We have only Dobson’s word that he blundered into “countless” swans’ nests during balmy-weather expeditions, and a number of commentators have cast doubt on this account. The out of print pamphleteer was probably lying through his teeth, just to make a point, though quite what the point is is one of those ineffable Dobsonian mysteries the like of which will keep students busy for the next thousand years.

One man who certainly did pay visits to swan habitats, in both balmy weather and thunderstorms, was Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the artist and mountaineer who perished in the Hindenburg disaster. Although his ornithological studies were decisively amateurish, even flawed, they were sincere, and he approached them with great gusto.

Ah-Fang first became interested in swans when he was asked to draw one by a manufacturer of matches. Incredibly, he had no idea what a swan was, and had to be shown engravings in a large and exhaustive encyclopaedia. It then had to be patiently explained to him that the swan was a type of bird, fond of watery places. Ah-Fang was on his way to the seaside, ready to rent a sailing vessel and ply the oceans, when he received an urgent message on his portable metal tapping machine enlightening him as to the difference between the salt sea and the oceans on the one hand, and ponds, lakes, and rivers on the other. He kept a copy of this communiqué in his pocket until the end of his life, not out of any sentimentality, but simply as an aide memoire whenever he came upon a body of water.

Ah-Fang could of course have copied a swan from the illustrations in the encyclopaedia and earned his matchmakers’-money, but he prided himself on always drawing from life. Sometimes this could prove a considerable challenge, as when he was commissioned to provide a set of plates for an edition of H P Lovecraft’s At The Mountains Of Madness. He never spoke of the circumstances in which he drew so vividly “that nighted, penguin-fringed abyss”, for example, and indeed, when questioned, Ah-Fang trembled with an authentically Lovecraftian shudder.

Once he was on the right track in terms of watery habitats, however, the depiction of swans was a much easier task. Ah-Fang saw his first swan on St Clothard’s Day 1924. He had been told, by whom it is not clear, that there was a pond within hiking distance of his temporary quarters, a shack on a patch of waste ground somewhere in the foothills of a fantastic mountain. Taking a flask of aerated lettucewater, some ready-toasted smokers’ poptarts, a map, a pad and a pencil, Ah-Fang headed off towards the pond whistling an air by Hurlstone. When he got there, he sat on a municipal bench, spotted a swan, executed a quick sketch, ate and drank, and hurried home before becoming drenched by teeming rainfall. He worked up the sketch into a finished drawing with his customary élan, popped it in the post to the match manufacturer’s agent, and sat back to await his payment.

Yet he found himself unable to relax, and in the following weeks was drawn back to the pond again and again, whatever the weather, to gape at swans, hardly bothering to sketch them. It was a stormy season, as it often is after St Clothard’s Day, according to folk wisdom, and Ah-Fang had much opportunity to observe swans beset by thunder and lightning. He left no record of seeing eggs hatched during a storm, and it has to be said there was a profound, if endearing, ignorance in his gaping. Ah-Fang did not actually understand what he was looking at. Perhaps it was this pop-eyed, empty-headed stupidity that made him the artist he was, one whose swan pictures now fetch preposterous sums.

One night by the pond, as storms blasted the sky and a gale howled, Ah-Fang was accosted by a mysterious figure who hove towards him from out of the darkness. Hoisting his lantern to see plainly who, or what, it was, Ah-Fang had only a moment to look before the light sputtered out. The figure wore a cloak, but her face was momentarily visible, and she bore a striking resemblance to, and may even have been the ghost of, Captivity Waite, the childhood sweetheart of Eugene Field, author of, among other works, the children’s favourite Wynken, Blynken, And Nod. When she spoke, it was with a voice both sepulchral and sweet. She told Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp that there were in the world other ponds, and other swans, and there were lakes and meres and rivers and streams where yet other swans might be found, and that he should go to them, one by one, and gape, and sketch, and work up his sketches, and even paint, in great splodges of emulsion, upon sheets of hardboard, the swans he saw, all around the world, in watery places. And then Captivity Waite, if indeed it was she, made a delicate gesture of farewell, and walked away into the howling blackness of the night.

And so, next morning, began the five tremendous years of Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp’s so-called “world swan tour”. Without the guidance of Captivity Waite, or her phantom, however, there were false starts. Ah-Fang spent three months wandering in Arabia Deserta without seeing a single swan, and a further week in the jungles of Borneo. He returned, battered and sick in spirit, to his original pond, thinking he had been in some wise deceived. The sight of the swans he knew, in balmy weather and in storms, coddled him, and he revived. He realised that, if Captivity Waite had spoken the truth, and there were indeed swans elsewhere in the world, he would have to find a more reliable way of tracing them. He hit upon the method of hanging around in the sorts of taverns frequented by waterbird enthusiasts, listening in on conversations, picking up clues, gradually learning the whereabouts of hundreds, even thousands, of locations where the chances of finding swans were high. Sometimes, of course, his information was flawed, or he misheard a significant detail in the rowdiness of whatever tavern he was loitering in, and he would take a long and uncomfortable train journey to a particular pond only to discover it brackish and stagnant and home to nothing but weird, almost Lovecraftian algae. But more often than not, Ah-Fang’s unwitting informants sent him in the right direction, and that is why it is thought that he saw more swans in his five year tour than anyone had ever seen before.

He did not sketch them all, but those he did he worked up, as Captivity Waite had suggested, into huge paintings, swan after swan after swan, some in twilight, some in a blazing sun, some on ponds, some on lakes, some on meres, and some gliding with swanly grace down rivers and streams and even canals. Ah-Fang painted swans in balmy weather and in foul weather, and many a time in thunderstorms, brooding over a clutch of eggs. Many of the pictures look, to the untrained eye, almost identical, for Ah-Fang was never the most skilful of draughtsmen, and his skills lay in sloshing great daubs of emulsion on to his hardboard with haphazard zest, relying on a stencil to capture the basic swan-shape he sought. Curiously, the stencil was cut for him by a man named Bewick.

“There is a superstitious belief that swans cannot hatch their eggs unless a storm is raging, the sky mad with lightning bolts and thunderclaps. I suspect this is true, for on the countless occasions I have gone blundering into swans’ nests, I have never seen eggs hatching, and the weather has invariably been balmy, for that is the kind of weather I prefer when blundering about among the nests of swans.”

From Quite A Few Things I Know About Swans by Dobson (out of print)

Shenanigans aplenty at Hooting Yard yesterday, when I awoke to discover that your favourite website had been targeted by fiendish cybercriminals from the hacking community. Well, in truth I did not notice immediately, for I spent my earliest waking hour or so researching a forthcoming Little Ruskin adventure – one where he is admonished for jumping off his favourite box on a Sunday. When it became apparent that I was unable to make postages, and that other funny business was afoot, my first impulse was to call in Detective Captain Cargpan. The doughty copper has, I understand, recently added a cybercrime unit to his force, a team of toughies who intersperse roughing up suspects down in the basement with tippy-tapping impenetrabilia into their laptops. Their helpline, however, informed me that Cargpan had taken them on a team-building awayday to some kind of jazz-funk seaside resort bowling alley aromatherapy human rights retail and leisure fairground complex, funded by a new and exciting quango. Money well spent, say I, never begrudging a single penny diverted towards the personal development of Detective Captain Cargpan and his crew.

I turned instead, as perhaps I ought to have done from the outset, to Hooting Yard’s own technoboffin, asking him to investigate. Tirelessly, he poked around in the digital innards of the website. It took all day to isolate the horrible truth – that an unkempt oik, as pockmarked as Stalin, somehow connected to Horst Gack and his mysterious wife and collaborator Primrose Dent, had tampered with Hooting Yard for his own nefarious ends. And those ends? Nothing less than a delusional attempt to undermine years of Dobson scholarship. Had the oik succeeded in his plan, the titles of every single out of print pamphlet by the titanic out of print pamphleteer would have been altered. Fake ones would have been invented, and passages deleted or rewritten or attributed to other, non-existent, pamphleteers. There would have been the perpetration of similar outrages, not least among them the recasting of Marigold Chew as mere figment.

That none of this happened is due entirely to the technoboffin. Single-handedly, he has averted disaster, and preserved the reputation of Dobson. We all owe him our gratitude.

One windy morning in the late 1950s, Dobson became fixated with the desire to have a type of plum named after him.

“Imagine the thrill,” he said to Marigold Chew, over breakfast, “going to the fruiterer’s and asking for a half pound bag of Dobsons!”

Marigold Chew said nothing in reply, merely casting her eye over Dobson in precisely the way a compositor might look at a pamphleteer.

Dobson had a very flimsy grasp of matters botanical, and had never grown any fruit in his life. He was ready to acknowledge that these were distinct disadvantages. If the world was ever to be enhanced by a plum called Dobson, drastic activity was required. After breakfast, putting on a pair of secondhand winklepickers, he pranced off to the kiosk by the pylon on the patch of waste ground by the sewage plant, over which loomed the immensity of Pilgarlic Tor and, above it, a sky blue and clear and without any sign of an imminent hailstorm. Unaccountably, the kiosk was shut, and not simply shut but boarded up, covered over with large rectangular panels of reinforced hardboard hammered into place with dozens of big fat nails. No signage had been pasted on to any of the panels to explain this startling state of affairs. Whenever anything changed within his familiar bailiwick, however slightly, Dobson was avid to be told about it, greedy for details, and ever on the lookout for signs and announcements and bulletins, in the absence of which he was liable to have a neurasthenic attack, and emit little cries, just like Edgar Allan Poe when he got the jitters, or the Wild Boy of Aveyron when deprived of potatoes.

On this day, however, so consumed was the out of print pamphleteer with his plum plan that he sailed on past the boarded-up kiosk, fleet in his winklepickers, and carried on along the lane abutting the sewage plant annexe, past the clown hospital and the vinegar distillery and the bottomless viper-pit, until, crossing Sawdust Bridge, he approached a tobacconist’s. Here, thought Dobson, he might find the publication he was seeking, for in addition to a range of pungent cigarettes and cigarillos and pipe tobaccos from the more benighted regions of the earth, the shop stocked a few magazines and penny dreadfuls and hastily-pasted-together prog rock fanzines, alongside the complete works of John Ruskin in pirated editions. It was quite a tobacconist’s.

As he pranced closer to its gaudy doorway, however, the pamphleteer’s path was blocked by a peasant leading an improbably numerous herd of goats to pasture. Dobson had no option but to stand and wait while goat after goat after goat after goat after goat passed slowly by. Just as our pamphleteer knew little of botany, it may be that the reader is ignorant of the goat world. Briefly, then, goats are cloven-hooved and Satanic and their milk has a peculiarly goaty flavour and they come in a number of varieties including the Nubian and the Toggenburg and the Anatolian Black and the Booted and the Fainting and the Finnish Landrace. Some such goats were among the flock that passed in front of Dobson, who sat down on a tuffet and ate some curds and whey, cartons of which he kept in his pockets as emergency snack solutions.

By the time the last of the goats clacked past, and the way to the tobacconist’s was cleared, it was lunchtime, and the shop’s shutters had been pulled down, and the tobacconist himself was fast asleep in a sort of man-cot behind his counter. Undaunted, for there were still fires in his head regarding the plum project, Dobson pressed on, beyond the swimming pool and across Yoko Ono Boulevard, skirting the Miasma of Grubbiness, past two brooks, one babbling and the other unbabbling, past a bear colony and a bee sanctuary, past a second shut tobacconist’s, until he reached Old Ma Purgative’s Newsagent & Hazardous Chemical Waste Compound. To his relief, he found it neither boarded up nor closed for lunch, and skipping past the life-sized cardboard cut-out of Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson playing his flute while standing on one leg which Old Ma Purgative kept in the porch, Dobson entered.

“How now, Mistress P!” cried Dobson, in an unnervingly cheery tone.

“Are you a mystery shopper?” snapped back the ancient proprietress, both her face and her voice curdled with spite. She was a proper caution, and had long ago lost whatever marbles her god had given her, her god being a household one, hung on a nail at the back of the shop, wooden, with savage talons, in the shape of a crow, with vermilion plasticine blobs for eyes. It held her in thrall.

Though he was a fairly regular customer, Dobson was used to Old Ma Purgative’s forgetfulness, and he did not take umbrage at being unrecognised.

“No mystery shopper I!”, he shouted, in the foolish syntax he tended to deploy when speaking to shopkeepers, “I am but an humble wight who seeks a copy of the current issue of So You Want To Buy Or Rent An Orchard?, the weekly magazine packed with much advertising of a fruity orchard nature.”

Old Ma Purgative gawped at Dobson, waved a wand in the air, said something in rhyming couplets about frogs and toads and pies and sparrows, and essayed a little hop and skip. Her burning desire was to become a character in a fairy tale or nursery rhyme, and to frighten children. But the pamphleteer was a grown man, and he had seen these shenanigans before, so he ignored Old Ma Purgative and stepped over to the magazine rack. Various titles were shoved none too tidily into the battered wire slots of the stand, mostly publications in foreign languages or those invented by teenage science fiction enthusiasts, such as Zigbog, as spoken by the superignorant Zigbog-ra in the long-running radio serial Pie Shop Deep Space Nine.

By the time Dobson had finished rummaging, fruitlessly, through the tat, his hands were filthy, so he bought a jumbo tube of disinfectant goo before bidding Old Ma Purgative farewell. Outside the sky was black and the air was thick with pinging hailstones. Dobson scampered to a cow byre for shelter. It was empty of cows, for this was a Thursday, the day when cows in these parts were taken on excursions.

Six hours later, when the hailstorm ceased, Dobson trudged home, taking a different route, along the canal towpath, past the duckpond and the dirigible hangar and the Museum o’ Whisks, past Pang Hill Orphanage and the disgusting pit, past large imponderables and smaller enigmas, and finally up the lovely lane lined with hail-drenched foxgloves and toadflax. Marigold Chew was out, supervising some cows on a cow excursion. Dobson did not even pause to remove his winklepickers, but sat straight down at his escritoire and wrote, at one sitting, the untitled and unpublished piece which scholars have dubbed Notes Pursuant To The Unravelling Of The Pamphleteer’s Plum Plan.

One windy morning in the late 1950s, he wrote, I became fixated with the desire to have a type of plum named after me. Knowing nothing of plums, and not much about fruit in general, I hit upon the idea that by buying or renting my own orchard, I would have the leisure to experiment. In my mind’s eye, I saw myself leaping out of bed every morning, and, come rain or shine, sprinting off to my orchard, there to propagate plum trees, to study them with such rigour that before long I would know all there was to know about plums, both the minutiae and the big picture. I would have a shed in my orchard which would become the world’s finest plum library. I would spend entire afternoons peering at seeds, at first in ignorance, but gradually with ever greater perspicacity. I would dig and mulch and prune and cut. I would erect bird scarifiers and familiarise myself with the workings of a shotgun. And then one day, years hence, when so close was the resemblance between a plum and my brain that it would baffle the most expert of fruitmen, I would grow an entirely new type of plum, and I would call it the Dobson, and thus my name would be immortal.

Such was my dream. The very first step to realising it was to obtain a copy of the current issue of that most excellent magazine So You Want To Buy Or Rent An Orchard? I strode out of doors with the vigour of a man sixty years younger, plum-bedizened. As I walked, I hummed the Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss, one after another, in the wrong, but to me preferred, order. The sky was blue and clear, with no hint of hail.

Alas, my efforts to find a copy of the magazine came to naught. Then came the hail, such teeming hail as I have never seen. I sheltered for hours in a deserted cow byre, and with every ping of a hailstone upon its corrugated iron roof, the more dejected I became. Crushed by misery, I was almost tempted to the stupidity of pleading with Old Ma Purgative’s wooden household crow god. Was I such a weed that I would fall at the first hurdle? Would I abandon my plum plan simply because, unbeknownst to me, So You Want To Buy Or Rent An Orchard? had ceased publication seven years ago, around the time of, and because of, the Korean War? It pains me to say that the answer to both these questions is “Yes”. I sit here, in my squelching secondhand winklepickers, gripping my pencil like a dying man’s straw, and I peer into the future, and I know the shattering truth, that there never, ever will be a plum called Dobson.

Human weakness. The puddle of a million dreams.

Serial correspondent Tim Thurn is perplexed. O beloved Mr Key, he writes, For some years now, Hooting Yard has been my unerring guide, informing my opinions and attitudes and in some cases even my behaviour. Rarely will I venture a viewpoint upon any topic without first doing a mental accounting of what the Yard has taught me. Thus I find myself in a state of some beflummoxment on the subject of our canine pals. I am unmoored. I am unable to work out the approved “line” on dogs. One day you tell us dogs are boring, but then you write, with some affection, of Skippy, a dog you feed and pamper and which appears to be your domestic pet. I cannot be the only reader who is utterly confused by these divergent dog attitudes, and would be extremely grateful if you could, in some wise, shed light upon the matter.

I will not reproduce the remainder of Tim’s wordy letter, which veers off into an account of the many and various dogs with which he has come into contact during his life. Better that I set him straight without further ado. Clearly, when reading of Skippy, Tim picked up on the words “bark” and “hound” and “cur”, and also I assume on the detail that Skippy is fed, from a bowl, on reconstituted meat chunks in jelly. Any reader, not just Tim, could be forgiven for thinking that I was referring to a dog. But dogs are not the only beasts that bark. Seals bark. Skippy is, in fact, a seal.

Now, it is certainly true that seals are rarely, if ever, referred to as hounds or curs, and are not, in the general run of things, fed in the manner or with the fare Skippy enjoys. But Skippy is a particular kind of seal, known as a selkie or sealchie, that is, an allegedly mythical type of seal which, when on land, can shape-shift, and take on other forms, often human, but sometimes dog or cat or cow or, extraordinarily, wasp or hornet. The selkie is not, however, a wholly convincing shifter of shape, and whatever form it takes as it flops onto land from its watery domains, it always retains a recognisably pinnipedian character. If one were lazy, one might call Skippy half-seal, half-dog, but that is too simplistic and gives quite the wrong impression of his physical appearance. Depending upon the time of day, and the play of light, and the humidity of the air, Skippy can look almost exactly like a common seal, or a mastiff, or even, from some angles, like a giant ungainly sparrow.

Whatever form he takes, on land, he barks, and tends towards other dog-related behaviour, such as fetching thrown sticks, drooling, and, when allowed, leading blind people safely through the many imperilments of the cityscape. Though myopic, I am not blind myself, but I make a little bit of pin money by renting Skippy to sightless folk who require a canine guide for half an hour or so while their regular dog is meeting an appointment at the veterinary surgery, which happens to be bang next door.

It will be said that I must have known, when describing Skippy as a hound and a cur, that readers would leap to the conclusion that I was referring to a dog rather than to a selkie. After all, selkies are not the most common of beasts to keep as domestic pets. I grant that. In mitigation, all I can say is that, on the day I was writing about, the quality of the light seeping in through the windows, and more particularly through the bathroom window, a sort of milky, soapy, lucence, lent Skippy a dogginess such that even I could forget for a moment that he is in fact a seal.

More problematic is the matter of Skippy’s diet. As far as I am aware, most seals like to eat fish, often swallowing them whole. Whether it be sprats or sardines or dabs, the average seal, and indeed the average selkie, if there is such a being, can happily eat nothing but fish throughout its life, a life, by the way, which an actuary would calculate at roughly twenty-five to thirty years. On the other side of me from the veterinary surgery there is a seal actuary’s office, and I checked those figures with him, a few minutes ago, in a break between paragraphs. I did not mention it at the time, thinking it better to present the information at a pertinent point, rather than interrupting my flow to buttonhole you with a newly-discovered fact. Incidentally, Mr Ten Boom, the actuary, is blind, and he has a sickly guide dog often in need of stomach pumpings at the veterinary surgery, so I regularly hire Skippy out to him for little trips to the newsagent or the greengrocer, located as they are on the other side of a wide boulevard frantic with hurtling container lorries. Mrs Ten Boom, the actuary’s wife, knitted a splendid little tabard for Skippy to wear on such excursions, yellow with black stripes, which can give him a disconcerting resemblance to an enormous bee.

But I must keep on track and return to the important matter of Skippy’s diet. I recognise that, having described my pet selkie as a hound and a cur, and mentioned his barking, the clincher for Tim Thurn and other readers, leading them to assume I was writing about a dog, was the reference to a bowl of reconstituted meat chunks in jelly. After all, long years of experience tell us, whether we are dog owners or not, that such a meal is de rigueur for our canine pals. I will not muddy the waters by pointing out that cats are commonly fed on broadly similar lines. I have not received any readers’ letters asking me to clarify whether or not Skippy is of the feline persuasion.

As a selkie, one might expect Skippy to salivate happily at the sight of the aforementioned sprats and sardines and dabs, but not at food fit for a dog presented in a bowl set upon the floor. Many seals jump in the air to catch thrown fish, rather than snuffling with their faces buried in a bowl. Yet recall, one of the defining characteristics of the selkie is that, while in water it is wholly a seal, upon land it shifts shape and takes on, partially and spookily, other forms. We cannot expect a transformation, in certain lights, of its outward appearance to go unaccompanied by a corresponding terrestrial enjumblement of its innards. The innards of a seal or a selkie are not merely blubber, they are as complex and miraculous as the innards of many another organism. If you have ever dissected anything, be it a fruit bat or a buttercup, you will know whereof I speak. Thus, once having heaved itself ashore, and bid goodbye to the sea, either temporarily or permanently, the selkie’s transmogrification, even if it is mythical, is startling. In Skippy’s case, by becoming in some manner doggish, he discovered doggish appetites. We have already ascertained that Skippy enjoys chasing after thrown sticks. Why, then, should he not see the allure in a bowl of reconstituted meat chunks in jelly placed before him on the floor? That does not make him a dog. It makes him a selkie which, on land, in the play of light, appears to the human eye to be a dog, more or less, if one does not examine him too closely.

It will be asked whether a selkie chooses the terrestrial form it adopts, or whether, as it emerges from the sea, it is subject to forces both eerie and inexplicable, and takes the form destined for it by the seal-gods. I confess I do not know the answer to that question. Better minds than mine have wrestled with it, not least Mrs Ten Boom, the seal actuary’s wife, the tabard knitter. As she knits, she devotes her powerful brain to all sorts of abstruse and thorny problems, regarding not merely seals and selkies but to anything that exercises her. By no means does she confine herself to the aquatic and amphibious. She is, it is said, one of the few people living who has read every word ever published by the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, and not just read them but annotated them. Unfortunately, though dozens of Dobsonists have beseeched her to make public her notes and marginalia, she refuses, point blank, often with the aid of a baseball bat. She is a dear old thing, a good neighbour and a tabard knitswoman of genius, but, just as there are religionists who claim to have a personal relationship with Jesus, Mrs Ten Boom insists upon an exclusive Vulcan mind-meld with the pamphleteer, and bashes senseless with her bat anyone who tries to broach it. For my part, I salute her, as does Skippy, who has recently devised a fantastic saluting gesture with his right flipper, which looks, in a certain cast of light, like a paw.