In her letter yesterday, Poppy Nisbet mentioned the decoration of the “Zeitgeist” Death Room, consisting in part of portrait paintings (by Marjorie Monroe) “of subjects who all looked like characters from Agatha Christie” from which “the faces [were] cut out and the rest of the image left intact”. Ms Nisbet has now provided photographic evidence of what she is talking about, so you lot can better appreciate the spookiness.

Left : intact portrait, Right : wrecked portrait.

On Thursday I remarked that it was hard to imagine a window made out of crows. Not for the first time, I was wrong – astonishingly so, given that ornithology is involved. But wrong nonetheless, as this letter from Poppy Nisbet makes clear. It plopped through the post all the way from the eastern United States:

In the long ago I occasionally worked on local theatrical extravaganzas, my favorite being “Zeitgeist”, an excruciating interpretation of Human Life from beginning to end. We, the perpetrators of this cultural maelstrom, took over the very small town hall in a very small town nearby. The building had a central front door and hallway flanked by two minuscule offices and leading to a large open room with a stage at the far end. As a preface to the main event onstage we made the offices into a birth room and a death room. It is the death room that requires description.

The house I now live in had belonged to artists for a long time and the higgledy-piggledy remains of their art lives were still in the barn studio when I moved here. One of the artists was a portrait painter of subjects who all looked like characters from Agatha Christie. The studio was overflowing with petrified tubes of oil paint, bristle-free brushes, canvas stretchers, human bones, broken glass and empty frames, my favorite relics being paintings with the faces cut out and the rest of the image left intact. As a backdrop for the death room these edited portraits were hung on the walls above dead leaves piled high, so deep that people could only wade through them with difficulty. The resultant noise was full of memories.

The room had a dilemma that demanded solving, a large window facing the parking lot. We felt that the evening trajectories of headlights would spoil the mood on the night of the performance so we cut silhouettes of flying crows out of a piece of black foam-core board and fitted it over the glass. A sheer curtain was hung over this on the inside, making the window amendments invisible in the general murk.

The headlights swept through the birds like a fog beacon, flaring up for a moment and projecting distorted avian outlines onto the folds of the curtain and the floating dust of the leaves. It left a surging impression of flight that was surprisingly spooky. Even now, whenever I see crows I remember the motion of light in black bird shapes filling up a window.

Hooting Yard devotee Alasdair Dickson saw a ghost. Fortunately, in spite of his terror, he had the presence of mind to take a snap, and he has donated the exposure to the Hooting Yard Spirit Photography Bank. Here it is. The spectral presence of a ghoulish phantom is clearly visible executing a woohoodiwoodiwoo manoeuvre behind an Edinburgh municipal bench.

Speaking of ghosts, over the past few years I have read quite a few books on spiritualism and the paranormal in the Victorian era and the first half of the twentieth century. A striking feature of the material is that, almost invariably, mention is made of Harry Price. Wishing to discover more about the “veteran ghost-hunter” than was divulged in scattered references, I obtained a copy of Search For Harry Price by Trevor H. Hall (Duckworth, 1978). What a hoot! The book proves to be a sustained character assassination, demonstrating in forensic detail that Price was a liar and a fraud and a charlatan, not only in the field of ghost-hunting, but, earlier in his life, as a numismatist, archaeologist, and book-collector. It is a highly entertaining read, and I have not yet arrived at the part, promised in the preface, where Hall examines “the ridiculous Brocken affair … the ‘magical experiment’ in the Harz Mountains in which a goat was supposed to change into a beautiful youth (which attracted some 800 press reports in over a dozen countries)”. I will tell you all about that in due course.

Hooting Yard Encyclopaedia topics addressed : ghosts, phantoms, spectres, wraiths, ghouls, woohoodiwoodiwoo manoeuvres, goat transformations, municipal benches.

“We shall pick up an existence by its frogs,” wrote [Charles] Fort in a memorable phrase; but he also told of falls of alkali, asbestos, ashes, axes;

of beef, birds, bitumen, blood, brick, and butter;

of carbonate of soda, charcoal, cinders, coal, coffee beans, and coke;

of fibres, fish, flesh, and flints;

of gelatin, grain, and greenstone;

of hay;

of ice, insects, and iron;

of larvae, leaves, and lizards;

of manna;

of nostoc;

of sands, seeds, silk, snakes, soot, spiderwebs, stones, and sulphur;

of turpentine, and turtles;

of water, and worms.

Damon Knight, Charles Fort : Prophet Of The Unexplained (Gollancz 1971)

In his comment on Christmas Dinner, Hooting Yard’s in-house anagrammatist R. provided one of his finest letter-jumbles : crams tern in dish. This is, quite clearly, the essential Yuletide recipe for my readers, and I thus present a handy pictorial guide:

Ingredients : tern

Equipment : dish

Method : cram tern in dish. Serve.

Brit (of The Dabbler) wrote to ask me if, as one of the world’s leading ornithologists, I would be tucking into a bird-packed Christmas dinner next week. Specifically, he wondered if I might be tempted by Grimod de La Reynière’s 1807 concoction, the rôti sans pareil. This is a bustard stuffed with a turkey stuffed with a goose stuffed with a pheasant stuffed with a chicken stuffed with a duck stuffed with a guinea fowl stuffed with a teal stuffed with a woodcock stuffed with a partridge stuffed with a plover stuffed with a lapwing stuffed with a quail stuffed with a thrush stuffed with a lark stuffed with an ortolan bunting stuffed with a garden warbler stuffed with an olive. The puckish gastronome did not actually recommend washing this down with a brimming tumbler of fresh warm starling’s blood, but that would be appropriate.

This year, however, in an act of right-on cultural outreach to our non-Christian Middle Eastern chums, I think I will go for whole stuffed camel – the recipe for which you can see here (scroll down to the end if you wish to avoid some blather about Dobson and Marigold Chew and Charles Montagu Doughty).

Lomg-term Hooting Yard aficionados may recall that in the closing years of the last century I produced four or five calendars. Each of these had a specific theme, thus the 1992 Hooting Yard Calendar was entitled Accidental Deaths Of Twelve Cartographers, while its 1993 successor commemorated The Golden Days of the Bodger’s Spinney Variety Theatre. In 1994 I thought to illustrate a fictional work of fiction (Fangs In The Mist – a phrase stolen from J. P. Donleavy) and, in casting about within my bonce for a suitable name for the fictional author, I lit upon Chlorine Winslow. “Chlorine”, it seemed to me, sounded like it might well have been a popular girl’s name in Victorian times, and I recall that I chuckled immoderately to myself having decided upon it.

Now, years later, I discover this:

Mrs [Leonora] Piper had become a medium in 1883. The thing had happened in the usual way – by contagion. She had been suffering from a tumour and had gone to visit a medium who gave medical consultations, but who also specialized in developing latent mediumship in others. At her first sitting Mrs Piper felt very agitated and thought she was going to faint. On the next occasion, the medium put his hands on her forehead. Once more she was on the point of losing consciousness. She saw a flood of light, unrecognisable faces, and a hand which fluttered before her own face. She then passed out. When she came to, although she could remember nothing, she was told that a young Indian girl named.,incredibly, Chlorine, had manifested through her and had given a remarkable proof of survival after death.

From The Spiritualists : The Passion For The Occult In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries by Ruth Brandon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1983).

Well, that was a slightly longer interval than intended. Now that the forthcoming paperback is almost ready, I really ought to buckle down to important Hooting Yardery again. One thing I have been doing while ignoring you lot is continuing my intermittent reading – begun last December – of Vincent Bugliosi’s magisterial Reclaiming History. This, you may recall, is a preposterously huge tome – 1,518 pages of dense text – devoted to the Kennedy assassination.

Two phrases are particularly evocative for hopeless JFK obsessives like me – the grassy knoll and the picket fence. So magisterial is Bugliosi’s magisterial book that he even finds space, in a footnote, for a minor though shocking revelation. The fence in Dealey Plaza commonly referred to as the picket fence is not a picket fence at all! Dogged in his pursuit of absolutely everything anybody could ever possibly care to know about the events of that day in Dallas, Bugliosi conducted an interview by telephone on 18 August 2005 with Gary Mack, curator of the Sixth Floor Museum. Mr Mack told him: “In a picket fence, the wooden slats are not touching each other across the width of the fence. Here, they are. The fence is more properly referred to as a stockade fence.”

I had to go for a long walk to clear my head after reading that. I can only hope it has cleared sufficiently for me to resume bashing out the prose you lot have come to rely upon to keep you sane in a doolally universe.

The picket fence – not a picket fence

I was delighted to learn that the Governor of Idaho is named Butch Otter. Mr Otter is not to be confused with his namesake, the character who made occasional appearances in the Unconscious Squirrel cartoon strip, along with his anthropomorphic pals Milksop Weasel, Mordant Heron, Smarmy Badger, and Rancorous Peewit.

Mrs Catherine Crowe, who wrote the best-selling Night Side Of Nature [1848], an enormous compilation of ghost stories, was found ‘in the street, clothed only in her chastity, a pocket-handkerchief, and a visiting-card. She had been informed, it appeared, by the spirits, that if she went in that trim she would be invisible’,

from The Spiritualists : The Passion For The Occult In The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries by Ruth Brandon (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1983)

In certain letters to his wife Josephine, Napoleon Bonaparte referred to her private parts as “Baron de Kepen”. Nobody knows why (nor who the Baron was).

Joesphine de Beauharnais

I was excited to note in the television listings that there is a showing this afternoon of a remake of the 1977 film Raid on Entebbe, entitled Raid on N. Tebbit, in which a crack team of Mossad agents attempts to rescue hostages from the home of a deranged octogenarian ex-cabinet minister.

Readers may recall that the very same N. Tebbit was in the news a few years ago for attacking a child dressed in a dragon outfit.

You’d be surprised how many people around the world appreciate sausages.

A world sausage expert quoted this morning on Farming Today on Radio Four.

Zamoyski is adept at painterly scene-setting. One vivid paragraph shows the Paris revolution of 1848, which sent King Louis Philippe scurrying into exile and ignited populist insurrections across Europe, as caused by a clumsy bandsman with a big drum. After a day of innocuous, anti-climactic Paris demonstrations, a company of soldiers stationed on a boulevard corner tried to retreat from a rowdy but hardly murderous crowd into the courtyard of the ministry of foreign affairs. They were blocked because the musician carrying the drum got jammed in the porte-cochère of the ministry. As a result some soldiers had to turn and face the crowd, grew rattled, and fired shots that left over 30 dead. The mangled corpses were piled onto a wagon, which was trundled through the streets of Paris by rabble-rousers crying for revenge. It was the drummer, rather than the previous uprisings in Palermo and Naples, and the granting of constitutions in Sicily, Sardinia and Tuscany, that triggered the continent-wide uprisings of 1848.

Rupert Davenport-Hines reviewing Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty, 1789 – 1848 by Adam Zamoyski in The Spectator.

Many thanks to long-time Hooting Yard devotee Jonathan Coleclough, from whom I received in the post today this splendid pamphlet. Mr Coleclough suspects it was published in 2008, though whether or not it is out of print is not clear.