Here at Hooting Yard we rarely take note of tennis tournaments, but let it be recorded that Tsvetana Pironkova, who surprisingly knocked Venus Williams out of the Women’s Singles at Wimbledon yesterday, hails from Plovdiv in Bulgaria. No doubt the plucky giant-killer was inspired by the Plovdiv Central Post Office mural painted by Georgi Bozhilov, a member of the legendary Plovdiv Fivesome. Perhaps, too, she grew up listening to the stories of Ugo and his blind Ma and his pal Ulf in Old Plovdiv. I like to think she owes her success to these things, which have been given the all-important Hooting Yard imprimatur.
Archive for the 'Plovdiv' Category
Ahoy, Mr Key!, writes Dr Ruth Pastry, Thank you so much for affording us readers a glimpse of the inner workings of Hooting Yard in your piece on that Olympics logo. Brief as it was, I was fascinated by the reference to the editorial conclave, and to the fact that the bloated janitor remains an unreconstructed Blunkettite. The real reason I am writing, however, is because I am desperate to find out what Mrs Gubbins was knitting. Can you tell me?
Well, Ruth, yes I can! A few weeks ago, the octogenarian crone was approached by a charity working with the filthy and destitute denizens of that cluster of hovels out
We have published a number of Ugo stories here at Hooting Yard, so this would be an opportune time to pluck them from the Archive and present all six here afresh, some three years after they originally appeared:
Ugo Goofs Off
Ugo lived in
Ugo’s Pal Ulf
In
Ugo’s Pod
In the old town of
Ugo’s New Hooter
Back in
Ugo Turns Blue
It was Saint Hector’s Day in the old town of
Ugo Goes Loopy
One morning in
I have received a number of letters asking me to give some account of Old Farmer Frack. It is true that he was a mad old man, probably due to ergot poisoning. But he could be surprisingly lucid, too. For a time he employed a professional voice coach, more used to working with thespians, to help him develop exciting new roars and bellows. His cows were much given to bellowing, and Old Farmer Frack wanted to be able to bellow back in a way they would understand.
The voice coach was Satnav Gobgag, scion of the Bulgarian aeroplane manufacturing dynasty, whose huge hangars on the outskirts of
Exiled after the war to the country where Old Farmer Frack herded his tubercular cows, and by now grey and stooped and often covered in crumbs and dust, Satnav Gobgag fetched up at a ruined hotel on the seafront at Cack. He was only thirty-four, but looked to be twice that age, such had been his privations. It is well worth avoiding such privations if one can, but Satnav did not have the benefit of hindsight. Cut off without a penny by the Gobgag clan, accompanied in his exile by his pet coot, Satnav was on the point of starvation when into his hotel one day wandered Old Farmer Frack.
Q – What was the mad old man doing there, so far away from his cows?
A – He was in Cack to collect bags of sand, and stopped in at the hotel for a greasy breakfast, for he was fond of greasy breakfasts, but back at the farm usually made do with a dish of cowfeed.
Q – For what purpose did Old Farmer Frack need bags of sand from the beach at Cack?
A – To forestall, or avert, the flooding of his barns.
The pair struck up a conversation in the breakfast room of the hotel. And of what did they speak, this ill-matched duo? Why, they chattered away about the single topic that was convulsing the citizenry of Cack in those dark days, namely the invasion of an army of killer moorhens which was sweeping through the town in wave after wave of destructive mayhem. Satnav’s poor coot was cooped up in his hotel room for its own protection, and the penniless voice coach was frantic with fear what would happen to it when, as must surely soon happen, he and his coot were tossed out on their ears for non-payment. He reckoned without the lackadaisical approach of the hotel manager, Grimes, who affected a foppish disregard for such niceties as money. So long as his chef cooked up a greasy breakfast, and there were petunias in the plant pots, Grimes was happy to lean against the wall in the lobby flicking ash onto the tiles from the Norwegian cigars he had specially flown in. By coincidence, his smokes arrived once a month on an aircraft of Gobgag manufacture.
Old Farmer Frack was temperamentally blind to any animals except his cows, so his brain was perplexed by this talk of moorhens. He kept trying to change the subject, without success. After a while, he sat back in a daze, hypnotised by his companion’s mellifluous fluting, high-pitched jabbering, booming ostinato, silky whispers, and impeccable diction, for Satnav was deploying all of his vocal talents in describing the terrible sight of a thousand murderous moorhens tramping relentlessly towards the shopping arcade. It was when he made a noise like a cow that Old Farmer Frack sprang out of his seat, grabbed him roughly by the collar, and demanded that he repeat his bovine bellowing. Shortly thereafter, a deal was struck between the two men. Satnav Gobgag fetched his coot, and his paltry luggage, from his room, and accompanied Old Farmer Frack aboard his cart as they trundled off along meandering lanes to the farm.
Within days, the mad old fool was having rewarding conversations with his cows. He bellowed at them and they bellowed back. As he herded them from field to field, purposelessly, through all hours of the day and night, his voice coach reclined on a rickety sofa improving his English with a thorough reading of Dobson pamphlets while his coot plashed happily in Farmer Frack’s pond.
The idyll could not last. One autumnal day, when fallen leaves from the pugton trees so clogged the pond that the coot stayed indoors, there came a hammering at the door. Old Farmer Frack was miles away, in the furthest of his fields, though a faint bellowing could be heard when the wind died down. The coot, still nerve-wracked from its sight, through the hotel window, of lethal moorhens, trembled. Satnav Gobgag dropped his pamphlet – I think it was Dobson’s Some Remarks On The Grotesque Pallor I Encountered This Morning In My Shaving Mirror (out of print) – and strode in his brave Bulgarian way to the door. Opening it, he was astonished to find Grimes, the hotelier of Cack, florid with rage and somehow deeply threatening in a windcheater the colour of custard and a stout pair of wellington boots. All foppishness gone, Grimes had come to demand money. So much money, in fact, that Satnav pictured himself doing the washing up in the unsavoury hotel kitchen for the next forty years.
Q – Had something happened to Grimes to make him suddenly mindful of the unpaid bills of his hotel guests?
A – Yes. He received a clonk on the head from a piece of falling masonry.
Q – Had he tracked down other past guests, or did he have some sort of vendetta against Satnav Gobgag?
A – The former. Grimes now spent his days on horseback, criss-crossing the land demanding money with menaces from those who had taken advantage of his formerly lax manner.
Q – What menaces did he threaten?
A – Menaces so heinous they are unsuitable for family reading.
Q – What happened next?
A – Satnav Gobgag did the washing up in the unsavoury hotel kitchen for the next forty years. His coot remained on the farm, where he visited it every other weekend until it perished. Old Farmer Frack, having learned as much bovine bellowing as he needed, continued to be mad, and bellowing, and his cows bellowed back at him, for ever and ever, Amen.
This piece first appeared in August 2004. I am posting it again for the simple reason that now, thanks to the indefatigable Salim Fadhley, it can be accompanied by a photograph, and thus be truly inspiring…
I am suffering from a spiritual malaise. I am soul sick. I have not eaten any breakfast. I need to darn a hole in the sleeve of my jumper, but I have no further wool that matches. I feel inconsequential and abandoned and remote. My cheeks blush furiously with an embarrassment born of pity. Every last pencil I have is blunt. I am being driven crackers by my landlord’s drooling hound. My senses are atrophied, like a muscle unexercised. Pots and pans are strewn haphazardly in my kitchen. My legs have given way. I have an evil taste in my mouth. Hope is something for other people, not for me. My teapot is cracked and the cosy is stained and threadbare. Nervous spasms contort my features. I keep to the shadows if I have to move in the street. Do you hear that sound? It is my groan of despair. I have extinguished all the lanterns and I know in my cold, base heart that they will never be lit again. The air is heavy with menace and all I can hear is the screaming of desolation and ruin. Insects swarm about my face but I cannot summon the energy to swat them away. I have sprained my ankle. Dust lies everywhere, ashes and dust. Desire, ah, desire for me is not even a memory. Feral cats hiss at me and extend their claws. Even my poultry is contaminated. All sense of urgency is lost and yet I cannot relax. My head is swimming. My shoes let in rainwater and my socks are soaking wet. The washbasin is cracked. The taps no longer work. Even the most innocent and cherubic children spit at me. I gag on my own wretchedness. And then with a mighty effort, I pull myself up, and I trudge across
Here is a 1930s photograph of the post office in Plovdiv. See the Comments for The Socks Of Pepintude to gain a deeper understanding.
Today I am wearing the Socks of Pepintude, and so attired I shall stride forth decisively. There is of course a risk that curs will snuffle at my socks, and kittens too, possibly, for the Socks of Pepintude emit odours which convulsively befuddle our four-footed friends, though they remain undetectable by the human nose. Or so I have been told by my spy at the lab, who keeps me up to date on such matters. It is best to wear a pair of tough Uruguayan Air Force boots over the Socks of Pepintude. This will go some way to deter curs, and kittens, and thus one’s decisive progress through the boulevards meets with less travail.
You may ask where I am going, so decisively, through the boulevards of this important town. I am going to the post office. Alas, unlike the post office in Plovdiv it is not emblazoned with a mural painted by the Plovdiv Fivesome, but none the less it is a very fine post office. Outside it on the esplanade is a flagpole with a big blue flag flying atop it. The doors are made of some weird iridescent metal and swoosh open as one approaches. Having thrown off any trailing curs and kittens I am going to cause those doors to swoosh and I shall make my decisive strides into the post office lobby, where a cadet in a cadet’s cap and tunic will point me towards a queue leading to a counter behind which I know in the innermost fibres of my being there will be a tally-stick person ready to sell me some postage-related items.
When the exchange has been made, I will exit again through the swooshing doors, having saluted the cadet, and I shall stride decisively into the esplanade, and gaze at the flag atop the flagpole, and I shall not flinch.
Source : Forty Visits To The Post Office by Dobson (out of print)
