Category Archives: Characters

Travels In Arabia Deserta

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One of Dobson’s more preposterous follies was his attempt to rewrite Charles Montagu Doughty’s mad, massive classic Travels In Arabia Deserta (1888).

“What do you mean, ‘rewrite’ it?” asked Marigold Chew, when the out of print pamphleteer announced his plan to his inamorata over breakfast one rainswept March morning.

“I mean,” spluttered Dobson, choking on a mouthful of goosefat toastie, “That I will enter Doughty’s head, as it were, see what he saw, hear what he heard, smell the very same fumes his nostrils smelled, and from those sensual prods I shall weave a spell of words to create a new and improved Travels In Arabia Deserta, no less mad, no less massive, but better, grander, more true.”

*It is an intriguing, if foolish, idea,” said Marigold Chew, “But I wonder if you have thought it through. You will know, from Doughty’s book, if not from other sources, that the desert is a vast and pitiless place of burning heat upon which the sun beats down relentlessly. You, meanwhile, are a man whose hatred of bright sunlight – and hatred is not too strong a word – has often led me to think you have the constitution of a vampire. You are a man who thrives under overcast skies and in drizzle, Dobson, not a sun-worshipper.”

“Two points,” replied Dobson, swallowing a forkful of shredded radish, “First, I have not actually read Doughty’s book. Oh, I have skimmed it here and there, gained a feel for its strange and highly-wrought prose, weighed its mad mass in my hands, but I could not claim to be familiar with every last nook and cranny of the text. Second, I do not intend actually to travel in the burning sands of the hellish sun-bashed desert. If you listened carefully, you will have heard me say that my plan is to enter into Doughty’s head, from the comfort of my escritoire, and to summon forth the new Dobsonized Travels In Arabia Deserta through the majestic powers of imagination alone!”

“And you will enter his head how?” asked Marigold Chew.

“I snipped from a periodical a photograph of the Doughty head,” said Dobson, “And I have affixed it to the wall by my escritoire with a drawing pin. As soon as I am done with breakfast, I shall sit and gaze at the picture, in awed concentration, and as I gaze, slowly but surely the lineaments and integuments of the Doughty brain will become fused with my own brain, and swimming before my eyes shall come wondrous mirages. Mirages, after all, are the stuff of travels in Arabia Deserta, are they not? And then I will take up my propelling pencil and scribble down, in impassioned prose, all I see, all I hear, all I smell, while thus entranced. My plan is sound,” he concluded, “And I shall give birth to a masterpiece!”

Marigold Chew drained her beaker of milk slops and turned her head to look out of the window at the downpour.

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*

It was still raining later in the afternoon when Dobson returned from a trudge along the towpath of the filthy old canal. He came crashing through the door, sopping wet, leaving a trail of puddles in his wake. Marigold Chew eyed him carefully.

“Who is this come a-crashing through the door?” she asked, “Is it Dobson or Doughty, or some zany minglement of both Dobson and Doughty?”

By way of reply, the pamphleteer merely grunted.

“You are sopping wet and leaving a trail of puddles in your wake,” said Marigold Chew, “Nobody could look less like they had been travelling in Arabia Deserta. I’ll put the kettle on.”

As she went to the kitchen sink, Marigold Chew saw, in the waste bin, the snipped-out photograph of Charles Montagu Doughty’s head, torn in half and scrunched up, the hole pierced by Dobson’s drawing pin visible in the centre of the Doughty forehead.

*

“How are you getting on with your visionary rewriting?” asked Marigold Chew that evening, as she and Dobson sprawled on the sofa. From the Dansette on the sideboard came the finger-tapping hoo-cha of Xavier Cugat and His Orchestra.

“I may have to rethink my plan,” said Dobson.

“Oh?”

“I gazed and gazed at Doughty’s head for hours,” said the pamphleteer, “But only one mirage, or vision, came swimming into my head. I could neither replace it nor dislodge it. There is not enough material there for a mad and massive book in two volumes, which was what I hoped to be able to wreak from the wild imaginings boiling in my doubled Dobson-Doughty brain. Instead, I shall have to make do with a recipe book. Or rather, a recipe pamphlet, for I have but the one recipe. That was my mirage.”

“Well, people are always on the lookout for an exotic recipe, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, “Get it scribbled down and I shall have it typeset in the morning on the Gestetner machine in the shed.”

*

Whole Stuffed Camel

Ingredients
1 whole camel, medium size
1 whole lamb, large size
20 whole chickens, medium size
60 eggs
12 kg rice
2 kg pine nuts
2 kg almonds
1 kg pistachio nuts
110 gallons water
5 lbs black pepper
salt

Method
1. Skin, trim and clean camel, lamb and chicken.
2. Boil until tender.
3. Cook rice until fluffy.
4. Fry nuts until brown and mix with rice.
5. Hard boil eggs and peel.
6. Stuff cooked chickens with hard boiled eggs and rice.
7. Stuff cooked lamb with stuffed chickens.
8. Add more rice.
9. Stuff the camel with the stuffed lamb and add rest of rice.
10. Broil over large charcoal pit until brown.
11. Spread any remaining rice on large tray and place camel on top of rice.
12. Decorate with boiled eggs and nuts.
13. Serves eighty to a hundred famished travellers in Arabia Deserta.

[My thanks to James Beckett for drawing to my attention this splendid – and genuine – recipe.]

The Stupid Milk

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The Stupid Milk is the first in a new series of blockbuster paperback potboilers by Pebblehead. The threads linking the projected series of a dozen books are the protagonist, tiptop secret agent Jug Souptin, and the titles, each of which is a translation from the Welsh of a near-anagram of the name of a twentieth-century American female avant garde choreographer. The use of such an Oulipian constraint is something of a departure for Pebblehead, and we can perhaps see the influence of his new literary agent, International Woman of Mystery Primrose Dent.

Frau Dent has long conducted her mysterious affairs according to dazzlingly complicated rules derived, ultimately, from the kinds of constraints employed by the writers of the Oulipo. So inexplicable are her doings that few can work out what it is she actually does, let alone the constraints she applies. All we can say for certain is that many, if not most, of her enigmatic schemes involve the use of Fuller’s earth, Coddington lenses, and Leyden jars.

Certainly all of these materials have appeared, in varying quantities, in the grounds of Pebblehead’s so-called “chalet o’ prose” since he was taken under the wing of Primrose Dent. And it is surely no accident that, in his very first adventure, tiptop secret agent Jug Souptin is called upon to foil a dastardly plot conceived by a criminal maniac whose chief weapons are given as Fuller’s jars, Coddington earth, and Leyden lenses (pp. 46-49).

Souptin himself is a curiously bashful hero for a Pebblehead book. He is winsome, distracted, and pale, with impossibly dainty hands and girly eyelashes. On page 9, we learn that “he would not say boo to a goose”, and not long afterwards (p. 12) he indeed encounters a goose on a canal towpath and signally fails to say “boo” to it, instead skipping away to hide behind a splurge of lupins until the goose has gone away. (The goose reappears, incidentally, on page 149, marching at the head of a gaggle of its fellows, honking, in a thrilling scene which ends with the criminal maniac toppling into a crevasse.)

The stupid milk of the title is goaty milk into which has been injected a serum which renders stupid anybody who drinks it. As ever with Pebblehead, a great deal of research has gone into the book, and he provides a recipe for the serum which any of us could whip up in a lab in five minutes. For the purposes of this review I did just that, then injected the resulting serum into a carton of goaty milk and fed it to several guinea pigs, including a guinea pig, a stray cat, a guide dog, a leafcutter ant, and the Labour Party MP David Lammy. I can confirm that Pebblehead certainly seems to know his stuff, but luckily I am not a criminal maniac, so I have not, like Jug Souptin’s foe in the book, concocted millions of gallons of the stupid milk and poured it into important reservoirs around the globe.

On a scale of fabness, I would deem this blockbuster to be tremendously fab. It has its faults, of course, particularly in Pebblehead’s portrait of the goose, which is unlike any goose one might meet in the real world. Indeed, I am not convinced the author knows exactly what a goose is. But we have been here before with Pebblehead. For all the diligence of his research and fact-checking in non-ornithological matters, he seems to have a blind spot when it comes to birds. Who can forget the tiny airborne ostriches which marred the otherwise excellent potboiler Tiny Airborne Ostriches!? Or the talking linnet in The Talking Linnet?

Interestingly, that linnet speaks Welsh. It may be worth going back to the book to see if anything it says is a near-anagram of the name of a twentieth-century American female avant garde choreographer. Then we might be able to make educated guesses at the forthcoming further adventures of tip top secret agent Jug Souptin!

Eerie Mavis

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Readers will be familiar with the plucky fascist tot Tiny Enid, but I have only recently learned of the existence of her cousin and sometime playmate, Eerie Mavis.

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Eerie Mavis spent much of her time loitering in a barn, mucking about with lengths of string and rotting fruit and pliers. She is said to have had an affinity with jackdaws, though it is not clear how this manifested itself. Eerie she may have been, but she did not have the power of flight, and her speaking voice was more akin to the mutter than the caw. Indeed, one of the eeriest things about Eerie Mavis was her constant, incomprehensible, and somehow menacing muttering, which began as soon as she woke from sleep on her straw pallet in the barn, and continued all bloody day until, in eventual exhaustion, she flung herself back on the pallet, and the Land of Nod. Even then, she was known to mutter in her sleep.

You could trust Eerie Mavis with a box of matches. She showed no signs of pyromania, and indeed could be counted on to douse any conflagrations which may erupt in the farmyard. She never seemed to be far from a spigot, and showed both delicacy and determination when handling a hosepipe.

She was not a musical tot – the eternal muttering put paid to any ambitions she may have had as a songstress – but could be spellbound by the sound of electric guitars played in the screeching heavy metal style, and also by the softer toots of the piccolo. When so spellbound, she would drop her string and fruit and pliers, and stand stock still, close by a spigot, in her slightly lopsided way, and shut her eyes, and levitate, an inch or so off the ground. Her muttering did not entirely cease at such times, but it became quieter.

Her slight lopsidedness had no apparent physical cause. She did not, unlike her cousin Tiny Enid, have a club foot, and wore no corrective boot. Passing farmyard adults would occasionally try to straighten her up, by means of gentle coaxing, to no avail. In a tape recorded interview, conducted decades later when she had become a crone, Eerie Mavis revealed that she had always stood bolt upright, and it was the farmyard itself that was lopsided. Alas, it had by then long been covered by concrete, and no land surveyor could attest to the truth of her claim.

A double biography of Eerie Mavis and Tiny Enid is long overdue. There is one in the works, from the pen of Pebblehead, but many obstacles lie in his path, not least the fact that each time he completes a page, no sooner has it rolled off his typewriter than it is snatched and borne away in the beak of a jackdaw, up into the blue Alpine skies, irretrievable, irretrievable, lost, lost, lost.

More About Pebblehead’s Typewriter

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The picture of Pebblehead’s typewriter posted yesterday prompted a bulging postbag, with numerous readers clamouring for further particulars of the bestselling paperbackist’s working practices. Among the commoner questions were: How does Pebblehead manage to bash out so many potboilers? How many typewriters does he get through in an average week? Is he capable of writing a word without having that pipe, crammed with acrid Serbian tobacco, clamped between his teeth? Does he employ a team of monkey typists?

I was about to write, “Alas, we may never know…”, when all of a sudden, a moment ago, Alan the postal crow flew in through the crow-vent with a press release clutched in his beak. I gave him some millet, and he relinquished the paper, upon which the following was printed, by the looks of it on a wonky Gestetner machine:

Raymond Roussel told us How I Wrote Certain Of My Books in 1932. Now, Pebblehead promises to tell us How I Wrote Certain Of My Potboilers. This will undoubtedly be the publishing sensation of 2013, or 2014, or whenever Pebblehead manages to deliver the manuscript, in between bashing out hundreds more potboilers and destroying quite a few typewriters in the process, while monkeys cavort around him in his chalet o’ prose.

Sucking on his pipe, its bowl stuffed with acrid Serbian tobacco, the bestselling paperbackist said: “Begone, Krishnan Guru-Murthy! I have no idea what you and your camera crew from Channel 4 News think you’re doing, camped out in front of my chalet o’ prose. You are interrupting the creative process of the most tireless potboilerist in the world, and if you do not leave immediately I shall have you set upon by Alpine zombies in tattered Nazi uniforms brandishing ray guns from outer space!”

If and when How I Wrote Certain Of My Potboilers is ever actually published, review copies will be sent out via Alan the postal crow. Make sure your crow-vent is clear and free from sordid and unseemly detritus, bones of voles, etcetera.

Blodgett’s Diary 24.1.46

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Blodgett’s diary for this day in 1946:

Pucker crunched duct. Hod tap askew, righted, fumbled. Pit gawped ope, shoved funnel up. Tawny pipit stuck w/ birdlime to spruce. Gnarled bole. Hacksaw honed, whetstone cracked. Figs in punnet. Jug on sill caught light ‘n’ odd, flat ant. Modern barber called. Chopped at tresses and flicked flecked highlit strands. Infected cow udder. Crumpled rag in bin. Bin beside sink. Barbaric gusts. Lemsip. Kite in ash. Go-go dancer in boat on lake in twilight. Noggin puttered. Putter slack. Gutta percha in gunny sack. Milk spilt, night soil sloshed. Stove exploded. Hooves clattered. Dots pricked. Gummed up shrift. Go to work on an egg.

Pebblehead’s Diary 19.1.92

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The bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead’s diary for this day in 1992:

To the launch party for my new paperback potboiler Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! I took the title from Ronald Firbank’s 1916 novel Inclinations, and I am pleased to think that this may be the first time in the history of fiction that an entire chapter of an existing work has been quoted as the title of a new one. (It was Chapter XX, for anybody who wants to check.) My Mabel bears scant resemblance to Firbank’s. She was young and not a little ditzy, while mine is a crone. In fact, for a while I thought of giving the book the title Crone With A Sponge! until, about half way through, I encountered intractable technical potboiler difficulties and had to ditch the sponge entirely, eradicating all mention of it from the opening chapters. It is, I think, a better book as a result, certainly a better potboiler.

I attended the launch party incognito, got up as a baffled bus conductor down on his luck. My disguise was almost wholly successful, and not even my own mother recognised me. What on earth she was doing at the party is a surpassing mystery. I must have words with the warden of the Bewilderment Home. Though nobody actually knew me for who I am, one fathead mistook me for the lumbering psychopathic walrus-moustached serial killer Babinsky, and called the coppers. They arrived just as I was cramming cream crackers from the buffet into the pocket of my bus conductor’s jacket. Never overlook free cream crackers, by the way – follow that advice and you can sail through life more or less unhindered.

Not so this evening, alas, as the coppers, led by doughty Detective Captain Cargpan, whacked me on the head several times with a lead-weighted sap, removed the cream crackers from my pocket and put them back on the buffet table, and bundled me into the back of their van. I assumed I would be taken down to the station, but instead we drove out into the blasted and inhospitable winter countryside. At a godforsaken spinney, the van screeched to a halt and the coppers dragged me out and tied me to the trunk of a yew tree. The yew tree pointed up, it had a Gothic shape. My eyes lifted after it and found the moon. I noticed that fumy, spiritous mists inhabited this place, and there was a row of headstones.

“I have decided that the only way to stop you, Babinsky, is to engage in a spot of extra-judicial killing,” said Cargpan. Then, “Ned, get the axe and the shovel,” he added, to one of his henchmen.

“But I am not Babinsky!” I cried, “I am the bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead!”

“Prove it,” said Cargpan, darkly.

“My hands are tied to the trunk of this pointy yew tree so I cannot rummage in my pockets, but if you do so, in among the crumbs of cream crackers you will find my jotter, in which are jotted down notes for my next half dozen bestselling paperback potboilers,” I said.

Cargpan rummaged, and a look of wonderment lit up his countenance.

“Bloody hell, boys, this isn’t Babinsky, it’s Pebblehead!” he cried, and he immediately freed me from my bonds and sat me down on a camping stool and gave me a cup of tea from a flask.

“We are all big fans of yours,” he said, as his little band of coppers all nodded, “We’ve got every single one of your books down at the station. If we take you back there, will you sign them for us?”

“Of course I will,” I said, “If, afterwards, you will return me to the launch party for Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel! Mabel!”

“Better than that,” said Cargpan, “We will throw a party for you ourselves. I don’t know if you have ever been to a coppers’ party, Mr P., but we can guarantee you a splendid time.”

And so it turned out that I ended the evening absolutely stuffed with cream crackers, wearing a paper hat, and regaling a basement full of coppers with piquant anecdotes of the literary life. More to the point, I gathered invaluable material for my forthcoming bestselling paperback potboiler Tied To A Yew Tree By Coppers! (working title), which I should have finished by late tomorrow afternoon.

Dobson’s Diary 17.1.61

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On this day in 1961 we find the out of print pamphleteer Dobson on his travels:

Woke up without the faintest clue where I was. It rapidly became apparent that I was zipped up tight in a sleeping bag. When I struggled out of it, I saw I was in a tent. I have absolutely no memory of going camping. In any case, I hate camping. In my experience, one finds that wherever one pitches one’s tent soon becomes a haven for moles. You fall asleep on a flat patch of ground and when you wake up the entire area is riddled with molehills. Usually.

That was not the case today, as I discovered when, emerging through the canvas flaps, I found that the tent had been erected within a hotel room. This was a curious occurrence to be sure, and I ransacked my memory to work out why it might be so. Was I so bent on travel that I had to double the experience, as it were, first booking into a hotel and then pitching a tent within it? It is something I have done only once before, when I was young and foolish. Now I am old and wise, at least by my own reckoning.

I abluted in the en suite bathroom and pranced out into the corridor in search of breakfast. I noticed something decidedly odd about the sausages and the cornflakes, and beckoned a hotel person. Finding myself inexplicably bereft of speech, I pointed at the sausages and the cornflakes and raised a quizzical eyebrow.

The explanation I was given for the oddness of my sausages and cornflakes sent my brain reeling. Not only was my tent in a hotel room, but the hotel was on a space rocket! I was hurtling at unimaginable speed towards a distant planet. And I could not speak because of what the hotel person, who I noticed had special breathing apparatus attached to a tinfoil helmet, called “space muffling”.

I had been planning to take a walk in the grounds of the hotel after breakfast but clearly this was not feasible, so I returned to my room and, once inside, crept back through the flaps into my tent. I set up a portable escritoire, took out my jotting pad and propelling pencil, and set about writing a pamphlet. Space Age Dobson, I decided to entitle it, immodestly.

Shortly after I had scribbled my opening sentence, and was chewing the end of my propelling pencil trying to think up a second sentence, the captain made an announcement over the space tannoy. Due to the wrong sort of particles in the galaxy, we would have to turn back and return to Earth. I scribbled out my title and my opening sentence and continued to chew the end of the propelling pencil, which tasted remarkably similar to both the sausages and the cornflakes.

We bumped back to earth about half an hour later. I disembarked and made my way home by bus. I told my inamorata Marigold Chew all about my excursion.

“You were never much of a traveller, Dobson,” she said, “You always get upset about moles.”

That gave me an idea for a pamphlet, and I repaired immediately to my escritoire, where I wrote in one sitting my pamphlet Are There Any Moles In Outer Space? No, There Are Not!*

* NOTE : Out of print.

Bobnit Tivol’s Diary 9.1.26

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Fictional athlete Bobnit Tivol is one of very few fictional athletes to have kept an entirely nonfictional diary, though quite how it came to be written is anybody’s guess. Here is what he got up to on this day in 1926:

Bounded out of bed spry and sprightly and cut two or three brisk Boswellian capers around the room before plunging my head into a pail of ice cold water. Then I was out at the cinder track. Being fictional, I do not need to travel from A to B, I can simply be in one place and then a moment later in another place. Generally speaking, that other place is the cinder track, unless I am taking part in a competition, when I might materialise in a field or a stadium. Nor do I need to eat breakfast, or indeed any other meal, except for fictional purposes, for example if a sense of drama is wrung from me having stomach cramps from overeating seconds before an important qualifying heat in an important sprint championship.

Today I was in training for just such a competition, the Pointy Town All-Comers High Speed Breathless Panting Round And Round A Cinder Track Trophy. Those who follow my fictional career know I placed in the top seventeen in this contest in 1922 and 1923 and 1924. Last year, of course, I was attacked by a swarm of hornets on the eve of the final and was unable to compete.

My coach, the irascible chain-smoking Old Halob, who is as real as I am fictional, was nowhere to be seen on this fine cold January morning. I missed his reassuring presence, but did my practice sprint anyway. I ran round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round the cinder track at high speed, panting breathlessly, all day. This is where I have an advantage over nonfictional athletes, who would collapse in exhausted heaps after a few laps. Being insubstantial and, some have said, unkindly, one-dimensional, I only collapse if there is a sense of drama to be wrung from my doing so. This usually occurs in important races, such as the final of the Sawdust Bridge One Hundred Mile Flat-Out Sprinting Cup, and not when I am merely on a training run.

I would have kept on running round and round the cinder track after the sun went down, but it was at that point, as night o’erspread the sky and all was plunged in darkness, that Old Halob appeared. If he was not real I might think he was a vampire. He looked at his stopwatch and blew his whistle and coughed up an unseemly amount of catarrh and led me away to a nocturnal pole-vaulting area. I had completely forgotten that I also had to get in shape for the Pointy Town Nocturnal Pole-Vaulting Challenge Ribbon!

So all in all it was a pretty good day, and night, as my days and nights go. Eventually found myself tucked up in bed at 5.59 AM, just in time to spring out of bed spry and sprightly at 6.00 AM tomorrow.

160 Pamphlets (Out Of Print)

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And lo! a new year dawns, and bang on schedule reader Mike Jennings provides us with an update on the Dobson canon, listing all those pamphlets which have come to light and been mentioned in dispatches over the past year. As ever, Mr Jennings has applied the obscure yet somehow charming Blötzmann Numbering System for ease of reference. Unless otherwise stated, all pamphlets are out of print.

Mr Jennings’ previous listings can be found at these links: numbers 1 to 104, 105 to 128, 129 to 139, and, all by itself, number 140.

141. Cyclops With A Broom!

142. A Full Account Of Sawdust Bridge

143. Well, They Both Have Beaks And Feathers, For Christ’s Sake!

144. Hints And Tips For Intrepid Explorers In The Polar Wastes

145. And what should they know of potatoes, who only potatoes know?

146. My Boundless Ornithological Ignorance, Together With A Paean Of Praise To Googie Withers

147. A Description Of And Reverie Upon Forty-Four Curlews

148. My Blithering Ignorance Of Vast Swathes Of Ornithology

149, When It Comes To Ice Hockey, I Have No Idea What I Am Talking About

150. Let Tourists Go To Switzerland And Italy And Drink Goaty Flavoured Goat’s Milk From Improperly Cleaned Mugs And Glasses, And See If I Care!

151. Trudges In Towns

152. It Behoves Me To Write At Some Length On Footnotes, Without Footnotes

153. Lead, Kindly Light, To Bald Men Wearing Specs

154. The Difficulty Of Mastering The Art Of Plinky-Plonky Musical Composition, With A Mezzotint Of Chas ‘n’ Dave

155. Some Unfocussed Thoughts On Birds And Boots

156. Funerary Customs Of Different Types Of Birds, No. 1 : The Seagull

157. Thoughts Upon A Rain-soaked Trudge From Homburg To Homburg

158. A Searing, Coruscating Analysis Of Paul Simon’s Song “50 Ways To Leave Your Lover”, With Particular Attention Paid To 50 Different Techniques Of Suitcase-Packing, Each Illustrated With Instructive Diagrams With Pointy Arrows And Diagonal Lines

159. A Few Tips On Mountain-Moving, With Shovel And Bucket

160. Things To Shove Through A Funnel Into A Jar

Dobson’s Diary 5.1.58

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Dobson’s diaries contain a huge number of undated entries. Over the past several years, a team of indefatigable researchers has been busy attempting to pinpoint specific dates where possible, in a project funded by an unfathomably secret organisation possibly led by international woman of mystery Primrose Dent. The team’s most recent success was to deduce, from internal textual evidence, that the following was written on the fifth of January 1958:

After a breakfast of kippers, hare-brains and jellied celery, I was all set to spend the day slumped at my escritoire, scribbling, but my inamorata Marigold Chew had other ideas.

“We must go on an outing!” she cried, frighteningly.

When I asked why, she replied that we ought to celebrate, by outing and picnic, the birthdays of Scarlatti, Zebulon Pike, Frederick Converse, Herbert Bayard Swope, Yves Tanguy, Stella Gibbons, Wieland Wagner, Friedrich Durrenmatt, W. D. Snodgrass, Walter Mondale, Umberto Eco, Raisa Gorbachova, Jan Leeming, Diane Keaton, Linda Clare, and Joan Balawejder, while also commemorating the anniversary of the deaths of Edward the Confessor, Catherine de Medici, Karl Alfred von Zittel, Sir Ernest Shackleton, Amy Johnson, Charles Slee, and Mistinguett. When I said that I had no idea who some of these people were, she announced that today was also the anniversary of the Great Fire of Eindhoven, the discovery of X-rays, and the foundation of the Nazi Party.

“So let us pack our picnic hamper and set off on a hike!” she added.

Which is what we did. After the picnic (cows, rain) we stopped in at the Museum of Ack-on-or-near-the-Vug. It was about to close, due to the pomposity of the curator, but we had a few minutes in which to look around. My eye was caught by an exhibit of indescribable gorgeousness. Well, I say indescribable, but the pompous curator made a pretty good fist of describing it on the card placed next to it, which I copied out in my jotting pad with my propelling pencil:

It is 45 cm. in height, has a jewel-encrusted crimplene base, ivory fluting, ruched silk underbelts, hectic trimmings, a delightful milky-green ribbed spandole, villainous scraping marks, a gutta percha rim, opalescent bison-head motifs, swivelling glutinous beads inlaid with serried gems, fleur-de-lys hatching, precise web-and-tuck dufraiment, talc stipples, a riband nightside opening on the velveteen casing, some rather brusque kaolin relief work, tiny cack-iron clips, berry lagging, a splendid gilt Spode handle, and corky frets on the oversling.

It was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen. Marigold Chew executed a quick sketch in her jotting pad with her propelling pencil, but as we left the museum a jackdaw swooped out of the sky and snatched that page of the jotter in its beak and flew away, away, up into the overcast sky.

Tiny Enid’s Diary 4.1.34

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Tiny Enid’s diary for this day in 1934.

Milk slops for breakfast, washed down with gin. Read a fascinating article in The Ipsy Dipsy Doo about Mussolini, Il Duce in faraway Italy. Having thoroughly digested it I decided to set off for the railway station to make the trains run on time. This is precisely the sort of activity a plucky tot such as myself ought to be engaged in.

On my way to the station I encountered a tearaway pulling the wings off flies. I kicked his head in and then made him glue the wings back on using a glue composed of his own blood, spittle, and bone marrow. Then I made him swear a solemn vow to be an upstanding citizen for the rest of his natural life. It is a shame such ne’er-do-wells can no longer be transported to Botany Bay.

Thinking of Botany Bay made me think of botany, so I paused by the railway embankment to pick some peonies and marigolds. Because of my deeds of derring-do and penchant for violence people often forget that I am just a simple little girly and take great pleasure in my flower press. Sometimes I fancy I hear the flowers shrieking as I press every last smidgen of life out of them.

At the railway station, the dithering old station master, Mr Cribbins, was faffing about with flags and hooters. Needless to say he cannot make the trains run on time. I lured him to some sidings by pretending my little dolly was trapped in the rails, then buried him up to his neck in coarse sand. I read him the riot act, or at least a version of it improvised by Il Duce, translated into English by my mysterious mentor. Back on the platform, I took up Mr Cribbins’ flag and hooter and deployed them in such a manner that I struck fear into the hearts of train drivers throughout the land. It was a good morning’s work.

Later I cut this picture out of a magazine:

el-fascismo

Dobson’s Diary 2.1.53

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The out of print pamphleteer Dobson’s diary, sixty years ago today:

I embarked on my research into sewage farm gnomes by rereading, and rerereading, the article in The Listener about a buff-breasted sandpiper. It was a pity, I thought, that no illustration accompanied the piece. Elsewhere in the same issue, the editor found room for a picture of masks in an article about masks. This exasperated me so much that I threw my new pencil sharpener, bought this morning to replace the one mislaid yesterday, out of the window and into a puddle. Why on earth the window was wide open on a day as inclement as this is a surpassing mystery, or it would be had Marigold Chew not embraced some hare-brained fresh-air fad. I hope she soon diverts her attention to something less chilly and windswept.

masks

Anyway, it seems quite obvious to me that everybody knows what a mask is, and we do not need a photograph to aid our understanding, whereas I doubt there are many persons with the vaguest clue about buff-breasted sandpipers. A picture would have helped. I was going to fire off a stern letter packed with invective to the editor of The Listener, but having chucked my pencil sharpener out of the window, and my pencil being ruinously blunt, and there being no spare pencils to be found anywhere, I was at a loss, and in any case, leafing through The Listener to locate the wholly unnecessary picture of a mask, so I could refer to the page number in my irate letter, I happened upon the piece about a buff-breasted sandpiper again, and paused to reread it for the umpteenth time, and it was then I was struck by a previously overlooked detail.

R S R Fitter begins his piece “I found myself at a large sewage farm…” A large sewage farm. Now, though I know very little about gnomes, I do know that they are small, or reputed to be small. Would small gnomes be likely to farm a large sewage farm? I thought it more likely that gnomes would be found at a small sewage farm, one of a size appropriate to their smallness. Thus even at this early stage I was making progress in my research, for my conclusion seemed inarguable. At a stroke, I had whittled down the number of sewage farms at which gnomes might be found. I resolved to obtain a map and a thick black marker pen with which to expunge all large and medium sized sewage farms, leaving only the smaller ones visible. That should keep me gainfully occupied for a while at least. I have high hopes for the pamphlet which will eventually result!

Another thing I need to do, when I have the means to sharpen my pencil and thus write a letter, is to send a query to R S R Fitter, c/o The Listener. I am intrigued by that phrase “I found myself at…” It is as if Mr Fitter woke from a deep sleep, or perhaps a trance or a coma, and “found himself” at the sewage farm, as opposed to where he might have expected to be, at home for example, or in a familiar snackbar. I want to ask him if this is a regular occurrence, and if there are any other places he has “found himself”, other types of farm, other sewage-related locations, or indeed anywhere else on God’s earth.

The Year of Our Lord MCMLIII has certainly begun with some fascinating lines of inquiry. Who knows what more lies in store?

Decontaminated plovers’ eggs for breakfast.