Max said, “Don’t you ever feel inspired to paint the Finnish countryside in summer?”

“It’s all so damned green,” she answered.

Then she told us about the squirrel, the one squirrel which has appeared on the island; and it slept under her neck and tried to collect food there. As the relationship between artist and squirrel developed, the squirrel came to expect a game at four o’ clock in the morning. Tove Jansson had to get out of bed and pretend to be a tree. The squirrel would run up and down her frozen limbs.

Oswell Blakeston, Sun At Midnight (1958)

There were afternoons at football, I’m not kidding, when the action on the pitch provided roughly the same excitement as watching week-old kittens failing to get out of paper bags.

Lynne Truss, Get Her Off The Pitch! : How Sport Took Over My Life (2009)

Twice in the season, incidentally, I saw West Ham (The Hammers) in opposition to Sheffield Wednesday (The Owls), a fixture I found too rich in unfortunate imagery. I didn’t mind foxes beating magpies, or gunners beating spurs, but the idea of owls being beaten by hammers still affects me to this day.

Lynne Truss, Get Her Off The Pitch! : How Sport Took Over My Life (2009)

For when I see you, (without joking)

Your eyes, lips, breasts, are so provoking;

They set my heart more cock-a-hoop,

Than could whole seas of cray-fish soupe.

from To A Young Lady, With Some Lampreys (c.1720) by John Gay

You will be pleased to hear that my lobster research continues apace, quietly, diligently, but with moments of high drama. In case any of you doubt that I am learning some startling facts, here is a little quiz.

What type of lobster am I describing?

It is found in the waters off Western Samoa. It is musical. It is furry. It is magnificent.

You will find the correct answer below the picture.

The answer is : the musical furry lobster, Palibythus magnificus.

I am not making this up.

Madam Galvani observed convulsions in a dead frog, which laid near an electrical machine which was in action. Although there is a diversity of information as to whether it was she or a student who noticed the incident first. As she is said to have been an invalid, and the frogs were for her benefit, it is more than likely she had an eye on them, and it would not be strange if they both saw the convulsions at the same time. However, the subject was investigated by Dr. Galvani, who was a Professor of Anatomy, and they found that. a knife touched the frog, and that when a metallic substance in contact with a nerve of the creature, was brought within the action of the electrical machine, there followed a twitching of the limb. And since that time a great many discoveries have been made about all this, and a machine constructed, called the Galvanic Battery; the principle of it, being that when two metals are connected by some substance capable of exciting their different electricities, similar effects to these described may be observed. Charges from the battery will occasion contortions and violent jerkings in dead corpses, which are rather horrible to witness. After the skin has been removed from the hind legs of frogs and some salt sprinkled over them, (while they are raw of course), the legs will quiver and jerk in a curious manner, occasioned by the action of the salt upon them. It is likely that Madam Galvani was going to have the frogs for her dinner. They have a taste between fish and chicken; you broil them over the fire, and then put a little sprinkle of salt, and the least dust of pepper, if any at all, then you will have delicious morsels. It is not necessary to cook them out of doors; building fires is a dangerous employment for children, and if you ever have any, bring them into the kitchen, and do the cooking there, where you can get help if you should need it. A word more about that pepper. Pepper, spice and other irritants, should be used with caution, if used at all, for the effect of them is to excite the coating of the stomach, and lead eventually to disease. In concluding about the battery alluded to, it is capable of producing great quantities of electricity; there is a positive pole and a negative pole,—the positive pole attracts a negative pole, and a negative pole attracts a positive pole. These terms, positive and negative, express different quantities of the fluid, positive being more, and the negative less. The term pole, in this connection, meaning point; point of concentration. Exactly how the metals are arranged in a pile, and the vessels with acid and water, and so on, are adjusted, is explained in works on the subject. We have learned so much of the ways of electricity, that we cannot be surprised as our predecessors were, even if dead bodies jerk and thump around. They have, by tracing remarkable phenomena, which astonished them, elucidated them and placed them where they belong, under and within this property of matter.

from Properties And Powers In Every-Day Matters by A Corey (1876), as noted in Odd Books : A Safe House For Literary Misfits, which is highly recommended.

In The Invention Of Murder : How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime (2011), Judith Flanders makes a passing reference which, though brief, has me eager to read the novel in question:

In 1860, in The Trail Of The Serpent, Mrs Braddon had advanced her plot through Sloshy, the adopted child of a mute policeman

Come to think of it, I may not bother to read the book itself, but simply adopt the characters for my own use. Sloshy! The mute policeman! They shall live again at Hooting Yard!

Jazz. And cows. David Thompson provides the link.

I do wish the cameraperson had trusted to our patience and not cut the film. I would have liked to see the cows making their approach to the fence.

The first fruits of my lobster research:

The common English lobster, (Homarus vulgaris), as seen on the marble slab of the fishmonger, is very unlike his relatives beneath the waves. The curled up form in which he is seen when so exposed is not that usually assumed in its own element, unless in the act of exerting its immense powers of retrograde motion. These are so great that one sudden downward sweep of its curiously constructed, oar-like tail, is sufficient to send it like an arrow, three- or four-and-twenty feet, with the most extraordinary precision, thereby enabling our friend to retreat with the greatest rapidity into nooks, corners, and crevices among the rocks, where pursuit would be hopeless. His eyes being arranged on foot stalks, or stems, are free from the inconvenient trammels of sockets, and possess a radius of vision commanding both front and rear, and from their compound form (being made up of a number of square lenses) are extremely penetrating and powerful. The slightest shadow passing over the pool in which the lobster may chance to be crawling or swimming, will frequently cause one of these sudden backward shoots to be made, and H. vulgaris vanishes into some cleft or cavity with a rapidity of motion which no harlequin could ever, even in his wildest dreams, hope to achieve. Down among the deep channels, between the crags at the sea’s bottom, alarms, except from the sea robbers themselves, are not to dreaded.

W B Lord, Crab, Shrimp, And Lobster Lore, Gathered Amongst The Rocks At The Sea-Shore, By The Riverside, And In The Forest (1867)

I don’t drive, and am almost wholly ignorant about cars. Certainly, other than a couple of iconic designs such as the VW Beetle and the Mini, I cannot tell one make of car from another. Thus it was, and remains, inexplicable to me how my eldest son, when tiny, eagerly announced the name of every car he saw. He was two or three years old at the time, not yet able to read, but when we went for a walk, he would point at each parked car we saw along a street, piping up its name. Other than his mispronunciation of “Ford Sierra” as “Fonsierra”, he was unerringly correct. Eventually, he stopped doing this, and moved on to other childish things, straightforward and unremarkable. One’s own child is never unremarkable, of course, but I mean to say that the talents he developed and displayed were not what Charles Fort would have described as “wild talents”, such as that somehow eerie, pre-literate knowledge of cars. Where did it come from?

I had more or less forgotten about this as the years passed, until this morning, when I read:

we moved back to Paris, and there I have, on my father’s authority, a story about people standing him drinks at the café while I entertained the clientele by identifying the marque of each car as it passed on the boulevard: “Renault! Peugeot! Citröen! Simca!” I haven’t evinced any savant talents since, but apparently at two I had this precocious knack – of cars only, French cars in particular.

That is Peter Blegvad, reminiscing in The Bleaching Stream (Journal of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics, Number 3, Absolu 139). It is precisely the same case as my son – the infant savant, privy to a body of knowledge without apparent provenance, displayed for a brief period when very young. Is this more common than I thought?

Hooting Yard’s global dominion is well-attested, and there are readers and listeners all over the world. Some are fortunate enough to live and breathe and have their being in places with fantastic names. Consider the reader who sent me a snap of his membership card for Toad Suck Buck’s, a “restaurant and river vista” in Toad Suck, Arkansas. Toad Suck, I am told, is in a “dry” county, so in order to serve its customers with alcoholic beverages, Buck’s is a “privite” club. I am eager to join, and I bet you are too. Meanwhile, I am thrilled to know there is a Toad Suck Branch of the Hooting Yard Fan Club.

In an 1829 [stage] adaptation of Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, a character is lost on a storm-racked Scottish heath, when suddenly: “Ha! What do I see on this lonely heath? A Piano? Who could be lonely with that? The moon will shortly rise and light me from this unhallowed place; so, to console myself, I will sing one of Julia’s favourite melodies.” And he does.

From The Invention Of Murder : How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders (2011)

For some reason, quite possibly ignorance, I have never made it my practice to add “tags” to Hooting Yard postages. I shove them into a category, but have always neglected the tags. It is not something I have thought about, until today, when I have realised that a skilled “tagger” can create something approaching poetry.

The friend who I thumped on the bonce with the Hammer of Thumpiness, until she caved in and began blogging, is only six posts in at BlackberryJuniper And Sherbet, yet her grasp of tagging is a wonder to behold. Consider this:

memory

rain

Swanage

wind

What a corker! Time, surely, to eject Carol Ann Duffy* from the Laureateship and appoint my friend in her stead.

* NOTE : The preposterous Duffy’s latest witterings argue that teenpersons’ txt-spk has poetic potential. Shouldn’t she be promoting literacy rather than garbled barbarism?

The following advert appeared in Exchange & Mart in 1936:

UNLUCKY AT GAMBLING?

If so why not experiment by buying a pack of Surrealist Forecast Cards? Designed by a famous mystic artist and author, they were originally intended as a joke, but he found that they picked the winners in his case, and in many others. Can be used for any race, anywhere, any year, and the same pack will last for years. These cards are not guaranteed, as they re-act differently in the case of each individual, but they do enable you to conduct an interesting and perhaps profitable experiment with luck. Obviously, if they were infallible we would be so rich that we wouldn’t need to advertise them. So we make this very fair offer. Buy a pack with full instructions for 5/-. If you find them to be of no use to you your money will be refunded without question or argument.

SURREALIST FORECAST CARDS,

261, Lauderdale Mansions, London, W.9

The “mystic artist and author” was Austin Osman Spare, and a rare photograph of a set of the cards (now worth considerably more than 5/- or 25p) can be seen here.

The first thing I did this morning, after getting up at 4.50 AM, was to find out about Sir John Vanbrugh. The real, historical Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), architect of Blenheim Palace and author of The Provok’d Wife, turned out to have little in common with the Sir John Vanbrugh (dates uncertain) who appeared in the dream from which I had just awoken.

My dream-Vanbrugh was famed as a painter of chickens. He had painted a particular type of white chicken so many times that it was known as “a Vanbrugh chicken”. Connoisseurs eagerly sought out Vanbrugh chicken paintings in auction salesrooms, where they sold for tidy sums.

Wide awake now, I can still see a Vanbrugh chicken, white with a red crop, in my mind’s eye.