Ever mindful of the need to trim the wicks of his tallow candles, Dobson employed for the purpose a tiny pair of shears which he deployed using the so-called Blötzmann Manoeuvres.

I took against electricity from an early age, he wrote, lying shamelessly, and often found myself in a quandary because untrimmed wicks set my teeth on edge. For a long time I thought the remedy for this was to imbue my teeth with greater strength, foolish young pup that I was. I crunched nuts morning, noon, and night, nuts of many different kinds. I had no favourites in the nut world, although of course the harder the nut, and the greater the effort needed to crunch it into a digestible pap, the hardier my teeth became, and the better they could withstand being set on edge by the appearance of untrimmed wicks on the tallow candles I used to illuminate my habitat.

By his own account, a temporary nut shortage forced Dobson to readdress the problem, but official statistics give the lie to this. Indeed, at the point where the pamphleteer adopted the Blötzmann Manoeuvres, there was a nut glut in the land. According to Pocock & Gabbitas, the squirrel population had been decimated by unexpected lupine savagery, leaving millions of nuts unhidden. If there was no lack of nuts, what made Dobson nail his colours to Blötzmann’s mast? It is significant that at this time, unlike later, Dobson’s colours were cherry and dun, and that a new Blötzmann mast had been erected atop Pilgarlic Hill, not far from the pig farmer’s hut where Dobson had regular sunrise gleanings. The siting of the mast, illegal then as now, was a stroke of genius by the Blötzmannist Erno Von Straubenzee, who had smuggled himself into the country aboard a packet steamer some months earlier.

Intriguingly, no sooner had Von Straubenzee disembarked from the boat, the Googie Withers, than its captain scuppered it, set it ablaze, and promptly vanished. Some say he still haunts the warehouses down at the harbour, rattling an old tin cup and begging for alms from the rough tough sailors thereabouts. Other stories have the one time packet steamer captain retired to the countryside keeping bees, like Sherlock Holmes. All that is known for certain is that a single charred plank dredged from the quayside was all that survived of the Googie Withers, and it was incorporated into a wooden altarpiece in St Bibblybibdib’s church, where it can be seen today, if you buy a ticket from the sexton, a monkey-faced man who sits in a little canvas kiosk in the churchyard each Thursday afternoon, awaiting redemption.

From the lych-gate of St Bibblybibdib’s, looking westward, on a clear day one can see the top of the Blötzmann mast, with its cherry and dun pennants. Turning to the east, the prospect is of fields rippling with wheat and rhubarb and hollyhocks and stinkwort, punctuated by ha-has and the occasional scarecrow. No wild jabbering pigs are to be seen, for they were eradicated by the same unexpected lupine savagery which did for the squirrels during the nut glut, just at the time Dobson falsely claimed a nut shortage led to his adoption of the Blötzmann Manoeuvres as his favoured way of trimming the tallow candle wicks the untrimmedness of which set his teeth on edge so.

But why did Dobson forever deny his association with Erno Von Straubenzee? Decades later, when it was put to the pamphleteer that he and the untidy Blötzmannite had been fast friends, often cooped up together for days on end in the pig farmer’s hut on the hill, scheming and plotting and cackling and letting sawdust trail through their fingers, reading the runes, Dobson blushed as he protested that the name Von Straubenzee meant nothing to him. He came up with improbable tales to account for his whereabouts on certain days when it was suspected the Blötzmann mast had been activated. And he was never able to explain how he had learned to trim his wicks so deftly with the tiny shears essential to the Blötzmann Manoeuvres. The one time he mentions the shears in a pamphlet, he is curiously abrupt.

In Ten Short Essays On Chopping And Cutting And Hacking (out of print), he gives full vent to his thoughts on scissors and scimitars and pastry-cutters, for example, devoting over twenty pages to the latter alone. There is detail here aplenty for the student who wishes to learn from scratch how to cut up bits of pastry in hundreds of different ways. Yet not only is there not a separate essay about the tiny shears, they are only mentioned in a footnote, and in such small type that only the most assiduous of readers is likely to be bothered with it. I freely admit that I have not read it myself, and rely entirely upon the account of the footnote given in the latest issue of Marginalia Dobsonia, the scholarly journal edited by Aloysius Nestingird.

Now here’s the thing. Parish records seem to show that Nestingbird is directly related to Erno Von Straubenzee, may indeed be his grandson. If true, it would explain a lot, although I am not entirely sure what precisely is explained, and Nestingbird has never replied to any of my letters. Last week I fired off a sort of questionnaire to him, demanding what they call full and frank answers to over a dozen accusations. I wanted to know if he had copies of the construction plans for the Blötzmann mast, or for any similar mast, if he ever worshipped at the wooden altar in St Bibblybibdib’s and, if he did, what god he worshipped there, and did he worship standing up, sitting, kneeling, or sprawled prostrate on the cold stone floor. I pumped him for an answer to the important question of whether he knew the name of the captain of the packet steamer Googie Withers, and what had become of that mysterious old sea dog. I threw in a sneaky query about the accounting procedures of his scholarly journal, convinced as I am that the profits are being salted away to fund the salt mines from which far-flung members of the Nestingird clan draw their dubious salaries. I asked all this and more, but of course got nothing in return, not even the threats I have become used to from the badly-dressed buffoon. I know for a fact that it is Nestingbird, or one of his cronies, who has sullied my reputation with the electricity people, and with the gas people too, and that both utilities have cut off supplies to my seaside cabin, and that is why I, like Dobson before me, now rely upon candlelight, and well-trimmed wicks. To date, I have not had to resort to the Blötzmann Manoeuvres, for wicks not neatly trimmed have yet to set my teeth on edge. If they do, with much bluster I shall begin to crunch nuts, and Nestingbird will be laughing on the other side of his pasty face. I will crunch nuts, and cackle, and be righteous and roopty-toot.

[This piece previously appeared on 25 March 2007.]

Dobson had an ambivalent attitude towards the footnote. Fond of footnotes as a reader, in his own writing he took pains to avoid them. He gave some indication of his thinking in the pamphlet It Behoves Me To Write At Some Length On Footnotes, Without Footnotes (out of print):

When I am reading a book or a pamphlet or a hysterical tract, I am very fond of footnotes. Indeed I lap them up. I have been known to ignore the main body of a text and read only the footnotes. Yet when it comes to the composition of my own sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose, it is my staunch belief that one should avoid footnotes wherever possible, and embed or incorporate the matter of the footnote into the main text. This can, and indeed usually does, have the effect of interrupting the flow of one’s argument, and risks undermining the majestic sweep of one’s prose. Why, then, do I eschew the footnote?

My guide in these matters was Herr Von Straubenzee, who taught me to write in the old wooden schoolroom long ago. Now it must be admitted that his own pathological loathing of the footnote was born, not of reason nor of a concern for the felicities of style, but of childhood trauma. Herr Von Straubenzee had been orphaned young, and he held a footnote responsible for his parents’ deaths. I could never quite grasp the details, though he often told us the story as he handed around our rations of blotting paper, and Frau Von Straubenzee would enact the grisly episode through the medium of shadow puppetry in the old wooden schoolroom when our lessons were over for the day. As far as I could gather, it was something to do with a footnote appended to a funicular railway timetable in some remote Alpine fastness, and the consequences thereof. Oddly, Herr Von Straubenzee was fixated on the footnote rather than on funicular railways themselves. Indeed, both he and Frau Von Straubenzee were daily passengers on one, as were all we tinies, for the old wooden schoolroom was otherwise inaccessible, perched as it was high up on a mountainside.

But psychological flaw or no, the abomination of footnotes expressed by my pedagogue had a lasting effect. I remember when I made my first faltering steps as a pamphleteer, and sent a draft of A Draft In Preparation For My First Ever Pamphlet (never in print) to Herr Von Straubenzee. I was young and cocky, and included in the draft a provocative footnote. My main text included the phrase “the contents of an ostrich’s stomach”. I plopped a superscript number “1” after this – thus threatening further footnotes! – and added, at the foot of the page,

^1. The contents of the stomach of an ostrich which died in London Zoo in 1942 included a lace handkerchief, a buttoned glove, a length of rope, a plain handkerchief (probably a man’s), assorted copper coins, metal tacks, staples and hooks, and a four-inch nail – a step too far, and the cause of death.

Herr Von Straubenzee returned my manuscript unread, partly blotted out, partly burned, and torn into a thousand pieces. He enclosed a note in which he consigned me to the deepest pit of hell for all eternity. He had no power to do so, of course – though I have always suspected Frau Von Straubenzee did – but I felt suitably intimidated and sent a fawning letter of apology, in which I promised never to knowingly write a footnote ever again so long as I should live. This seemed to do the trick, and over the next few years I retained the good graces of my old teacher. He sent me a crate of Carlsbad plums on my birthday. Well, one year he did. The following year he sent me a sausage. After that, not a sausage. And then later of course, he died.

It was after the death of Herr Von Straubenzee that I fell prey to the temptations of the footnote. I no longer need fear his disapproval. Frau Von Straubenzee was still among the living, very much so, but she had always pooh-poohed her husband’s footnoteophobia, so I had no cause for concern from that quarter. I remember the first time I felt impelled to insert a post-Herr Von Straubenzee footnote into one of my pamphlets. Curiously enough, it concerned the pedagogue himself. The pamphlet was Hysterical Reactions To Misprints, Footnotes, Redactions, And Blotting Mishaps In Alpine Funicular Railway Timetables, 1900-1949 (out of print). I had constructed a particularly fine paragraph on the Von Straubenzees, and felt I ought to disclose that their orphaned child went on to become my teacher in the old wooden schoolroom perched high on a mountainside. I did not see how I could include this gobbet of information in the text without fatally undermining its sweeping majesty. And so, with a heavy heart and the hope that Herr Von Straubenzee would not be rolling in his grave, I made it a footnote.

I may well have gone on to shove footnotes willy nilly into my prose thereafter, had it not been for the reaction it provoked. In those days my pamphlets would occasionally be reviewed in learned journals, and it was one such review, in The Learned Journal Of Hysterical Reactions To Misprints, Footnotes, Redactions, And Blotting Mishaps In Alpine Funicular Railway Timetables, that stopped me in my tracks. A certain B. Tick wrote:

A new Dobson pamphlet is usually a cause for rejoicing in this neck of the woods. Indeed our small editorial team has been known to crack open a bottle of vitamin-enhanced goaty milk when postie toils up the gravel path bearing the latest outpouring of the titanic pamphleteer. We don’t much care what he writes about, so long as it is suitable reading matter for a funicular railway journey, which, with Dobson, it always is. This time, however, he is trespassing on a subject about which we know not a little. I would go so far as to say we know everything there is to be known. I had hoped to be able to say that he has acquitted himself with aplomb, but alas, he has not. This is a witless and foolish pamphlet, marred particularly by an extraordinarily jarring footnote. Had Dobson inserted the footnoted matter within the main body of his text, I would be singing his praises, and extolling the pamphlet as perhaps the finest of all his works. But if you are going to thrust a footnote upon your reader, you have to know how to wield it. Dobson hasn’t got a clue. He thinks it is enough merely to plop a superscript “1” into his text and then add some blather at the foot of the page. Did he ever listen, when tiny, to the wise words of Herr Von Straubenzee in the old wooden schoolroom perched high on a mountainside and accessible only by funicular railway? He must have had an excess of earwax that prevented him from hearing that great man.

The review went on like this for page after page, and quite frankly, I threw the Learned Journal aside before I finished reading it, and broke down sobbing. When I dried my eyes, I used a matchstick to dig around in my ears to remove the clotted wax that had been accumulating for decades. Then I made a vow never to write another footnote for as long as I should live. This will explain to my readers why so many of my pamphlets consist of little else but subsidiary and incidental matter. Works such as Subsidiary And Incidental Matter Appertaining To Hysterical Reactions To Misprints, Footnotes, Redactions, And Blotting Mishaps In Alpine Funicular Railway Timetables, 1900-1949 (out of print) are in fact the footnotes I could have written, oh I could have!, but never did.

Shortly after his stint on the Country Diary, and his abortive plans for a country dairy, Dobson conceived the idea of writing an Urban Diary. By keeping his observations to town and city, he reasoned, he would have no need to trespass in the countryside and thus run the risk of encountering peasants who, as he put it, “babble gibberish in the guise of rustic wisdom and so befuddle my brain”. Dobson hawked his idea around a few newspaper and periodical editors, but found no takers. Unwilling to abandon the idea, however, he issued what he intended would be the first in a lengthy series of pamphlets. This work, Trudges In Towns (out of print), has recently been hailed as a pioneering work of psychogeography, a judgement which may be based on a misreading of the critic Brent Crude, who suggested that “there is more psychosis than geography on display in this tatty pamphlet”.

The title, with its plural Towns, is somewhat misleading, as so far as we know Dobson never went further than a single town, Pointy Town, in search of material. In fact, unstinting research by hothead young Dobsonist Ted Cack suggests that the pamphleteer barely moved from one spot while working on the text.

This is by no means, writes Cack, the work of a flaneur, nor even of a pedestrian. What I have discovered in the course of my unstinting research is that Dobson barely moved from his escritoire while writing Trudges In Towns. He might have popped into the kitchen to boil some water in a kettle preparatory to pouring it into a teapot into which he had already spooned, from a caddy, a modicum of tea leaves, and he may have remained in the kitchen, staring vacantly out of the window, at crows or cows or trees or whatever it was that was visible outside his window at that time, while he waited for the tea leaves to infuse the hot water, and he would still have been in the kitchen, away from his escritoire when, eventually, he rested a tea-strainer over his cup and poured tea through it from the teapot, into the cup, before adding a dash of milk, poured delicately from a bottle taken from the refrigerator, also located in the kitchen, and, making use of a teaspoon from the cutlery drawer, stirred the decoction so that milk and tea-infused water were throroughly and inextricably intermingled, and he would only return to his escritoire and get some bloody scribbling done when, having placed the cup of tea atop a saucer, he carried it out of the kitchen, before which he would have ensured that the tea-strainer and the teaspoon had been rinsed under the tap and placed for the time being on the draining board anent the sink, there to dry in the warm fug of kitcheny air. But that was about as far away from his escritoire as he got. There is no evidence that he ever trudged the streets of Pointy Town, alert to the sights and sounds and smells of what Keith Pratt, husband of the toyshop assistant Candice-Marie Pratt, famously termed “the hurly burly of the urban conurbation”. I forgot to mention, by the way, that before rinsing the tea-strainer under the tap in the sink, Dobson would have deposited the tea leaves caught in the strainer into a waste bin in the kitchen, one with a flip top lid, a lid raised and lowered by depressing a pedal at the exterior base of the bin with the sole of his foot. Some might accuse me of wittering away with far too much detail about the inconsequentialities of Dobson’s doings, but in my view it is the duty of a biographer to act as a conjuror who makes his subjects “walk and appear that have layen in their graves many hundreds of years”, as John Aubrey put it. And, yes, I am well aware that Dobson has not been dead that long, but I am writing for posterity, even if I am writing a short article for a tatty magazine rather than a big fat biography.

Ted Cack need not justify his methods to me. I am always delighted to read even the most trivial prattle about the twentieth century’s titanic out of print pamphleteer. In fact, I would be spellbound by an account of his making of coffee, or cocoa, or his boiling of potatoes, or his chopping of carrots, or a myriad of other activities, those performed in the kitchen and elsewhere. Each fragmentary glimpse of Dobson contributes to our portrait of the man, in all his Dobsonosity. Quite frankly, I don’t care if all that stuff he wrote in his Urban Diary was mere figment, embroidered from the stuffing of his brain, rather than based on direct observation of whatever was going on in Pointy Town at the time.

But what, precisely, was that stuff? And why did not a single newspaper or periodical editor show the slightest interest in it? After the initial rejections, Dobson thought that by issuing the pamphlet as a kind of sampler, and sending copies to editors, he would have them fighting tooth and claw, bidding ever more ridiculous sums of money, to engage him as a regular urban diarist. In the event, the tatty pamphlets were chucked, unread, into bins, much like the tea leaves from Dobson’s tea strainer. Trudges In Towns was meant to be the first in a series, but no subsequent pamphlets were ever written, and it stands alone and isolated in the Dobson canon.

The problem, I think – and Ted Cack agrees with me – is that the day Dobson chose to write about for his first Urban Diary happened to be a day on which all the countryside persons for miles around descended upon Pointy Town en masse, with their carts and horses and hay and straw and turnips and potatoes and shapeless hats and smocks and muck and slurry and what have you. Even if the pamphleteer had roamed further than his kitchen, in the streets and alleys and mews of Pointy Town he would have met with nobody but peasants, wide-eyed and dribbling and, of course, babbling gibberish in the guise of rustic wisdom and so befuddling Dobson’s brain.

It is his very befuddlement that is expressed in the text, which makes no sense whatsoever, and is largely unreadable. Even young hothead Ted Cack doesn’t understand it, nor even claim to, and that is saying something.

A new edition of Trudges In Towns, in which all the original words are crossed out and replaced by others, from opposite ends of the dictionary, is currently in preparation. Ted Cack is writing an extremely lengthy foreword, in which he promises to examine in detail Dobson’s habitual method of tying his bootlaces in the first week of March 1954.

I am enormously pleased to see that an enterprising publisher has issued a collection of Dobson’s so-called nature writings. At some point in the early nineteen-fifties the pamphleteer managed to persuade a harassed and overtired newspaper editor to let him loose on the paper’s Country Diary column. The regular correspondent had been incapacitated in a badger-gassing episode that went spectacularly wrong, and Dobson, weirdly alert to such things, immediately presented himself at the newspaper offices. It is the columns he wrote, in his temporary incumbency, which have now been gathered together and published in a handsome volume. Most of this material will be new, even to the most indefatigable Dobsonist.

Albeit he was only a stand-in, it was a daring appointment, perhaps an act of desperation. For all his undoubted talent as a crafter of sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose, Dobson was profoundly ignorant of the natural world. He was perhaps the least-qualified person ever to write a nature column in a national newspaper. Had the editor not been harassed and overtired, he would surely have sent the pamphleteer packing with a flea in his ear. Instead, Dobson was given a desk and a notepad and a pen and some blotting paper and told to knock together a thousand words in time for the next print-run, in a couple of hours’ time.

Have you ever gassed a badger? he began, and followed it with nine hundred and ninety-four words recounting the badger-gassing episode that went spectacularly wrong which led to the incapacitation of the regular Country Diary columnist and explained why he, Dobson, was sitting at his desk and using his pen and notepad and blotting paper. Not that I will need the blotting paper, he wrote, As so surely do I craft my sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose that nary a blot of ink e’er besmirches them. By the time it was typeset and printed, of course, none among his readers could know that, on the contrary, the pamphleteer’s manuscripts were hideous to behold, a mass of scratches and scribbles and nib-stabbings liberally splattered with blots, of ink and sweat and spit and blood.

Did you gas a badger yesterday? he wrote the next day, and the day after his column began Well, have you gassed any badgers yet? At this point a subeditor stepped in and suggested, tentatively, that Dobson might want to broaden the subject matter of his column. There was more to nature, this chap suggested, than the gassing of badgers, a topic of which, after all, the pamphleteer appeared to know next to nothing. Dobson flew into a temper and accused the subeditor of being harassed and overtired, which was undoubtedly true. But after calming down and smoking a few acrid Serbian cigarettes and doodling a map of Pointy Town on a sheet of blotting paper, he relented, and apologised, and promised to extend his range, as he put it, for the next day’s Country Diary.

The beauty of this new collection is that it includes some of the columns Dobson wrote which were spiked and never appeared in the paper. Among them are the next day’s piece, his fourth, and the first not to fixate upon the gassing of badgers.

Over the last few days, he wrote, I have had much to say about the gassing of badgers. Several letters have landed on my desk from readers, suggesting that I have no idea what I am talking about. Be that as it may, it is time to move on to pastures new. There is more, much more, to the natural world than badger-gassing, or so I have been advised. For instance, have you ever gassed a swan?

These and the following nine hundred and twenty-five words were spiked, or rather set fire to, and their space in the paper taken up instead by a mezzotint of a badger by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint. Dobson was summoned to the editor’s office and told to avoid, if possible, any mention of gas in his future columns. He asked if the interdiction included marsh gas. Marsh gas, declared the editor, after some thought and pencil-chewing, was an acceptable topic, but only after a week or two. First Dobson would have to show that he was capable of writing a wholly gasless Country Diary column. Seething, Dobson agreed.

The pamphleteer was now in something of a pickle. What on earth was he going to write about? Thanks to this invaluable collection, in hard covers, we know the answer to that question. Dobson somehow managed to string together sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose about voles, spinneys, farm implements, tractors, riverbanks, weasels, owls, canal towpaths, orchards, copses, bogs, ditches, rainfall, slurry, pigs, flocks of Stalins, hollyhocks, mud, lupins, nuthatches, wild rampaging boars, ungassed badgers, henbane, hen coops, Vanbrugh chickens, puddles, ponds, linnets, and a legion of other suitably rustic topics. All of them were addressed in his column the next day, Friday.

Before he sloped off home that evening, Dobson was surprised to learn that in the paper’s Saturday edition, the Country Diary was given double the space. Two thousand words?, he asked, incredulous. Quite so, said the harassed and overtired subeditor. Dobson went away fuming. He decided not to head for home after all, but to seek inspiration by spending the night in the open, sprawled in the middle of a field, out in the countryside. Ignorant as he was of country ways, he did not know that the field in which he chose to sprawl was a haunt of badgers, and that at dead of night, farmers bent on badger destruction came stamping through the muck armed with gas canisters.

When dawn broke, Dobson was sprawled, not in an open field, but in a bed in a clinic for gas victims. Incapacitated, and unable to file his copy, he was told the newspaper no longer required his services. The regular Country Diary correspondent had made a full recovery and was back at his desk, or rather, at a desk alongside it, his own desk, which Dobson had commandeered, having been taken away by the janitor to be scrubbed clean of the stains of ink and sweat and spit and blood with which the pamphleteer had besmirched it.

Several months later, Dobson contacted the editor to suggest he write a daily column about gas. The editor dropped his letter into a waste chute.

The pamphleteer Dobson had an idée fixe that anyone born on the first of April needs must be a fool, and an incorrigible and irredeemable fool at that. (It is pertinent to note that Dobson took great pains never to divulge his own date of birth and seems to have destroyed all records of it.) Challenged to provide evidence for his theory, Dobson embarked on the writing of a pamphlet. Putatively entitled A Compendium Of Foolishness, its subtitle gives a succinct summary of what we could have read had he ever written it: A Bumper Collection Of Anecdotes Regarding Acts Of Foolishness Committed By Fools Born On All Fools Day. As far as we know, he got no further than scribbling the title with his propelling pencil on a sheet of notepaper, at which point he sat gazing out of the window for hours, trying to think of appropriate tales of foolishness. Rummaging around in that capacious pamphleteering brain, he drew a blank.

Dobson was reluctant to abandon the project so soon, but felt unequal to conducting any research. He had only recently recovered from an attack of the spraingue, had one arm in a sling, was temporarily blind in one eye, and spent the best part of his waking hours with his feet submerged in a bowl of jelly water. Such was my pitiable condition, he wrote, That the very thought of conducting fool research risked a recurrence of the spraingue. I was at my wits’ end, and could only gaze out of the window for hours on end in hopeless despair, munching cake.

One wet Thursday morning during this period, Dobson was disturbed by a hammering at his door. He removed his feet from the bowl, slipped on a pair of Argentinian Public Baths Attendants’ pantoufles, and went to admit his visitor. It turned out to be the radio broadcaster Gilbert Viperhead, the very man who had demanded, on air, that Dobson prove his theory about fools. He was brandishing a horsewhip.

“You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!” cried the radio host, “And unless you provide me with conclusive proof that those of us born on All Fools Day are fools, I shall give you a damned good thrashing with this horsewhip I am brandishing!”

“As you can see,” replied Dobson, “I am a sick man. Allow me time to recover from my recent attack of the spraingue and I shall furnish you with so much evidence it will be pouring out of your ears.”

In spite of his florid face and the demeanour of an enraged retired colonel, Viperhead was a reasonable man. He unbrandished the horsewhip and accepted the cup of tea Dobson offered him. They spent an hour in almost pleasant conversation, discoursing on topics such as the spraingue, radio broadcasts, fools, jelly water, and horsewhips.

But when he had gone, Dobson realised his dilemma. Sooner or later, he was going to have to justify his fool theory, or remain in permanent convalescence. And then he had what was to prove a fateful idea. He scurried back to his escritoire, took off the pantoufles, plunged his feet back into the bowl, took his propelling pencil and some notepaper, and started scribbling away.

Dear Cicely Courtneidge, he wrote, You were born on the first of April and are therefore a fool. Please reply by return of post with two or three anecdotes of incidents or episodes in your life which demonstrate your utter foolishness. Yours sincerely, Dobson.

He stuffed this missive into an envelope, scribbled Cicely Courtneidge’s name and last known address on it, sealed it, and affixed a stamp. He then wrote identical letters to Emperor Go-Saga of Japan, William Harvey, John Wilmot, Otto von Bismarck, Ferruccio Busoni, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Edgar Wallace, Lon Chaney Senior, Wallace Beery, Whittaker Chambers, Lor Tok, Toshiro Mifune, Milan Kundera, Debbie Reynolds, Ali McGraw, Samuel R Delany, Annie Nightingale, Ronnie Lane, David Gower, Susan Boyle, Philip Schofield, and Dennis Kruppke. He would not need to track down anecdotes of foolery – the anecdotes would come to him! Dobson was not so foolish as to think that some of his correspondents were still alive, but he hoped that, by cleverly pre-dating some of his letters, their heirs might feel duty bound to reply. What he did not take into account was the fact that some of the living recipients might take exception to being called a fool by an obscure and penurious scribbler.

So it was that, on a wet Wednesday morning shortly after shoving all these letters into the postbox at the end of the lane, Dobson was disturbed by a hammering at his door. He removed his feet from the bowl of jelly water, slipped on a pair of Peruvian bordello keeper’s pantoufles, and went to admit his visitor. It turned out to to be Jack Hulbert, star of stage and screen and husband of Cicely Courtneidge. He was brandishing a horsewhip.

“You, sir, are a scoundrel and a cad!” he cried, “How dare you insult my dear wife by calling her a fool? I am going to give you a damned good thrashing with this horsewhip I am brandishing!”

“As you can see,” said Dobson, but before he could get another word out Jack Hulbert began thrashing him with the horsewhip. The pamphleteer learned that day that not all outraged gents are as amenable to reason and cups of tea as Gilbert Viperhead. It was not the only visit he received that week that left him battered and bruised and bewailing his own foolishness.

He never did write the pamphlet.