From Wivenhoe To Cuxhaven By Way Of Ponders End

I went from Wivenhoe to Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. For the journey, I wore upon my head a hat woven from the hair of gorgeous hairy beasts, and a pair of goggles. Otherwise, I was dressed in the sort of suit you might see Edward G Robinson wearing in a film noir, with accompanying spats. It was suggested to me that I might take in Nunhead and Snodland along the way, but I had no time, I had no time.

Other than the sea crossing, for which I commandeered a skiff and its skiffer, I walked the entire route. Whenever I became exhausted, I slept upon the ground, under the bowl of night. I would like to say that I grew familiar with the stars, but I did not. Unless it was cloudy, as it often was, I could see countless stars twinkling above me, but they appeared randomly scattered, and I was never able to discern any patterns. I always woke up with strands of hay in my hair, wherever I had slept. I used my gorgeous woven hat of hair as a pillow.

Though I was walking, rather than cycling, I carried with me a bicycle pump. Often I pumped it, pointing it ahead of me, as an exercise drill, and also as a means of dispersing gangs of gnats or midges hovering in the air. Sometimes I fancied I could hear their faint insect shrieks as they were whooshed out of my path. I refreshed myself with water from duckponds.

I tried to keep a steady pace. There were times when I felt the bile rising in my throat. Whenever this happened, I stopped walking, sat on the ground, took my journal from the pocket of my film noir suit, and wrote a memorandum. Here is an example,

I am no longer in Wivenhoe. Ten minutes ago, walking along a bosky lane lined by what I think are plane trees, I pumped the pump at a cloud of midges, scattering them. Shortly afterwards, I felt the bile rising in my throat. Above me the sky is wonderfully blue and dotted with linnets, swooping. Tonight it will be dotted with stars. The stars do not swoop, they stay where they are, far away in the cold universe, so far away that the linnets can never reach them, and nor can I. But I can reach Cuxhaven, by way of Ponders End, and must do so quickly, while there is still time.

The act of writing in my journal always made the bile subside, and I was able to press on. When it was humid, my goggles steamed up. I carried on walking, as if in a mist. When I came to a stream or a rill I would take off the goggles and dip them briefly in the water, and wipe them dry on one of my film noir sleeves. Sometimes a true, engulfing mist would descend. Then I would get down on my knees, even if where I was was muddy, and take from my pocket my little wooden god, and prop it against a stone, and beseech it. Here is an example of such beseeching:

O little wooden god propped up against a stone, I beseech you to sweep away this engulfing mist and to make visible my path, so that I may walk on fearlessly towards Cuxhaven by way of Ponders End. Ooba gooba himmelfarb farbagooba!

The last four word were my incantation, designed to assuage my little wooden god and have it do my bidding. My bidding was always done, for the air would clear, sooner or later, and if the land was flat I could see for miles. One day I was able to see Ponders End far in the distance, and on another day I saw the sea, and once I was on the sea, being skiffed across it by an energetic skiffer in his skiff, I saw Cuxhaven, just in time.

I paid the skiffer to skiff me across the sea. He refused to skiff me otherwise. I had no cash, no chequebook, no debit nor credit card, not even shells or beads or trinkets, but I had honey. Along my journey from Wivenhoe to the coast by way of Ponders End, I had paused whenever I passed an apiary and snaffled honey from beehives. I collected it in pouches strung around my waist attached to a cord, hidden under my film noir suit. Some of the honey I ate to keep myself from fainting, but I was careful to keep some aside, for I did not expect to be skiffed across the sea for nothing. My offer to pay the skiffer in honey was met with great civility, even glee.

I knew that, if ever I made the return journey from Cuxhaven to Wivenhoe by way of Ponders End, perhaps able to take in Nunhead and Snodland given that I would no longer be pressed for time, I would be accosted by several irate beekeepers demanding recompense for their stolen honey. I had time enough, in Cuxhaven, to work out a way to repay them. If time passed and my head remained empty of ideas, I could prop my little wooden god against a Cuxhaven stone and beseech it for a brainwave. If all else failed, I could stay in Cuxhaven, and never go back to Wivenhoe through all the days of my life.

Yet conscience told me this was wrong. It was one thing to be holed up in Cuxhaven, quite another to be holed up in Cuxhaven tormented by guilt that good honest beekeepers had been robbed by my own honey-snaffling hands. Yes, it was true that I bore the bee-stings, but I had sucked the venom and spat it out and rubbed my hands with dock leaves. I still had dock in my pocket, should the bees of Cuxhaven have at me with their stings. I hoped they would not, for I resolved not to take their honey. In Cuxhaven, I had sausages.

Startling Bedside Manner

As a doctor his bedside manner was startling. He seemed more intent on reducing his patients to gibbering mental wrecks over the state of their souls than curing their bodies. Here is an example, the victim being a Mrs Cooper who is on her death bed. She seems to have been cheerful enough until Dr Prince arrived.

“I frequently visited her, and spoke to her most solemnly of her awful state, which I put before her in the most appalling picture of death and eternal damnation.”

The good lady replied that she was very happy, and prayed to God to take her out of her misery. Prince was not impressed; as the illness continued he observed that Mrs Cooper appeared to become more wicked and to yield to the most “horrid passions”. These horrid passions were directed at the lady’s husband who, for some reason, irritated her.

“She would damn her husband to hell and swear she would tear the eyes out of his head, if she could get out of her bed; but the palsy of her legs prevented her… About three weeks ago, when passing her door, I went to see her. I used to have a strange sensation of dread when I went into her chamber, as if I realised the presence of Satan about her bed, waiting for his prey… On this occasion I was about to leave her in despair, when I thought she seemed to take a little more interest in what I said, when explaining the reason that she did not fear death; viz. her own blindness.”

Sensing victory, he pressed on, tormenting the wretched woman with visions of hell and damnation. A few days later he announces triumphantly in his journal:

“The truth appeared to have flashed upon her suddenly, and was accompanied with such conviction and terror, that she quite trembled in bed from fear; to use her own words, she ‘had the horrors’. What a wonder-making God! How full of faithfulness and love! ‘Worthy is the lamb that was slain.’ Amen.”

From The Reverend Prince And His Abode Of Love by Charles Mander (1976)

Doctor, later Reverend, Prince was Henry James Prince (1811-1899), founder of the Agapemonites, whose Abode of Love was established in Spaxton in Somerset.

Blurb Envy

ateliertovar

Yesterday postie delivered From The Atelier Tovar : Selected Writings by Guy Maddin. Readers may recall I enthused about Mr Maddin last year. I am looking forward to reading this collection of journals, journalism and film treatments by the Winnipegite, but for the time being there are two phrases from the back cover blurbs of which I am inordinately envious. How can one not delight in a book of which it is said: “his treatments are deadpan whatsits of the highest order” and “you have arrived there, at the Atelier Tovar. Galoshes recommended”?

Dixon Of Dock Green

dixonofdockgreen

Dixon went to Dock Green. It was a small patch of grass, hardly a lawn, at the edge of the dock. The dock itself was one where huge steamers came into port from faraway lands, carrying all sorts of exotic cargo. The cargo was mostly packed into wooden crates, which were winched from ship to dock by dockhands. When it was lunchtime, the dockhands sprawled on the green, the small patch of grass, and prised the lids off their Tupperwares and unscrewed the lids from their flasks. They ate their bloater paste sandwiches and drank their tea and while they chewed and swilled they talked to each other about the cargo they had winched ashore that morning. The wooden crates usually had lettering stencilled on their sides and tops describing what the crates contained. One might read FRUIT GUMS, another GIRAFFE BRAINS.

Leaning on a fence, smoking his pipe, Dixon listened carefully to the chitchat of the dockhands. He used to be a policeman. Now he was a spy. His mission was to find out what cargo had been winched ashore that morning and report back to his spymasters. His spymasters were shadowy figures who sat behind a big desk in an unlit room in a skyscraper in town. The room was unlit so that Dixon was unable to see them with any clarity and thus recognise them and thus be able to identify them at a later date if ever questioned.

Dixon could have just blundered around the dock and read the stencilled lettering on all the crates but he preferred to listen to the chitchat of the dockhands because he could not read. He used to be able to, when he was a policeman, but he had lost the ability. One day, one September day to be precise, he had been chasing a miscreant and lost his footing in a gutter and banged his head, and after banging his head he forgot everything he had ever known, even his own name, and where he lived, and how old he was, and what he did for a living, and how to read. In short, he was an amnesiac.

One of the spymasters came to the clinic where Dixon had been put. To disguise his identity, the spymaster wore a mask and modified his voice with an electronic device. He offered Dixon a job at Dock Green. This day I am telling you about was Dixon’s first day. While he was leaning against the fence smoking his pipe and listening to the dockhands, he forgot all about the unlit room in the skyscraper and the shadowy spymasters who had sent him on his mission. He became very interested in the fruit gums and giraffe brains and the winching mechanism and he walked on to the ship to take a closer look.

Dixon was still on the ship when it steamed out of port on its way to a far distant land to collect more cargo. One day, out in the middle of one of those big oceans that make up so much of the planet’s surface, he received a bash on the head from a violent sailor. Then Dixon remembered everything. He remembered he was a policeman, so he tried to arrest the violent sailor for bashing him on the head. But the law of the land holds no sway at sea, and the ship’s captain locked him up in a cabin until they made landfall.

The first land they came to was a tiny rock. The captain and the violent sailor took Dixon by the arms and legs and shoved him off the ship on to the rock. It was almost barren, encrusted with barnacles and other shelly denizens of the sea and rocks, but there was a small patch of grass. Dixon dubbed it Dock Green and fashioned a flag from his cravat and found a stick for a flagpole and planted his flag in the grass. And he devised a fishing rod and a bow and arrows and a desalination unit, for he was a resourceful policeman, and he ruled over his little kingdom, where there was never a whiff of crime, for many, many years. 

NOTE : Younger readers, and those unfamiliar with British television of decades past, may like to know that an inaccurate adaptation of this story was the basis for a long running series.

Pots And Potters

It occurred to me the other day that I have neglected the subject of pots and potters. That is about to change, for I have been immersing myself in the study of the pots and potters of Sibodnedwab, and am so enthralled that I cannot actually think about anything else.

You are more likely to have heard of Sibodnedwab in the context of blebs and pustules than potters and pots. “Sibodnedwab Pimple” is the common name for a particularly distressing dermatological condition, so called because the medico boffin who first identified it was, at the time, tackling an outbreak in and around that brickish township. It is a big and unsightly pimple, often found erupting on the forehead, where it throbs and glows, like a third eye. Many Sibodnedwab potters show the scars of past pimpledom, and thus are sometimes known as the Pimple Potters. Anglepoise refers to them as such in his magisterial but unpublished survey of their pots and fragments.

That so many Sibodnedwab potters’ pots survive only as shards and fragments is due to the ferocious bombardment of the township by unhinged aggressors. Every day for the past forty years, the township has been subjected to attack. Untold tons of pebbles have been catapulted from outwith its walls, and every so often a flock of trained swallows flies over, dropping other pebbles. So many Sibodnedwab pots have been smashed that the historic township glue factory cannot manufacture enough glue to gum them all back together.

The pebbleers are motivated by fear of the Sibodnedwab Pimple, which they mistakenly believe is contagious. They are also said to hold that the pimple actually is a third eye, and that it makes visible rays and beams and lights of such horror that they drive men mad. This is of course a primitive superstition, but then the pebbleers are a primitive and stupid people, not one of whom has ever had the wit to fashion a pot. They cannot even knead dough with any finesse. The baps and buns they bake to peddle by the sides of major traffic routes are not of a consistency or munchiness to tempt the major traffic route user who has made the error of purchasing a bagful in the past.

Anglepoise rightly laments the fragmentary state of much Sibodnedwab pottery, but that does not stop him cataloguing it, nor singing the praises of the pimpled potters. He rescues from obscurity some of the key figures, among them Bink, Bunk, Snop, Tegg, Wimshurst, Gock, Flum, Higg, Bleg, Zont, De Havilland, Shud, Muff, Tung, Cuck, Weck, Bipp, Fung, Rack, Ick, Snit, Puck, Cherrybib, Belch, Cracker, Font, Flip, Sunk, Bark, Dodd, Wope, Jamm, Pulp, Cousins and Lamonto. Not all of them were literally pimpled. Dodd, for example, was born with a head upon which pimples and pustules and other blebs never grew. But then, he was something of a medical anomaly in other ways, ways that confounded his carers at the Home for Startling Young Potters where he spent his childhood. All that remains of Dodd’s work is a single shard, but what a shard it is! Anglepoise gives it due attention, over twenty pages of his unpublished manuscript, and tries heroically to extrapolate from the shard a vision of the whole pot. It was, he concludes, the sort of pot you would have displayed on a mantelpiece rather than one you might have put to use for holding your grain or your millet. Struck by dozens of pebbles on a single day in the summer of 1969, it was smashed to smithereens. All but one of those smithereens was then lost in a flood.

There are similar stories of the fate of pots by other named potters, and of course there are many fragments, and indeed some surviving whole pots, whose potters’ names we know not.

What is it about Sibodnedwab, we may ask, that makes it such fecund ground for potters? It is a township built upon clay, of course, but then so are many other townships, including the ones where many of the unhinged pebbleers were born and raised. The clay itself does not explain things. It is true that clay was mined there long before mines of any kind existed anywhere else, and the township fathers passed an ordinance that there must be at least two working kilns for every habitable dwelling. It is equally true that virtually every other activity in the plastic arts is forbidden. But these can be seen as a response to potmania rather than its source. Sensibly, Anglepoise does not get bogged down in sterile academic argument. His is a work of celebration, and cataloguing. I found it intriguing to learn, from a postscript, that he is blind, as were a number of the Sibodnedwab potters. Some, like Muff, Rack, and Cracker, were born blind, but others lost their sight when their eyes were put out by catapulted pebbles.

That postscript is at times quite moving, for in it Anglepoise describes the many hours he spent in an underground bunker where the shards and fragments are gathered, cutting his hands to ribbons while handling, as delicately as he could, the often jagged and razor sharp remnants of the potters’ art. In the end he had to wear special mittens with sensory devices sewn into them. Now and again he would drop a fragment, resmashing it as he did so, when jumping out of his skin at a sudden onslaught of pebbles up above. The roof of the bunker was pocked and pitted with holes where one of the larger trained swallows had dropped a big pebble from a great height. Thankfully, netting strung up across the ceiling meant that few if any pebbles ever landed upon the floor of the bunker itself.

If anyone has the stomach for it, there is probably a monograph to be written on the unhinged and irrational pebbleers themselves. That a type of pimple, a pimple understood and neutralised by medical boffins, could provoke such violence, over such a period of time, is, on the face of it, extraordinary. Even when we take full measure of the pebbleers’ stupidity, still we shake our heads in disbelief. There have been calls for brave potters to go incognito among the pebbleers to teach them how better to knead their dough, the thinking being that if they sold more baps and buns by the sides of major traffic routes their sense of grievance, and their fear of the “third eye” pimple, would be lessened as they grew wealthier. Rare is the potter, though, willing to take the risk after what happened to Higg. Higg it was who volunteered when first the idea was mooted to go among the pebbleers freely offering to share his kneading skills. Like Dodd, he had never fallen victim to the Sibodnedwab Pimple, his forehead remaining as smooth and unblemished as a baby’s. But his potters’ jargon betrayed him to the cleverer pebbleers, and they broke him on a wheel.

Anglepoise is so busy extolling and cataloguing that he does not address the curious matter of the pebbleers’ undoubted ability in wheel-building, catapult-making, and the training of swallows. For unfathomably stupid people prey to ridiculous pimple superstitions, in these three areas, and in the collection of pebbles, they show ingenuity and energy. Perhaps all that is needed is for an enlightened chieftain to emerge in their midst. But alas, the rollcall of their chieftains is a litany of thick-headed brutes and ignorant hotheads. That they can show such patience and tenderness when schooling their swallows makes it all the more perplexing.

There remains the mystery of why Anglepoise cannot find a publisher for his magnificent work. Let us leave aside the bigoted conglomerate which refuses to handle any work by blind authors, a decision based, it seems, solely on the poor sales of David Blunkett’s memoirs. One would think a book that combines a catalogue of pots and pottery fragments, the potted biographies of numberless potters, some with pimples and some without, and an elegiac prose style, would be snapped up by the kinds of punters who buy their books along with sausages and eggs and washing up liquid at out of township supermarkets. As it is, the manuscript languishes, as it has done since its author perished on a blizzard-wracked mountainside, on a shelf in the deepest basement of the Sibodnedwab Pimple Puncturing & Disinfecting & Swabbing & Sewing Up Treatment Centre, in the heart of the township. So subterranean is the basement that no pebbles ever penetrate its vaulted ceilings. Yet the shelf upon which the manuscript rests is rickety and worm-eaten and liable to collapse at any moment. If and when it does so, Anglepoise’s work will topple to the earth, and be trodden upon, repeatedly, by the big stomping boots of the miners, who, even today, are still opening up new seams of clay to supply the potters. The endless onslaught of pebbles has failed to stop their potting, and even if their pots last but ten minutes before being smashed to bits, we can but praise their industry and tireless potmanship.

Death Of An Ornithologist

There is an obituary in today’s Guardian of ornithologist David Snow, who died in February, You can read the whole thing here, but I have helpfully extracted the more arresting bits:

[He] pioneered studies of three of the world’s rarest birds: the lava gull, the nocturnal swallow-tailed gull and the flightless cormorant.

His father also gave him a pair of pocketable first world war German Goerz binoculars.

The nearby birding hotspot of Slough sewage farm was a favourite destination, and resulted in muddy shoes in chapel on Sunday evenings.

He maximised his ornithological shore leave by having his bicycle sent ahead by train to suitable British ports.

in 1958, [he] married Barbara Whitaker. Between them, they pioneered studies on such species as hermit hummingbirds, the bearded bellbird and the extraordinary cave-dwelling oilbird which emerges at night to feed on fruit, navigating by echo-location, using audible clicks.

he was active to the end of his life: a scholarly little note about the feeding of blackcaps wintering in his Wingrave garden appeared in the January bulletin of the Buckinghamshire bird club.

Cows On A Collective Farm

Bela Tarr’s Sátántangó sounds like my kind of film. Indeed, I’m astonished that it has only just come to my attention, given that it was released in 1994. Clearly I am not keeping up with things as energetically as I ought to be. Sátántangó is seven and a half hours long, in black and white, set on a collapsing collective farm in Hungary, and the opening shot, which lasts for almost eight minutes, follows a herd of Hungarian cows trudging around a collapsing collective farmyard. I have not yet seen it, but I suspect I will adore it.

Dismember That Heron

CARVING – Wynkyn de Worde printed in the year 1508 “The Book of Kervinge”. Some of the words are curious, and throw light on the names of dishes which have been corrupted by process of time. Where the meaning is quite plain the spelling is modernised, but not otherwise.

“The terms of a carver be as here followeth. Break that deer – lesche (leach) that brawn – rear that goose – lift that swan – sauce that capon – spoil that hen – frusche (fruss) that chicken – unbrace that mallard – unlace that coney – dismember that heron – display that crane – disfigure that peacock – unjoint that bittern – untache that curlew – alaye that felande – wing that partridge – wing that quail – mine that plover – thigh that pigeon – border that pasty – thigh that woodcock – thigh all manner small birds – timber that fire – tire that egg – chine that salmon – string that lamprey – splat that pike – sauce that plaice – sauce that tench – splay that bream – side that haddock – tusk that barbel – culpon that trout – fin that chevin – trassene that eel – tranch that sturgeon – undertranch that porpoise – tame that crab – barb that lobster. Here endeth the goodly terms of Carving.”

From Kettner’s Book Of The Table by E S Dallas (London, 1877)

Goat God Catechism

goat-god

Is there anything more frightening than the goat god?

No, there is not.

Must one tremble when the goat god appears, looming from a cloud of foul inexplicable gas?

Yes, one must tremble.

How must one tremble?

In awe and dread.

Must one cover one’s ears when one hears the terrible clattering of the goat god’s cloven hooves upon the linoleum?

Yes, one must clap one’s hands over one’s ears.

When the goat god brays its harsh bray, is it so loud that all birds and small mammals in the vicinity are rendered deaf?

Yes, they are deafened, temporarily.

Is mayhem caused by the deafening of birds and small mammals?

Yes, it can be, because those that depend upon their hearing for orienting themselves in the sky or upon the earth become confused and terrified.

Does the goat god take pleasure from causing such havoc in the natural world?

Yes, it does, there is mirth in its braying.

Is the goat god accompanied by helpmeets?

Yes, the goat god has two helpmeets.

Are the goat god’s helpmeets men or goats?

They are mutant hybrids of both, their upper half being as a man, their lower half being as a goat.

Do the helpmeets speak in a human tongue or do they bray as would a goat?

They do neither, for they are silent.

What horror takes place once the cloud of foul gas has dispersed to reveal the goat god and its helpmeets in all their dreadful majesty?

Some of the deafened birds fall from the sky and some of the deafened small mammals scurry about in circles of disoriented bestial befuddlement.

What else happens?

I continue to tremble in awe and dread with my hands clapped over my ears.

What does the goat god do?

It continues to bray, loud and mirthful and terrifying.

Does it continue to clatter its cloven hooves upon the linoleum?

Yes, it does.

Why is the ground covered in linoleum?

Because the goat god has appeared in its cloud of foul inexplicable gas in the kitchenette of my squalid flat.

For what purpose has the goat god appeared in your flat?

I am not yet sure of its purpose, but it appeared because I accidentally summoned it.

By what accident did you summon the goat god and its helpmeets?

The accident was that I was reading aloud a recipe from Old Ma Purgative’s Wonder Book Of Pies and I pronounced some of the words amiss.

Wait a moment, if you are in your flat, what explains the presence of all these deafened birds and small mammals?

I said my flat is a squalid flat. It has no roof, and it is overrun with wildlife.

Why do you have no roof over your head?

My roof was removed by the regime.

Do you think Old Ma Purgative deliberately inserted words which might easily be pronounced amiss into her pie recipes to trick her readers into summoning the goat god?

Yes, I do.

Gosh.

Indeed.

What happens next?

I am going to finish baking the pie and feed it to the goat god and its helpmeets, and then we shall issue forth from my flat and wreak vengeance upon the regime.

Will you be writing up an account of the terror you unleash?

No, for this whole bailiwick shall be laid waste and there will be neither notepaper nor pens nor pencils when we are done.

Will your flat still be standing?

No, it will not, and I shall vanish with the goat god and its helpmeets in a second cloud of foul inexplicable gas.

Will the regime survive the vengeance you and the goat god and its helpmeets wreak?

Not in this bailiwick.


In The Vestibule

On the day Hattie Jacques died, Dobson was slumped in the vestibule of a large and shabby hotel, to which he had been summoned by a captain of industry. The out of print pamphleteer was on the verge his dotage, but was not quite there yet. If anything, his lucidity was terrifying. There were egg stains on his cravat.

The captain of industry failed to turn up, leaving Dobson in the lurch. At a loose end, and with barely a penny in his pockets, he slumped in the vestibule. The hotel did not have a commissionaire, or indeed anybody who cared that a pamphleteer was blocking the entrance, smelling faintly of egg.

Hattie Jacques died of a heart attack on the sixth of October 1980. The captain of industry whom Dobson was expecting to meet had died a day earlier. Nobody thought to look in his appointments diary. Even if they had, it would have beflummoxed them, for the captain of industry used an unbreakable code. He did this to lend himself an air of importance.

Of Norman Wisdom, with whom she appeared in The Square Peg and Follow A Star, Hattie Jacques said he was “difficult and self-centred”. The same could be said of Dobson. Indeed, he wrote as much, in a pamphlet entitled Why I Can Be Difficult And Self-Centred (out of print). Presenting an obstacle to anyone who wanted to enter or leave the semidilapidated hotel that afternoon was but one instance of this.

A number of people stepped over the slumped pamphleteer that day. Some even trod on him, so frantic was their haste. Dobson did not complain, for he was past caring. He was composing an essay in his head, as he often did, so that when he returned eventually to his escritoire he could scribble away at high speed. Sometimes he wrote so quickly that he scorched his notepaper.

The dead captain of industry had arranged to meet Dobson because he wanted the pamphleteer to write his biography. As we have seen, he had a massive and delusional sense of his own importance, and felt that only a master of majestic sweeping prose such as Dobson could do justice to his life. By any objective measure it had been a colourless and godawful life, devoted almost entirely to the manufacture and sale of buttons.

Hattie Jacques sported many buttons made by the captain of industry’s button company during the second world war, when she worked as an arc welder. The company provided the welding factory with all its buttons, and made its fortune in so doing. It was in the factory that Hattie Jacques nurtured her comic talents.

Dobson had been apprised of the reason for his abortive meeting, and, slumped in the vestibule, was tussling with a title. The Life Of A Buttoneer appealed to him, but there was already a book of that name, an adventure story by the bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead set in Wivenhoe and Cuxhaven. “A rip-roaring and emotionally wrenching rollercoaster ride!” exclaimed the review in Book Reviews With Lots of Exclamation Marks magazine.

Like Hattie Jacques’ ex-husband John Le Mesurier, the captain of industry had arranged his own death notice to appear in the newspaper. It read “Decisively Important Maker Of Buttons Is Dead. Keep buying his buttons so his name lives on for thousands of years.” One of the people who trod on Dobson in the hotel vestibule dropped his newspaper as he did so, and the page with the buttoneer’s death notice came to rest upon the pamphleteer’s egg stained cravat. He made no attempt to move it.

Hattie Jacques was buried in St Paul’s Churchyard in London. The captain of industry’s body lay undiscovered in his captainy penthouse flat, where it was gnawed by rats and mice. Eventually it was tossed into a furnace by a feckless janitor. The shabby hotel vestibule was not Dobson’s final resting place, thank god. At some point in the evening of that October day, he bestirred himself, scrunched up the newspaper that had fallen on him and shoved it into his pocket, finessed the cravat about his neck, and plodded home, difficult and self-centred, like Norman Wisdom, along lamplit streets. He had a while left before his dotage descended upon him.

lemesurier

 

The Sludge-Banks

Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to work we go. We work at the sludge-banks. We monitor and count and then extract from the sludge the flies and gnats and bluebottles and other insects which have flown thwack! straight into the sludge, and become stuck, and died. There is something about the winds hereabouts, in their sweep and turbulence, that impels the tiny creatures towards the sludge. And once they are near, they are attracted by the pong rising from the sludge, the stink of corruption and rot and death. The sludge-banks lie at the edge of a vast lake bordering the estuary.

We do not actually sing the song of the seven dwarves when we go to work. First, we are none of us little folk, and second, we know only too well the ruthless and ruinous energy of the Disney Corporation’s legal fiends. We witnessed the suicide, by bleach, blade and plunge, of a colleague who was pursued through the courts relentlessly for having named his duck D—-d. So when we go off to work at the sludge-banks we do not risk singing that jaunty song, much as we would like to, and much as it would suit us to do so, despite our not being of the diminutive persuasion.

Instead we sing the sludge-banks song. What it lacks in dwarvish jauntiness it gains in intellectual heft. The tune we borrowed from Charles Ives, a startling passage from the third movement of the Piano Trio. For the words, we collaborated, during a weekend workshop in a wigwam in the woods. We smoked pipes and drank copious draughts of undistilled nettlewater, and as soon as we had finished a verse we danced around a bonfire before resuming our lyrical labours. Or, rather say, we hopped and flailed around a bonfire. There are twenty-six verses in the sludge-banks song.

I shall not tell you a single word of any of them, for we have taken a leaf out of the Disney Corporation’s book, and we shall wreak a terrible vengeance on any who pirate or copy or duplicate or cause to be babbled or you-know-what the words of our work song. Hi ho, hi ho.

Perfectly Sane Voodoo Zombies

I don’t want to get into unspeakable navel-gazing, but cannot let slip one of the comments on the Drabblecast* reading of Boiled Black Broth And Cornets. One of the pleasures of having stories read there – apart from the fact that I was paid thirteen quid for this one – is the nature of some of the contributions to the discussion forum. The audience is, I suspect, at something of a tangent to the Hooting Yard listenership.

Consider this, from “delfedd”: “What the bleep happened in that story? I got the voodoo zombie part. But why did she go absolutely insane?” Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but “delfedd” appears to be suggesting that to ply your friends with voodoo zombie soup is perfectly normal behaviour. Only later does Becke Beiderbix go “completely insane”. I find this quite a worrying attitude, the more so because “delfedd”’s location is given as “Everywhere”, meaning that s/he could barge in through my door at any moment, in full voodoo zombie mode.

* NOTE : Incidentally, I have been wondering what the connection is between Norm Sherman’s podcast and our own dear Margaret Drabble. And does he have plans to launch another podcast named after her sister A S Byatt?

The Muscular Fool And The Other Fool

A fool dug a hole in the ground with a spade. When he had dug deep enough, the fool put aside the spade and sat down in the hole, deep enough in this instance meaning that from his sitting position his head was below ground level. The ground itself was fallow. We should remember, even if the fool did not, that “The lark’s shrill fife may come / At the daybreak from the fallow”. So, at least, was the assertion of Sir Walter Scott in The Lady Of The Lake. He goes on to say that “the bittern sound[s] his drum / Booming from the sedgy shallow”, but there were no shallows, sedgy or otherwise, in this fallow where the fool sat in a hole he’d dug, nor any bitterns to boom. Scott brought a curse upon himself by making disparaging remarks about the Muggletonians in one of his novels*, but the fool had not been cursed. He was simply a fool.

It is pointless to ask of such a person, “why have you done what you have done?” Either he will not reply, or, if he does, he will dizzy your brain with his explanation. You might understand the individual words he shouts or mutters at you, but you will be hard pressed to make any sense of them when you join them together. That is one of the things about fools, they drive a stake through the heart of reason. I used to be a fool, so I know that only too well.

I was not the kind of fool to dig holes in the ground with a spade, for my foolishness led me down other pathways. I could often be found in department stores, wandering from one floor to another, via the escalators, up and down, all day long, never making a purchase, followed about by in-house detectives, chanting. I mean that I was chanting, not the detectives. The detectives had no time to chant, they were too busy keeping track of me.

They would have had no trouble tracking the fool with the spade, for he had dug his hole in the ground and now he was sat in it, quite still. The in-house department store detectives could have gathered in a ring at the rim of the hole and kept their eyes on the fool for hours. But they would not be likely to do so. Being in-house types they did not do any detecting outwith the precincts of the department store itself, not unless one of them went rogue, and was overzealous in his duties. That had been known to happen. But not on this occasion.

Fools come in all shapes and sizes. The fool in the hole in the fallow was muscular, which ought not be a surprise when you consider that it takes some strength to dig a hole in the ground deep enough to sit in so that one’s head is hidden from view. You or I might be panting and shaking after such exertion, but the fool sat in his newly dug hole looking for all the world as if the most energetic thing he had done all day was to stir a spoon in a bowl. That was what he had done first thing, before marching across the fallow with a spade over his shoulder. He had poured porridge into a bowl, like a bear in a fairy tale, and then stirred it with a spoon, and then spooned it bit by bit into his mouth and swallowed it, and then he licked the bowl clean. These were not the actions of a fool by any means, but then most fools have moments, even whole mornings, of lucidity. Yet as soon as he had prepared and eaten a sensible breakfast, the fool reverted to inexplicably foolish behaviour, and went out and dug a hole and sat in it.

When I was a fool, I too usually ate a proper breakfast at the start of the day, though in my case it was rarely porridge. I had been traumatised by the version of the fairy tale of the three bears told to me as a bedtime story by my Ma. In Miss Eleanor Mure’s telling of 1832, it is not Goldilocks who enters the bears’ cottage while they are out and about, but an ill-tempered old woman. When the bears come home, they first try to burn her, then to drown her, before finally chucking her aloft on St Paul’s churchyard steeple, upon which she is impaled. Thus as an infant there was fixed within my little brain the association of porridge with impalement, and I became keen on cornflakes. Even at the peak of my foolishness, I seldom set out without a stomach full of Mr Kellogg’s finest. When milk was scarce, as it often was, given the pitiable state of the cows where I grew up, I would just shovel the cornflakes down my gullet straight from the carton.

It may be the case that the fool in the hole sometimes had to make do with dry oats for his breakfast, if he too experienced problems obtaining uncontaminated milk. That would depend upon the cows in his locality, and whether they were hale or sickly. Irrespective of their health, and the potability or otherwise of their milk, it could happen that a blundering cow might roam into the fallow field and topple into the hole dug by the fool. If the fool was still sitting in his hole, he would find himself underneath a panic-stricken and possibly injured cow. Being a muscular fool, he would probably be able to push the cow off him and to climb out of the hole. One might hope that pangs of compassion would burst through his foolishness, at least temporarily, and that he would rush away to find the farmer or a veterinary surgeon, but there can be no guarantee of that. Fools can be so well wrapped up in their own foolishness that their behaviour appears ruthless and despicable. So it may be that, his hole now being occupied by a cow, the fool would simply retrieve his spade from where he chucked it and dig himself a second hole, in which, once dug, he would sit, in the fallow where no bitterns boomed but larks would fife at daybreak, shrilly. If the fool was still sitting in his hole come the dawn, having spent the night under glittering stars, the lark’s fifing would almost certainly awaken him.

Now, consider the situation. We have already ascertained that this fool is the sort of fool who thrives on a proper breakfast of porridge. You cannot make porridge while sat in a hole dug in the ground, even if you are a brainbox rather than a fool. So the fool, intent upon his breakfast, would clamber up out of his hole and begin mincing across the field towards wherever it was he could rely upon the makings of porridge. One can be both muscular and of the mincing sort, whether fool or no. Again, we may hope that the fool’s heart would be stirred at the sight of the stricken cow in the adjoining hole, but with a stomach clamouring for porridge the fool is not likely even to notice the other hole or the cow within it. The cow may bellow, but the fool, in the extremity of his foolishness, will misconstrue the bellowing as something else, as, say, the fifing of a mutant lark, or a factory hooter, for there is a factory over yonder, for the making of fireworks and other explosive devices, and its workers are summoned at dawn by means of a hooter. To a fool’s ears, all sounds can become confused.

On this bright morning, as the fool minced across the fallow towards his porridge, a cherry-cheeked farmer was in his barn counting his cows. He counted them thrice, just to make sure he was correct in his apprehension that one was missing. And then he resolved to tramp his fields until he found his cow. In the distance, the bells of St Bibblybibdib’s clanged, and in the fallow, the fool and the farmer met, the one mincing from the east and the other tramping from the west. The farmer asked the fool if he had seen his cow. The fool replied, but as we have seen, though his individual words were coherent, they made no sense when joined together. There can be danger when fuddleheadedness shares space in the brain with a hot temper, and the farmer was hot-tempered, as was betrayed by his cherry cheeks. They were cherry because his blood often boiled. Little things enraged him, from misdirected farm postage to creaking wheelbarrows. Fretting about his cow, and stupefied by the fool’s response to his simple question, he lashed out at the fool with his big hairy farmer’s fists. Though muscular, and quite able to triumph in any fight he got into, the fool was disadvantaged by the sudden ferocity of the farmer’s onslaught, and he toppled to the ground. In so doing, he clonked his head on a large pebble. Miraculously, the clonk caused an enjugglement of bits inside his brain, and he became instantly, and permanently, lucid, and no more a fool than you or I. He jumped to his feet, and shook the farmer’s hairy hand, and pointed to where the cow languished in a hole dug in the fallow, and promised the farmer he would help to rescue it as soon as he had had his breakfast porridge, and away he minced with a clear head and bright eyes.

My own transformation from being a fool to no longer being a fool had nothing in common with this tale. I suffered no clonk on the head, nor was I mincing across the fallow as church bells clanged. I had dug no holes in the ground, and there were no cows to be seen. I was in a city far away when my foolishness evaporated, sprawled on a divan, twitching and shattered, with a belly full of cornflakes and milk that, had I but known it, was contaminated. It was the seething microscopic beings lurking in the milk that burrowed their way up into my brain and nibbled away the weird bits that made me a fool. When their nibbling was done, the tiny, tiny beings burrowed through the top of my skull and were smothered by my bouffant. I picked out the dead shrivelled things with tweezers, and put them in a jar, and I put the jar on my mantelpiece, and there it stands. It can do no other. Jars stay put, once you have placed them where you want them. I only learned that lesson when I was no longer a fool.

 

* NOTE : In Woodstock, or The Cavalier (1826), a character named Tonkins meets a violent end. Scott regrets that “his brains had not been beaten out in his cradle” to prevent him growing up into “one of those Muggletonians”. For this he was cursed by Robert Wallis, a Muggletonian from Islington.

 

Bix Bei Der Bec Ke

Those of you who enjoyed listening to Norm Sherman’s reading of “Far, Far Away” will be pleased to hear that this week’s featured story on his Drabblecast podcast is “Boiled Black Broth And Cornets”. Once again, his approach to the telling of the tale is wildly at variance with my own*. Actually, I haven’t yet read this piece on the radio, but when I do, it will sound completely different. I am very fond of Norm’s treatment, he somehow makes my words much spookier than I thought they were.

In the preamble, Norm mentions that he has just bought a copy of Gravitas, Punctilio, Rectitude & Pippy Bags. He’s obviously a very sensible man. If you haven’t yet purchased your own copy, do so now. 

* UPDATE : In a comment on the Drabblecast discussion forum, listener “tbaker2500” concurs: “Whilst listening to the story, I also heard in my head how Frank would read it. Two entirely different beasts. Frank always sounds so indifferent, Norm so earnest. ” Hmm… “indifferent”? An interesting choice of word. I think it may be the mot juste.

Junctions

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Pansy Cradledew draws to my attention this title from a small collection of Victorian Yellowjackets*. Alas, I have never read Misery Junction by Richard Henry, and I find myself wondering if the story is set in one of the notorious junctions and sidings of the Hooting Yard to O’Houlihan’s Wharf Branch Line. There, Misery Junction is the foul rainswept junction between two other junctions, one called Moral Squalor Junction and the other known as Pretty Little Dandelion Junction. It should be noted that the pretty little dandelions growing so profusely around the railway lines at that spot were contaminated with some kind of toxin, and the pretty little ponies which cantered up to them for a lunchtime chew were swiftly carted off to the knackers yard, stone dead.

* NOTE : Pansy quite rightly points out that I have confused a series of 19th century paperbacks (Yellowbacks) with a type of wasp (Yellowjacket). Such an easy mistake to make.