, I know a grain supplier, a man with a silo, oh pretty please, but for all he was drawn to grandiose debauch Pimty was as conscientious a poultry inspector as the market ever had, and he foiled her kidnaps, every one of them, using his lustre, really quite mysterious, but absolutely effective, going by results, the inspector of inspectors always had a good word for him, back at headquarters, that man Pimty is a bloody marvel, never a day goes by that his poultry inspections aren’t a masterclass in the art, even when he’s sozzled, there is a lustre about him that makes my jaw drop, Pimty never heard any of this, they never invited him to HQ, not even to the cocktail parties, a stuffy bunch, and him shall we say difficult, haphazard in certain settings, liable to break things, jugs, plates, toasters, he was a devil with toasters, rarely invited anywhere, hence the lonely picnics, Pimty in a field beneath the enormous sky, placating angry cows, sprawled on his rug, away from the poultry, maybe that was when he worked at his lustre, it was as if he emitted rays, no, a sheen, unearthly, when he chose to switch it on, which he certainly did when Pebblehead came calling, he’d heard rumours, bustled into the poultry market first thing Monday morning, in cape and spats, entourage of bodyguards, so where’s this blind inspector I’ve been hearing about, tell me dammit, I have a paperback to write, ah good day to you sir, gosh, Pebblehead dumbstruck, slumps in a chair, an assistant takes notes, Pimty all the while inspecting geese and hens and ducks, even a swan, mute, he doubles up on rubber gloves, uses some sort of beam, strange miniature torch, works its controls so so deftly, but the swan is dead, they prosecute the merchant, huge pile of legal papers, even bigger pile of braille for Pimty, big thick sheets, untold thousands of dots, he knows the whole thing backwards, fantastic witness, visits the swan killer in prison, dank cell, no smoking, repent, repent, but we can never have you back at the poultry market, you crossed a line and I drew that line, yes, and it’s indelible, like all my lines, wherever I draw them, he’s babbling, Pimty, making it up as he goes along, to strike the fear of god into the convict, before he’s shipped away, over the sea, to a penal colony, one specially built for bird-killers, rocky and remote, blasted by gales, screeching gulls, auks, guillemots, sky cold and grey and hopeless, place of penitence, prising barnacles from stone for food, all in Pimty’s mind, vengeful, eaten away with hatred, teeming visions, the hen in the brain, oh yes, lustrous, Pebblehead saw that, but he had no idea of Pimty in the round, the whole man, duck messiah, goose god. It is certainly worth reading the biography, soon to be a film, but much of what Pebblehead writes is nonsense. For one thing, Pimty looked absolutely nothing like Anthony Burgess.

One Thousand

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Today there is cause for celebration. No, not the Muggletonian Great Holiday, that was last week. The reason for unbridled cheer is that what you are reading is the one thousandth postage at Hooting Yard since the site was rejigged at the beginning of 2007. (I cannot recall precisely how many postages appeared in the old format, to be found in the 2003-2006 Archive, but if memory serves it is something in the region of 950.) A milestone to be celebrated, then – but how?

Ideally, you lot would cancel all other engagements, put your feet up, and spend the rest of the day rereading all one thousand postages, in chronological order, making notes in your jotter, pausing occasionally to stare out of the window as you mull over a particularly arresting item, and generally wallowing in the sheer Hooting Yardiness of it all. Always remember that a day devoted to Mr Key is never a wasted day. However, I am sensible enough to realise that most of you will have other things calling on your attention, such as feeding the hamster, waiting at the bus stop, smoking, genuflecting, pootling about, milking the cows, rummaging in the attic, taking your pills, repairing the fence down by the drainage ditch, tallying up the entries in your ledger, doing the dishes, spreading jam on bread, clutching at straws, embarking on a perilous journey downstream by kayak, grovelling in filth, putting the spuds on, intoning spells against the pestilence, mucking about, boiling your shirts, describing an arc parallel to the surface, dusting the mantelpiece, rekindling that lost love, chopping celery, going for gold, doing the odd bit of trepanning, squeezing out sponges, cutting up rough, vomiting, preening, polishing your shoon, checking the gutters, making hay while the sun shines, piling Ossa upon Pelion, folding your towels, voting with your feet, remembering a childhood idyll, splitting an atom, clocking in, lurking in the shrubbery, gathering your wits, burning an effigy, being Ringo Starr, toiling to no purpose, making whoopee, burgling the Watergate building, casting the runes, mesmerising a duck, emptying the bins, licking some stamps, darning a hole in your pippy bag, crunching numbers, thwacking a bluebottle, going rogue, distributing alms to paupers, looking shifty, holding out a glimmer of hope, pole-vaulting, caterwauling, playing pin-the-paper-to-the-cardboard, rinsing lettuce, closing the barn door, glorying in crime, sticking to the point, feeling off colour, pondering the ineffable, gargling, straining, wheedling, pining, flailing, and lying crumpled and woebegone and exhausted and hot-in-the-brain. You may have to do all of these or none, but in either case the chances are that you will be unable to devote your every waking hour to Hooting Yard, even though you yearn to do so. We shall have to come up with some other form of celebration.

It is at times like these a person’s thoughts turn to cake. It will have to be an enormous cake, to fit a thousand candles on to it. Think of all that burning wax!

I shall leave you with that thought, and press on. One could, of course, throw a party. Invite a thousand guests, and have each of them commit to memory, for party-piece recital, the text – or, as bespectacled postmodernist Jean-Pierre Obfusc would say, the discourse – of one Hooting Yard postage (including this one). The drawback to this otherwise fantastic scheme is that some postages run to thousands of words, whereas some, very occasionally, have been wholly pictorial, other than the title. Allocating all one thousand to the satisfaction of every single guest is a task fraught with difficulty, and is unlikely to be achieved without conflict and, indeed, fist-fights. Now, incidents of physical violence are not unknown among the readership. Even the surprisingly numerous Hooting Yard devotees of the Mennonite faith engage in punch-ups from time to time. Don’t even go there, as the airheads say. Taken all in all, I am not sure the party is such a good idea. Anyway, where would you fit so many people? They would not all fit into your chalet or hovel or well-appointed yet curiously pokey high-rise urban living pod, and rental fees for barns and disused aeroplane hangars have gone though the roof, according to what I have been reading in So You Want To Rent A Barn Or A Disused Aeroplane Hangar, Do You, Chum? magazine. (It’s interesting to note, by the way, that the late Harold Pinter was on the editorial advisory board of this threatening, sinister publication.)

Cake, burning wax, and party all proving prohibitive, what are we to do? Well, in extremis, one can always turn to Mrs Gubbins for some outré ideas. For once in her life, the octogenarian crone is not helping police with their inquiries, in spite of that dodgy business with the pile of mysteriously bleached bones and the trained vulture, and she is to be found snugly ensconced in an attic room at Haemoglobin Towers, furiously unravelling tea-cosies. Where once she did knit, now she unravels. By heck, there will be a glut in the used wool market by the time she is done! It is possible this is part of yet another criminal scheme, but if so it is one that is far too complicated for my puny and innocent brain. Best to ask no questions, and leave La Gubbins to her unravelling. I popped my head in to her sanctum, though, just to ask if she had any bright ideas for a Hooting Yard Thousandth Postage celebration. She looked up, fixed me with that unnerving gaze, like a blind person looking at a ghost, and pronounced the single word “Nobby”. Then she went back to her unravelling.

It was difficult to know what to make of this. The only Nobby that sprang to mind was Nobby Stiles, the popular Manchester United and England midfielder of the 1960s. His joyous capering on the pitch after England hoisted the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966 had captured the imagination of the press in those more seemly times, so perhaps that was what Mrs Gubbins was recommending – joyous capering on a field of grass. Or was she suggesting that I should enlist Nobby Stiles to help with planning a celebration? It seemed unlikely, though not of course impossible, that the retired footballer was a Hooting Yard fan, but even if he was, I did not know him, had never even collected his autograph when I was a tot, and had no idea how to get in touch with him. I entertained the thought that perhaps the crone had said “knobby”, with a K, meaning that which is characterised by having knobs, or the quality of knobbiness, such as, for example, a gnarled tree-trunk, or the backs of certain kinds of toad, but that seemed even more unfathomable. La Gubbins being the kind of woman she is, it is likely that her pronouncement was a sweeping one, containing all possible meanings of “(k)nobby”, with and without a K, plus additional meanings thus far unrevealed to the common timber of humanity. But I am afraid I had to dismiss, as wildly impractical, the idea of getting Nobby Stiles, and perhaps some other lesser-known Nobbys, to assist me in arranging a celebratory caper, of people and toads, round and round a tree in a field, much as it was appealing.

It was back to square one, and as we all know, deep in our hearts, the question always to be asked at square one is “What would Dobson do?” The beauty of the question is that if we are able to arrive at a half-way sensible answer, we know the guidance given will be infallible. Working out a valid Dobsonian response, however, is to blunder along a path strewn with nettles and serpents, unless of course one is satisfied with the generic answer “Write a pamphlet!”, which is, admittedly, correct ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Even in the present case, I can think of few methods of celebration more apposite than that every one of my readers should sit down at their nearest escritoire and pen a pamphlet. But think of the logistics. Someone would have to collate all the screeds, typeset them, print them, and distribute them to an uncaring world. I try my best to retain an attitude of breezy optimism, but I cannot see it happening. And I have not seen any vans driving past recently announcing, from the lettering on their sides, that they are in the business of Pamphleteering Solutions.

But “Write a pamphlet!” is not, invariably, the answer to the question “What would Dobson do?” Very, very occasionally, by deep analysis of the question, exercising the brainpans to their fullest extent and beyond, a different answer is revealed. To find out what this is we need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the complete Dobson canon, and to have pieced together as much biographical information on the out of print pamphleteer as we can, not excluding rumour, hearsay, tavern mutterings, and wild surmise. That is why I put the question to Aloysius Nestingbird, who knows more about Dobson than anyone else alive. As it happens, Nestingbird is only barely alive, following a calamitous bobsleigh accident. Quite what a frail ninety-two-year-old was doing plunging down the Caspar Badrutt Memorial Perilous Ice Declivity at the Pointy Town Antarcticorama is a question for the bigwigs at the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing, who I understand have already empanelled a Board of Geriatric Investigation to be headed by the fiercely independent, because ignorant of bobsleigh matters in general, Ant, or it might be Dec, the taller of the pair, the one with the glassy eyes of death.

Anyway, I bluffed my way into the clinic where Nestingbird languishes, using the techniques prescribed by Blötzmann in his Methods Of Dissimulation To Be Employed When Entering Restricted Medical Facilities (Second Series), an invaluable work which I always carry with me, just in case. Nestingbird was almost invisible beneath a panoply of tubes and wires and monitors and bleepers and what have you, but I ripped them out of my way and put my mouth to his still-bloody, gored ear, and put to him, in a dulcet whisper, the question. I want to arrange a celebration of the thousandth Hooting Yard postage. What would Dobson do? Nestingbird groaned, and some sort of despicable fluid bubbled out between his bloody lips, but he managed to tell me the answer, albeit in a croak so weak I barely heard it. But hear it I did. He said “Nobby”.

Returning home via the funicular railway, I racked my brains to see if I could wring any sense from this. Put in my position, it appeared, Dobson would “do Nobby”, or, I suppose, “do a Nobby”, as if that made any difference. Neither was a phrase I had ever heard before, and nor had any of my fellow-passengers, whom I badgered about it, growing, I am ashamed to say, rather hysterical, to the point where I was bundled off the train as soon as it reached the base station and taken round the corner, past snow-covered shrubbery, and handed over to Detective Captain Cargpan and his toughs. It is lucky for me that Cargpan is a fanatical devotee of Hooting Yard, otherwise I feel certain I would have ended up back in the clinic, and in a much worse state than Aloysius Nestingbird. Instead, the doughty copper let me off with a mussing of my tremendous bouffant. He didn’t know what “doing Nobby” was, either.

I had the sinking feeling that if I sought advice from anybody else, from born-again beatnik poet Dennis Beerpint, for example, or from Old Farmer Frack, I would get the same response. When I eventually arrived home, I made a cup of tea and heated a couple of smokers’ poptarts. Perhaps the celebration would have to wait upon the two-thousandth postage. Or perhaps I should be grateful for my simple snack. I sat down at the table, slurped the tea and shovelled down the bitter poptarts. Was this, after all, “doing Nobby”?

Uberhub

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OutaSpaceman dropped me a line to inform me that when he searched Google Images for “moorhen”+”mezzotint”, nearly all the results linked to Hooting Yard. I explained to him that all interweb searches lead eventually, by twists and turns, back to here, for it is the uberhub lying at the centre of the entire network, a sort of throbbing pulse from which all else emanates. What I must do, one day, is to discover which single Hooting Yard postage lies at the very core of the hub, is the glistening jewel which, by who knows what mighty and mysterious forces, has generated everything else on the interweb. I would not be surprised to find that the postage in question is something to do with plucky tot Tiny Enid.

Speaking of whom, here is a rare picture of Tiny Enid in later life, taking a break from writing her Memoirs.

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Writer-In-Residence

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The people of Pointy Town were once asked, in a referendum, if they wanted William S Burroughs as their writer-in-residence. Sensibly, they rejected him, arguing en masse that he was a gun-toting drug-addled nincompoop who took himself far too seriously and was, in turn, taken far too seriously by the kind of people who don’t actually read many books. That cut-up business may have won him some fashionable fans, but it’s just pictures of Jap girls in synthesis, innit? No, the Pointy Towners prefer their prose sequential and sparky, which is why they picked Pebblehead. But the bestselling paperbackist turned them down, for he was loth to live in Pointy Town, and residence therein was obviously a sine qua non for the position. There was a half-hearted plot to abduct Pebblehead from his “chalet o’ prose” high in the Swiss Alps and forcibly remove him to Pointy Town, but it fell apart by dint of timidity and awe.

The people then called for the appointment of Christopher Smart, author of Jubilate Agno. That great poem had recently become popular in Pointy Town as a method of organising civic behaviour. A line or two would be chosen at random each day, much in the manner of bibliomancy, but rather than foretelling the future the chosen text was, as far as possible, “acted out” by all literate Pointy Towners, and used as a sort of guide to their public conduct in the streets and boulevards. It had to be gently pointed out to them that Smart was long dead, and that while, at a pinch, it may have been possible to exhume whatever remained of him and have it reinterred in L’Etoile Du Pointy Town Cemetery, there could be no expectation of any new writing being done.

Pointy Town being a town without art, the panel next made the curious suggestion that the writer-in-residence post be offered to art critic Cosmo Hoxtonwanker. The thinking was that he might be able to identify this or that which could be considered as art, or could become art if viewed through artistic lenses. This idea was dismissed as foolhardy even faster than the rejection of Burroughs.

The next name out of the hat, as it were, though there was not actually a physical hat as such, was that of Jeanette Winterson. Although it was thought by many that she was far too important a writer to be persuaded to bother herself with a dismal provincial backwater like Pointy Town, initial inquiries proved positive. The people were divided, but a slim majority found in her favour, and the panel had gone so far as to evict all the guests from the Grand Hotel on the seafront so the even grander novelist could be installed there and have the building and its lovely gardens all to herself. Alas, negotiations fell through when the great author said she would refuse to write with the Pointy Pencil Of Pointy Town, considering it to be a phallocentric symbol.

At this point, quite unexpectedly, William S Burroughs, having heard the rumours, turned up in the town. He lurked on pathways like a ghoul of dreadful countenance, injecting himself with heroin and clearly lapping up being the cynosure of a certain cast of impressionable teenperson devoted to the “edgy”. His presence grew so tiresome that eventually he was pelted with pebbles and laughed at until he left town.

Still, though, Pointy Town was without a writer-in-residence. Even twee versifier Dennis Beerpint could not be persuaded to take on the job. And so the plan was quietly dropped… on the very day that, hoving into view on the horizon, huge and terrible and drooling, the Grunty Man approached! Could he wield the Pointy Pencil in his great clumsy fist? Inside that lumpen head, were there actually any thoughts that could be put down on paper, or even any thoughts at all? Was there in all Pointy Town a barn big enough to contain him in comfort?

Read on next week in Episode Two, in which the Grunty Man wrests editorship of the Pointy Town Clarion & Big Thumping Iron Hammer from milquetoast fop Gervase Weed!

About Ivan Clank

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Is it not curious, the manner in which the most disparate things interconnect? The way in which we find linkages, some flimsy, some as sturdy as iron chains, between persons and places and objects and events? If Mr Raven, the club-footed inquiry agent in The Strange Affair Of Adelaide Harris by Leon Garfield, could continue devising his spidery diagram beyond the bounds of that book’s plot, would he not eventually encompass the whole world within its web of foul intrigue?

These idle thoughts, bubbling gently in my brain while I stared out of the window hoping to see a heron, or a cow, were prompted by the recollection that Ivan Clank, the bailiff whose grisly demise was mentioned in passing in Variation On A Theme Of Scott Walker, was, albeit briefly, a member of the Pointy Town chapter of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club. He had left, or rather been booted out, before the picnic excursion described here yesterday. In fact, if the membership records are to be believed – and why should they not be? – Ivan Clank’s time in the club lasted but twenty minutes. At 4.25 on the afternoon of a gorgeous summer’s day, he paid his sub, signed his name in the ledger, and received his badge and card and list of rules and regulations and passport-sized photograph of Tuesday Weld and a celebratory slice of flan. A note appended at 4.45 on the same afternoon declares that “Ivan Clank, Membership No. 835, bailiff, has left, or rather been booted out of, the club”. No explanation is given. The handwriting appears to be that of the secretary, Mr Thubb.

In itself, this would be of minuscule interest, but hark! What is that we hear? It is the pencil of the pamphleteer Dobson, scratching across a page of one of his writing tablets! In a further interconnection to warm the cold, cold heart of Mr Raven, we learn that Dobson actually wrote a pamphlet about Ivan Clank and his fugitive Tuesday Weld Fan Club-related activities. The pamphleteer seems first to have become aware of Ivan Clank when he read an account of the bailiff’s gruesome destruction at the hands of brigands in The Daily Bailiff & Brigand Herald. He liked to keep up to speed with these things, did Dobson. The paper’s legendary “Recommendations For Further Reading For Those Whose Curiosity Has Been Piqued” column pointed the pamphleteer in several directions, most of which he failed to follow up. But he did learn, somehow, about Ivan Clank’s membership of the Tuesday Weld Fan Club, and its abrupt termination, and he even seems to have gained access to the membership records, which is a wonder, all things considered, what with one thing and another, from whichever angle you look at it, all in all, shambeko, shambeko, hal-an-tow.

The resulting pamphlet is not one of Dobson’s best. Ivan Clank, The Bailiff, O Is He Dead Then? is a curdled and bickering text, unleavened by any of the pamphleteer’s usual majestic sweeping paragraphs. It purports to be a potted biography of the bailiff in which the Tuesday Weld Fan Club hoo-hah is seen as pivotal, but Dobson does not say what it is that pivots upon it. Instead he launches into a character assassination of Mr Thubb, a man he had never met and of whom he knew not a jot. It was lucky for Dobson that he was not prosecuted for libel, though that would have been an unlikely outcome given that the pamphlet sold just two copies, both to buyers overseas with more money than sense. It is a sad reflection upon the state of pamphleteering, or possibly just of Dobson’s pamphleteering, that it was his best-seller that year.

Blodgett, Killer Robot

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Blodgett, of course, was often mistaken for a killer robot, whenever he went rampaging around remote rural airfields and landing strips dressed in an outfit of tin foil and sheet metal with plastic, bakelite, and glass adornments. Why, might one ask, did he make such a spectacle of himself, repeatedly?

Luckily, we have evidence from Blodgett himself. He was interviewed on the television chat show Let’s Talk To People Who Rampage Around Remote Rural Airfields And Landing Strips!, which was screened on the Swivel-eyed Nutcase TV Channel for several months in the early 1970s. I have scoured YouTube for a clip without success, but a transcript exists, which I got hold of through bribery, subterfuge, and threats of violence. Alas, it is incomplete, but a fragment is better than nothing.

Cheesy Host : Our next guest will probably surprise you, because it’s a killer robot! [Chortles.] Not really! It’s just Blodgett, in an outfit that makes him look like a killer robot! Give him a big hand!

[Tumultuous applause.]

Cheesy Host : Welcome to the show, Blodgett.

Blodgett : Yava Hoosita!

Cheesy Host : Ho ho ho! Indeed! I think what our lovely audience want to know is why you rampage around remote rural airfields and landing strips dressed like that.

[Tumultuous hoots of agreement from the audience.]

Blodgett : Well, Sacheverell, as you know, we are under serious threat from Communists. Stalin may be dead these twenty years, but the Soviet beast has never been in such rude health. We could be overrun by the Red Hordes tomorrow, unless we take every precaution possible.

[Applause both tumultuous and thunderous, save from a beardy cardigan-wearing Open University lecturer.]

Cheesy Host : We all agree with that, Blodgett! But how does your rampaging around remote rural airfields and landing strips dressed as a killer robot help the fight against international Communism?

Blodgett : I have a one-word answer to that, Sacheverell…

Annoyingly, the transcript ends there.

Cupboard

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robinet-testard-image-from-mattheaus-plateariuss-the-book-of-simple-medicine-ms-fr-vi-n-1-fol-166v-c-1470-st-petersburg-national-library

The picture above adorns the cover of the latest bestselling paperback by Pebblehead. Entitled Cupboard!, it is a fast-paced and thrill-packed adventure featuring Pebblehead’s recurring hero Dax Manley Hopkins, manly, winsome, beguiled and unflappable. Though the cupboard of the title is singular, there are hundreds, possibly thousands of cupboards in the book, some of which Dax opens to take a look inside at crucial moments in the plot. One such is the cupboard the contents of which are shown, neatly arranged, in the picture. It is called the “L Ron” Cupboard, for reasons which Pebblehead never quite makes explicit, unless I am misreading him. God knows it is easy enough to misread Pebblehead. For all the dash and verve of his effortless prose, the effect is sometimes as if one is reading an inept translation from a language if not quite dead, then at least sick and sprawled ungainly upon an invalid’s mattress.

The objects in the cupboard are, we are told, made of dough and painted with a coating of emulsion. Each has a function which is utterly baffling, at least to Dax, though he has managed to lay his hands on a set of laminated flash cards giving the name of each item. These names are enigmatic. Here they are:

Top shelf, left to right : 1. Bombs a’ Poe. 2. Luxembourg bales. 3. The Kreutzer Sonata. 4. Yoko Eno Bono.

Second shelf, left to right : 5. Eaten in Harbin. 6. La Condoleezza. 7. Gas giant.

Third shelf, left to right : 8. National Cylinder. 9. Weems. 10. Agony in the garden. 11. Gold Diggers of 1933.

Fourth shelf, left to right : 12. Alone and palely loitering. 13. Thou art Pierre Loti, innit.

Bottom shelf, left to right : 14. Bittern storm over Ulm 15. Yeast fixture.

I will not spoil the bestselling paperback for you by telling you what happens when Dax, so manly and winsome and beguiled and unflappable, first opens, then closes the cupboard. (The scene takes place on pp. 409-444.)

Or, the picture might be by Robinet Testard, an image from Matthaeus Platearius’s The Book of Simple Medicine, Ms. Fr. VI n. 1, fol. 166v., c. 1470, St. Petersburg National Library, which I found at Mapping The Marvellous.

Tiny Enid’s Bathtub Gin

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One blustery and bitter springtime morning, Tiny Enid decided to make a goodly supply of bathtub gin. The plucky tot was wholly ignorant about the distillation of spiritous liquors, but she was a resourceful girl, and so she clumped with great determination along the streets, past the duckpond and the hazardous waste facility, to her local library. Now, it may surprise some younger readers, but in those days of Tiny Enid’s tinydom, libraries were filled with books, and had not yet become chat ‘n’ snack zones for diverse and vibrant hoodie teenpersons. So the heroic infant was able to gen up on all she needed to know about the making of bathtub gin by consulting a selection of large and impressive volumes in the reference section. Having crammed her sparkling brain with information, Tiny Enid picked up all the things she would need as she made her way home, taking a different route which took her past the badger sanctuary and the moonshine supplies emporium.

With her usual excessive, if not deranged, zeal, Tiny Enid set to work, and soon had a bathtub full of gin. This she decanted into a jerrybuilt vat, and proceeded with a second bathtubful. Only when the vat was filled to the brim with rotgut gin did Tiny Enid relax, sitting down in her favourite armchair, smoking a cheroot, and listening to gramophone records of Xavier Cugat And His Orchestra.

While at the library, Tiny Enid had taken the opportunity to borrow an instructive book, by Gabbitas, entitled Large-Scale Sabotage Of Civic Plumbing Infrastructure. She speed-read this while gobbling down her supper of jugged hare and bloater paste sandwiches, so that before bedtime she was able to pipe her vat of bathtub gin into the local water supply.

By the afternoon of the following day, Tiny Enid was pleased to note that the whole town was a scene of moral degradation and unparalleled debauch, a Hogarth print come to life. She checked that her vat was now empty, readjusted the piping system back to normal, plunked a cloche hat on her head, and went out into the teeming streets to set the world to rights.

Many, many years later, when she wrote her Memoirs, Tiny Enid explained:

It can be difficult to imagine the frustrations of a brave, adventurous tot, such as I was, growing up in a peaceable, indeed an idyllic, little townlet. Those who have read Lark Rise To Candleford by Flora Thompson, or watched the television adaptation, may have some idea how few opportunities I was granted to perform acts of heroic derring-do, when everybody was basically quite well-behaved and knew their place. I much preferred situations of chaos and abandonment, in which I was able to assert my Fascist Supertiny persona. The poisoning of the town’s water supply with bathtub gin was one of my more successful provocations. And while some might have used it to preach and hand out temperance tracts, I had a good deal of fun kicking people in the head and shouting my head off until they all sobered up. After that, they began to realise who they were dealing with. They even struck a medal for me, to commemorate the way in which I dragged the town back from the brink of moral collapse.

My oh my, she was a proper caution, that Tiny Enid.

104 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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I am indebted to reader Mike Jennings who, despite being banished to a pompous land, has, in his own words, been “compiling these tentative notes toward a Dobson bibliography”. This seems to me to be a work of magnificent scholarship. Indeed, I cannot begin to imagine how we have all been coping without it.

Mr Jennings adds “Much work is to be done of course with regard to details such as binding, font, illustration etc but I know my limitations.  Such scrutiny I will leave to more qualified Dobsonists with the requisite anoraks and little grease-proof bags of egg sandwiches.”

The bibliography is ordered according to an arcane system of Mr Jennings’ own devising, one the intrinsic beauty of which I hope we can all appreciate. I have taken the liberty of applying a set of Blötzmann Numbers to the pamphlet titles. Though broadly similar to ordinary numbers, they of course harbour a terrifying underlying significance. To paraphrase H P Lovecraft, “the most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to understand the Blötzmann Numbers”.

Unless otherwise stated – and it isn’t – all titles are out of print.

1. The Adhesive Properties Of Six Hundred Different Types Of Glue, With Diagrams

2. Dobsonetics.

3. A Recantation Of Dobsonetics.

4. On The History Of Potato Clocks.

5. My Revolutionary New Method Of Moving Sludge Around The Countryside.

6. Hedges Hidden From Sight By Steam.

7. I, Piano Tuner!

8. “The hedgehog grumbling back to darkness is known by me and loved by me” (The Rod McKuen pamphlet)

9. Why I Shall Bestride This Century Like A Colossus.

10. Certain Aspects Of Plastic Baubles And Plastic Sheeting.

11. Killer Bees, Ferenc Puskas, And Tomatoes On the Vine.

12. How I Coped With A Collapsed Lung During A Thunderstorm.

13. Chew, Gnaw, Eel, Teeth, Pap And Slops For Dinner : A Memoir Of Vlasto Pismire.

14. Of the fifteen-part critical analysis of The Life and Times of Captain Cake, Volume IV is entitled Welk, Bankhead, Loy : There’ll Be A Welcome In The Hillsides.

15. Worlds Beyond Sense .

16. Chucklesome Fripperies From My Notebooks (Lavender Series).

17. Things Beginning with B, My Hatred of Squirrels, & Hedy Lamarr: Scientist.

18. How And Why I Built Eight Small Pâpier Maché Brontosauruses.

19. How I Invented a Revolutionary New Birdseed.

20. The Belle of Amherst & Other Essays Written During An Unprecedented Pea-souper.

21. Hideous Execution Practices Of The Blood-Drenched Corsairs.

22. Ten Easy Steps To Grooming Your Cormorant.

23. My Nightmares About Emily Dickinson.

24. Downy, Witched, Dutch Cloud-Heaps of Some Quaintest Tramontane Nephelococcugia of Thought.

25. Dobson’s Heraldic Dossier.

26. Marsh Gas, Badge Man, Prester John & Other Imponderables.

27. Tip Top Encyclopaedia Of Tip Top Pop Bands.

28. There’s Hours Of Fun To Be Had With A Handful Of Pins (Under the pseudonym “Blenkinsop”).

29. Description of & Reverie upon Forty-Four Curlews.

30. Some Hurried Notes On Tab Hunter.

31. Eight Things You Never Knew About Tuesday Weld.

32. Why I Do Not Live In A Grot, Elfin Or Otherwise.

33. Copse & Spinney Nomenclature : A Guide For Tiny Tots.

34. Six Types Of Snodgrass Implement.

35. On The Naming Of Curs As Fido : A Stern Corrective.

36. An Alphabetical Guide To What Every Infant Should Know About The Majesty Of Nature.

37. How My Annotated List Of Chewed Things Was Lost In A Muddy Canadian River.

38. The Bee As Moral Exemplar & Other Insect-Related Parables For Young & Old Alike, Innit.

39. Cornflakes, Ready Brek, Special K and Suicide.

40. Some Things To Eat In The Bleak Midwinter.

41. A Full And Frank Commentary On “The Dark Night Of The Soul”, Wherein Certain Controversial Theories Are Proposed Which Have Led The Author Into Fist-Fights With Sailors Outside Tough Drinking Taverns In The Marseilles Dockyards.

42. Little Stories Of Charming People To Warm The Cockles Of Your Heart.

43. Six Hundred And Twenty Uncanny Tales, Together With A Pen-Portrait Of Victoria Principal.

44. How I Was Attacked By A Flock Of Partridges At A Bus Stop While On My Way To The Potato Club.

45. Bilgewater Elegies.

46. Netherlands, Holland, Dutch – What’s That About?

47. Some Thoughts About Shabby Taverns, Cows And The 1958 Munich Air Disaster Which Wiped Out The Flower Of Post-War English Football, Although Sir Matt Busby Survived The Crash, Praise The Lord.

48. An Essay About Bowls, Dishes And Pots.

49. A Pamphlet Of Majestic Sweeping Paragraphs.

50. Why I Smashed My Copy Of “Thick As A Brick” By Jethro Tull Into Twenty Thousand Pieces With A Geological Hammer And Then Glued It Back Together Again.

51. Notes On A Shelf Of Test Tubes Containing The Blood Of Squirrels.

52. Observations On Cows From A Great Distance, In The Rain.

53. He Who Plucks The Strings Of A Banjo In Wintry, Wintry Weather.

54. Ten Things Guaranteed To Drive Marigold Chew Crackers.

55. Nomenclature of Paraguayan Bandit Musicians & Soviet Collective Farm Administrators Compared.

56. All About My Nocturnal River Trip In The Government Canoe With Captain Vargas, During Which I Was Heavily Sedated.

57. My Parents Are Dead, But Christ!, I Adore Hiking.

58. The Death Of Stalin Has Led Me By Dense Entangled Byways To The Unshakeable Conviction That A Complete And Thorough Pedagogic System Can Be Based Entirely Upon My Own Pamphlets.

59. How I Thwarted My Cacodaemon With A Pointy Stick And Some Bleach.

60. God Almighty, Is There Anything More Satisfying Than A Well-Executed Picnic?

61. A Dictionary Of Squirrels (and its appendix Eerie & Macabre Picnic Praxis).

62. A Dictionary Of Guillemot Habitat Maps.

63. Wild And Unhinged Fantasies Regarding The Existence Of Wholly Imaginary Registers.

64. Why I Can Be Difficult And Self-Centred.

65. The Sane Person’s Guide To Swearing By The Etruscan Gods.

66. 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!.

67. Why Those Let Loose From Mad Cabins Should Immediately Up Sticks And Settle At A Seaside Resort.

68. “On terrifying facial expressions”.

69. Meetings With Remarkable Owls.

70. “On the forest beings”.

71. The Unutterable Chaos Caused By Panicking Hens.

72. My Mysterious Day Trip To Alaska And What I Did With A Handful Of Pebbles While I Was There.

73. How To Knit Knots While Remaining Invisible To Hurrying Brutes.

74. Tips For Janitors.

75. On the History and Origins of the Fred Jessop Cup.

76. A New And Improved Method Of Drying Your Puck With A Towel.

77. Some Arresting, Diverting, And Frankly Sensational Factoids Regarding Certain Ponds I Have Had The Pleasure To Take A Turn Around, In All Weathers, Arranged In Alphabetical Order By Pond Name.

78. How I Spent Six Months Underground In An Amazing Subterranean Vault Built To House The Blister Lane Gasworks, Together With Mr And Mrs Pan And Their Cat Hudibras. (considered lost)

79. An Essay Concerning A Bird Perched Upon A Promontory.

80. A Disquisition Upon The Various Types Of Cloth From Which Trousers May Be Woven , Together With Some Pictures Of Hume Cronyn.

81. How I Conquered My Fear Of Googie Withers, Together With A Few Tips On The Limitless Possibilities For Entertainment Afforded By A Toy Squirrel Made Of Tin.

82. Fun With Paraffin!

83. How To Dye A Goat.

84. What Planet Does Jeanette Winterson Live On?

85. On The Judicious And Non-Repeating Deployment Of Pancake Hints.

86. Thousands Of Unusual And Arresting Facts About Birds.

87. The Huddled Shapelessness Of The Dead.

88. How I Poked A Pointed Stick Into A Hedge.

89. Mawkish Fables Of Punctilio And Rectitude For Tiny Tots.

90. Never Pack A Knapsack In A Panic.

91. Keeping Cutlery Aligned Tidily In The Cutlery Drawer As An Absolute Imperative If One Aspires To Be Fully Human.

92. The Happy Sprinter : An Eye-Witness Account Of The Training Schedule Of Fictional Athlete Bobnit Tivol Under The Direction Of His Coach, Old Halob.

93. Tacky To Goo : Some Frightfully Complicated Thoughts On The Consistency Of Manufactured Pastes.

94. Ten Short Essays On Chopping And Cutting And Hacking.

95. Some Remarks On The Grotesque Pallor I Encountered This Morning In My Shaving Mirror.

96. The Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse… Or Were They?

97. How I Mislaid My Bus Pass During A Thunderstorm.

98. An Anthology Of Disastrous Hiking Mishaps Cobbled Together From A Lifetime Of Ill-Starred Rustic Pursuits.

99. Forty Visits To The Post Office.

100. Six Lectures On Fruit.

101. Where Eagles Dare.

102. The Man Who Put The Bee In Beelzebub.

103. An Anecdote About Channelling Jungle Demons Wearing A Copper Cone Atop My Head While Hiding In A Cubby Full Of Bats.

104. Quite A Few Things I Know About Swans.

A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets

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The title of Dobson’s A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets leads the reader, not unreasonably, to expect an essay upon the subject of cardboard breakfast cereal packets. It is nothing of the sort. Such a topic was, it need hardly be said, grist to the pamphleteer’s mill, for nothing cardboard was alien to him. But we should recall that he had already dealt with cardboard breakfast cereal packets, exhaustively, in his pamphlet Nothing Cardboard Is Alien To Me (out of print), as well as in several other works.

A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets is, in fact, a hand-written and unpublished screed scratched out by Dobson with a butcher’s pencil upon cut or torn sheets of cardboard, once forming parts of breakfast cereal packets, composed during a paper shortage. The historical evidence for this paper shortage is slight, even non-existent, and it may be that it occurred only inside the pamphleteer’s head. He is known to have imagined crises of various kinds, such as outbreaks of ergot poisoning, bird attacks, planetary collisions and thunderstorms, none of which actually took place but fantastic details of which he scribbled down in his journals alongside the mundane and tiresome. Marigold Chew suggested Dobson did this to make his life seem more exciting and to provide any future biographers with opportunities for hysteria-heightened prose. If that is the case, it must be said that an invented paper shortage is hardly the stuff of high drama. Tousle-haired young Dobsonist Ted Cack has suggested that the pamphleteer simply ran out of paper one day and could not be bothered to fetch a fresh supply from the stationer’s.

Whether his recourse to bits of cardboard was genuinely necessary or otherwise, the Short Essay is an intriguing piece of work, chiefly because it remained in manuscript and was never typeset and turned into a pamphlet proper. Dobson perhaps felt it was too short, although at other times he happily issued for publication, in pamphlet form, some remarkably brief works, not the least of which was the famous and much-anthologised Paragraph About Potatoes, for many of us our introduction to the titanic pamphleteer.

Ted Cack’s view, expounded in an incoherent and shouty way during his hour upon the fourth plinth when he took part in Gormless Gormley’s ludicrous pageant of inanity in Trafalgar Square, is that Dobson planned to incorporate the Short Essay, unaltered and in its entirety, into a longer piece, a study of the behaviour of toads in the Soviet Union, which, despite voluminous notes, a research trip to Omsk, and the purchase of a fur cap with ear-flaps, he never actually completed. It is difficult to know what to make of young Ted Cack’s argument, for the words toad, behaviour, Soviet and Union are nowhere present in A Short Essay Upon Cardboard Breakfast Cereal Packets. Where, and to what purpose, we are entitled to ask, did the out of print pamphleteer intend to insert this fragment of prose, barely sixty words long, into a piece which, the extant drafts tell us, was single-mindedly concentrated, with laser-beam precision, upon communist Bufonidae?

An additional curiosity about the Short Essay is that the cardboard sheets were at some point coated with a kind of disgusting yet transparent paste which makes them resistant to all known photocopying techniques. Now there’s a thing.

Further Reading : A Very Long Essay About Stalinist Toads, Written With A Magic Marker Upon Hundreds Of Cream Crackers, by Dobson (out of print).