I have made it clear in the past that I abhor Twitter. (The Hooting Yard Twitter feed, adverted to over in the right-hand column, consists of nought but pointers to postages on this site, generated by some sort of het internet robot, so I need never go near it with a bargepole.)

One reason to loathe Twitter is of course the enthusiasm with which it was embraced by The Most Gigantic Brain In The Known Universe, of whom Peter Hitchens has observed “Stephen Fry’s voice and manner generally make me switch off the radio – that strange mixture of hair oil and molasses, bubbling with self-satisfied giggles, is more than I can take at any time of day”. Hitchens may be bonkers, but in this case he is surely correct.

Anyway, I mention Twitter only because I came across an eerily prescient observation, in The Tents Of Wickedness by Peter De Vries, published in 1959:

“And have you noticed something else about figures with the tragic sense? They’re the ones who buck the race up. Not the twitterers.”

Yesterday I went to a concert given by William D Drake. One of the songs he and his band performed was a splendid setting of a sonnet by Michael Drayton (1563-1631), a poet of whom I confess I had never heard before. Here is a portrait, and the poem:

When first I ended, then I first began;

Then more I travelled further from my rest.

Where most I lost, there most of all I won;

Pinèd with hunger, rising from a feast.

Methinks I fly, yet want I legs to go,

Wise in conceit, in act a very sot,

Ravished with joy amidst a hell of woe,

What most I seem that surest am I not.

I build my hopes a world above the sky,

Yet with the mole I creep into the earth;

In plenty I am starved with penury,

And yet I surfeit in the greatest dearth.

I have, I want, despair, and yet desire,

Burned in a sea of ice, and drowned amidst a fire.

“The tea table was crowned with a huge earthen dish, well stored with slices of fat pork, fried brown, cut up into morsels, and swimming in gravy. The company seated round the genial board, evinced their dexterity in launching their forks at the fattest pieces in this mighty dish, – in much the same manner that sailors harpoon porpoises at sea, or our Indians spear salmon in the lakes.

“Sometimes the table was graced with immense apple pies, or saucers full of preserved peaches and pears; but it was always sure to boast an enormous dish of balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat and called doughnuts or olykoeks, a delicious kind of cake, at present little known in this city, except in genuine Dutch families.

“The tea was served out of a majestic Delft teapot, ornamented with paintings of fat little Dutch shepherds and shepherdesses tending pigs, – with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fancies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper teakettle. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum; until an improvement was introduced by a shrewd and economic old lady, which was to suspend, by a string from the ceiling, a large lump directly over the tea table, so that it could be swung from mouth to mouth.

“At these primitive tea parties, the utmost propriety and dignity prevailed, – no flirting nor coquetting; no romping of young ladies; no self-satisfied struttings of wealthy gentlemen, with their brains in their pockets, nor amusing conceits and monkey divertisements of smart young gentlemen, with no brains at all.”

From A History Of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker (Washington Irving), 1809

If I am to believe the findings of the Unofficial Blötzmann System™ Het Internet Übersurvey of twenty million fluffyheads – and why should I not? – then I must accept that three out of every four visitors to Hooting Yard alight here to discover the very latest in cow news.

A related survey, not quite as über, suggests, astonishingly, that not all cow news involves the tragic figure of blind, bearded David Blunkett. While I try to get my head around that, you may wish to read and digest this thrilling tale of attempted cow tipping at Wagner Farm.

Cow picture courtesy of an inexplicable world.

“Books on ‘Hindu feats’ became available throughout the twentieth century, explaining such classic Indian wonders as snake charming and ‘the bed of nails’, but also including a wide range of potentially dangerous demonstrations that were less obviously Indian. These were the books to read if you were interested in ‘Driving a spike into your head’, ‘Eating a ball of fire’, or the equally imaginatively entitled ‘Car on head’. More delicate readers could relax at home with one of the more gentle ‘feats of the yogi’, such as ‘hypnotizing a rabbit’. But anyone attempting the more adventurous pastimes would do well to read the instructions carefully. ‘Chewing molten lead’, for example, required a special compound that ‘melts at approximately 160 degrees. If you wish a lower melting point, add to the above a small amount of quicksilver… When melted, this mixture may be poured on the tongue which, it goes without saying, must be moist with saliva.’ And if the student was not convinced by that explanation, the following assurance of the author was given: ‘Personally, I have never developed enough courage to try this, although several have told me it is OK.'”

Peter Lamont, The Rise Of The Indian Rope Trick (2004), quoting from Thrilling Magic by Leonard H Miller (1959)

“I have studied the ways of snakes long and carefully. All of them are stupid animals.”

R H Elliot, The Myth Of The Mystic East (1934)

So, I was thinking, as I so often do, of the golden age of the Bodger’s Spinney Variety Theatre, and then, over at Ragbag, I came upon this marvellous list of music hall acts:

“The joy, perhaps as much in memory as at the time, was in the variousness: the magician Ali Bongo (‘The Shriek of Araby’), the illusionist Cingallee, the pigeon act Hamilton Conrad, the animal and bird impersonator Percy (‘I Travel the Road’) Edwards, the drag act Ford and Sheen, the mind-reader The Amazing Fogel, the lady whistler Eva Kane, the male impersonator Hetty King, the foot spinner and raconteur Tex McLeod, the yodelling accordionist Billy Moore, the human spider Valantyne Napier, the mental telepathists The Piddingtons, the novelty xylophonist Reggie Redcliffe, the speciality dancer Bunty St Clair, the pianist Semprini, the aereliste Olga Varona, and many, many others – inhabitants of a lost world.”

Later today I will be attempting to contact The Piddingtons, via mental telepathy of course, and I shall keep you informed of the ensuing revelations.

In his later years, Rayner Heppenstall described himself as a “freelance reactionary”. Here is his amusing capsule summary of les événements of 1968, from The Sex War And Others : A Survey Of Recent Murder, Principally In France (1973):

“Paris always had the best riots. Those of May 1968 marked the clear emergence of a new criminal class, that of the Western World’s countless superfluous undergraduates. Our own welfare kids had done a fair amount of marching this way and that and shouting ‘Fascist!’. This word they had no doubt picked up from their Left-wing parents, for none of them had been born when fascism ended at least in Western Europe. One kind of seasonal marching had ended when the actress Vanessa Redgrave decided, doubtless on doctor’s orders, to stop planting her fair bottom on the cold stones of Trafalgar Square. The French students had heard of Freud and Marx, whose names had bored Britons of my generation to a state verging on hysteria before the war but had somehow skipped Paris, where they had their own anarchist tradition. In Régis Debray, they had a little Che Guevara of their own, and for some reason they had paid more attention than our own young to the government-organised wrecking or cultural revolution in China the previous year…

“At least on the routes of marches, public lavatory attendants get a chance to start cleaning up as soon as the procession has passed, while in general Pop fans congregate in the open air, so that the dead grass can afterwards be sprayed. The Paris undergraduates blocked up the drains in theatres and university buildings until the stench became too much even for them. Then they moved out and left it all to the cleaners and decorators. Even now atavistically respectful of the plumbing, German and Anglo-Saxon undergraduates also occupied fine premises, but in smaller numbers and for shorter periods.”

“In spite of the fact that the Ancient Egyptians enjoy rather more popularity than their contemporaries, it is evident that the books which they wrote are closed books to those who have not the glamour of vanished peoples, and the fascination of mighty cities now made desolate, strong upon them. Yet in the heterogeneous and pitiful flotsam that reluctant seas have washed to us piecemeal from a remote past, there are, as will be shown later, many things which, although proceeding from a culture and modes of thought as far removed from our own as they may well be, are worth the reading.”

Battiscombe G Gunn, Introduction to The Instruction Of Ptah-Hotep And The Instruction Of Ke’gemni (1906)

“The [1957 Homicide] Act was criticised on many grounds and in most quarters. None criticised it more severely than those ‘abolitionists’ to placate whom the Bill had been brought in. That is perhaps natural enough. For them, it abolished too little. The nervous and those who simply saw no reason for change (known as ‘retentionists’, just as non-motorists had, to their astonishment, come to be known as ‘pedestrians’) were dismayed to find that no more than a ‘life’ sentence (averaging ten years) thenceforward awaited those who, for the first time as far as the law knew and when not actively engaged in robbery, for any reason or none, killed anyone but a policeman or prison officer with poison, cold steel, a blunt instrument, drowning, strangulation, smothering, burning, gassing, starvation, driving a car at the victim or tampering with his brakes, infecting him with a fatal disease, pushing him off a tall building or over a cliff, torturing him beyond what his constitution would bear, shutting him in with dangerous animals, inducing madness with drugs, hypnotic suggestion or sustained ill-treatment and then putting the means of suicide into his hands or leading him to believe that a fatal trap is a way to safety, anything in fact that a writer of detective stories might plausibly imagine. Apart from prison officers and policemen, the victim might be anyone at all, a child or the Queen.”

Rayner Heppenstall, The Sex War And Others : A Survey Of Recent Murder, Principally In France (1973)

“Appendicitis was a disease that I spent much time in battling. I read up on it and knew all the symptoms. I went to the public library and hunted up a Gray’s Anatomy and studied the appendix. It seemed to be a little receptacle in which to side-track grape-seeds and other useless rubbish. I would no sooner have knowingly swallowed a grape-or a lemon-seed than I would a stick of dynamite. I would not eat oysters lest I get a piece of shell or even a pearl into my vermiform appendix. I was exceedingly careful never to swallow anything which I thought might contain a gritty substance. I had once heard a lecturer on hygiene and sanitation speak of the limy coat which forms on the inside of our tea-kettles from using ‘hard’ water. He stated that in time we would get that sort of crust inside of us from drinking water which contained mineral matter. I thought how easy it would be for some of it to chip off and slip into the appendix and set up an inflammation. So to be on the safe side, I thought I would try drinking spring water for a while, but it gave me a bad case of malaria. I then came to the conclusion that between being dead with chills and having an inner concrete lining I would choose the latter, which seemed the lesser evil.”

William Taylor Marrs, Confessions Of A Neurasthenic (1908)

A quick note to confirm that in future Hooting Yard will be following the Russian practice and using the term foggy Albion to refer to the United Kingdom.

Could this be the finest couplet in rock music?

Well I’ve come back from the foundry and I find you in bed

With Chris and Tim and John and Lindsay, Dagmar and Fred

It’s from the song “Group Sex” on the album The Gab – Gift Or Curse? by The Plain People Of England, an offshoot of the Orchestre Murphy. It is, I suppose, vaguely possible that some readers may not realise just who it is in the bed, so here is some further reading.

“I think there’s very little likelihood of the Labour Party launching an all-out war on beards.” – Douglas Murray