After I mentioned Prudence Foxglove the other day, I was deluged with post from readers avid for more information about her. I am currently working on a biography of the unsung Victorian genius which, though potted, will also be magisterial. Meanwhile, I have managed to dig out an excerpt from her play May The Light Of Our Saviour Beam Down Upon The Cripples And Paupers Of Every Parish In The Land (1894).

[Scene : A filthy hovel steeped in gloom.]

Drunken Brute : Go and get my bludgeon so I can bludgeon you about the head in a fit of intoxicated rage.

Urchin : Lumme, guvnor, you’re as frightening a brute as ever bludgeoned a poor half-blind urchin about the head!

Drunken Brute : Yes I am, and if you don’t get my bludgeon this instant I’ll box your ears as well, you urchin you.

Urchin : Oh! Did ever a poor half-blind urchin lead so squalid and unChristian a life as I am fated to do since my parents perished in an early railway accident and I was abducted from Kindly Old Ma Dropsy’s Idyllic Cottage For Pallid Infants by the Drunken Brute?

[Urchin exits to fetch Drunken Brute’s bludgeon. Drunken Brute does some comic business with a birdcage and a set of napkins. Enter Urchin, holding a prayer book.]

Drunken Brute : What now, Urchin? That looks to me suspiciously like a prayer book.

Urchin : It is a prayer book, Drunken Brute. While I was stumbling half-blind about the other part of the filthy hovel, trying to find the bludgeon, a proper posh lady dressed all in finery came and handed it to me, suggesting that I read some prayers to you.

Drunken Brute : Grrr. I’ve a good mind to give you a double boxing of the ears.

Urchin : Yes, that is quite understandable, given that you are a Drunken Brute. But perhaps the lady was right, and that if I read you some prayers you will be engulfed in the light of Our Saviour, and no longer be drunken and brutish but a reformed character of sober mien and a determination to devote your life to hard work and social advancement.

[Urchin begins to recite prayer. Drunken Brute is seized by pangs of remorse and self-loathing and collapses into his chair. Enter Prudence Foxglove.]

Prudence Foxglove : My name is Prudence Foxglove, and I am the proper posh lady who pounced upon this half-blind Urchin in the other part of the filthy hovel. And see what wonders I have wrought by bringing the word of Our Saviour into this benighted hellhole. Note, too, the daring modernism of my play, where I, the authoress, barge into the action and address you, the audience, directly. We shall leave the Urchin and the Drunken Brute bedazzled by the Lord’s light, and in Act Two we shall cast our eyes upon another scene of moral depravity and high debauch. The scene is another, filthier, hovel, where a smallpox-scarred match-girl is at the mercy of a different drunken brute, until by chance they hear a thunderous sermon from an Oxford-educated preacher, a man of stern Protestant rectitude, and their lives are transformed.

This is a transcript of a handwritten piece read today on Hooting Yard On The Air on ResonanceFM. If you do not already keep your bakelite wireless tuned in to the station twenty four hours a day, for god’s sake get a grip!

It occured to me to write something on the bus on the way to the studio, to give this week’s show a really contemporary feel. I know that Hooting Yard listeners rightly expect a programme that has its finger on the pulse of the times, that is truly up to the minute. Well, this week it certainly is, because what I am reading to you was written within the past hour.

And I am reading it with some difficulty, actually, because a bus journey does not lend itself to the practice of exquisite copperplate handwriting. I am trying to make sense of what can only be described as a semi-legible scrawl. Buses bump and clatter and shake, and at times it is akin to being a sock or a napkin in a tumble drier.

God, this is dull. Let me turn to another, non-bus-related topic.

Recently I referred in passing to my Flemish cheesecloth suit, and as a result I received letters from several listeners who, showing great good sense, sought my advice on matters of style and fashion, of dash and élan. Strikingly, no fewer than four of these letters concerned the wearing of hats at a rakish angle.

“Dear Frank,” wrote one listener, somewhat over-familiarly, given that I have no idea who he is, “Can you tell me how best to calculate the exact angle at which I should wear my hat, or titfer, to maximise its rakishness?”

Well, for that correspondent, and for the others who raised this important issue, I am preparing a small pamphlet, not yet in print, which addresses the question with more vigour and panache than I would guess have ever been attempted since people began wearing hats, caps, bonnets, Tam o’ Shanters, berets, fezzes, and all sorts of other headgear, which as you are probably aware was an immensely long time ago, back in what we often call the mists of time, and certainly before you were born. By my reckoning, it took several centuries from the first wearing of a hat to the insight that to tilt said hat at a rakish angle lent the wearer a certain cachet among the other members of their tribe, or what, following Hazel Blears, we would now call their community.

Of course, there were many false starts. Some angles are simply not rakish, and never will be, but they were tried and tested, often with the use of protractors and sextants and astrolabes, and we should be grateful to those tireless but flawed hat angle experimenters, for without their work we would doubtless still be going about our modern gleaming city streets wearing our hats at ludicrously unrakish angles. Some people still do, of course, including one or two of my fellow-passengers on this bus. I think it is my duty, once my pamphlet is in print, to carry a carton of them with me where’er I roam, handing out free copies to the insufficiently rakish.

End of bus journey now. I shall lay down my pen, and speak to you soon.

The best thing to do, in certain circumstances, is to lie on your side, upon the grass, in a meadow, and have an acolyte pour vinegar into your ear through a funnel. When you stand up, in the middle of the meadow, and tilt your head, shaking it a little, the vinegar will be expelled from your ear and you will feel the benefits.

It is important that you have an acolyte who can properly adjudge the amount of vinegar to pour into your ear. Too little, and the whole exercise is pointless. Too much, and you will be tilting your head and shaking it until the cows come home, and you will find it very difficult to expel all the vinegar.

When the cows come home they may be disconcerted to find you in their meadow, with your tilted head, and some of them may become fractious. Fractious cows can be dangerous, so it will help if you have your acolyte armed with some sort of cow-protection device. This might be made of corrugated cardboard, or alternatively of tin foil. Best to consult a catalogue of cow-protection devices beforehand, with your acolyte at your side.

Choosing an acolyte to whom you are prepared to entrust the pouring, and the cow-protection, is a fraught business, believe you me. It is a process during which you can expect much heightened emotion, many tears, a certain amount of wailing, and, now and then, fencing contests, with flashing épées. It has even been known for rival acolytes to bash each other about with spades, so it is advisable not to give them access to the keys to the potting shed. You will probably have at least one set of duplicate potting shed keys, hanging from a hook in the pantry, so make sure you keep the pantry out of bounds to your acolytes, save for those who need to enter it to fetch tins of tinned plums and tinned radishes and other tinned goods. It is a simple matter to give but one acolyte the responsibility for the fetching of tins, and that acolyte can be disqualified from even the possibility of pouring vinegar into your ears in the middle of the cow meadow, while you lie on your side, by having him blinded or having his legs broken and confining him to the house.

Another thing to bear in mind when choosing the appropriate acolyte is that they must be able to get you from the house to the middle of the meadow with the minimum of fuss. Fuss is corrosive of the soul and has been known to result in horrible bodily eruptions such as sores and boils and suppurating patches of pus in such tender places as the groin and the armpits. You will want a level-headed and charming acolyte, one who, confronted by menacing geese on the way from the house to the meadow, will soothe them by singing something by Kevin Coyne in a deeply lovely voice. Geese are usually placated in this way, even the most ferocious ones.

You will probably want to be carried from the house to the meadow on a palanquin, given your preening self-regard. You will thus require additional acolytes to do the carrying, one of whom can also be the vinegar-pouring acolyte, if you so wish. It is therefore a very good idea to have some distractions at hand to entertain those who, once their carrying is done, have nought to do until you command them to carry you back to the house when you have flushed the vinegar out of your ear. Most acolytes can be happied by board games. Poopy, The Kronstadt Rebellion, and Waiting Around In A Meadow While Vinegar Is Poured Into The Ear Of Your Hero are splendid and complicated games using dice, counters, and the feathers of placated geese, but of course there are many other games, board-based and otherwise, which you may consider packing in your pippy bag when making preparations to be carried from the house to the meadow. If you have acolytes who are resistant to the allure of exciting board games, it is probably best to dismiss them, with their tails between their legs, as the saying goes.

The dismissal of acolytes can be problematic, particularly if they are clingy. Clinging acolytes are known to use gum to affix themselves to fixtures and fittings, such as the doors of pantries and the railings bordering manses. Be on your guard against them. Rifle fire tends to deter all but the clingiest, who may have to be detached from their gummy emplacements with gum-dissolving fluids in spray canisters. When making a purchase of these canisters, you may be asked to fill out a form declaring that they will not be used to dissolve the gum affixing an acolyte to the railings of your manse. In these  circumstances, just lie. You will go to hell, but would you not rather be in hell than be subject to the fawning of a gummed acolyte?

When consulting propulsion tables, it is extremely important that you know exactly what you are looking at. This is all the more so since there are two different sets of propulsion tables in circulation, the popular Blötzmann Propulsion Tables and the somewhat arcane Non-Blötzmann Propulsion Tables. Both sets are widely available, either as booklets or as loose-leaf plastic sheets which can be propped on a little hands-free propulsion table-holding tripod. Of course, both the Blötzmann and Non-Blötzmann tables give pretty much the same results, depending on the precise nature of your experiment, and even some of our most top-drawer propulsionists have gone on record to say that they do not give two pins which set of propulsion tables they use. But there is slightly more to it than that.

It is hardly surprising that Blötzmann himself execrated the Non-Blötzmann tables in rather fruity language. I would quote him directly, were it not that my upbringing makes me prefer the thought of throwing myself into the path of a speeding train rather than uttering some of the fruitier words in Blötzmann’s lexicon. Sheltered it may have been, and riddled with priests, but I make no apologies for the way I was brought up. Yes, I may blush when I read language like that spat from the mouth of Blötzmann, but that does not make me a bad person, merely, I would aver, one who does not wish to be sullied and besmirched. The Blötzmanns of this world may scoff at one of my refined sensibilities, and god knows they do, but I shall not waver. That is why I will not repeat the verbal abuse Blötzmann poured down upon the begetter of the Non-Blötzmann Propulsion Tables. You will just have to take my word that he condemned them absolutely.

Given the popularity and effectiveness of Blötzmann’s own propulsion tables in calculating all kinds of propulsiony matters, it is common to find people asking why the Non-Blötzmann set was ever devised in the first place. Oh, I don’t mean that you will be asked such a question while waiting at a bus stop or trudging along the high street or when you pop into the newsagent to buy a packet of cheap Lithuanian cigarettes. But at any gathering of propulsionists, for example at a cocktail party held to celebrate the publication in an important academic journal of a new paper on a knotty propulsion problem, or in the queue for the toilets at an award ceremony for a propulsionist who has won a ribbon or a medal, you can bet that someone present will pipe up with the old question of why on earth the Non-Blötzmann Propulsion Tables were not only created, but published in great quantities, in innumerable editions and formats, and often included a picture of Blötzmann on the cover which was deliberately scribbled upon or otherwise defaced. It is as if he is some kind of Stalin figure, wielding limitless power, who must be deposed for the greater good. Perhaps there is an element of truth in this. After all, Blötzmann was a commanding figure in the world of propulsion, with a deafeningly loud voice, the constitution of a bison, and a tendency, at conferences, to wear dazzling suits dotted with badges made from semi-precious metals. He had a curious way of carrying himself, such that even when sprawled half-asleep in a chaise longue, his belly full of cognac, he looked as if he was standing upon a plinth, gazing into a brighter future. And of course, since his death in that unfortunate picnicking accident, statues of him have sprung up wherever one looks, or at least wherever one looks in propulsionist circles, and it cannot be denied that a sort of personality cult has arisen in his wake.

It is also true that the person or persons who devised the Non-Blötzmann Propulsion Tables remain, to this day, completely anonymous. I had hoped, when I sat down to write this article, to reveal to the world their identity. Then we could at least refer, along with the Blötzmann Propulsion Tables, to, say, the Huffington or Widdecombe or Blunkett-Blears Propulsion Tables, instead of having to use that frankly irritating Non-Blötzmann formulation. It saddens me, immeasurably so, that I cannot make good on my intention. I have, you see, been “got at”, by dark and sinister forces within the propulsionist community. Tomorrow morning at dawn I begin work in the salt mines. It will, I suppose, be something of a novelty to give lectures on propulsion to salt miners as they hack away with their picks and shovels, although I am fearful that the language deployed by salt miners is a sight more fruity than the language used by Blötzmann in his denunciation of the Non-Blötzmann Propulsion Tables. Wise, I think, to pack a pair of earplugs in my pippy bag, to protect my delicate sensibilities, for which, I repeat, I refuse to apologise.

When I spat, I spat into the fire, that fire over there, the bonfire, the one with the effigy engulfed in it, blazing, the effigy of the plotter who plotted the downfall of the regime, the dastardly plotter, he whose plot collapsed by dint of our highly efficient spying methods, for we had uncovered his plot at its very birth, when the plotter and his plotting cronies were huddled in a tent out on the mud flats, where they thought they would be safe from our spies, they picked so remote a spot out on the mud flats, in so featureless an expanse of flat mud that they thought they would know if they were being spied upon, but ho ho ho they didn’t, they had no idea that our methods were so advanced and that we had learned how to place a tiny camera and a tinier tape recorder inside a robot starling, and calibrated the tiny devices so that they worked in unison, so that later in the lab we could match sound and vision, the plotters’ hateful guttural gabbling and the X-ray film of them huddled in their tent wrapped up in their kagouls, we had everything on record, so when we put them on trial all they could do was look sheepish and terrified, good, so they should, for they had sin in their hearts, the sin of plotting to topple the regime, for which they were burned on bonfires, bonfires just like that one over there where an effigy burns, crackling and fizzing, on the anniversary of the plot’s collapse, the bonfire on which I spit and spit and keep on spitting, until my mouth is dry, and I return to my balcony and raise my hand in a salute to the teeming crowds who cheer as the effigy is consumed in flames, while the robot starling flies above their heads, filming and taping, unremarked, just as it was unremarked by the plotters, those seedy fellows who were rightly burned on a bonfire just like this a year ago today.