Monthly Archives: August 2009

Erk Gah

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It is hard to think of an esoteric sect more hidden, more obscure, than the Erk Gah. We know virtually nothing of its membership, its ceremonies and rituals, its raiment and vestments, its perfumes, its symbols, its armaments cache, its hierarchy, its headgear, its idiosyncratic buttoning methods, its potions, its nostrums, its pomposity, its colour schemes, its texts, its insignia, its dietary stringencies, its bucket and spade seaside outings, or its ultimate purpose. Some have suggested that the Erk Gah does not even exist.

One wonders, then, what to make of Evaporated Milk & Ducks’ Blood, the latest bestselling paperback by Pebblehead, with its audacious subtitle The Truth About Erk Gah Revealed! As ever with his ventures into non-fiction, Pebblehead’s prose is breathless and slapdash and at times laughable, but he makes grand claims, and they deserve to be treated seriously. After all, we are unlikely to get a better guide to this mysterious sect, even if it is wholly spurious.

One thing Pebblehead refuses to tell us is from what sources he cobbled his 300-plus pages together. Indeed, one reviewer has already insisted that the book ought to be shelved alongside Fantasy Fiction, that Pebblehead has made the whole thing up. But how would anybody know one way or the other, unless they were a member of the Erk Gah? It may be pertinent that the reviewer in question disguised his identity behind a terrifically-wrought anagram.

But let us look at some of Pebblehead’s claims.

Membership. The Erk Gah has a finite number of members. When one dies – of which, more in a moment – they are replaced by a new recruit. How this newcomer is chosen is an ineffable mystery. It is possible that there are as few as twelve members at any one time, although other estimates give a figure of several thousand. Erk Gah members do not die in the sense that you or I would understand the term. Instead, they are “begusted into flimflam”. Pebblehead does not expand upon this.

Ceremonies And Rituals. The major Erk Gah ceremony is the so-called “knocking about of the ball with the puck”, which as far as one can gather may look to the innocent eye like hockey practice. “Thus,” intones Pebblehead, ominously, “does the sect conceal its existence by creating a facsimile of a well-loved sport which is part of the fabric of our everyday lives, if we are sporty persons of course”. There is another ritual, involving binoculars, promontories, and seabirds, which can be equally misconstrued by the ignorant.

Raiment And Vestments. Unutterably gorgeous, according to Pebblehead, and so stylish that Erk Gah members can be mistaken for dazzling stars of the Riviera set. Apparently, there is something called the cufflink code, but the details of that, too, are an ineffable mystery.

Perfumes. The Erk Gah can be sniffed out, we are told, if one is sensitive to certain vaporous effusions. Pebblehead gets rather tied up in knots trying to explain what on earth he is babbling on about here, and the passage is dense with footnotes. At one point he suggests the scents with which the Erk Gah spray themselves are odourless, which, if true, is either foolish in the extreme or perhaps yet another of those ineffable mysteries.

Symbols. Chiefly pelicans, silkworms, bowls of alphabet soup, chunks of gack, herons, old bakelite wireless sets, dust, corks, bats, cravat pins, big fat magnetic robots, chaffinches, oildrums, pulp, song thrushes, camphor sausages, toadflax, jibs, cloudbursts, mayonnaise, tin tabernacles, blots, mist, and Herculean effort. All these things, with their deep Erk Gah significance, are depicted on a gigantic shield, carted about the countryside at dead of night, by blind devotees. Or so Pebblehead would have us believe.

Armaments Cache. The Erk Gah are fond of Howitzers, and have been known to fire them when unprovoked. If you hear a mysterious explosion in the distance, on a Thursday at dusk, that might be the Erk Gah.

Hierarchy. “There are so many levels,” writes Pebblehead, “So many, many, many levels, gosh, my head is spinning!” Novelty Pebblehead dolls with spinnable heads went on sale in toyshops as part of the publicity for the book, presumably to give some credence to this assertion.

Headgear. Less Riviera set, more grimy peasant. Shapeless, filthy rags puckered up and scrunched and plopped atop the pate. Beetles and other black creeping things scurry among the folds. They can hardly be called hats, but are made by milliners contracted individually by some kind of Erk Gah hat emissary. Whereabouts this position fits within the Hierarchy is moot. Pebblehead’s head was presumably spinning far too rapidly for him to be able to enlighten us. And was the paperbackist himself wearing a sordid Erk Gah hat as he wrote? There are, after all, plenty of corrupt milliners setting up shop in our streets, more’s the pity.

Idiosyncratic Buttoning Methods. “All this buttoning and unbuttoning!” wrote the anonymous 18th century suicide. Was he or she a member of the Erk Gah, practising auto-begustment into flimflam? Pebblehead does not tell us, probably because he doesn’t know. But he does devote an excruciating forty pages of his book to the matter of buttons and buttoning and unbuttoning and unbuttons. Excruciating, because here his prose it at its sloppiest, and it is impossible to make head nor tail of what he is trying to say. I, for one, would have been interested in the Erk Gah concept of the unbutton, for example, “that which is not, and cannot be, a button, on any possible planet”.

Potions. The most popular of Erk Gah potions appears to be a decoction of evaporated milk and ducks’ blood, hence the title of Pebblehead’s tome. This mixture is drunk from lovely goblets, or from paper cups, depending upon the alignment of the stars and the idiosyncratic buttoning method in use at the time. Where the devotees get all the ducks’ blood from is an ineffable mystery, as they seem not to approve of the slaughter of ducks or of anything else which paddles in ponds. There is another potion, of evaporated milk without the commingling of ducks’ blood, of which the Erk Gah are equally fond.

Nostrums. Pebblehead alludes to a bulky collection of nostrums which the Erk Gah are said to apply to common agues. Many of these remedies are of a purgative effect, which I am afraid conjures up the image of a troop of sectaries throwing up all over the place, and an overpowering stink of regurgitated evaporated milk and ducks’ blood. I looked up “mops” and “disinfectant” in the index, but neither word appears there. In fact, the index is a very shoddy piece of work, and I think it may have been taken from another book entirely. Pebblehead has done this before, of course, through either indolence or stupidity.

Pomposity. There is an inherent pomposity in most occult and esoteric sects, acting as a sort of protective veneer. Without pomp, the edifice might crumble, and crumblement must be avoided at all costs.

Colour Schemes. Mostly sepia.

Texts. One of Pebblehead’s most startling discoveries is that a list of the foundational texts of the Erk Gah is identical in every particular to a list of volumes stolen over a period of five years from the Tundist Owl Library. We know that the Tundists were so enraged by the thefts that they sent a gang of merciless cut-throats in search of the culprits, but the fact that the books were never returned to the library suggests that the Erk Gah, if indeed the thieves were among their number, must have outwitted the Tundist avengers. This ought not be surprising, Recent studies have shown that, contrary to myth, the Tundists were a witless and noodle-brained bunch, many of whom did not even know what an owl was, despite the comprehensive collection of owly prose in their library. But if the basic texts of the Erk Gah are indeed originally Tundist, are they a mere subsect? That is a question to which, one hopes, a writer more scholarly and less populist than Pebblehead will address themselves, though the survival rate of authors investigating Tundism is calamitously low, and much blood has been spilt, not all of it the blood of ducks.

Insignia. Pebblehead makes a cack-handed attempt to sketch the insignia of the Erk Gah on the frontispiece of his book. It looks as if he used crayons. A six-year-old would have made a better fist of it.

Dietary Stringencies. What foodstuffs, we might ask, do the Erk Gah wash down with their evaporated milk and ducks’ blood potions? The answer, according to Pebblehead, is “anything from the tuber family” and “anything with a –hip or –wort suffix”. That seems pretty stringent to me, but then I’ll eat anything, as will Pebblehead himself. I had dinner with him a few weeks ago and we scoffed a surfeit of lampreys and more bloaters than his dining table could support. He had to have it shored up with cast iron props.

Bucket And Spade Seaside Outings. An endearing feature of the Erk Gah is their predilection for bucket and spade seaside outings. Less endearing – much less endearing – is that their favoured destination is the foul and filthy fishing port of O’Houlihan’s Wharf. It is a curious place to rattle towards on the train, waving one’s bucket and spade cheerily out the window, for of course there is no sandy beach there, merely a couple of rotting jetties built upon squelchy oozing mud, mud that is home to disgusting squirmy wriggling things which are surely abominations in the sight of God. And yet year after year the Erk Gah descend upon this briny hellhole, mad with glee. What they actually do with their buckets and spades when they get there does not bear thinking about. The most Pebblehead will divulge is that shutters go up in the whelk-encrusted hovels, the streets empty, and a fug of eerie mist falls upon the port.

Ultimate Purpose. This, of course, as Pebblehead readily admits, is the final ineffable mystery of the Erk Gah. It brings his book to a limp and unsatisfactory ending, which he tries to bolster by dazzling the reader with vividness. But Pebblehead doesn’t really do vivid, at least not in his non-fiction, and the resulting closing paragraphs are pitiable. The reader senses that he knows this, which is why in a last desperate lunge at thrillsomeness, Pebblehead chucks in an extremely potted pen-portrait of his favourite pig. It is, he says, “a committed pig”.

Further Reading. A rival account of the Erk Gah, which differs from Pebblehead’s book in every single detail, can be found here.

All The Best

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Over at Comment Is Free, two impeccably bourgeois graduates of the grammar and public school systems and of Oxford University debate whether the total collapse of civilisation would be, on the whole, you know, a good thing. A commenter called “questionnaire” gets to the nub of its amusement value:

I love the way George [Monbiot] and Paul [Kingsnorth] are putting ‘best wishes’ and ‘all the best’ at the end of each doom scenario.

Wax

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From the splendid Awful Library Books, a 1966 title that really ought to have been an international bestseller.

wax

While Mary correctly points out the likelihood of the publishing magnate saying “I think the kids are looking for a good book on wax”, she overlooks clear evidence from the cover that the book’s true purpose was to popularise, for tinies, some sort of Aztec-voodoo wax doll curse-and-abomination pin-sticking procedure.

Insolent Unlearned Sots

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Things are going from bad to worse with Dennis Beerpint. The weedy poet, still posing as a beatnik, was apparently very upset by the negative reviews of his newly-published Ginsbergy Howl-y piece, Whimper!, a thousand-odd lines of unrelieved drivel. At public performances, where he has been declaiming these free verse witterings from platforms and soap-boxes, hecklers boo and things get chucked at him, chiefly tomatoes.

Now, Beerpint has fallen victim to delusions of persecution. In a letter to the weekly magazine Weedy Poets Under Attack, he claims that this passage from The Anatomie Of Absvrditie by Thomas Nashe, written over four hundred years ago, is aimed directly at him:

“Hence come our babling Ballets, and our new found Songs and Sonets, which euery rednose Fidler hath at his fingers end, and euery ignorant Ale knight will breath foorth ouer the potte, as soone as his braine waxeth hote. Be it a truth which they would tune, they enterlace it with a lye or two to make meeter, not regarding veritie, so they may make vppe the verse ; not vnlike to Homer, who cared not what he fained, so hee might make his Countrimen famous. But as the straightest things beeing put into water, seeme crooked, so the crediblest trothes, if once they come with in compasse of these mens wits, seeme tales. Were it that the infamie of their ignoraunce did redound onelie vppon themselues, I could be content to apply my speech otherwise, then to their Apuleyan eares, but sith they obtaine the name of our English Poets, and thereby make men thinke more baselie of the wittes of our Countrey, I cannot but turne them out of their counterfeit luerie, and brand them in the foreheade, that all men may know their falshood… What politique Counsailour or valiant Souldier will ioy or glorie of this, in that some stitcher, Weauer, spendthrift, or Fidler, hath shuffled or slubberd vp a few ragged Rimes, in the memoriall of the ones prudence, or the others prowesse? It makes the learned sort to be silent, when as they see vnlearned sots so insolent.”

Is Beerpint an insolent unlearned sot? Perhaps he is. On the other hand, if this passage really is directed at him, it is likely to be the one and only time he is compared to Homer.

But now my own braine waxeth hote, for the sun is bright and battering, and I must lie me down in the shade, and ponder the wonders of Burnham-on-Crouch, of which more some other time.

Dobson’s Cocoademon

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Ahoy there, Frank!, writes Tim Thurn, irritatingly, Are you sure you’re not confusing Dobson’s Cacodaemon with his Cocoademon? I recall reading somewhere that the titanic pamphleteer once unscrewed the lid from a jar of cocoa and unleashed a ferocious sprite which made his life a misery for about a week. Everywhere he went he found cocoa powder splattered in his path. Some of us wouldn’t be too bothered by that. If it were me, I’d avail myself of a little plastic scoop, and scoop up the cocoa powder, because I truly love cocoa, and drink seven or eight mugs of it a day. But apparently Dobson wasn’t so fond, and he was only unscrewing the lid from the jar as research for his pamphlet Notes Upon The Unscrewing Of Lids From Jars (out of print). He hadn’t even bought the jar of cocoa, he was just wandering through the aisles in Hubermann’s Food Hall hoping no one would spot what he was doing. I have never read that pamphlet, by the way, so is there any chance you could find a copy and transcribe it on your splendid website?

Dear Tim, replies Mr Key, Making up titles of spurious Dobson pamphlets is no way for a grown man to behave. I suggest you do something more useful with your life, such as projectile vomiting in the direction of Andy Burnham.

Dobson’s Cacodaemon

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Even the most learned of Dobson scholars has difficulty with his pamphlet How I Thwarted My Cacodaemon With A Pointy Stick And Some Bleach (out of print). For one thing, who knew Dobson had his own personal Cacodaemon? It is never mentioned elsewhere in the canon, nor does it make an appearance in his voluminous diaries. Occasionally, like other indefatigable diarists, Dobson had recourse to codes and symbols, but all of these have been deciphered after decades of study by Aloysius Nestingbird and their significance revealed in his magisterial survey The Meanings Of Every Single One Of Those Enigmatic Symbols And Scribbles In The Journals Of The Out Of Print Pamphleteer Dobson, itself, alas, now out of print too. Nestingbird realised that the childish drawing of a horned and hooved goaty devil figure brandishing a spit fork, usually done in red ink, which appears in the diaries from time to time without additional written comment, had nothing whatsoever to do with some putative Cacodaemon of Dobson’s, but was simply the pamphleteer’s idiosyncratic manner of noting that Hungarian football ace Ferenc Puskas had played a blinder in a match that day. Puskas was never known by a nickname aligning him with a devil of any kind, but Nestingbird shows convincingly that the inside of Dobson’s head was rarely in accord with the wider world.

Nor do we find any reference to a Cacodaemon in any of the recorded utterances or memoirs of Marigold Chew. Surely the woman who knew Dobson better than anyone else would have known of it? There is a possibility, of course, that she did know, but kept a judicious silence for fear of exposing her inamorato to ridicule. But then, there was much else that was preposterous about Dobson, from his boots to his handwriting, and she seems to have happily acknowledged, even celebrated, his various absurdities.

What of the pamphlet itself? In its startling opening sentence, the pamphleteer announces that he is going to tell us all about how he thwarted his Cacodaemon with a pointy stick and some bleach, and that if his prose were paint, in this pamphlet it would be matt rather than gloss. The fact is, Dobson continues in some of the glossiest prose he ever wrote. Indeed certain passages are so glossy that Nestingbird, among others, has recommended reading it through a screen or veil to dull its unearthly sheen.

Dobson gives his Cacodaemon no “back story”. He does not explain when it first began to haunt him, nor how terrible, or otherwise, has been its impact upon his life. It merely shimmers before him after breakfast one drizzly morning in April, and he reports this matter-of-factly, as if it is a familiar accompaniment to his post-breakfast drizzly April morning doings. On the particular morning of which he writes, Marigold Chew is away, which may in itself be significant. Dobson does not tell us where she has gone, but by checking the calendar one can conclude she was probably on one of her periodic jaunts to Shoeburyness as part of the bottomless viper-pit study group.

Dobson then recounts how he loses patience with his Cacodaemon. It is making demands upon him, as we are given to understand it “always does”, and the pamphleteer snaps. He goes to the broom cupboard and takes out a pointy stick, and dips the end of the stick in bleach, and charges across the room at the Cacodaemon, shouting his head off and threatening to impale it upon the stick. At this point, with a hideous sort of sucking and seething and squelching noise, the Cacodaemon seems to implode in upon itself. Bringing himself to a halt just before he clatters into the wainscotting, the pamphleteer peers down at the floor and sees a tiny smudge of noisome goo. This, he suggests, is all that is left of his Cacodaemon. He leans the pointy stick against the wall, and goes to the draining board to fetch a rag. He wipes the smudge with the rag, pours more bleach into a bucket, and drops the rag into the bucket. There is, he writes, “a faint echo of the sucking and seething and squelchy sound, as if heard through a funnel blocked with pebbles and dust”.

And thus the pamphlet ends, save for a rather curious colophon from which not even Nestingbird has been able to wring any meaning. I suppose we have to ask if Dobson was just making the whole thing up. We know there were times when he felt compelled to write a pamphlet even when his head was empty of ideas. Perhaps this was one of those times. Further light will no doubt be shed on the matter with the publication of Aloysius Nestingbird’s forthcoming study Dobson’s Head, Its Innards, And What They Reveal About The Colossus Of Twentieth-Century Pamphleteering.

I had hoped to be invited to write an introduction to this book, but I was told, in a dream, that there would be no such invitation, that Nestingbird had never heard of me, and that my pretensions to Dobsonist scholarship were flimsy and pathetic and doomed. Hard to argue with that, belched and spat out as it was from the fiery maw of a Cacodaemon.

Aide Memoire

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Gawp-eyed and jaw dropped, drool dribbling down my chin, I remain astonished at the seemingly fathomless ornithological ignorance I find around me. Only the other day, as I passed an aspen clump in which dozens of birds were perched, chirping, I had to explain, slowly and patiently, to my walking companion that the noise he heard was birdsong, that it was made by birds, that birds were, for the most part, aerial life-forms with wings and beaks and feathers, and that though they were capable of flight they often perched on tree-branches and other handy surfaces. This intelligence seemed to dumbfound him. It was with a certain desolation that I realised this said more about my choice of walking companion than it did about the companion himself. He is a harmless enough soul, but his brain has been Jesuit-damaged, and his prospects are grim indeed. My own prospects are not much better, but at least I know what a bird is.

And the reason I know is that I carry always with me, tucked in my pocket, an aide memoire, like the one shown below, courtesy of Agence Eureka. Might I suggest that you print it out, have it laminated, and keep it about your person at all times? Then you, too, will know what I know, at least in the ornithological field.

3821219369_00e78af718

Conscious Squirrel!

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At the beginning of the year, you may recall, in homage to George Orwell’s egg-counting mania, I began a daily squirrel count. Alas, I lack the single-minded diligence necessary for so useful a pastime, and I am afraid the count petered out on, er, the second of January.

I mention this solely as a pretext to draw to your attention this squirrel.

It is said somewhere, possibly by Dobson, that every fictional hero has an antipole, an eerie opposite that features in an – almost certainly unwritten – mirror of the original work. (If it was Dobson, it is a shame he never developed this thesis into an entire pamphlet.) I think we can safely say that what we have here is the antipole of Unconscious Squirrel!, the unconscious squirrel.

Flies In Mud

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Bored by stamps, coins, and football paraphernalia, I decided to collect flies in mud. I began my collection last Saturday, and what with one thing and another have not been able to devote as much time to it as I would have liked, so it is very much in what you could call its pupate stage. I have one fly trapped in mud, but have assembled much of the kit I will need to add to my collection, which I envisage becoming the finest in the world one day, if I stick at it.

Currently the collection is small enough to present no display problems. My fly in mud is resting on an ornate Frampton stand in my parlour. Few people these days designate one of their rooms as a parlour, but I do, and with reason. Some time ago, I had an astonishingly vivid dream in which a terrifying divinity – I think it may have been the hideous bat-god Fatso – appeared before me, shimmering, and roared “You will have flies in mud in your parlour!”

I do not always act upon instructions given to me by frightful gods in dreams, you understand, otherwise my life might be untenable. But I was happy to go along with Fatso, if indeed it was He, partly because, as I say, I was bored by stamps and so on, but partly, too, because it gave me a chance to redesignate one of my rooms.

There was a chance I had slightly misheard the spooky intonation in my dream, and that what the god had actually said was “flies and mud” rather than “flies in mud”. I pondered this for a while, before realising that the “in” would meet both cases, whereas if I went with the “and”, I might be at risk of mucking up what was quite obviously an important pointer to my future.

It is not difficult to find mud around where I live. I will not go into detail, but if you think about constant rainfall, unsurfaced rustic tracks, and the clopping of drayhorses back and forth morning, noon and night, you will get the idea. As for flies, they are plentiful, as they always will be in an area with a large number of illegal butcher’s shops. Time was I got involved in hopeless attempts to shut them down, or at least to stop them selling contaminated pork, but I had my arms broken and skull cracked once too often to continue with my civic duties. Now I try to do my bit by subsisting on a diet of peas and radishes and gooseberry fool. Very occasionally I have one of my pork cravings, but I have found I can satisfy it by carving a radish into the shape of a pig and using my imagination.

Of course, I use different cutters and slicers for radish-carving and for hewing the tidy cubes of mud in which my flies are entrapped. Well, more accurately I should say “cube of mud in which my fly is entrapped”, for as I said, so far I have only had time to make a start on my collection. The cutter-slicer is one of the crucial elements of my kit, which also includes a Bolsover scope, tinted contact lenses, pincers, an illustrated fly identification pamphlet, and a modified pippy bag. Making the necessary adjustments to the pippy bag was a nail-biting process, and in the end I called in expert help. One of the illegal butchers had been “turned”, regularly attending a twelve-choking-fit programme set up by Illegal Butchers Anonymous, and he proved invaluable. Where I had been screwing my courage to the sticking place, he ignored the sticking place entirely and soon had my pippy bag ready for flies in mud. I was so pleased I gave him a handful of peas as a gift.

I am hoping to add to my collection this coming weekend, and have in mind a particular stretch of mud over by the Ringo Starr Caterpillar Breeding Centre. Armed with my kit, I shall trudge out in the rain, at dawn, tum packed with a hearty gooseberry fool breakfast, the world, thanks to my contact lenses, all gold and purple and brown and green and puce and mauve and blue. If you see me, doff your cap, if you have a cap to doff. If not, just tilt your head at the angle prescribed by Blötzmann (Second Handbook).

A Scrap From Inksmudge Past

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Mooching about Interwebshire*, it is easy to forget those long ago days spent in the seedy village of Inksmudge. Although there are umpteen websites devoted to all sorts of past publishing glories, it is rare – at least in my experience – to chance upon an item I clearly remember snipping out of an old inky paper and slotting in to my teenage cuttings pile. (Why did I never bother to paste things into a scrapbook?)

Those heaps of printstuff were, for the most part, lost or abandoned or buried or burned to a cinder many years ago. So I was delighted, this morning, roaming through the shire, to find this snippet, almost certainly from NME circa 1974. It still makes me laugh, though perhaps now accompanied by a lump in my throat. Tempus fugit, lost youth, blah blah blah…

NowWillYouJoinHenryCow

* NOTE : A term coined, as far as I’m aware, by John Barleycorn at the much-missed According To The Ninth.

The World Trend

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There are difficult days, like today, when I awake in the grip of the fever. My ablutions are performed hurriedly, as if there is no time to waste, even though it is still before dawn. If I can face breakfast, I bolt it, like a half-starved squirrel alighting upon a single discarded nut on the lawn of a municipal park. I pace up and down, disconsolate, muttering, eyes popping, my hair dishevelled and with beetles falling from it. I wander through the chartered streets and see in every face I meet signs of the same restlessness, signs of the same phrenzy. Aimless and distracted I return home. My limbs are aquiver but I snap them to stillness and manage to make a pot of tea. I turn on the kitchen radio and tune in to Tugboat Crew Playtime, hoping the tunes will soothe my brain. I feel as if there is a nest of vipers squirming in my vitals, but eventually I gather. I gather. And I walk as boldly as I can across the hall and push open the living room door and I look down…

And of course, it is fine. It is perfectly serviceable. A tad worn in places, a faded stain here or there, but nothing I cannot cope with. And thus does my carpet madness evaporate, and I am human again, no longer a demented thing.

I had resigned myself to these periodic attacks, but now it seems help is at hand. If my carpet madness gets worse, there is a remedy. According to the North Korean Central News Agency,

Products of the Pyongyang Carpet Factory are drawing interests of many people at home and abroad.

The factory, with a long history of carpet production, is producing various kinds of hand-woven carpet, machine-woven carpet and others to suit the world trend.

It is located in Sosong District of Pyongyang.

Pak Won Chol, director of the factory, said in an interview with KCNA to the following effect: The factory is making silk carpet good for health and longevity which the Korean ancestors had long used and wool carpet giving comfortable feeling.

A doctor once told me he thought my own “episodes” of carpet madness were brought on by a neurotic terror that my carpet did not suit the world trend. If that is indeed the cause, then I now know how to conquer the bonkersness once and for all.

Thanks to Mick Hartley for the link.

Birds That Clang

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In a poem she scribbled on the back of a letter to a friend in 1855, the Pre-Raphaelite Muse Lizzie Siddall wrote:

The voices of a thousand birds / That clang above my head, / Shall bring me to a sadder dream / When this sad dream is dead.

A freakish loon by the name of Wilf Birdclang – methinks he changed his name by deed poll – has spent the last fifteen years identifying and cataloguing the thousand different types of bird that make a clanging sound. It would not surprise me if you raised your eyebrows at that sentence, an inner voice exclaiming “what fresh nonsense is this?” You are probably of the conviction that few, if any, birds go “clang”, and certainly not a thousand different types. You might also be thinking to yourself that Lizzie Siddall did not suggest that her clangers were anything but a thousand birds all of the same type. Granted, she does not specify, but I think sheer common sense indicates that she had just one type of bird in mind. What that bird may have been she does not say, thus allowing the likes of Wilf Birdclang to step in with his ludicrous list.

The point about his fifteen years’ work is that it is all bluster and assertion, without a trace of evidence or argument. For example, the first bird on Wilf’s list is the starling. He writes:

1. The starling. Starlings make loud, even deafening, clanging noises.

Any ornithologist of repute will tell you that this is complete drivel. Indeed, I am an ornithologist of repute, and I am telling you it is drivel. I have come across any number of starlings in my time, and not one of them has clanged, ever, deafeningly or otherwise.

Wilf Birdclang has now set to work on a list of a thousand sad dreams. Let us hope it proves more rigorous than his birdy twaddle.

Sewer Reminder

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The episode of Tunnel Vision in which Mr Key trudges through the sewers declaiming sewer- and tunnel-related prose will be broadcast tonight at 9.00 PM on ResonanceFM. At least, I think so. If through cataclysmic mishap you miss it, it will be repeated on Saturday 15th at 4.00 PM.

UPDATE : And if, through a second cataclysmic mishap, you miss the repeat, I understand that a podcast will be available from Sunday 16th. Check the Resonance podcasts page.

Potter’s Arch Or Potter’s Crank?

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Potter’s arch or potter’s crank? It’s a choice you have to make, when tobogganing, in a split second. Pick the wrong manoeuvre and bones might be broken, or at the very least sprained, and you would almost certainly end up with a mouth full of snow. If your movements were impaired, as well they might be by dint of bone damage, and a fresh fall of snow occurred, from those expansive bleak grey skies, with little wind, you could be buried, all trace of you erased, for in the morning a passing hiker or cadet would see a smooth untrodden white blanket, stretching from here all the way across to where the woods begin at the foot of the mighty mountain. Your toboggan would be buried alongside you, some yards away, at the point where you were tossed from it into the snow, like an Eskimo rag doll.

Make the right choice, in that instant, between arch and crank, and no such calamity will befall you. You will continue zooming downward, whatever the gradient, with bumps and buffets to be sure, but joyously, until, as the slope evens out at the end of the course, you will slow gradually, and come to a halt at the scoring station. It is just a little hut, the station, where officials in woolly hats await you, and mark your time and elegance in their records.

They are passionless men, these officials. If you choose wrongly, between potter’s arch and potter’s crank, and are helpless in the snow with broken bones somewhere up on the slope, they send no search parties. They wait and wait, sipping Schnapps from their flasks, pointing to pines, scanning the sky, until the sun begins to set and they wend their way along the Hopfskag to the village, to homely hearths and warm beds. They will not even think of you, alone on the mountain slopes as snow falls from the sparkling night sky, burying you and your bashed-up dented toboggan.

You should not believe what you have heard about big dogs coming to snuffle you out, with brandy-barrels fastened about their necks. There are no such hounds in the Hopfskag. It is said they are frightened away by the mountain spirits, the groaning wraiths that prey upon the souls of crashed tobogganists.

That is why, in that split second you have to choose your manoeuvre, to make that decisive potter’s arch or potter’s crank, you should trust to neither skill nor instinct, but to the mountain spirits. Offer yourself to them, brain and bone and body and soul, frame and core, in a howl of subjugation to their power, and make your move. They will tell you whether to arch or to crank. But be warned. They are mischievous and fickle. The dogs learned that long ago. Tobogganists have not, yet.