I remember, as a schoolboy… passing a huge tureen of soup, without first serving myself, down the oblong trestle table at which my fellow pupils and I were seated. Suddenly, one of the supervising staff, our Latin master, an ex-army man, roared from the top table to ask me why I was not having any. “Frankly, sir,” I replied in a supercilious voice, the memory of which, to this very day, grates on me as much as the voice itself must once have grated on everyone who knew me, “I find soup rather a bore.” Whereupon, to my horror, he leapt to his feet, marched the length of the refectory hall and, now unnervingly puce of feature, stood over me. “A bore?” he barked, “You find it a bore, do you? Well, let me tell you, Adair, you putrid little twerp, had you been in a Jap prisoner-of-war camp during the last war, as I was, you would have been delighted to be bored with some soup! Oh yes, you would have got down on your knees and begged to be bored out of your gruesome little mind!” Needless to say, I ate the soup – and, from that formative moment on, I got, as it were, the hang of the thing.

Gilbert Adair, “On Soup”, collected in Surfing The Zeitgeist (1997)

Once there were two of us little goatherds in the wood, and were talking of various childish things: amongst others we wished that we could fly, for then we would fly out of the mountain to Germany (for so Switzerland was called in St. Gall). On a sudden came a frightfully large bird darting down upon us, so that we thought it was going to carry one or both of us away. At this we both began to scream, and to defend ourselves with our shepherd’s crooks, and to cross ourselves, till the bird flew away; then we said to one another, “We have done wrong in wishing to be able to fly; God did not create us for flying, but for walking.” Another time I was in a very deep fissure looking for crystals, of which many were found in it. All at once I saw a stone as large as an oven starting from the side, and as I had no time to get out of the way, I stooped down upon my face. The stone fell several fathoms down to a spot above me, and from thence it made a spring away over me, so that I escaped with a whole skin. I had plenty of such joys and happiness on the mountains among the goats, of which I now remember nothing more.

from The Autobiography Of Thomas Platter, A Schoolmaster Of The Sixteenth Century, Translated From The German By Mrs Finn (1847)

Take a pottle of sweet thick Cream, and the white of eyght Egs, and beate them into your cream with a dishfull of Rosewater, and a dishfull of Sugar withal, then take a sticke and make it clene, and then cut it in the end foursquare, and make therewith beat all the aforesaid things together, and ever as it ariseth take it off, and put it in to a Cullender, this done, take a platter and sette an Apple in the midst of it, stick a thicke bush of Rosemary in the Apple. Then cast your Snow upon the Rosemary and fill your platter therewith, and if you have wafers cast some withal, and so serve them forthe.

from A Book of Cookerie (1594), posted on the London Library Blog

The greatest novel ever written, by anyone, anywhere.

Gilbert Adair on Franz Kafka’s (unfinished) Amerika, in his essay “On Actemes”, collected in Surfing The Zeitgeist (1997)

Max uses visualization and mime to inspire Wiky when they dance. “I’ll think of a sparkling river, and before I’ve even begun to mime paddling down it, Wiky has become a leaping fish. That may make me think of a crocodile eating her, but just as I begin jaw snapping, she becomes a fluttering bird trying to distract me. It’s a very stimulating technique, but you have to be careful. Once when we were dancing I visualized a bright red rose and then the fleeting image of a speeding red sports car entered my mind. At that very moment Wiky leapt sideways and crashed into the bookcase, which completely wrecked the dance sequence, not to mention one of my mother’s vases. I’ve spoken to other dance visualizers about this and the general consensus is that she responded to the flower as a bee and then had no time to change roles when the sports car came along. Her only course was to take evasive action.”

Wiky, you will be delighted to learn, is a cat. She is among a number of cats – including Nijinskat, Fluff, Boots, Zoot, Archie and Toffee – featured in the magisterially twaddle-packed book Dancing With Cats (1999) by Burton Silver and Heather Busch, authors of Why Cats Paint (1994).

Pansy Cradledew was excited to find this book for just 30p in her local library sale, and declares it to be possibly the best book bargain she has ever snapped up. You just know you’re in for a treat from the opening sentence of the Foreword by Swami Shakya Bahrain, Spiritual Healer, who declares “For some years now, a new consciousness has been entering our world, a new understanding of the energy fields that tie us and all…” – sorry, I fell into a doze there for a moment. Anyway, what we have is over one hundred pages filled with crackpots talking about dancing with their cats, accompanied by glorious colour photographs of said dances. For some reason an integral part of the pastime appears to be that the human dancer is dressed foolishly.

Those of you keen to pursue the activity – whether or not your cat bashes into the bookcase – may wish to visit this somewhat alarming website.

Here is a snippet from Phil Baker’s excellent The Devil Is A Gentleman : The Life And Times Of Dennis Wheatley (2009):

Star Of Ill Omen is an extraordinary performance, with its characteristically fraught and tender Wheatley love story (quite unlike James Bond and his girls) embedded in a mind-bogglingly improbable Cold War potboiler. Realistic details are combined with a larger naivety about space that wouldn’t be out of place in Dan Dare, and there are moments whose sheer weirdness compares with the work of proto-surrealist Raymond Roussel: when, for example, the insects [a breed of hyper-intelligent insects who buzz around like bees and give telepathic orders] show them black and white films of great moments in human history, and

“the bee-beetles who controlled the machine again pressed the lever; again the machine whirred and the words came, ‘Music while you work’, followed by the rumba.”

Wheatley never attempted science fiction again.

But why should I, in so vast an Ocean of Books by which the minds of studious men are troubled and fatigued, through which very foolish productions the world and unreasoning men are intoxicated, and puffed up, rave and create literary broils, and while professing to be philosophers, physicians, mathematicians and astrologers, neglect and despise men of learning: why should I, I say, add aught further to this so-perturbed republick of letters, and expose this noble philosophy, which seems new and incredible by reason of so many things hitherto unrevealed, to be damned and torn to pieces by the maledictions of those who are either already sworn to the opinions of other men, or are foolish corruptors of good arts, learned idiots, grammatists, sophists, wranglers, and perverse little folk?

William Gilbert, On the magnet, magnetick bodies also, and on the great magnet the earth (1600)

Having much enjoyed Phil Baker’s biography of Austin Osman Spare, I have just started reading his earlier life of Dennis Wheatley, The Devil Is A Gentleman (2009). It is as informative, entertaining, and amusing as the Spare book. Here is Dennis, reminiscing about his visit to Germany in 1913 to learn about the family wine trade. He was much impressed by the officer class…

… a race apart, immune from arrest by the police, they could be tried only by their own courts of honour and, if found guilty of a disgraceful act, they were simply given a pistol with which to shoot themselves. The civilian population had been conditioned to regard them with abject veneration. Ladies, as well as men, when approaching one of them in a street, stepped off the pavement into the gutter to give them ample room to pass, which they accepted as their right and did not even acknowledge by the flicker of an eyelid. Awed, and admiring, I watched them greet one another with a graceful salute, a click of the heels and a sharp bow from the waist. It was years later before I realised that very few of them had any brains at all …

Several years ago, I wrote “Accounts of dreams are rarely of interest to anyone other than the dreamer” before going on to describe a dream in which I was about to attack the late actor Roy Kinnear with a chair-leg. Since then, I have occasionally shared with readers other dreams I have had, when I think they may be of interest. What I have not done is to recount somebody else’s slumberland visions. I was so delighted, however, by reader Mark Patterson’s dream that I felt impelled to post it here:

Dreamt last night that my only Christmas present was a ‘Ginger Complains’ dvd. 70 minutes of poor quality footage featuring Ginger Baker grumbling about this and that in front of a succession of run-down cinemas. ‎25% of his griping was inaudible due to poor sound quality.

Ginger Baker in happier times, with his mum

In my first book “GHOSTLY GIFTS” I related some of the earlier cases where I uncovered physical objects in the presence of witnesses. Since then my talent has developed greatly and I travel around the Isle of Wight seeking out these unhappy souls whose greed, foolishness, jealousy or other sins have held them prisoners without chains waiting for release.

I may be busy at home going about my daily chores, dusting, ironing or one of the many jobs a housewife performs when a voice speaks and tells me to go to a certain place where someone needs help. The voice I hear is one of my spirit guides. I then have to make suitable arrangements with one of my small team of helpers who provide me with transport as I have no car to travel to the place I have been told. I may not have a hazardous or rich social life but it is certainly never dull as I set forth upon these journeys not knowing what story I shall hear and what I may be led to find. All I need are willing helpers, a pencil and paper because as soon as I hear a ghostly voice speak I write down every word in strange writing at great speed, the pencil never leaves the paper so that each word is joined to the next. My helpers usually arm themselves with some tool to dig with and we all wear old clothes as ghosts seem to have a habit of leading us through mud and bogs or making us crawl under barbed wire, through thick brambles, scramble down cliffs or push aside a herd of cows!

from Margo Williams, Out Of The Mist : More Adventures Of An Isle Of Wight Psychic (1982)

It was a little late to search for the philosophers’ stone in 1669, yet it was in such a search that phosphorus was discovered. Wilhelm Homberg (1652-1715) described it in the following manner: Brand, “a man little known, of low birth, with a bizarre and mysterious nature in all he did, found this luminous matter while searching for something else. He was a glassmaker by profession, but he had abandoned it in order to be free for the pursuit of the philosophical stone with which he was engrossed. Having put it into his mind that the secret of the philosophical stone consisted in the preparation of urine, this man worked in all kinds of manners and for a very long time without finding anything. Finally, in the year 1669, after a strong distillation of urine, he found in the recipient a luminant matter that has since been called phosphorus. He showed it to some of his friends, among them Mister Kunkel.”…

To obtain phosphorus, a good proportion of coal (regarded as a type of phlogiston) was added to urine, previously thickened by evaporation and preferably after putrefaction, and the mixture was heated to the highest attainable temperature. It was obvious that phlogiston entered into the composition of the distillation product. The question remained whether this product was generated de novo. In his research of 1743 to 1746, Andreas Sigismund Marggraf (1709-1782) provided the answer. He found the new substance in edible plant seeds, and he concluded that it enters the human system through the plant food, to be excreted later in the urine. He did not convince all the chemists with his reasoning. In 1789, Macquer wrote: “There are some who, even at this time, hold that the phosphorical (‘phosphorische’) acid generates itself in the animals and who consider this to be the ‘animalistic acid.’“

Although Marggraf was more advanced in his arguments than these chemists, yet he was a child of his time. The luminescent and combustible, almost wax-like substance impressed him greatly. “My thoughts about the unexpected generation of light and fire out of water, fine earth, and phlogiston I reserve to describe at a later time.” These thoughts went so far as to connect the new marvel with alchemical wonder tales. When Marggraf used the “essential salt of urine,” also called sal microcosmicum, and admixed silver chloride (“horny silver”) to it for the distillation of phosphorus, he expected “a partial conversion of silver by phlogiston and the added fine vitrifiable earth, but no trace of a more noble metal appeared.”

from Eduard Farber, History Of Phosphorus (1965)

Here at Hooting Yard we try to keep up with all the latest seabird news. As headlines go, this is rather impressive:

Lost puffin found at sex clinic

and it may or may not have something to do with this piece of signage:

Thanks to Andrew Dale (puffin) and Jeff Chilton (penguins).

In a spare moment, you might want to make a flying dragon. Be warned, however, that its designer, John Bate, admitted that “it is somewhat troublesome to compose”.

Further excitements from The Mysteries Of Nature And Art (1634) at The Public Domain Review.

The Grauniad asks some of those who worked with him to share their memories of the late Ken Russell. Among them, Glenda Jackson, who recalls:

As a director he never said anything very specific. He’d say, “It needs to be a bit more … urrrgh, or a bit less hmmm“, and you knew exactly what he meant.

That’s so true, isn’t it? Paying due attention to the ellipsis, Hooting Yard has been on a constant mission to be a bit more … urrrgh, and a bit less hmmm, and we shall redouble our efforts in memory of the great man, until it’s entirely … urrrgh and there is not  a trace of hmmm whatsoever.

It was just as well that the Lemane plan had been abandoned, as Richard Bradley’s efforts to buy the island for the crown had descended into farce. Stopping to purchase some goods to take upriver as ‘dashes’ – that is, gifts or bribes – he had been blackmailed by a local trader into buying far more merchandise than he had intended. Then he had been made to pay a large number of ‘barrs’, or small iron bars worth five shillings each, to local figures. Bradley paid barrs not only to such dignitaries as the ‘King of Barra’ and the ‘master of Gillifree’ but to two ‘Key Keepers’, the ‘Tobabmanser of Jancacunda’ and to the latter’s retinue of fifty servants. The Tobabmanser was unable to conduct any negotiations without his ‘singing Man’ (who also required payment in barrs of course), and when the ‘King of Lemain’ arrived he also brought a large retinue of servants, including the requisite key keeper, singing man and principal marabout. The whole negotiations cost much more than Bradley had anticipated, and during the palaver, wilting in the West African rainforest, he sickened and died. Later, his brother Henry would proudly announce to Sydney that the island had been purchased, only to discover that he had laboured in vain as the government had abandoned the plan.

from Emma Christopher, A Merciless Place : The Lost Story Of Britain’s Convict Disaster In Africa (2011)