Dennis Beerpint’s majestic poem Two Monks Took The Blood Of A Duck is the subject of Key’s Cupboard in The Dabbler this week. Elderly Hooting Yard readers will know that the title is taken from Alfred Wesley Wishart’s A Short History Of Monks And Monasteries (1900), wherein we also learn – in the same brief quotation – that St Ursula had three heads. She is one of the very few Catholic saints to have more than  one head, a fact which becomes blindingly clear if you tot up the number of saints and then count the number of saints’ heads. The two numbers almost match, but however many times you do the calculation you will always find slightly more saints’ heads than saints.

In their girlhood, both of my sisters attended an Ursuline Convent School, and I asked them if the three-headed nature of their dedicatory saint had any decisive influence on the school’s ethos.

“No,” they said, “Don’t be such a nitwit.”

My sisters have one head each.

Quiz time in my cupboard at The Dabbler this week. Match nine passages of sober and sensible twentieth-century prose to the works in which they originally appeared, tainting the very air with a shuddering miasma of crepitant dread!

Hooting Yard remains in what I like to think of, melodramatically, as a security lockdown, but my cupboard over at The Dabbler has not been neglected. Yesterday it contained some useful tips on dealing with your foes, if you have any. Meanwhile, I may be approaching the end of my unplanned yet necessary diversion away from the important business of tippy-tapping majestic prose, and should be back soon.

Over at the super soaraway Dabbler this week I provide readers with some tips on how to make a homunculus. These miniature persons can be very helpful, if a bit eerie. Hooting Yard certainly couldn’t cope unless we had a little band of homunculi scurrying about taking care of business and protecting us from harm.

Today at The Dabbler, my indispensable guide to the Regal Woading, which I reproduce here:

By rights, several dimblebys should be on hand to guide you through the events of today’s regal woading, but they have been ripp’d untimely from their anchorage, so I am stepping into the breach. Let us be joyful.

Before entering into the state of woaded bliss, the darlings are pulled by elegant horses in procession through the streets of the capital. These streets are lined by flag-waving peasants and other savages, watched over by coppers with clubs “on the ground”, as they say, and, from high buildings, by snipers armed with high-velocity rifles and walkie-talkies. But the mood is rightly joyous. The peasants wave their flags and, as the carriages progress, the darlings, yet unwoaded, wave back, though flagless. The horses have been equipped with tackle that occludes their peripheral vision, to prevent them seeing anything that might make them panic and, in panic, go galloping pell mell, crushing peasants beneath their hooves. Were that to happen, to continue with the woading would be unseemly, and there must be not a smidgen of unseemliness on this day of all days. Hence the horses’ blinkers-tackle.

Within the huge ensteepled and consecrated edifice await the guests and the shamen. None has need of blinkers. The arch-shaman is a fellow with a ragged grey-white beard, as is considered proper for his office. He will perform the rite of regal woading when the darlings are ushered, separately, into the cavernous interior of the edifice. See, there, the trough of woad, and the siphon and funnel and besplattering implement which will be used to woad-besplatter the darlings at the most significant moment of the ceremony.

But first there is much rigmarole, of a kind that cries out for interpretation-by-dimbleby. The arch-shaman, or one of his acolytes, will ascertain that the woading is pure, unalloyed and sullied not by any hint of bewolfenbuttlement. In a modern woading such as this, those watching electrical transmissions may be able to see each individual grey-white hair in the arch-shaman’s beard trembling faintly in the cool air. It is a sight to behold. The horses remain outwith the edifice, stamping their hooves, being fed from nosebags. The peasants and savages too, stay in their pens beside the streets, feeding from crisp-packets. The coppers and snipers stay alert.

Inside there is solemn blathering and the woading itself, and the darlings buss their lips, and a great hosannah of voices is raised in song. Here even a dimbleby might pause, to let it sink in, sound and spectacle without comment. Then, blue with woad, the darlings emerge, upon the steps, to much cheering and clanging of bells, before climbing together into a carriage to be pulled by snack-refreshed horses for the return procession. Somewhere in the teeming masses, a “student” raises a placard of contempt. Before he can be clubbed by a copper or shot by a sniper, he is torn limb from limb by a gaggle of peasants, unnoticed by the larger throng. It is meet that it should be so.

Across the land, jelly and ice cream are gobbled. Huzzah!

In The Dabbler this week I examine in breathtaking detail the parliamentary career of a scientist who dabbled in politics. Dabbler he may have been, but Sir Isaac Newton’s record as a parliamentarian, albeit brief, was exemplary, and ought to serve as a model for some of the more loathsome specimens at large in the Palace of Westminster today.

This week in my cupboard at The Dabbler I launch an exciting new series in which I dispense free online legal advice to the unwashed masses. Our first topic is bonkers alibis. There is, I am told, a body of opinion that reliable legal advice is best sought from qualified practitioners who have devoted a number of years to study of the law. There is some merit in this view. Unfortunately, if I took it seriously, I would not be in a position to dispense legal advice of any sort, and that would never do, would it? I like nothing better than to stand on street corners haranguing passers-by with legal tips, through a loudhailer if necessary, or even a tannoy, whether those passers-by are in need of the advice or not. After all, the day may come when they will need it, hoit cum toit, tolly polly, rinkum dinkum.

It is also worth pointing out that you may benefit from deep textual study of my legal tips even if you are not a member of the unwashed masses, for example if you are the sort of person who bathes occasionally and shuns human company, aloft in your ivory tower. Such persons are still placed under arrest, rightly or wrongly, particularly if Detective Captain Cargpan is in a bad temper, as he so often is, when he has not roughed somebody up for a few hours. Why, only the other day I heard tell of a fellow, an inhabitant of an ivorian turret given to preening upon his balcony spitting upon and hurling anathemas at the unwashed masses gathered below at the foot of his turret, with their pitchforks and stink. Up the spiral staircase lumbered Cargpan and his toughs, and they bashed this chap about and dragged him off to the nick, where they bashed him about some more before charging him with several obscure crimes most of us thought had been removed from the statute book, such as “leaning against his own mantelpiece” and “having an oddly-shaped head”.

Of course, I knew these were still heinous acts of criminality, even though I have never studied the law. My knowledge comes from having memorised Dobson’s pamphlet How To Fill Your Brain With Arcane Legal Precepts Through Simple Will-Power And Osmosis (out of print). The ivorian turreteer did not, alas, retain me as his legal advocate, and that is why he is now serving twenty thousand years in Sing Sing, or in the Pointy Town equivalent of Sing Sing, which is called something like Bing Bang or Ping Pong or Whiff Whaff. It is not to be confused with the thrilling sport of the same name, played with light little white balls and bats. The bats are not white, though they are fairly light and fairly little, when compared, say, to big bats like bludgeons, the ones Detective Captain Cargpan issues to his ruffians on the morning of an arrest. Nor are these the same bats that hang upside down in caves and flit and swoop and occasionally become entangled in the hair of screeching girlies in certain genres of film.

I hope from the above it is clear that I have an enviable grasp of many matters, legal and otherwise, and therefore can almost always be relied upon when dispensing advice, in The Dabbler and elsewhere.

I am pleased to report that Hooting Yard came out on top in a recent poll asking punters “Which blog with the word ‘Hooting’ in its title do you think keeps its finger most firmly on the pulse of the global body politic?” Many thanks to the untold billions of readers who voted for us. Commemorative biros will be in the post shortly (ink not included).

Sometimes, however, one has to hike elsewhere to find out what’s really going on, as airheads and conspiracy theorists like to put it. So today you had better open the door of my cupboard in The Dabbler, where the current unrest in Libya is fully and cogently analysed through the prism of some Libyan proverbs.

This week at The Dabbler I’ve devoted some words to the ever-intriguing subject of birds. Long-time readers will have read it before. I can always be relied on for avian lore. Some say I know not of what I speak, which is a monumental bit of cheek. Whether it’s a pratincole, a lark, or a linnet, I know all there is to know about birds, innit? Oh for the wings, for the wings of a dove! Or the wings of a nuthatch if push comes to shove. When push comes to shove I usually fall over. Unlike the corncrake, the wren, or the plover. They just fly away, on wings of song. I think that’s correct, but I may be wrong. There is so much to learn about birds of the air, more than my pea-sized brain can bear. But rather than stumbling through mental fog, I read words of wisdom in The Dabbler blog.

Over at The Dabbler this week I recall my favourite pedagogue, a chap with a jarring speech impediment. A slightly different version of the piece appeared here some years ago. One detail that I certainly had no intention of changing, for obvious reasons, was the pedagogue’s use, for pedagogic purposes, of tonybuzanities. These awe-inspiring pedagogic aids are named after Tony Buzan, he of the sepulchral voice and the flowing black cape – truly a boulevard magnifico, if ever there was one, and a magnifico whose brain pulsates at a rate lesser mortals can only dream about, while dribbling and grovelling at his feet.

Imagine your distress if, during the burial service of your dear departed, the vicar was seen to be chewing filberts! Or consider your consternation if, awaiting in her chamber the farmer’s wife with whom you were about to commit adultery, the door crashed open to admit, not the object of your illicit affections, but a fearsome bear! You can read about these and other shocking incidents from the late eighteenth-century, including the discovery of a submerged hazelnut hedge, in my cupboard at The Dabbler this week.

One for the Blodgettists in my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, wherein you may find limned the fate awaiting you in the month o’ March. If things do not quite turn out as predicted, please note that no legal system in the world will convict Blodgett of chicanery, so do not even try to have him hauled before a court.

Speaking of The Dabbler, beery readers ought to hie on over to this postage, in which you get the opportunity to win a case of Bath Ales. In fact, you should take part come what may, simply to support the super soaraway Dabbler and thus, by extension, Mr Key himself.

You will need to read Key’s Cupboard in The Dabbler with particular care this week. I am planning to use each of the phrases listed therein as the punchline of a spectacularly well-crafted and hilarious joke, each joke to form one chapter of a spectacularly well-crafted and hilarious comic novel. The critics will be helpless with laughter, and I shall be awarded laurels.

That, at any rate, is the plan. If it has a flaw – oh, and it does! it does! – it is that I am not much of a gag-writer. So that is where you lot come in. Readers are invited to provide me with jokes to which the lines listed in the cupboard are the perfect, irresistible punchlines. I will then cobble them all together into the funniest novel ever written.

Naturally, I will take full credit, to make certain of getting those laurels wrapped around my head. Your reward, and it is a fine one, will rest in the knowledge that your wit and hilarity is represented by a laurel leaf touching the bonce of Mr Key. Whingers and ingrates may be further placated by having their names scribbled on the leaves with non-permanent marker pens. I can’t say fairer than that, can I?