Much as I am enamoured of the idea of sun worship, as practised by Aztec fundamentalists and the islanders in The Wicker Man, among others, I cannot help but feel John Donne was right when he described the golden orb as a “busie old foole”. At Hooting Yard, it is usually overcast, or raining, or snow-smothered, which is just how we like it. (To those of you who live in snowless regions, be advised that snow is nothing else but the foam or froth of rainwater from heaven.)

One person who I suspect would have agreed with me was the painter Karl Weschke. When asked if he chose to live in Cornwall because of the quality of the light, he replied: “Cornish light? I’ve got a 60-watt light-bulb and I keep the curtains closed.”

See how much one can learn by reading The Dabbler?

In an email I sent to someone the other day, I confessed to having an inner Guardian-reading armchair lefty airhead nestling within me, adding the parenthetical comment that he needs to be bludgeoned into submission. In truth, my inner woolly-brained “progressive” loon has been shrivelling up slowly but surely for quite some time. It won’t take a bludgeon to bash him utterly senseless.

And indeed it has not, for today I have finally understood the obvious superiority of capitalism. I really have.

There is, this week, in Trafalgar Square, a temporary maze. It is open from 11 am to 8 pm, entrance is free, and it is a proper maze, with wrong turns and dead ends and, best of all, hedges higher than Mr Key’s head. I blundered through it this afternoon, in sunshine after rainfall, and enjoyed myself, if not quite immensely, then enough, enough. It was a diverting fifteen minutes, wandering through a high hedge maze slap bang in the middle of London.

My pleasure was soured only by the fact that, on the blue plaques dotted hither and thither within the maze, I noted a number of typos. “Fred Astair” without a final “e”? A misplaced apostrophe in “Beatle’s”? I have come to expect such slapdashery, but still it never fails to depress me. The blue plaques themselves, by the way, give a clue to one reason for the maze being there in the first place, which is that it’s meant to boost the West End as a tourist hub. There are no advertisements for particular shops or restaurants, just the general message that this is a place of great historical interest which now, in the twenty-first century, is the world’s finest and most popular retail ‘n’ leisure complex (or words to that effect). That’s one reason why the maze is there, the other being, of course, simply to provide people with the chance, for a week, to walk through a maze in Trafalgar Square, at no cost, and without having your forehead tattooed with a corporate logo or some such marketing ploy.

But why has it made me embrace the joys of capitalism? For one very simple reason. Those high hedges, of which the maze is constructed, were provided by RentaHedge! What a fantastic idea for a business, one which – crucially – no bureaucrat or civic functionary would ever think up. I am lost in admiration for the entrepreneurial genius who, one day, thought: “I know! I will make a living by renting hedges to people!”

Sadly, my own talents do not lie in that direction, so I shall continue to plough my lonely furrow of prose. Pansy Cradledew suggested starting a business called RentaSedge(warbler), renting sedge warblers to those who needed a temporary sedge warbler, but a bank manager took one look at the business plan and reached for his bludgeon. Heigh ho.

Conjure up an image of the ancient world. Do you see a betoga’d fellow beating a bird about the bonce with an iron bar? No? Then read your Pliny. Here he is, in the Natural History, telling us about parrots:

“She hath an head as hard as is her beak: when she learns to speak, she must be beaten about the head with a rod of yron: for otherwise she careth for no blowes.”

ADDENDUM : Pliny’s seventeenth-century English translator Philomen Holland uses the phrase “barton & mue” for aviary. This is splendid, and I suggest we all take every opportunity to resurrect so grievous a loss to the language. You may wish to write a note of it in your day-book, particularly if, as Pliny/Holland says elsewhere, your “memory is so shittle, [you] will soone forget the same againe”.

Forgive me for returning to Pliny’s Natural History yet again. Here (in Philomen Holland’s English translation of 1634) he is surely describing the tribe or grouplet which spawned the Grunty Man:

“Tauron writeth, That the Choromandae are a savage and wild people: distinct voice and speech they have none, but in stead thereof, they keep an horrible gnashing and hideous noise: rough they are and hairy all over their bodies, eies they have red like the houlets, and toothed they be like dogs.”

Earlier, I cannot remember where, I have said that the Grunty Man is older than the Earth itself, but now I may have to revise that statement in the finished version of my ten thousand page biography The Life And Times Of The Grunty Man! (The exclamation point in the title is quite deliberate, and intended to impart a sense of excitement to what is otherwise, I have to say, quite a dull narrative, consisting as it does chiefly of scenes in which the Grunty Man grunts from within his grim dark foul-smelling lair, century after century.)

So there I was, thinking that in Austin Osman Spare I had found my go-to guy for curses, imprecations and anathemas. That was until I came upon the Scots poet Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), of whom I was only dimly aware.

What happened was this. It occurred to me this afternoon that it was a matter of utmost urgency that I discover the etymology of “frogman”, specifically whether, at any point, the word “toadman” had been preferred. As always happens as soon as one consults the Oxford English Dictionary, I was blown off course. My attention was caught by “frogland”, which is defined, not unexpectedly, as “marshy land in which frogs abound, as the Fens, Holland, etc.” The first of a mere two citations in the OED is “1721 RAMSAY Tartana xxxiii, May she be curst to starve in frogland fens.”

My curiosity was piqued. Who was she and what had she done to deserve so awful a fate? I soon found an online edition of Allan Ramsay’s Poems of 1721 and read:

May she be curst to starve in Frogland Fens, / To wear a Fala ragg’d at both the Ends, / Groan still beneath an antiquated Suit, / And die a Maid at fifty five to boot ; / May she turn quaggy Fat, or crooked Dwarff, / Be ridicul’d while primm’d up in her Scarff ; / May Spleen and Spite still keep her on the Fret, / And live till she outlive her Beauty’s Date ; / May all this fall, and more than I have said, / Upon that wench who disregards the Plaid.

Gosh. This strikes me as a somewhat hysterical overreaction to someone eschewing the wearing of tartan, but then I am not a mad Scotsman, so what do I know?

It is always useful to be reminded of Vaucanson’s robot duck. So go and read Heather McDougal at Cabinet of Wonders.

I don’t know about you, but increasingly I find myself compelled to cast anathemas, often at bus stops, supermarkets, and other sites of close contact with one’s fellow citizens. But getting the tone right can be the devil of a job. One wishes the curse to come across as neither deranged nor weedy, but rather as a considered, cogent, rational, searing, and – above all – unarguable response to the situation.

How pleased I am, then, to have discovered this splendid outburst from Austin Osman Spare:

“Your theology is a slime pit of gibberish become ethics. In your world where ignorance and deceit constitute felicity, everything ends miserably, besmirched with fratricidal blood.”

It is from his book Anathema Of Zos, A Sermon To The Hypocrites (1927) which I am clearly going to have to read, possibly even learn by heart. Further reading here and, enticingly, the opportunity in a couple of months’ time to see an exhibition of Spare’s work.

You would be surprised how often I am asked by readers if it possible to somehow experience the mystic woohoohoodiwoo conjured up by the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman in the deep dense weird woods, without actually having to enter the deep dense weird woods for a moonlit encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman herself. In part, your surprise would be that anybody could manage to articulate that question on an empty stomach. Until now, my standard answer has been “No, it is not possible to somehow experience the mystic woohoohoodiwoo conjured up by the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman in the deep dense weird woods, without actually having to enter the deep dense weird woods for a moonlit encounter with the Woohoohoodiwoo Woman herself,” although depending on how much time is at my disposal I might just say “No” or even slap the importuning reader about the head with the outer packaging from a carton of smokers’ poptarts.

I say “until now” because, thanks to David Thompson, I have learned of the activities of a certain Erial Ali. Click on this link, scroll down, slowly, slowly, and be engulfed in mystic woohoohoodiwoo!

Discouraging news reaches me about Dennis Beerpint. The weedy poet has, it seems, cast off his beatnik persona. In an interview with the magazine Ex-Beatnik Poets Speak Out! he says:

“People will accuse me of selling out, but quite frankly I am sick and tired of sticking it to The Man, you dig? There’s no money in it. I want to be a people’s poet, like Carol Ann Duffy or Ian McMillan, but I am neither the Poet Laureate nor an irritating professional northerner. So when the Co-op offered me the position of surrealist-in-residence, I jumped at the chance.”

“Surreal” is a much-abused word these days, but it is surely appropriate to describe Beerpint’s first effort on the Co-op’s behalf. He was asked to add an intriguingly madcap line to the allergy advice on their jam doughnuts, and came up with this corker:

These products have been prepared in an area that handles the following ingredients: Celery, Crustaceans, Fish, Lupins and Molluscs.

Clearly, though he may indeed have “sold out”, Dennis Beerpint has not lost his mojo.

NOTE : Many thanks to Gaw for drawing this to my attention.

“He was an expert in many subjects and intervened widely in others. Among his contributions to learned journals were papers on meteorology, navigation, surveying, anthropology, archaeology, painting, photography, the use of spectacles by divers, ultrasonic whistles, diet fads, currency reform, visions, corporal punishment, the ideal length of rope for hanging people, the flashing of signals to Mars, and dozens of other topics. Almost as numerous were his inventions, ranging from advanced scientific instruments to gadgets for personal convenience. At the age of thirteen he designed a steam flying machine, followed by an hour-glass speedometer for bicycles, and, in later life, a periscope for seeing over the heads of crowds. It was used for viewing processions, of which he was particularly fond, in conjunction with a wooden brick, wrapped in cloth and tied to a string so that it could be lowered to the ground for standing on.”

I know what you’re thinking. Did Dobson and Blötzmann spawn some kind of love-child (perhaps using a technique concocted by the latter)? But no. Apart from anything else, that would be chronologically incoherent, like a leech doctor with a brain scanner. It is in fact Francis Galton, as described in Eccentric Lives And Peculiar Notions by John Michell (1984). There is a touch, too, of Joost Van Dongelbraacke, the suburban shaman. Michell notes that Galton

“was strongly religious, but the only type of worship that appealed to him was the spontaneous variety he had seen among the Africans. He considered that their chants, dances and fetish worship expressed the genuine religious spirit of the natural man. As usual, he put that belief to practical test. Looking round for the least worshipful object he could find, he hit upon the comic figure of Mr Punch, and forced his mind into believing that it possessed divine powers. The experiment succeeded. He came to experience ‘a large share of the feelings a barbarian entertains towards his idol’, and for a long time he was unable to look at Mr Punch’s grotesque features without a feeling of reverence.”

Photograph and Bertillon record of Francis Galton (1893)

Kristan Tetens, at The Victorian Peeper, has a postage about an exhibition (in North America, alas) entitled Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage. Splendid stuff, and I recommend you read, look, follow the links, and learn.

Kate Edith Gough, Untitled page from the Gough Album (1870s)

A Very British Dude * explains proper mustard:

“Listless and radioactive yellow, [American mustard] does not add to the celebration of all that is good and holy in your mouth. The “Actions on” ingesting Proper Mustard are as follows. Your sinuses should clear instantly; your brain should be invigorated and you should develop a nose bleed. English Mustard delivers and it is thus the correct Mustard.”

* I am charitably assuming this is a deliberate oxymoron. The alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.

From Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, Number 12, May 1851

“Physico-Physiological Researches on the Dynamics of Magnetism, &c., by Baron CHARLES VON REICHENBACH, translated from the German, by JOHN ASHBURNER, M.D., is a scientific treatise, showing the relations of magnetism, electricity, heat, light, crystallization, and chemism to the vital forces of the human body. It is founded on an extensive series of experiments, which tend to bring the mysterious phenomena of Mesmerism within the domain of physics, and in fact to reduce the whole subject of physiology to a department of chemical science… The investigations, of which the results are here described, are of a singularly curious character, exhibiting the most astonishing developments, with a philosophical calmness that is rare even among German savants.”

“In the album presented to the King of Bavaria by the artists of Münich, is an admirable composition by Hübner. It is an expression of the feelings of a large portion of Upper Germany. It represents a female prostrate upon the ground, with the arms crossed, the face entirely hidden, in an attitude of the deepest despair. The long hair floats over the arms, and trails along the ground. The whole figure is a mixture of majesty and utter abandonment. The simple title of the piece is – Germania, 1850.”

That fellow on the cover bears a striking resemblance to the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint, during one of his “episodes”.

Speaking of sea monsters, I am indebted to Transpontine for drawing to my attention this fearsome creature of the deep which has somehow become stranded on Tooley Street in London SE1:

Father Ninian Tonguelash is on his way…