Over at The Dabbler this week, the muffin dilemma of De Quincey’s lieutenant-colonel, one of the greatest of all breakfast anecdotes.
Elsewhere, global dominion continues apace with my diverse and vibrant wittering on Episode 72 of The Pod Delusion.
This week in The Dabbler I conduct a long-overdue inquiry into the death of Virginia Woolf. If everything goes according to plan, this should be the first in a series of inquiries into the deaths of the great modernists, a necessary step, surely, into any proper understanding of postmodernism. I have convinced myself that, once I fully grasp every last little detail of the deaths of the modernists, I will be in a much better position to winkle some meaning out of the endless clogged blather of standard po-mo prose. Some would say it is not worth the effort, and they are probably correct, so perhaps I ought to put the whole project into a dustbin or wastepaper basket. What a quandary!
In my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, you will be able to discover the causes of thousands of mid-nineteenth-century fires in an unnamed bailiwick served by “the Brigade”. Prometheus was never so busy a bee, nor so inventive. Salutary warnings are implicit in this list, and I recommend you keep a watchful eye on your monkey, your monkey’s nuts, your cargo of lime, your sewing, your rats and your ants.
It’s quiz time, readers! Limber up those cranial integuments and see if you can answer the following brain-teaser:
Who wrote these words?
“Our phaeton was a small, white, swan-shaped carriage, ornamented with golden designs, and propelled by a galvanic battery in the graceful swan-head, which at my request took the place of the ordinary steed. This was, to me, an exceedingly novel mode of travel, which my short sojourn in the spirit world had prevented me from before enjoying.”
Was it : A) Washington Irving, or B) the spirit-form of Washington Irving, transmitting its thoughts by mysterious means from its habitation in ethereal realms?
You will find a clue to the correct answer through a careful reading of the contents of my cupboard in today’s Dabbler.
Meanwhile, here at Hooting Yard, I will have a few things to say about the important topic of galvanic batteries embedded in the graceful heads of swans, soon, soon.
This week in The Dabbler I address the important topic of mud idol maintenance, with some simple tips on sprucing up your talismanic fetish object. This is the first article in a projected series intended to cover everything a sane person might wish to know about the subject. My people are currently in talks with a publisher, with a view to issuing the complete set as a part-work, building week by week into an exhaustive mud idol encyclopaedia, to be slotted in to ring-binders, eventually taking up an implausible amount of shelf-space. The marketing people insist that something like this will only sell if there is a “free gift” every week, so we are looking at the idea of giving away sachets of mud, sourced from a bog of mystic legend. If any readers can suggest an apt bog, please get in touch via your spirit medium.
Unlock the door of this week’s Dabbler cupboard, and when it creaks open you will find instructions on how to join DABBLEHUB, the exciting new antisocial faffing-about network. Aaron Sorkin is already at work on a feature film (silent, black-and-white, juddery camera-work) which will chronicle the troubled gestation of this most dabbly of hubs.
This week over at The Dabbler I am afraid I have had to issue a set of corrections and clarifications to Old Key’s Almanacke for 2011. As I point out, the errors in the original were probably due to the wrong kind of ectoplasm on the line, the “line” in this case being an invisible thread strung between the corporeal world and the eldritch realms inhabited by the shade of Old Key himself.
The mysterious prognosticator can, however, already claim a triumph of foresight in the first week of the year. Old Key noted that birds fall out of the sky when petulant Ozymandias, King of Kings, gets one of his temper tantrums, and what do we find? In Arkansas, blackbirds have plummeted from the blue, while flocks of jackdaws have crashed to earth in Sweden.
A missive arrives from Dr Ruth Pastry:
So then, Mr Key, I have just had the dubious pleasure of reading Old Key’s Almanacke in today’s Dabbler. I note that in your prognostications for the coming year you failed to mention birds. Knowing, as I do, that you are a man of exceeding ornithological perspicacity, this came as something of a surprise. You will protest that eggs get a mention, in October, but as I need hardly tell you, eggs are not birds. Some of them may become birds, in due time, but that is beside the point.
I myself would never presume to foretell the future without first making a very careful study of our wing-blessed friends. It is, I think, well known that accurate forecasts about the future doings of princes and potentates and popes depend upon acute “reading” of the various timbres of coos and caws and clucks and chirrups and shrieks of all sorts of birds, not excluding budgerigars and pratincoles. Similarly, by plucking and arranging in significant array the plumage of certain birds, including avocets and owls, one gains eldritch insight into the likely outcome of the coming year’s important sporting fixtures. Of course, you need to know which type of bird to pluck the feathers from, how to lay out the feathers upon a plain flat surface, and, crucially, how to interpret the pattern thus formed.
I do not claim, however, to be a haruspex, for the simple reason that it is against my moral code wilfully to slaughter a bird – any bird – that I might wrench out its entrails, hot and bloody, for the sole purpose of fortune telling. I leave that kind of thing to the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman.
Anyway, I wish you a happy new year, whatsoever may come to pass, and now I must dash, because the iFry I received as a Christmas gift is wittering imbecilically upon every subject under the sun, and I shall be driven insane unless I silence it by plunging it into a bucket of scum-coated rainwater. Toodle pip!
I must investigate the means by which one can schedule postages in advance, where one saves one’s words o’ wisdom as a draft and then they plop into place on the blog at a date and time of one’s choosing. Those Dabbler people know all about such interweb magic, and so, today, you can read why (nearly) every day is Christmas inside my head
It may be a little quiet here for a few days while I watch my flocks and muck about with gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and stare at a star, and other such important activities. I will, however, try to post the traditional Hooting Yard pictorial Christmas greeting tomorrow, if I can find something suitable.
Meanwhile, over at The Dabbler, you can find a seasonal tale exhumed from the Archives. Devoted readers will probably have it by heart, and be ready to recite it to the tinies at bedtime, but I learned that apparently there are a few visitors to The Dabbler who have not spent the past six months poring over the accumulated treasures of Hooting Yard (2003-2010), so we must help them get up to speed before the new year.
In my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, as promised, a small addendum to Sabine Baring-Gould Week. You can forget all about The Little Shop Of Horrors and consider instead The Little Shop Of Roger Giles, surely the finest emporium ever to grace the West of England.
Meanwhile, continuing the Hooting Yard Global Outreach service, the fourth and final sponsored episode of The Drabblecast includes an extract from I Had A Hammer, and the inimitable Norm Sherman reading a snippet from Brit’s review of Impugned By A Peasant & Other Stories. If I have not already done so, I must take this opportunity to bestow a thousand thanks upon the bonce of Salim Fadhley, onlie begetter of the whole sponsorsip hoo-hah.
Sabine Baring-Gould Week at Hooting Yard began on Sunday 5th December, so I suppose it has now expired. I had been hoping to regale you with some choice snippets from his biography of Robert Stephen Hawker, The Vicar Of Morwenstow (1886), but, frankly, I was a little disappointed. The most arresting of Hawker’s eccentricities are listed in the opening paragraph of this piece, and Baring-Gould has little to add, save perhaps for a detailed account of the dressing-up-as-a-mermaid incident. (Part of my disappointment was to discover that this was a single occurrence rather than a general Hawker pastime.) However, the book is not without its pleasures, and I feel before we say farewell to Sabine we should mark this additional note about the vicar:
“After the death of Mrs Hawker, he fell into a condition of piteous depression, and began to eat opium. He moped about the cliffs, or in his study, and lost interest in every thing…
“He took it into his head that he could eat nothing but clotted cream. He therefore made his meals, breakfast, dinner, and tea, of this. He became consequently exceedingly bilious, and his depression grew the greater.”
There is another particularly splendid passage, in which Baring-Gould transcribes the wording of a sign outside a “little shop” in Cornwall. I have in turn transcribed it, and it is due to appear in my cupboard at The Dabbler this coming Friday. So there is something for you all to look forward to.
In The Dabbler this week, a rant about a rose garden. It can be read with profit even by such persons as are horticulturally ignorant.
In my cupboard this week, I bring to the huddled masses of Dabbler readers Maud Pastry’s recipe for alphabet soup. Within seconds of it being posted this morning, my email inbox emitted a raucous clanging noise, audible as far away as Timbuctoo – a signal that I had received a missive from the bluestocking soup maven herself. It reads as follows:
“It is a crying shame, Mr Key, that you did not seek my permission before letting those Dabbler people, whomsoever they may be, reproduce my receipt for alphabet soup. Either through neglect or mischief you omitted a crucial passage from the receipt, and I feel sorry for any reader who prepares the soup according to the bastardised version which is now so regrettably in the public domain. It occurred to me to issue a corrective as a tweet on The Dabbler’s Twitter feed, but on reflection I realised I do not even know what that means, being as I am a creature very much of the previous century, if not the one before that. I therefore insist that you air this letter on your weblog.
“Please note that when leaving the bowl to stand, and before transferring the contents to a cauldron, one should introduce into the liquid a duck, preferably a merganser or teal. The duck should be left to plash ‘n’ dabble in the bowl, as if it were a pond, for at least two hours. You should then remove the duck, gently, wearing gloves, and allow it to go on its merry way, perhaps to rejoin its family of other ducks, wherever they may be. The soup will contain a “memory” of the duck’s presence, plashing ‘n’ dabbling, and this adds a piquancy to the flavour which, though imperceptible on the palate, is such stuff as soups are made on, as the Swan of Avon (a man, not a duck) might have said.
“I shall look forward to seeing this important note appear, Mr Key. Do this in memory of me.”
‘Tis Friday morning, which means of course that one finds something new in my cupboard at The Dabbler. This week, a brief note on a forgotten drama by the author of God Save The King/Queen, Henry Carey (c.1687-1743), together with a link to the complete text. I hope this will be of interest to any clapped-out old thespians among my readership. Word has it that the Bodger’s Spinney Variety Theatre will be mounting a star-studded production of the play in lieu of this year’s Christmas panto.