Bonkers Maisie

Pevsner never passed this way, so the building, long abandoned, remains unsung. Hidden by elm and yew and larch and sycamore, only ghosts sing here now… sing and dance, conjure and tumble, toot and whistle and crack the corniest of corny gags you ever did hear. For the crumbling palace of which I speak was once Bodger’s Spinney Music Hall & Variety Theatre, and it was here that one of the most singular careers in entertainment began, and ended.

Like a character from a Gothic novel, Bonkers Maisie was locked up in an attic for forty years. Whether her bonkersness was the motive for her confinement, or the inevitable result of it, we cannot say. All others who lived at the stinking farmhouse atop which the attic loomed are dead and gone, and they left no diaries or memoirs or confessions. Indeed, the only book to be recovered from the farm was the novel which was Bonkers Maisie’s companion for all those years. It was a copy of Iron In The Soul by Jean-Paul Sartre.

On the night of her rescue, Bonkers Maisie came lolloping down the staircase clutching the Sartre in one hand and a moth-eaten stuffed toy bear in the other. It was a one-eyed bear, and looked rather like the cloying mascot of the BBC’s annual Children In Need appeal. It did not have a name. As she passed through the door into the open air for the first time in forty years, Bonkers Maisie took one rapid, unblinking, uncomprehending look at those who had kept her shut away. The soldiers had lined them up against the wall of the pig-sty, blindfolded, their necks already bared for the nooses. An owl hooted, and Bonkers Maisie was given an already-lit cigarette, and driven away in a jeep at reckless speed.

One week later posters appeared in Bodger’s Spinney announcing an exciting new turn at the Music Hall & Variety Theatre. Opening the show for more established acts, Bonkers Maisie would take to the stage for half an hour. The advertisement ran shy of divulging the precise nature of her performance, so when the local hoi polloi peasantry shuffled resentfully into the sawdust-strewn mosh pit, they had no inkling of what to expect. With everybody inside, the soldiers slammed shut all the doors and set the timer-locks.

This was the era of the New Look, and when Bonkers Maisie skipped onstage it was obvious that a benefactor had replaced her tattered attic rags. She tapped the microphone hesitantly with a gloved fingertip, and took from her new expensive Wyck Thayer handbag her spookily pristine copy of Iron In The Soul. And beginning very quietly, but gradually getting louder, until she was shrieking like a banshee, she read:

An octopus? He pulled out his knife and opened his eyes … Rushes of blood to the head settle nothing … The abscess had got to be drained … He’ll pretend to agree, so as not to look like a pricked bubble, but no sooner is your back turned, than he evaporates into thin air … Brunet was grinding scraps of bread into the ground with his heel … The general mood welled sluggishly up in his mind and oozed from his mouth … Truth stood blocking every vista.

To those among the gathered peasants who were existentialists familiar with Sartre, it was apparent that Bonkers Maisie was plucking phrases from the book at random. To the rest, the words took on a haunting grandeur. Some wept. All were transfixed.

And then, after reading for fifteen minutes, Bonkers Maisie stopped, put the book back in her handbag, sashayed to the side of the stage and came back bearing in her Dior-clad arms a large bundle of dishcloths. She spent the next quarter of an hour in complete silence, scrunching up the dishcloths one by one, unscrunching them and then scrunching them up again. It was not quite a magic show, in fact it was as far from a magic show as one could get, yet by the time the emcee tootled his whistle to signal that she cease her scrunching, the crowd of rustics was bathed in an aura of absolute awe.

That season, Bonkers Maisie performed her show every night without a break, gradually moving up the billing until she was the star act for the final weekend. The morning after her final appearance, it is said that the soldiers came for her in their jeep, and drove her away from Bodger’s Spinney before dawn. Some say they took her to the seaside, and that she lived out the rest of her days in tranquility. No one has ever been able to locate her gravestone.

Note : Astute and/or pernickety readers may question a certain befuddlement in the chronology of the tale of Bonkers Maisie, and of course they are free so to do. I offer no defence, except to say that I may have muddled up my source material.

Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars

Hooting Yard is excited (possibly overexcited) to announce publication of Unspeakable Desolation Pouring Down From The Stars, a decisively sensible novella of high adventure, derring-do, and baffling conspiracies. Prior knowledge of arcane philatelic imponderables is useful, but not necessary. The book also contains two shorter pieces, one of which features mute blind magnetic love monkeys.

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Click on the cover art to buy the book.

Name That Boy!

I read somewhere last week that Mohammed is now the second most popular name for newborn boys in the UK. It strikes me as a bit odd that you can get beheaded for drawing a picture of the Prophet Mohammed, but it’s perfectly fine to attach his name to your son. Still, there is much about Islam that I find perplexing, such as a recent fatwa in Egypt which allows an unmarried woman to work in an office alongside men so long as she breastfeeds each of them five times to create a familial bond. Now there’s a sensible idea.

Anyway, I was prompted to think about boys’ names, and more particularly what name I would ideally like to see in the number one spot above Mohammed. Readers will know that I am very keen on Sebag, but my current choice to become the most popular boys’ name is Suetonius.

Not only is it a splendid, resounding name, but of course it also commemorates the author of The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars. Suetonius – whose full name was Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus – can be seen as a kind of Dobson-like figure, in that many of his works are terminally out of print. That is, they are lost, possibly forever. We know that he wrote, among other things, Physical Defects Of Mankind, Lives Of Famous Whores, and an essay on Critical Signs Used In Books, but no trace of them survives. Luckily, we do have the rattling good read that is The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars.

George Costanza, in Seinfeld, favoured the names Soda and Seven, neither of which holds a candle to Suetonius in my opinion. So if there are any expectant parents reading this, and your newborn is a boy, do the decent thing and name him after the Roman Ur-Dobson. And mothers please note! While I would recommend breastfeeding, it would probably be a good idea to limit the milk supply to little Suetonius, rather than sharing it out among those unprepossessing gits in the accounts department.

Goofy, Macabre

One of the difficulties that beset Joost Van Dongelbraacke throughout his career as a so-called “suburban shaman” was the ruinous cost of insurance. Having been dragged through the courts by a Pointy Town quantity surveyor who claimed emotional distress, disfigurement and loss of earnings after being entranced into a week-long state of whirling ecstatic frenzy, Van Dongelbraacke vowed never again to practise his mystic arts without being covered. His first approach was to a greasy insurance agent with an unfortunate cowlick of hair who dithered and faffed and seemed more intent on his executive desktop bonsai garden than on the urgency of the suburban shaman’s business. The next three people he consulted were by turns lost in wistfulness, egg-bound, and unseemly, and one of them failed to provide Van Dongelbraacke with a suitable chair in which to sit during their appointment. He was ushered into a seat that emitted pneumatic hisses and tilted and swivelled on tubular steel pistons. It was, Van Dongelbraacke thought, the most unshamanic chair in which he had ever tried to sit. He judged each of the three to be unsuitable.

And then one evening in a tavern the suburban shaman struck up a conversation with a mountebank who was passing through Pointy Town on his way to a seaside psychic smorgasbord. Ferns and berries decked the brim of this mountebank’s hat. His visage was half flesh, half mascara. At a certain angle you could have mistaken him for the god Baal. It was difficult to imagine that he had once been an actuary, but that was indeed the case, and he had maintained many friendships with past office colleagues in the insurance industry. Listening attentively to Van Dongelbraacke’s plight as the two of them sank pint after pint of diluted rosemary-and-hibiscus syrup on the tavern balcony, looking out over the filth-strewn fields which stretched unbroken to the horizon, the mountebank eventually took a card out of his pocket and handed it to the shaman.

“This is the man you need,” he said, “His premiums are ridiculously expensive, you may be alarmed by his taste in cloisonnée enamel ware, and never, ever try to make him laugh. But those things aside, he is as fine an insurance man as you will find on the terrestrial globe.”

Van Dongelbraacke was puzzled by this reference to a globe, for in his belief system the earth was cylindrical, tapered at one end and ineffably mysterious at the other. But he liked and trusted the mountebank, whose pincer-liked perspicuity appealed to him, as did the hat-brim decked with ferns and berries, a look which the suburban shaman was to ape in the coming years.

Six weeks later, after a particularly exhausting session of communal hysteria around a bonfire in one of those filthy fields, Van Dongelbraacke took the bus to O’Houlihan’s Wharf. He had the insurance man’s card in his pocket, and berries on the brim of his hat. The ferns, he decided, would have to wait. At the time of which I write, the pier at that brine-soaked hellhole had not yet collapsed, and it was in a booth at the far end, a mile or more out to sea, that the suburban shaman came face to face with Jean-Claude Unanugu.

It’s a name you might know, especially if you are an aficionado of the kind of insurance man who spends his leisure time as a creative genius. Charles Ives, Wallace Stevens and Franz Kafka spring to mind, and Unanugu can be added to their company. Acerbic, battered, chippy, Drambuie-soaked, eerie, foolish, grunting, and hot-to-trot, Jean-Claude Unanugu was the self-styled “Grand Master of the Goofy and the Macabre”. In his numerous pulp paperbacks, he explored with forensic precision the narrow territory where that which is goofy meets that which is macabre. Sometimes, in his work, goofiness wins out. At other times, he favours the macabre. At his best, the two modes, or registers, or styles, or styles, or modes, or registers, or styles are inextricable, melded and fused and joined and inextricably fused and melded, in a joinment of characteristically Unanuguesque inextricability. It can be hard to see where the goofiness falls off and the macabre begins, just as it can be hard to see where the macabre ends and the goofiness takes over, so inextricably fused are they in Unanuguesque meldment.

Now, you might be tutting irritably that I am repeating myself, or at least writing in a peculiarly annoying and inelegant manner. In fact, that was a clever pastiche of Unanugu’s early style, seen to best effect in early trash like The Macabre Thing From Goofy Town or The Goofy People From The Macabre Village. Later in his career he devised new tricks and quirks, and I am not alone in thinking that no other writer has ever made such fantastic use of italics, block capitals and exclamation marks. One of the great pleasures of a middle period Unanugu novel such as The Macabre Yet Goofy Duckpond is the manner in which each sentence is given equal weight, every single one ending in an exclamation mark. It is the only book I know which, when read aloud, demands to be shouted out at the top of one’s voice.

Much like Stevens and Ives, but possibly not Kafka, Jean-Claude Unanugu kept his working and creative lives separate. When devoting his time to insurance, he set up in his booth on the pier. It was a small, cramped booth, of wood and canvas, with a tin roof which resounded under the rain, and as you know it often rained in O’Houlihan’s Wharf, for that was how the gods had ordered things. It was teeming down on the day Joost Van Dongelbraacke disembarked from the bus and made his way through the ill-starred streets to the pier. There were numberless booths and kiosks on the pier in those days, and the suburban shaman found himself distracted by all sorts of depraved enticements as he shuffled along, stepping carefully on the rotting planks. He passed by Edna The Squid Woman, Little Severin The Mystic Badger, The Astonishing Food-Splattered Jesuit, Kim Fat Goo The Evil Tattooist, David Icke, David Blunkett, Bonkers Maisie And Her Scrunched-Up Dishcloths, and the Poopsie Clutterbuck Sextet, who performed the latest news headlines in the form of madrigals. A gust came in from the west and blew Van Dongelbraacke’s berries off the brim of his hat into the churning sea. Far out, half way to the horizon, he could see the tell-tale silhouette of a tugboat. What, he wondered, was it going to tug out there? Closer to shore, he saw dozens upon dozens of buoys, red and yellow and blue buoys, each with its own chain. Van Dongelbraacke had always loved the sound of chains clanking at sea, and he stopped a moment on his prance along the pier to listen, but the faint clanking he heard was soon drowned out by the barking of a bedraggled Twinkly Twirly Man in the doorway of a nearby booth, who was manipulating a saucepan and a bus ticket in remarkable ways. Such antics, thought the shaman, had what Roland Barthes would call jouissance. Like almost everybody who uses the word, possibly including Barthes himself, he had no idea what it meant, but he was a shaman, a babbler of incantations, so why should he care? He tossed a coin at the feet of the Twinkly Twirly Man, told him that he admired his jouissance, and headed on.

Inside his booth, as fat raindrops pinged and panged on the tin roof, the Grand Master of the Goofy and the Macabre was blotting the ink on a freshly written insurance policy that was neither goofy nor macabre. It was, if anything, a piece of actuarial magic that the suburban shaman would have admired for its hallucinatory qualities. In Jean-Claude Unanugu’s suspiciously manicured hands, insurance policies became things of beauty. If Von Dongelbraacke’s beliefs were true, there is no doubt that Unanugu’s policies would have to be filed at the end of the earth that terminated in ineffable mystery. Blotting done, the insurance agent cracked open another bottle of Drambuie. His own credo allowed for a globular earth rather than a cylindrical one, though privately he held that this globe was, like his stories, both goofy and macabre. In that sense, he felt himself to be a realist, an attitude which had caused him no end of grief with the O’Houlihan’s Wharf Pier Booth Rental Authority, which preferred to rent its booths and kiosks to the non-reality-based community.

A mere six or seven prancing paces away from the booth now, Van Dongelbraacke too saw himself as a realist, although for him the “real” existed on an ethereal plane accessible only through whirling about around a bonfire while chanting gibberish. But, as he always liked to insist, it was very choreographed whirling, and absolutely specific gibberish. That was why a hapless goon like the litigious Pointy Town quantity surveyor could not just whirl and babble without the guidance of a shaman. And that was why the shaman needed insurance cover. And that was why Joost Van Dongelbraacke poked his head in through the entrance flap of the wood and canvas and tin booth on the pier and saw…

Why did I resort to an ellipsis? I did so partly in homage to late-period Unanugu, where the texts of such novels as Beyond The Macabre Yet Goofy Duckpond actually have more ellipses than words, and partly because I wanted to go and make a cup of tea before bringing this narrative to a close. Jean-Claude Unanugu’s work – both in fiction and insurance – was fuelled by Drambuie, but mine is dependent upon copious cups of tea. I make no apologies for that. It was Thomas De Quincey who said “tea, though ridiculed by those who are naturally coarse in their nervous sensibilities… will always be the favourite beverage of the intellectuals”. Whether or not I am an “intellectual” is but futile conjecture, but I suspect I have more chance of being one through regular tea intake than by bandying about the jouissance word. Now, that is quite enough twaddle. Let us return to that ellipsis.

Joost Van Dongelbraacke poked his head into the booth and saw Jean-Claude Unanugu, the Grand Master of the Goofy and the Macabre, sitting at a little fold-out camp table, swigging Drambuie and ready to sell him some hot-to-trot insurance.

And…

Joost Van Dongelbraacke poked his head into the booth and saw… his Döppelganger. For a split second he thought he was looking into a mirror. The resemblance between the two was uncanny. Indeed, it was macabre. Was it also goofy? Why, stap my chives, yes it was! And what happened next was goofier still, and even more macabre. For Van Dongelbraacke went into the booth and closed the flap behind him. There were witnesses to this, including the bedraggled Twinkly Twirly Man and David Icke, and though they were not realists, their accounts, painstakingly taken down by Detective Captain Cargpan’s doughty squad of gumshoes, were deemed reliable by the O’Houlihan’s Wharf Constabulary’s investigative überbrains. So we must accept that there were two men inside that booth on that sopping wet Thursday afternoon. Yet only one ever emerged. Was it Jean-Claude Unanugu or was it Joost Van Dongelbraacke? It was neither, or it was both. It was, we are forced to concede, an entirely new being, an entirely new kind of being. I know this may sound implausible to members of the reality-based community, but let me ask you this. Is there any other way to explain that, within days, the O’Houlihan’s Wharf Chamber of Commerce registered a new company which offered Shamanic Insurance Solutions, to whom fees could be paid in the blood of ducks and the bones of ospreys and in pointed sticks set afire?

Tacky To Goo

If you spend a bit of time thinking about the matter, it becomes apparent that human ingenuity has created a myriad of pastes. At one end of the spectrum are thick pastes, tacky to the touch, and at the other are pastes so runny that they are akin to goo. There are other ways of thinking about the variety of pastes other than the thick-to-thin or tacky-to-goo spectrum, but they have less appeal. Why is this? Not surprisingly, it is a question to which Dobson once turned his magnificent pamphlet-writing brain.

It has to be said that the resulting fourteen-page essay is one of his less engaging works. Fancying that he might win some kudos with the scientific community, Dobson splattered his text with technical terminology of which he had no grasp whatsoever. It has been reported that up and down the land laboratory cafeterias rang with laughter as boffins digested a Gestetnered draft of the pamphlet which Dobson had circulated ahead of publication. In the event, Tacky To Goo : Some Frightfully Complicated Thoughts On The Consistency Of Manufactured Pastes was only ever issued in this scrappy format, cranked out in the potting shed by Marigold Chew as an act of kindness to the increasingly beleaguered Dobson.

A pauper with a barrow was employed to trundle copies of the pamphlet around various market squares, but he lacked the mouthy bumptiousness required of a true salesman, and returned with the entire print-run intact. Downcast and hopeless, the pauper trudged along the winding lane towards chez Dobson & Chew heaving the pamphlets in a filthy frayed sack. His barrow had been stolen by cutpurses.

A less determined pamphleteer may have thrown in the towel at this point, but, as has often been remarked, there was an edge of steel in Dobson. After taking a turn around the pond, and pelting pebbles at swans, he crashed back into the house and immediately fired off a letter to Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist. Ordinarily, of course, so celebrated a mezzotintist would have had nothing to do with a pamphleteer on his uppers, but there was between the two men a special bond. It was a bond forged in childhood, in an orchard, in the teeth of a summer thunderstorm, a bond redolent of the hit single Two Little Boys by the bearded Antipodean Renaissance man Rolf Harris. Neither a wooden horse nor, later, trench warfare were involved in the Dobson-Tint Pact, but you get the general idea.

Dobson’s inspiration on this gusty Tuesday was to bind his scientific pamphlet anew, with a really terrific Rex Tint mezzotint on the cover. Sales, he felt sure, would go through the roof, even when handled by the pauper. Shoving the hastily-scribbled letter into a pre-stamped jiffy bag, and enclosing as a memento of the pact a couple of hazelnuts, Dobson roared back out and headed for the postbox at the top of Pang Hill.

There is a long-running quiz show on the BBC called A Question Of Sport. One of the regular features is a round called “What happened next?”, in which the footage of some unusual sporting event is stopped just before the crucial moment. Let us imagine that a phantom cinematographer, taking grainy black and white film of the swans of Pang Hill Pond, turned their camera on the excited pamphleteer, and followed him up the hill. Now, freeze the imaginary film with Dobson just a few paces from his goal. Why did that jiffy bag never plop into the postbox? Something happened to stop the pamphleteer in his tracks, something that meant the letter and the hazelnuts were never sent, that Tacky To Goo was never rebound with a terrific Rex Tint mezzotint cover, that not a single copy of the original Gestetnered pamphlet was ever sold, and that Dobson, in despair, never again tried to worm his way into the core of the big forbidding world o’ science.

Ten Songs

Here is one of those occasional Hooting Yard music playlists. All these pieces come recommended by the bloated janitor. He may be an unapologetic Blunkettite, but he knows his musical onions, apparently.

Hammond Song, The Roches

Two-Headed Boy, Neutral Milk Hotel

Manolete, Weather Report

Plastic Factory, Captain Beefheart & The Magic Band

The Old Man’s Back Again, Scott Walker

Misumo Bo Tamo She, King Bruce & Black Beats

O’er The Hills, Martin Carthy

Jackie And Edna, Kevin Coyne

Born Secular, Jenny Lewis & The Watson Twins

In Love, The Raincoats

Knitted Bulgarian Folk Tale Puppet

Ahoy, Mr Key!, writes Dr Ruth Pastry, Thank you so much for affording us readers a glimpse of the inner workings of Hooting Yard in your piece on that Olympics logo. Brief as it was, I was fascinated by the reference to the editorial conclave, and to the fact that the bloated janitor remains an unreconstructed Blunkettite. The real reason I am writing, however, is because I am desperate to find out what Mrs Gubbins was knitting. Can you tell me?

Well, Ruth, yes I can! A few weeks ago, the octogenarian crone was approached by a charity working with the filthy and destitute denizens of that cluster of hovels out Pointy Town way. As you may know, these ill-starred wretches are even lower than the lowest of the low, wallowing in a dank pit of turpitude and lacking even the most basic sanitation. Other charitable organisations shun them because, you know, there are limits. Anyway, Mrs Gubbins was asked to knit something for them, and she wisely decided to bring a little joy to their hearts – if they actually have beating human hearts – by making for them a life-size knitted puppet of Ugo, hero of a series of exciting Bulgarian folk tales.

We have published a number of Ugo stories here at Hooting Yard, so this would be an opportune time to pluck them from the Archive and present all six here afresh, some three years after they originally appeared:

Ugo Goofs Off

Ugo lived in Plovdiv. In the fog, Ugo goofed off. “There you go, Ugo, goofing off again,” said Ugo’s ma. It was foggy. Ugo stepped in some goo. He got it on his boots. “Ma, I’ve got goo on my boots,” said Ugo. Ugo’s ma gave him a rag to wipe the goo off his boots. She had a drawer of gewgaws. Gewgaws and rags. Ugo’s ma was blind, so when Ugo goofed off and got goo on his boots, she opened the drawer of gewgaws and rags and rummaged, feeling for a rag rather than a gewgaw, for if she gave Ugo a gewgaw he wouldn’t get the goo off his boots, but with a rag he would. Ugo sat in the porch after goofing off and wiped the goo off his boots with a rag. In the fog. In Plovdiv.

Ugo’s Pal Ulf

In Plovdiv, Ugo had a pal called Ulf. Ulf had the plague. “Look at my bubo, Ugo,” said Ulf. “Oooh!” said Ugo when he saw the bubo. Ugo had the flu. His ma made him a tincture for his flu but there was not much she could do about Ulf’s bubo. In the Plovdiv lazaretto, Ulf mooched about in a foul mood. Ugo and Ugo’s ma brought food for Ulf. “Have some pancakes, Ulf,” said Ugo. Ulf gobbled a pancake. “Far be it from me to poo-poo you, Ulf,” said Ugo’s ma, “But you should put the pancake on your bubo, like a poultice.” “Oh,” said Ulf. He did as bid, and soon his bubo was gone. But Ugo still had the flu, so his ma was thrown for a loop. She could cure the plague but not the flu, and did not know what else she could do. For the time being. In the lazaretto in Plovdiv.

Ugo’s Pod

In the old town of Plovdiv, Ugo plopped his pod onto a stool. Ugo’s ma said, “Ugo, why are you using a pod instead of a jar?” Ugo’s ma was blind, but she knew that the plop of Ugo’s pod was different to the plop of his jar. “Oh, ma,” said Ugo, “My jar is in the shed.” Ugo’s ma bashed Ugo on the head. “Never leave your jar in the shed, Ugo,” she said, “When you do I will bash you on the head, as I just did.” Ugo said, “Sorry, ma. My pal Ulf put my jar in the shed.” “Ah,” said Ugo’s ma. On Thursday last. In a hovel. In the old town of Plovdiv.

Ugo’s New Hooter

Back in Plovdiv, Ugo won a hooter as a booby prize. Ugo tooted his hooter in his blind ma’s ear. “Ooh, Ugo,” said Ugo’s ma, “That hooter makes a din!” “It’s a hooter, ma. I won it as a booby prize,” said Ugo. “And what did your pal Ulf win, Ugo?” asked Ugo’s ma, shelling peas as she spoke. “Ulf won a toy wolf, ma,” said Ugo, “It’s as noisy as my booby prize hooter, because when you press your thumb on its tum, the toy wolf that Ulf won roars.” Ugo tooted his hooter again and ran off to find Ulf. On a very wet Tuesday. Near the old fort. In Plovdiv.

Ugo Turns Blue

It was Saint Hector’s Day in the old town of Plovdiv. Ugo’s hood got snagged on a tack and he turned blue, or, as Carl Sagan used to say, blooow. “Oooo” said Ugo’s pal Ulf, “Ugo, you look all blue.” “Ack” said Ugo. “I’ll go and fetch your blind ma, Ugo, to see what she can do,” said Ulf, though he could have pulled Ugo’s hood off the tack on which it was snagged. But Ulf had been sniffing glue. Ulf found Ugo’s ma sitting on a stool. “Ugo’s ma,” said Ulf, “Ugo has turned blue. His hood is snagged on a tack.” Ugo’s ma was chewing a chew, but she jumped off her stool and ran to Ugo, who was indeed very blue. Ugo’s ma spat out her chew, and it landed in a pot of glue. It was the glue Ugo’s pal Ulf had been sniffing. Ugo’s ma unsnagged Ugo’s hood from the tack. “Ack” said Ugo. “Ooo, Ugo’s ma, I knew you would know what to do,” said Ulf. Ugo’s ma clouted Ulf on the head with a spoon, and confiscated his glue. Ugo went off to find his shoes. It was time for mass. At Saint Hector’s Cathedral. On the Left Bank. In Plovdiv.

Ugo Goes Loopy

One morning in Plovdiv, Ugo went loopy. He put on his shoes and went out to the yard and made a noise like a shrew. Thinking there was a shrew in her yard, Ugo’s blind ma tooted her hooter to alert the Plovdiv Shrew Patrol. But Ugo started to sound like a goose. “Ooo,” said Ugo’s ma, “What am I to do? A shrew and a goose!” Then Ugo began to moo, like a cow. “Wow!” said Ugo’s pal Ulf, who came tumbling into the yard dressed up like a moose, for Ulf was loopy too. “Is that you, Ugo’s pal Ulf?” asked Ugo’s ma. “Woo woo woo,” said Ulf. “Ulf, there is a shrew and a goose and a cow in my yard,” said Ugo’s ma. “No, Ugo’s ma,” said Ulf, “It’s only Ugo being loopy.” “Ah,” said Ugo’s ma. She packed Ugo and Ugo’s pal Ulf off to school. On a tram. In Plovdiv.

Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away

“Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away”. As we have learned, this was the title of a song written by the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, one of several appalling stabs he made at the form. No one with any sense has ever listened to a Dobson song more than once, for the experience is excruciating, as I can avow. That is by no means all I avow, and if we had but world enough and time I would give you a list of every single avowal I have ever made, which I am sure you would find interesting reading. Alas, time presses, heavy as a big lump of iron, and you will have to be satisfied with that single avowal of the frankly horrifying nature of the Dobson songbook, beside which the Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is like an infant’s picture book devoted to perky piglets and bunny rabbits.

“Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away” is also a line from the Book of Isaiah (Authorised Version, chapter 36, verses 16 and 17). Most of the lyrical content of Dobson’s wretched songs was taken from Isaiah, for no apparent reason. One would have thought so prolific a pamphleteer would have been capable of penning his own words, even keen to do so. Not Dobson. What he appears to have done, so far as we can tell, is to pick phrases pretty much at random from the book Peter Ackroyd has called “a series of incandescent utterances”, to shove them together with no regard for sense or metre or singability, and then to set them to music so woefully inadequate that it beggars belief. No wonder Marigold Chew took to wearing a pair of reinforced cork earplugs. Discovering that the standard earplugs sold at Hubermann’s failed to block out completely the din from Dobson’s rehearsal room, the resourceful Marigold located a cork reinforcing atelier hard by the banks of the Great Frightening River. On her first visit, she was surprised to discover the workshop populated entirely by gnomes, some Swiss, some Austrian, and some claiming citizenship of Gondwanaland. “They may have been disturbingly-proportioned little men wearing pointed caps,” she later wrote, “but they certainly knew how to reinforce cork.” As with all his fads, Dobson’s songwriting shenanigans petered out after a couple of months, and peace once more reigned in the house, but Marigold Chew, enchanted, continued to visit the little people by the river for the rest of her life.

“Drink ye every one the waters of his own cistern, until I come and take you away” are the words the Grunty Man roared at a cowering tangle of orphans he waylaid one terrible Thursday afternoon. The pallid tinies were foraging for roots and scraps in a noisome ditch beyond Blister Lane when cracks of lightning rent the sky, thunderclaps boomed, and before they could run back to the safety of the orphanage, the Grunty Man was there! They had thought him a mere figment of nightmares, but here he was, all too real, solid and hairy and brutish and grunting. They trembled as the Grunty Man repeated his strange and evil plan, all except one precocious orphan who put her hand up to ask a question, as if she were in a classroom rather than in a noisome ditch. This disconcerted the Grunty Man, who was impatient for the nippers to glug down the water from their cisterns so he could carry then away to his horrible lair up in the hills, as his scheme dictated. “We did not bring our cisterns with us on our foraging expedition,” piped up the brave tot, “So may we be excused to go back to the orphanage and there to drink from them every one?” As soon as the Grunty Man had grunted his confused agreement, off they all scampered, back to Pang Hill Orphanage, where they armed themselves with pitchforks and shovels. Then they burst out through the iron gates as one, and ran back to the ditch, and chased the Grunty Man back into the hills from whence he had come. For many long years after that fateful Thursday afternoon he sat stewing in his lair trying, in his slow-witted way, to work out the flaw in his plan, which as I said before, was both strange and evil.

That Olympics Logo

The new logo for the 2012 London Olympics has caused a flap. Sorry, it’s not a logo, it’s a brand, a brand which, according to diminutive Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, “takes our values to the world beyond our shores, acting both as an invitation and an inspiration”. I agree, and I know that Hooting Yard’s values are exactly the same in every last detail as Tessa’s. In fact, at an editorial conclave the other day, loveable octogenarian crone Mrs Gubbins looked up from her knitting and said “When in doubt, just ask ‘What would Tessa Jowell do?’” and we all nodded in recognition of the deep wisdom of those words. (All except the bloated janitor, of course, who still swears by Blunkett, but that’s another story.)

Certain people seem to think that the logo – the brand, the brand! – is devoid of content and meaning, and make the same charge against Tessa’s words. Such carping is only to be expected. For my money, anything Tessa Jowell says ought to be carved in stone and studied, much as one would study the work of a great literary giant. The rewards are immense.

To show that I know what I’m talking about, we commissioned a new Hooting Yard brand, the better to embody our values. It cost slightly more than the £400,000 price tag of the Olympic thing of beauty, but I’m sure you will agree that it was money well spent. At a meeting to identify funding, the vitamin-deficient inmates of Pang Hill Orphanage insisted that they can cope with severely reduced gruel rations for the next forty years. Indeed, they have never looked so blissful.

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The Man Who Would Be Dobson

Dobson was a great collector of coupons. Almost all coupons are redeemable in one form or another, but not in Dobson’s world. “Do not even think of urging me to redeem any of my coupons!” he shouted, more than once, when it was gently suggested to him that he was sitting on a fortune in unredeemed coupons. Curiously, for a man so attached to the written word, the pamphleteer preferred coupons with minimal or no wording, and those which were beige in colour. Another thing he used to say, or to shout, was “I cannot be doing with flimsy coupons made of paper!” He never said so explicitly, but for Dobson the Ur-coupon was a small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard.

A few years ago I was sitting in a snackbar when something curious happened. Some would say the mere fact of me sitting in the half-civilised air of a snackbar is curiosity enough, given that I am more usually to be found sprawled in a ditch or languishing louchely in a damp and derelict farmyard outhouse, but stay with me on this one, if you will. I would rather not explain what I was doing tucking into a snack in a snackbar in mid-afternoon on a Tuesday, togged out in what I have to say was a rather fetching Lord Summerisle yellow polo neck and drainpipe trousers combination. Granted, I do not have the bouffant sported so majestically by Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man, and perhaps there was rather a lot of straw snagged in my hair, together with the odd beetle, but all I can say is that I cut a pretty dashing figure. My surroundings probably had something to do with it, as it was a bloody fantastic snackbar, all things considered.

Anyway, I was chomping my way through my snack when the man behind the counter began to sing. It was not a song I knew. The verses seemed to consist mostly of extracts from the Book of Isaiah. There was a bit that went “he is gone up to Bajith, and to Dibon, the high places, to weep; Moab shall howl over Nebo, and over Medeba” which I recognised, but it was when the snackbar tenor got to the chorus that my ears really pricked up. “Yea, and I shall wash myself in the blood of the Lamb, and plead with the Lord, to get me a small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard,” he sang.

This was extraordinary. This was a song about the out of print pamphleteer’s Ur-coupon! Could Dobson have written it himself? I choked on my potted paste pie and leapt to my feet. For a second I wondered if the gasps from an adjoining table meant that I was not the only Dobsonist to frequent this snackbar, but then I realised that my neighbours were gazing awestruck at my winklepickers. Who can blame them? I flashed a rakish smile, a beetle dropped from my hair, and I lolloped elegantly over to the counter.

“I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair,” the man was singing now, but I held up my hand and stopped him.

“Tell me,” I drawled, not wanting to sound too excited, “What is that song you are singing?” The man held up a little sign informing me that he was deaf as a post, so I repeated my question using the only sign language I know, which is a version of the Blötzmann system that I learned as a youth in the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift movement. Luckily the stone deaf singer knew it too. Later, he was to explain to me that he had not learned the system in the Kibbo Kift, but, to my astonishment, directly from Blötzmann himself, shortly before that towering figure was blown up in the Hindenberg.

If one can jabber in sign language, we jabbered. Ten minutes in, by which time I was leaning as insouciantly as I could against the counter, the better to show off my poise, the snackbar singer broke off from our conversation to harry the rest of the snackers out into the wind and the rain. He slammed the door shut as the last one left, locked it with a surprisingly enormous key, and pulled down the blinds. Then he took me into a back room, beyond the kitchen and the pantry, and we settled ourselves in for what I can only describe as a Dobsonathon. It’s not a pretty word, but I can’t think how else to describe a discussion that continued, virtually uninterrupted, for the next four days.

It turned out that my new pal was an autodidact who had, for the past decade, devoted himself to getting to the bottom of this thing Dobson had about coupons. It was a narrow speciality, to be sure, but the world needs people like him. He confessed that he was completely uninterested in the bulk of the pamphleteer’s pamphlets, had never read them and never intended to, and indeed could not care less about any aspect whatsoever of Dobson’s activities save for his coupon mania. I wondered if Guido – I learned his name eventually, on day three, I think – was himself a coupon collector. I put this to him, in my best attempt at a Terry-Thomas voice, and it was the only time during the whole Dobsonathon that he laughed. At least, I think he laughed. He gurgled, caterwauled, hooted, made noises similar to those of an enraged badger, shrieked, and spat all over the table. Something in his demeanour signalled that he expected me to fetch a mop and wipe down the formica, but I have pride as well as poise, so I spat on the table myself, repeatedly, though I forebore from the gurgling and caterwauling etcetera. That gave him pause, so much so that it was like sitting opposite a life-size wooden effigy in the back room of a snackbar. Although this was not an experience I had ever had before, or not precisely, I knew instinctively how to deal with it. I reached with a certain deftness into a pocket of my drainpipe trousers, uncapped the lid from a tiny bottle of Dr Baxter’s Cranium Agitator, wafted it under Guido’s nose, and was rewarded by the sight of him twitching back to life, just as I had suspected. And so our conversation was able to continue, though I never did find out the answer to my question. To this day, I have no idea if Guido too was a coupon enthusiast in his own right. I saw no evidence that any coupons had been amassed within the snackbar, and I had a damned good search when my host took a toilet break, but of course he may have been one of those collectors who keeps his cargo in the safety deposit box of a large and important foreign bank, just as Dobson did, if we are to believe the janitor of a large and important foreign bank who contributed a letter to the Quarterly Digest Of Dobson Studies, Volume XIV, Number 2, a letter which the editor authenticated as genuine after subjecting it to a battery of forensic tests. Such is the dedication of those who take these matters with due seriousness. It is a trait I admire, and I admired it in Guido, just as he admired my yellow polo neck sweater and my effortless social graces.

Now. Guido’s song, which had so transfixed me, and forged a bond between us, was self-penned. Dobson, it appeared, had had nothing to do with it. I can’t say this surprised me. We all know that the pamphleteer’s few attempts at songwriting were absolutely pathetic, hardly the kind of thing to worry proper songsmiths such as, to pluck a name at random, Leo Sayer. Others have written about the horrors of hearing such Dobson dirges as the godawful Drink Ye Every One The Waters Of His Own Cistern, Until I Come And Take You Away, so I needn’t add to the brickbats. What intrigued me was why Guido, robbed of hearing by that kindergarten firework mishap, had chosen to compose a song about Dobson’s couponophilia, and not only that but a song which aped the pamphleteer’s own wailings in many respects. Of course, Guido’s work was a thing of melodic loveliness, so in that sense it differed, but even so, the whole business struck me as a bit fishy.

Over a dish of shredded cabbage and bloaters, towards the end of our long talk, my pal told me that what he was trying to do was to somehow become Dobson, the better to understand him. This was such a startling admission that I am afraid I banged my knee on the underside of the table and let out a yelp, which, let me tell you, is an unforgivable breach of etiquette when one is sharing a meal with a snackbar counter man of Guido’s eminence. I was mortified. I knew he had not heard my yelp, but he had seen it, and had probably felt its vibrations in the air around his impossibly handsome head. I let fall my napkin, with as much daintiness as I could muster, stood up leaving my bloaters half-eaten, and swept out of the room, through the pantry and the kitchen and the snackbar itself, wrenched the strangely enormous key in the lock, flung open the door as if I were at a vital moment in a Terence Rattigan drama, and hit the grimy streets of this hepcat town, wishing I had a muffler to muffle me against the wind. What I was muffled against, for weeks afterwards, was shame at my own lack of table manners. Unable to face up to the enormity of my conduct, I retreated to my usual haunts, the ditches and barnyards, and tried to blame the fiasco on Guido. On the rare occasions I was approached by a peasant of those parts, I would beseech them not to go anywhere near the snackbar, thinking to smash asunder what today would be called its customer base. I used some of the straw snagged in my hair to fashion a Guido-like voodoo doll and stuck it with pins innumerable.

But came the day I found myself first whistling, then humming, then, boy oh boy, singing lustily, from a mountaintop, that stirring chorus about Dobson’s small, blank, beige, rectangular piece of cardboard, his Ur-coupon, and tears streamed down my face as I understood how fortunate I had been to spend four days with the Man Who Would Be Dobson. He wasn’t, of course. No one could be. But Guido came closer, I think, than anyone else ever has to being imbued with the pamphleteer’s true spirit. It was a privilege to know him. I am still on that mountaintop, still singing, dressed now in the apparel of a beatnik, but minding my manners more than ever, and still attracting gasps from passers-by.

Puny And Dying

Yesterday I listened, belatedly, to a Little Atoms interview with Jonathan Meades. (It’s available for download here – the second one, dated 11 May 2007, though the earlier interview is well worth your attention too.) Each Little Atoms show has a musical interlude, often chosen by the guest. The magnificent Meades, perhaps the only reason to watch television these days, picked La canzone dell’amore perduto by Fabrizio de André. Not being at all familiar with Italian cantautores of the late twentieth century, his name was new to me, but I adored the song, so I decided to find out more. You can go and read his wikipedia entry, as I did, and do further research if you so wish, as I haven’t, yet.

The entry devotes a paragraph to de André’s kidnapping by Sardinian bandits in 1979, which is interesting, but I thought I’d draw your attention to two other things, mentioned in passing, that particularly intrigued me.

De André’s first wife was named Puny. This is a superbly Hooting Yardish name, isn’t it? I do not think it will be too long before a character named Puny turns up in a piece of prose here, perhaps one that features heroic infant Tiny Enid. I recall that somewhere or other I refer to a book or film entitled I Was Puny Vercingetorix, and though puny there was intended as an adjective rather than as a first name, I may have to revisit that in the light of my new knowledge.

The other thing that made me slap my forehead with glee was the title of de André’s second album – or rather, the contrast between it and the titles between which it was bracketed. (Forgive those two ‘between’s, I can’t think offhand of a more felicitous way of putting it.) The first album was called Volume One, and the third was dubbed Volume Three. Yet for some extraordinary reason, the title of what a lesser artist would have called Volume Two was instead Tutti morimmo a stento, or We All Died Agonizingly.

That’s the thing about Jonathan Meades, he provides you with new and unexpected avenues to explore, even when he’s just picking a piece of music.