I was much taken with this illustration of a Victorian organised fern hunt, reproduced at the excellent Victorian Era blog. It reminded me that Dobson was a great one for fern hunts. Although he was a pamphleteer decisively of the twentieth century, he had about him something of the Victorian, especially at certain periods of his life, such as the two decades or so he spent blasted out of his brain on laudanum, as were most Victorians most of the time, if some accounts are to be believed. Gladstone, to give but one example, regularly made speeches in the House of Commons with his head swimming in an opiate fog. It makes one wonder if we would  be better governed today were the illiterate thickos in Parliament to have their brains ravaged and jangled a tad.

In spite of his boundless ignorance of the natural world, or perhaps because of it, Dobson developed quite a taste for fern hunting. In a memorable pamphlet, he described the attraction:

Hunting animals is the sport of fools. Nearly all animals run away when pursued. Ferns, on the other hand, stay right where they are, so you can go crashing through thickets with much gusto, a determined jut to the jaw, every so often emitting cries of panic or revelation, or both, all the while safe in the knowledge that your quarry is not dashing away over the fields, vanishing over the horizon, leaving you and your band of fellow adventurers exhausted and stupid and empty-handed.

Dobson did not always grasp the point of an organised fern hunt, however, and would arrive at the appointed gathering-place armed with a net, or a blunderbuss, or sometimes with a geological hammer. It had to be patiently, and repeatedly, explained to him what a fern was, information he had singular difficulty lodging in his skull, whether or not it was doused with laudanum. In another pamphlet, at another time, for example, he wrote this:

What better sport is there than chasing a wild fern across the countryside, watching it dash away over the fields, vanishing over the horizon, leaving you and your band of fellow adventurers exhausted and happy and empty-handed, but refreshed by bucolic air, panting, drugged up to the eyeballs and ready to go home and write dozens of pages of De Quinceyan babble?

To his credit, Dobson never made any attempt to suppress the pamphlet in which he wrote this drivel, but in any case, like all his works it was soon out of print, and forgotten, just as we have forgotten the delights of organised fern hunts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s time I made that telephone call.

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