Capacious and pulsating it may have been, but Dobson’s brain contained many, many pockets of ignorance. He was in his mid fifties, for example, when he first came upon the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, a work of which he had no previous inkling. He did not read it, merely noting the title on the spine of a copy lodged on the bookshelf of his friend Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the Sino-Dutch artist and mountaineer.

Back at home later that day, he mentioned it to Marigold Chew.

“Did you know that an eleventh century Japanese bint wrote an entire book about pillows?” he asked.

“Yes, Dobson, of course,” said Marigold Chew, “I have borrowed it from the mobile library more than once, and read it from cover to cover.”

“Speaking of the mobile library,” said Dobson, and he embarked on a long-winded and pettifogging digression upon the mobile library, which in that place at that time took the form of a cart pulled by an elegant yet tubercular drayhorse, the cart piled high with hardbacks covered in greaseproof paper jackets, the drayhorse chivvied on its way by an equally elegant and equally tubercular librarian-carter, a man of grim countenance and terrible personal habits who bore a distinct resemblance to the actor Karl Johnson, noted for his roles as elderly peasant Twister Turrill in Lark Rise To Candleford and as Wittgenstein in Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein. In fact, it may even have been Johnson himself, moonlighting as a mobile librarian to supplement his thespian earnings. Dobson posited this possibility, but doubted it was true, as we, too, must doubt it until all the evidence is in.

So implacable was the pamphleteer’s babbling that Marigold Chew was unable to get a word in edgeways, and was thus given no opportunity to point out to Dobson that the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, like all pillow books, was not actually a book about pillows, but a collection of lists and aphorisms and observations and jottings and poems and opinions and anecdotes. Had he ceased prattling for but a moment, Dobson would have learned this, and not, when eventually he exhausted the topic of the mobile library and the greaseproof paper jackets and the drayhorse and the librarian-carter and the actor and the fictional peasant and the non-fictional philosopher, gone scurrying off to his escritoire to sit and scribble the following:

I have learned that a thousand years ago, a woman from the land of Yoko Ono wrote an entire book about pillows. Such is human progress that in the intervening millennium there must be much, much more to be said on the subject. Clearly I am the pamphleteer to take on this daunting task. I shall set to work on the Pillow Book of Dobson as soon as I have taken a nap. NB: The nap will of course be research for my Pillow Book, as I shall be resting my head upon a pillow while I nap, and present my findings as soon as I wake up.

As far as we know, the promised “findings” were never written down. So refreshed was Dobson by his nap that, upon waking, he immediately put on his Iberian duck hunter’s boots, grabbed an Alpenstock in his fist, and set out for a jaunty hike that took him past the electricity pylons and the abandoned swimming pool and the badger rescue station and the allotments. All the while he hiked, he concentrated his mind on pillows – a thousand years of pillows! His brain reeled as he struggled to comprehend the sheer amount of material he would have to marshal in the making of his Pillow Book. What advances mankind must have made in the field of pillows since the eleventh century! How many heads had rested on how many pillows in that time? How many dreams dreamt during pillow-assisted dozes and naps and even comas? Pausing for a breather outside the bolted and shuttered off licence, Dobson suddenly felt intimidated by the scale of the task before him. He watched the skies for swifts and sparrows and starlings and other birds beginning with S. He rattled the bolts on the off licence door. He chucked his Alpenstock into a ditch. And then he turned for home, resolved to write, not a Pillow Book, but a whole series of Pillow Pamphlets, each to tackle a single, manageable subsection of his vast unwieldy subject matter.

“Marigold!” he announced, bustling through the door, “I have had a brainwave with regard to my working methods on the pillow project!”

“I did not know you had embarked upon a pillow project, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, “And what have you done with the Alpenstock?”

“Oh, I chucked it into a ditch,” said Dobson, “I shall go and retrieve it later. But first I must write out the plan for my Pillow Pamphlets, updating a thousand years of pillow history since Sei Shōnagon wrote her book about pillows long long ago in far Japan!”

But so exhausted was the pamphleteer by his hiking and his brain activity that before sitting at his escritoire he took another nap. He thus set a pattern for what was to follow. Every time he determined to set to work on the Pillow Pamphlets, he convinced himself that further practical pillow research was necessary, and lay his head upon a pillow, and fell asleep.

The project was eventually abandoned when the pamphleteer’s attention was distracted by cataclysmic world events, and he turned his energies to writing his famous pamphlet On The Inadvisability Of Taking Daytime Naps During The Unfolding Of Cataclysmic World Events (out of print).

I should perhaps give some explanation of the postages headed The Funnel, Volumes One and Two. They comprise the lists of contents of the only two editions of a decisively obscure magazine entitled The Funnel, conceived and written by Dobson and edited and published by Marigold Chew.

Dobson was insanely jealous of the success of the Reader’s Digest, every single issue of which sold more copies than even his most popular pamphlets. Trudging along one morning past the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing, it occurred to him that whereas his pamphlets tended, in the main, to address one subject at a time, the great attraction of the Reader’s Digest was its variety. Each copy came packed with diverting disquisitions on topics as various as John’s kidney, escapes from imperilment, Jane’s liver, Aztec antiquities, anticommunist hysteria, and astrological flummery.

“To hell with pamphlets!” shouted the pamphleteer, at a siskin perched upon a bough. The siskin is, in the words of one ornithologist, an attractive little finch, but it has no understanding of human speech, so Dobson’s words were wasted. But when he arrived home, having plodded around the edge of the eerie marsh, he repeated his imprecation to Marigold Chew.

“Gosh,” she said, adding “You could just staple four or five pamphlets together, and that would provide the variety you seek, Dobson.”

“Have you actually seen the Reader’s Digest?” shouted Dobson, “It covers far more than four or five topics. It is so packed with prose that its binding needs a spine, unlike virtually ever other magazine available at this point in the twentieth century!”

“So staple ten or a dozen pamphlets together, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew.

“No staple is big or sturdy enough for the popular magazine I envisage!” shouted Dobson, and he began pouring milk into a bowl.

Over the following weeks and months, the pamphleteer and his inamorata thrashed out the details of a publication Dobson was convinced would have the editor of the Reader’s Digest either grovelling piteously at his feet or banging his head repeatedly against the damp stone walls of an oubliette in a secure facility for lunatics. Each issue of the as yet untitled magazine would contain not ten, not a dozen, but thirteen articles, penned by Dobson but with titles provided by Marigold Chew. She would enter into a shamanistic trance-frenzy, cavorting dizzily around a bonfire in the back garden, twigs and bones and feathers entwined in her hair, and summon from eldritch tonybuzanities a set of two-word titles based on the alphabet (issue one) or the qwerty keyboard layout (issue two). Fuelled by plentiful tumblers of aerated radishwater, Dobson would write all the articles in one marathon scribbleathon, the reams and reams of dazzling prose typeset and Gestetnered by Marigold Chew, and untold millions of copies piled high in a convoy of container lorries revving their diesel motors outside the house, ready to fan out across the land to doctors’ and dentists’ waiting rooms and other carefully selected distribution points.

On a Thursday night in November, Marigold Chew induced a shamanistic trance-frenzy and delivered forth twenty-six titles for Dobson to crack on with. At dawn, brandishing the flayed skin of a wolf on which the titles were daubed in her own blood, she went looking for the pamphleteer, who was nowhere to be found in the house. She found him beyond the pollarded willows by the canal just before the level crossing, slumped in the muck, weeping.

“Here, Dobson,” she cried, still in a partial frenzy, “The contents of issues one and two of The Funnel are ready for you, wrenched from realms beyond sense!”

But Dobson continued to weep, clawing at the mud.

“All is hopeless, hopeless,” he whimpered, “I have just been apprised, by Sputnik or some such space age contraption, of the latest Reader’s Digest circulation figures. I must be mad to think I could ever match them. No, Marigold, I am afraid it is back to the drudgery of pamphleteering for me. Tell the convoy of container lorries to drive away. I shall weep and claw some more and then I shall come home and pour milk into a bowl.”

“Right-o, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, brightly, “And I shall put the kettle on and pop the smokers’ poptarts into the toaster.”

And thus dawned a Friday morning in November. Far far away, in Texas, Lee Harvey Oswald woke from an uneasy sleep, got ready for work, and before leaving the house, plopped his wedding ring into a pale, translucent, blue-green china teacup with violets and a golden rim that once belonged to his wife’s grandmother.

Sometimes, though rarely, Dobson’s heart would swell with a charitable impulse, and on one such occasion he hatched the plan of inventing a novelty sandwich paste, the profit from sales of which he would donate to his local otter sanctuary.

“I shall call it Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste,” he explained to Marigold Chew, “The better to fix in the minds of my customers the eventual destination of their pennies.”

“It is a capital idea, Dobson,” replied Marigold Chew, “But it has a fatal flaw.”

Dobson’s face soured.

“Oh? And what might that be?” he asked.

“We do not have a local otter sanctuary,” said Marigold Chew. And she tossed a pebble off the bridge across which they were ploughing, into the tumultuous river below.

Later, back at home, the out of print pamphleteer racked his brains for a way to salvage his scheme, for the charitable impulse was still throbbing. After a prolonged bout of pencil-sharpening, which he found conducive to concentrated thought, Dobson made a Eurekaish grunting noise and ran out into the garden, where Marigold Chew was busy with a pair of pruning shears.

“Who says the otter sanctuary need be a local one?” he cried, “I can divert the profits to a remote otter sanctuary!”

“All well and good,” said his inamorata, “But consider something else, Dobson. Is there not a danger that your potential customers, otter-lovers every man jack of them, might construe that a paste called Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste is actually made out of pulverised otters? Even if they are wrong, I suspect sales would suffer, simply due to the misunderstanding.”

Dobson retreated indoors and sharpened dozens more pencils. An hour later he was back in the garden.

“Each tub of Otter Sanctuary Sandwich Paste would bear a label, a bold and bright label, on which would be emblazoned the slogan ‘Does Not Contain Otters’. That would set the otter-lovers’ minds at rest, would it not?”

“It would,” said Marigold Chew, snipping a sprig from a shrub, “But what ingredients would your sandwich paste contain, if it is to be, as you suggested while we were ploughing across the bridge earlier, a novelty sandwich paste?”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Dobson, airily, “I will think of something.”

Dobson now had two immediate tasks to accomplish, which we can summarise for the slow-witted reader as follows.

1. To identify a remote otter sanctuary deserving of the out of print pamphleteer’s largesse.

2. To concoct a novelty sandwich paste the recipe for which must contain not a trace of otter nor of the by-products of otters.

To facilitate his thinking on these critical matters, Dobson would need to sharpen a goodly number of pencils. Yet every pencil in the house had been sharpened to its utmost pointiness, as a result of which the blades of the Dobson-Chew pencil sharpener were blunted, and needed either to be honed upon a whetstone or else replaced with new blades. Thus, in addition to the tasks enumerated above, the pamphleteer faced two further challenges, viz:

1. To obtain a fresh batch of pencils.

2(a). To have sharpened the existing blades of the pencil sharpener, or

2(b). To replace the blades with brand new ones, gleaming and lethal.

A moment’s thought was all Dobson needed to realise that he could accomplish both these aims by paying a visit to the stationery department at Hubermann’s. In spite of the fact that it was pouring buckets of rain, he donned his Belgian Railway Official’s boots, lacing them so tightly he was in danger of cutting off the blood supply below his ankles, and clattered out of the house into the downpour.

One thing it is important for the reader to understand about Dobson is that, in spite of his bookish erudition, he was a man profoundly ignorant of the natural world. His witlessness in ornithological matters is well-attested. But did you know that, if you were to line up for him, as at an identity parade, an otter and a stoat and a weasel and a vole and a shrew, Dobson would have a deal of difficulty telling you which was which? He had never paid proper attention to his small mammal lessons at school, and forever after in life was lumbered with bafflement about such creatures.

Knowing this, we can grasp an understanding of what happened next. Trudging along the towpath of the filthy old canal on his way to Hubermann’s in the rain, Dobson was set upon by a trio of savage and starving small mammals roused by the smell of his Belgian Railway Official’s boots. They had, you see, recently been smeared with a protective coat of some sort of dubbin-substitute by a wizened and scrofulous pedlar who came a-knocking at Dobson’s door hawking his wares. Whatever this substance was, and however well or ill it protected the boots, it was absolutely irresistible to certain small mammals. Thus it was that, in their frenzy about Dobson’s feet, his tiny attackers caused the pamphleteer to lose his balance, and he toppled over the edge of the towpath into the canal.

The rain had reduced to a drizzle by the time Dobson, sopping wet and with bits of canal-water vegetation sticking out of his bouffant, came crashing through the door and slumped in a chair. Marigold Chew gave him a quizzing look. He told her of his mishap.

“That remote otter sanctuary won’t get a penny from my sandwich paste!” shouted Dobson, “In fact, to be on the safe side I am not even going to make any sandwich paste! That will show them!”

“But was it a trio of otters that attacked your boots, or could it perhaps have been stoats or weasels or voles or shrews?” asked Marigold Chew.

Incapable of a sensible response, Dobson fell into a sulk.

A few miles away, on the outskirts of another town, a wizened and scrofulous pedlar hawking his wares knocked upon another door. In his punnet, he had jars and jars of paste for sale. Each was labelled, but the labels were hard to decipher. In one light, they read “Dubbin Substitute”, but then, seen from a different angle, “Novelty Sandwich Paste”. The pedlar was dressed all in green, and when he spoke, the timbre of his voice cast a spooky spell, as if he were a figure from a fairytale.