. . . that very excitable, choleric, good-natured old gentleman, with his popping, bobbling gestures, his habit of exploding into a room rather than entering it, his obstinacy allied so strangely with extreme changeableness, his ideas that floated in and out of his mind as if they were blown by a sea-gale, his head shaped like a pineapple, and his eyes that floated on the surface of his face as if they were bubbles. Mr Greville remarked that “King William had considerable facility in expressing himself, but what he said was generally useless and improper”.

King William IV, described by Edith Sitwell in Victoria Of England (1936)

The little dry leaves are blowing against the windows of a house near the sea, with a sound like the whispering of small pale ghosts; they are blowing along the parade, over the edge of the century, they are floating away and away into the far-off plantations where the country gentlemen are rooted in the mould.

Here they come, these small ghosts left over, drifting over, from the eighteenth century – dry ghosts like the Beau and Beelzebub or Wicked Shifts, Bogey and Calibre, Gooserump and King Jog, Mouldy and Madagascar and Snipe, and Mr Creevey himself brushing those leaves together with his old hands. Soon there will be no leaves left.

On the 22nd day of January in the year 1820, whilst the threadbare-looking sea beat thinly upon the shore, a man of fifty-two years of age, his once robust and reddish face now yellow, his thin dyed black hair, that had once been shining and carefully brushed (where any remained), now dull with sweat, and with the grey showing through the black and with the skull showing through the hair, lay dying upon a hired bed in Sidmouth.

The magnificent opening paragraphs of chapter one (“The Death Of The Duke Of Kent”) of Edith Sitwell’s 1936 biography Victoria Of England. They don’t write ’em like that anymore.

Between 1218 and 1260, you couldn’t set foot outside your house between Peking and Prague without having a Mongol horde sweep past and lop your ears off while flaying your grandparents and eating your dog, all without dismounting. By moving quickly, travelling in large packs and placing important people in highly visible positions of authority, the Mongols created a daunting illusion of ubiquity and numerical superiority.

The same situation prevails with Baby Boomers. While it may be true that tie-dyed, hemp-toking countercultural hipsters were never an absolute majority of Boomers, it certainly seemed like it at the time.

Joe Queenan, Balsamic Dreams (2001)

a man named Jason Pennington . . . [spotted] a car full of smoke on the side of the 101 freeway where he saw an elderly man hunched over at the wheel of his Jaguar

It would be interesting to know if Mr Pennington is, in fact, half-man, half-porpoise.

Thanks to Sharon Smith for alerting me to this eerily familiar headline.

Yet again, Hooting Yard demonstrates that it has its finger on the pulse, is tapping into the zeitgeist, setting the agenda, and alighting upon what are unfortunately called the “trending” topics before they are trendy. No sooner does Mr Key turn his gimlet (if myopic) eye to the subject of chickens, when suddenly everyone is at it.

In his Dabbler Diary on Monday, Brit wrote about the unimaginable number of chickens slaughtered daily worldwide. Nige addressed the important topic of chicken sexing. And in the paper the other day I learned of a play entitled, brilliantly, Knives In Hens. I am not a theatre-going person, so I had never heard of this “brutal fable set in a timeless spartan rural community”, but apparently it is a “modern Scottish classic”.

What next in the world o’ poultry? We wait with bated breath . . .

As you know, I am currently keeping my eye out for chickens. Thanks, then, to Ruthie Bosch for sending me this snap of a chicken alongside a smoking child, from a century or so ago. I will probably receive a stern directive from some governmental agency insisting that I airbrush the gasper out of the photograph, but history is history. Weirdly, it seems that in the early twentieth century not everyone was in thrall to some kind of Blairite-Cameronian-Third-Way-Consensus, in spite of what the BBC tells us. (See Lark Rise To Candleford, and any other period drama.)

Today’s insight into the mysterious world of rustic persons – courtesy of BBC Radio 4’s Farming Today – came when the presenter spoke of “towers of cheese”. I am not sure whether these resemble the Towers of Trebizond or Leonard Cohen’s Tower of Song, but I shall investigate, and let you know.

On Farming Today on BBC Radio 4 this morning, I heard the following piece of rustic wisdom, or perhaps it was a spell or incantation:

I see the chicken – good thing happens.

I have decided to test this by taking the first opportunity that presents itself to look at a chicken. I will then wait for something good to happen, and – whatever the eventuality – will report back, in vivid detail.

A snippet from Memoirs Of A Public Baby by Philip O’Connor:

The hut on the hill was in a fairly detached part of a holiday camp, the most “select” of several on this hill in Surrey. The signs of this selectiveness were the wide spaces between the huts; their decorum in colour and lack of fantasy in architecture; and the absence of radios (though the loudspeaker was still young), and the quality and size of the cars arriving at week-ends; and the good-quality plus-fours of the younger set. They were, in fact, of the class most disliked by my guardian, mostly prosperous shopkeepers, with a sprinkling of teachers, whom he also didn’t like. It fairly pleased him not to like anyone in the camp except a certain scoutmaster. This was the quintessence of scoutmasters, and I feel certain he came from Roehampton, because of a particular greenhouse wildness in his appearance (I caught him acquiring a tropical tan artfully behind a bush once). He liked to stand most erect on the brow of the plateau and scan the horizon, eyes narrowed, ready, I believe, for eventualities.

I have never watched a single episode of the BBC soap opera EastEnders, so I had no idea who Cockney matriarch Lou Beale was. I do, however, read obituaries with great interest, including those of people of whom I have never heard. And when reading the Guardian obituary of Anna Wing, the actress who played Lou Beale, I learned that “between 1953 and 1960, she was the partner of the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor” and “she encouraged [him] to write his first book, the extraordinary Memoirs of a Public Baby (1958)”.

I had never heard of O’Connor either, and my interest was piqued – rightly so, I realised, when I read his 1998 obituary in The Independent. Here I learned, among other things, that his mother abandoned him twice during his childhood, and the second time

he was again adopted, this time by a one-legged bachelor civil servant who wore size 13 boots and owned a small wooden hut on Box Hill near Dorking

and that

The impression that he created as a young man in wartime Fitzrovia was of utter precariousness. As thin as a skeleton, his face already eroded, his smile never calm, he lived off doughnuts and Woodbines, ogled at women and spoke in cryptograms, spoonerisms and jingles, delivering sentences backwards and falling about in drunken exhilaration

and

Many people knew him simply as The Man Who Stood Behind The Door And Said “Boo!” To T.S. Eliot

Who could read those snippets and not want to read the Memoirs? So I borrowed a copy from the library, and am already delighted, by page 35, to learn that Philip O’Connor had “a lasting fear of monkeys . . . feeling horribly near to them and that I have a secret they might discover which would involve me in some unconscious activity consequent upon the discovery of a bond between us.”

Self-consciously “bohemian” drunkard poets are tiresome, particularly when convinced of their own genius, and no doubt in person O’Connor was – as Stephen Spender says in his introduction to the Memoirs – “a menace”. But they can also, sometimes, write wonderful books, and Memoirs Of A Public Baby – what I have read of it so far – is one. Bear in mind, too, that the Independent obituary notes that O’Connor “dabbled interestingly with chickens”.

In the introduction to his Les Vies Imaginaires (1896) – a profound influence upon Borges – Marcel Schwob writes:

If Boswell’s book took up ten pages it would be the book we were looking for. Doctor Johnson’s common sense comprises the vulgarest of commonplaces: expressed with the bizarre violence that Boswell has the art to depict, it has a quality unique in this world. Only this ponderous catalogue resembles the doctor’s dictionary; from it one could extract a Scientia Johnsoniana with an index. Boswell has not had the aesthetic courage to select.

(Translation by Iain White.)

I was delighted to note, elsewhere in the introduction, that Schwob makes mention of “the conjectures to which Boswell abandons us concerning the use Johnson made of the dried orange-peel he liked to keep in his pockets” – as noted recently here.

NB : Hooting Yard’s in-house anagrammatist R. will, I hope, get to work on the title of this postage.

Newspaper reports of the annual swan upping on the Thames reminded me of an amusing swan-related matter which I had unaccountably forgotten to mention. During the Wimbledon tennis championships, I forget which game exactly though it may have been one of the men’s semi-finals, during one of the breaks between sets, the BBC cameras drifted off to the surrounding scene, and showed a jetty by the river around which sunbathers sprawled. Also present was a swan, approached by a tiny tot who looked as if she was wanting to feed it a sandwich. The proximity of tot to swan led one of the commentary team to observe that, belying their elegance and grace, swans are of course savage and aggressive creatures. Whereupon fellow-commentator Tim Henman – whose surname suggests he knows a thing or two about birds, or at least about poultry – said (and I paraphrase from memory):

Whenever you see a swan, someone always points out that they are capable of breaking your arm. Have you ever met anybody who’s had their arm broken by a swan? I haven’t.

Sadly, the cameras then returned to the tennis, and we were not treated to any further swan-talk from Hen-man.

Swan upping in the last century