“True confession:  I have had two library clown traumas in my career.” – Mary, at Awful Library Books.

Mary clearly did not work at the Pointy Town Municipal Library during the 1950s, or she would have had many more such traumas. Between 1952 and 1958, the library was staffed entirely by frightful clowns in full traditional clown costume, as part of a “social engineering experiment” conducted by the Blötzmannite head librarian, one Barb Crutch. She never made clear the purpose of her scheme, nor indeed its results. She died in the Munich Air Disaster, puzzlingly, for no one ever discovered what connection she had with the Busby Babes, and her replacement as head librarian quietly dropped the clown business. One Tuesday morning in March 1958, she tricked all the staff into thinking they were going on a charabanc outing, and once they were all aboard, she persuaded the driver to take them to a big top erected on a piece of land reserved for government nerve gas tests. So ended the reign of clowns at Pointy Town Municipal Library.

Further reading : Library Clown Traumas – What They Are & How To Shake Them Out Of Your Head Good And Proper Using Bleach & A Dog Whistle by Dobson (out of print).

Their first album pretty much defined the style we know as “bathtub reggae”, the follow up sounded like a swarm of hornets trapped in a funeral parlour, and now top beat combo Brute Beauty And Valour And Act, Oh, Air, Pride, Plume, Here / Buckle! are storming the charts again with their new release. It’s a box set of cover versions of the seven Sibelius symphonies, recorded in what might best be described as Ivesian pillow-talk progpunk doo-wop. Fatima Gilliblat talked to the band outside a kiosk on a crumbling seaside pier.

Fatima : It’s very windy.

Band : Yes. And have you noticed how the gulls seem tense, as if awaiting orders from some sort of gull-god?

Fatima : I am holding tight to my choc ice, for I fear it might be snatched by one of these rapacious scavenging birds.

Band : But that’s the point… you see how they are just hovering, not swooping down to the pier at all, despite that pile of discarded wafers and toffee apples and seaside resort cocktail sausages in puff pastry?

Fatima : Yes, that is curious. Perhaps they’re not hungry.

Band : [Hollow laughter.] Gulls are always hungry.

Fatima : Well, anyway, let’s talk about this new album.

Band : Wait! See, there is broiling and tumult in the clouds over to the west.

Fatima : So there is.

Band : The gull-god is come! Put aside your choc ice, Ms Gilliblat, and clamber on to this makeshift altar we have cobbled together from rotting pier-planks and seaweed.

Fatima : OK, if you say so. But why?

Band : Because we are going to sacrifice you to the gull-god of course, and tape the  blood-curdling savagery, and then pop back to the studio to incorporate the field recording into our next album.

Fatima : How exciting to think that I shall give my life for the cause of experimental sound art!

Band : That’s the spirit!

Unfortunately, soon after this interview, the band split due to “artistic differences”. The latest news is that they have called a truce and are getting it together in the country, so we may yet hear Fatima Gilliblat’s electronically-manipulated death throes.

UPDATE : Apparently, Fatima survived. She is in fact a descendant of mythical giant crows, and tore the gull-god to pieces with the power of her corvine brain.

The town of Throm is perhaps best known for its gorgeous sewers, with their chandeliers, Rococo ironwork railings, and jewel-encrusted access ladders. In spite of the magnificence of their sewers, the Thrompersons fought hard to win that official designation as a town. It is, after all, the size of a village, with the atmosphere of a hamlet, and the public morals of a cluster of shabby huts. But town it now is, at least on paper, and bursting with civic pride. The mayor’s chain of office hangs around his neck, and trails along the ground into the gutter, where it drops through a brightly polished grating down, down, deep down into the most subterranean of the sewers, where it is bolted to an adamantine slab of rock, and bolted fast. It is a long chain, a chain the mayor is proud to wear. At the end of his term, the soldering person will come and unfasten it from around his neck, and it is at this time, his ten-years’ duty done, unloosed from his chain, that the ex-mayor might make a trip to Bosis.

Some have mistakenly dubbed Bosis the twin-town of Throm. It is no such thing. It is neither town nor village nor hamlet, nor even a cluster of huts. It certainly has no sewers to rival Throm. It has no sewers at all, for it is the kind of place that, though rained upon incessantly, has always been shunned by drainage engineers. So to the untrained eye Bosis can look like a mere midden of mud and filth and muck, roosted upon by the occasional disoriented scavenger gull or vulture. This unseemly prospect conceals, however, the great attraction of Bosis, which draws Thrompersons to it week in, week out, through the winter months. Bosis is registered as a site of historical significance, for it was here, at the dawn of time, that the Lord appeared, carrying an enormous burlap sack. There are many versions of the story, but the essential details are covered by Abbie Farwell Brown in The Curious Book Of Birds (1903):

One day the Lord gathered together all the insects in the world, all the beetles, bugs, bees, mosquitoes, ants, locusts, grasshoppers, and other creatures who fly or hop or crawl, and shut them up in a huge sack well tied at the end. What a queer, squirming, muffled-buzzing bundle it made, to be sure! Then the Lord called the woman to him and said, “Woman, I would have you take this sack and throw it into the sea!”

This Lord has been erroneously identified as the God of the Christians, but recent scholarship carried out at the Bosis Institute Of Insect History has put a pretty firm kibosh on that idea. It now seems certain that the Lord referred to was actually a native of Throm, or what passed for Throm in those distant days, and may have been the same Lord who dug the very first shaft of what was to become the fantastic sewage system. We know much more about the woman who was entrusted with the sack. She was a Bosisite, of the higher peasantry, in raiment of turquoise, with bells on her fingers and bells on her toes, a maiden of baffles and puffers and woad. Her name, we think, was Clothgard.

Thus is the close link between Throm and Bosis explained, although one puzzling aspect of the tale is that both town and midden are far inland, far, far from the sea. It is possible that the Lord’s brain was ravaged by the fumes released when he sunk a shaft into the mud at Throm, and he knew not what he did. We have clues that he performed some other curious deeds, in Throm and Bosis and further afield. Incidentally, given the foul and barely habitable nature of present-day Bosis, the Institute Of Insect History hovers above it, in an airship tethered to a sturdy wooden post.

Should you wish to make the trip from Throm to Bosis, bear in mind that the recommended route is one of much squelching, and watertight boots are advisable. One ex-mayor of Throm did the journey in his socks, for a wager, and they found him in a ditch in the squelchy wasteland between town and midden, shivering and gibbering and beset by flies and gnats and bugs and beetles and other escapees from the Lord’s enormous squirming sack.

Bubbles surge from froth. Hot pan, hot pan. Do the bubbles carry infection, disease, bad vapour, the sickness unto death? We shall find out. We coax some bubbles into a bubble-container box, and cart it to the bench. We have apparatus on the bench, with which we can apply all sorts of tests to the bubbles. Testing is overseen by our captain. He deters the sort of larking about to which we are tempted when we get to test things with the apparatus on the bench. Our captain has a Bjorn Borgish air. He is glacial in the midst of pandaemonium.

When we complete the bubble tests it is clear that infection is present. And not just present, virulent. Thank heaven for our suits and serums! Our captain raises one Roger Moore eyebrow, a signal, we know, to cool the pan and diminish the bubbling. This is duly done, but done ineptly, and there is an escape of gas. The gas is more toxic than the bubbles. Hooters are activated.

We gather in the field as per our drill. There are cows in the field, munching vegetation. We have already tested the vegetation and passed it with bright flags, as we do, and so we know the cows are safe. Our captain counts us. He counts the cows, too, for no apparent reason. It is the same number of cows as it was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Surely our captain knows that?

Perhaps he does not, anymore. This may be the first sign. Diligent in his duty, our captain was the last one out. We were all gathered in the field, in our designated rectangular patch, while he was still inside. He must have breathed in some of the gas. And those cufflinks he sports. So elegant, so chic, yet so sharp at the edges! Could a chance swipe of cufflink have rent a rip in the bubble box? Might our captain have swallowed an escaped bubble, or even the whole sample?

He has counted us, and he has counted the cows, and now he is counting the clouds. Poor captain! The gas and the bubbles are ravaging his cranial innards. Synapses are snapping in all the wrong ways, or snapping at the wrong time, or not snapping at all. He flaps his arms as he carries on his imbecilic counting. And now we can see bubbles coming out of his ears!

We round upon the nitwit who muffed the pan-cooling. We berate him for the catastrophe he has caused. He is infuriatingly insouciant, leaning against a cow and lighting a cigarette. It is like berating Noel Coward. But what is that poking out of his breast pocket? It looks very much like a green cardboard triangle as carried by the Communists in at least one Mickey Spillane novel. Could it be there is a traitor in our midst?

Our captain is now counting the birds in the sky. Somehow he has managed to get them to keep still for him, in mid-flight or -swoop or -dive, as he counts. At least his derangement has not atrophied his captaincy of the elements! We can take advantage of the stillness to subjugate the Bolshevik. And we do.

Later, in the canteen, our captain congratulates us on our quick wits. He still has bubbles pouring out of his ears, but he has stopped counting things for the time being and seems more like his usual self. He has suggested we lay him out on the bench and test him with the apparatus, so we will do that after teatime.

The most curious thing about the whole episode is that the number of cows in the field seems to be getting progressively fewer. I have counted them over and over again, in fact I am still counting them, but each time I count, there is one less cow to be counted. And yet the birds are once again in motion in the sky above, the Commie is bound and chained and tethered, and the bubbles are pouring out of my ears, too, just as they are from our captain’s, and I am flapping my arms, huge energetic flapping movements, flap, flap, flap.

Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson wrote a September Song. But so did Dennis Beerpint, with music by Binder:

Ho, boys, ho! It is September now, and we must do some marching across the muddy loam! From Pang Hill down to Blister Lane we’ll march and sing and bawl, for we are Mister Pipkin’s boys and we have got our sticks!

We swing our sticks from left to right and sweep away dull care! For now it is September and we march right past the pond. All the ducks are in the pond, doing what ducks do, and we are Mister Pipkin’s boys in our inelegant boots!

When we get to Blister Lane we’ll turn upon a coin, it might be a florin with embossings of a king. But we care not for kings or queens or Stalin with his pocks. We only care for Pipkin and his ukase that we march!

The whole month of September back and forth you’ll watch us march! And you’ll be kept behind a fence so you don’t hinder us. The fence is of barbed wire and electric to the touch. But you can buy a choc ice from the kiosk in the field!

Ho, boys, ho! We’ll chuck our sticks aloft! And then we’ll catch them as they drop and swing them once again! Mister Pipkin and his wife will come to watch us march! They’ll sit in deckchairs by the pond and clap us as we pass!

And when we’re strafed by fighter jets we’ll sit in the mud and cry! We’ll sob our little hearts out and fill the pond with tears! It’s the same every September, according to the stats. They’re kept by Mister Pipkin in his creamy vellum book.

Ho, boys, ho! That is quite enough! Dennis Beerpint wrote this song for us to roar aloud! But Mister Pipkin is stone deaf and doesn’t hear a word. So we will march in silence and we’ll throw away our sticks.

There comes a time in everybody’s life when foes must be fought in battle. This is a universal truth, as sure as eggs is eggs. It might be objected that some people have no foes to speak of, but that is moonshine. There is always an enemy lurking, lying in wait, whether it be a marauding troop of stiletto-wielding banditti, or an inner demon gnawing at the vitals. It might be further argued that one need not battle one’s foe, but instead flee from them, running away screaming, mayhap, or hiding in a barn. Much good that would do you with one of those vitals-gnawing types! And even external foes, such as the banditti, will be in close pursuit, and track you down, and have at you. No, I am afraid it is true that sooner or later one must battle one’s foes.

That being the case, it can be instructive to examine the historical record, to consider how others have battled their foes, to pick up handy tips. Here, for example, we have a scene depicted in a mezzotint by the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint:

Rex Tint is a particularly fab mezzotintist, so we can see at a glance the situation he has captured so skilfully. A gigantic knight, in chain mail, armed with a mighty sword and a big spiked thumping orb-on-a-stick, is confronted on a mountain path by a pale child threatening him with her girlie pin-cushion and pencil-sharpener. The knight is clearly in the utmost peril. His has been a life of chivalry and tourneys in which he never came upon a real foe, and even when he went off on a crusade against the Saracen hordes, he thought of them not as enemies but as mere pests in thrall to a false and fiendish god. But now, on what Rex Tint tells us in a scribble on the back of his mezzotint was a balmy Wednesday afternoon in the far Tyrol, he has come face to face with a very real and very menacing foe, the one that has awaited him, the one against whom he must do battle. Yes, he could flee. No doubt he could find a barn in which to cower, like a little mouse. But the knight knows his Nemesis would pursue him there, and find him trembling in the hayloft, from which there would be no escape. He knows this is his moment of destiny, when he must battle his foe, as we all must, one day, whether or not it be a Wednesday in the far Tyrol.

And what of this foe, this girlie in her gingham frock and corrective boots? Why does she menace the giant yet chivalrous knight? How did she find him on this remote mountain path in the far Tyrol? For how long has she pursued him across the globe, her pin-cushion and pencil-sharpener always in readiness, their pins and blades glinting in the sunlight, when the sun is shining, or protected by wrappers against rust, when it is raining? What fires burn in her tiny head? (Incidentally, note how Rex Tint has cleverly shown her with a head much larger in proportion than it ought to be, for purposes of illustrative oomph, using a mezzotinting technique known as “making the tiny bigger”.)

All these questions are pertinent, and the answers to them would provide the knight with valuable information about his foe. Ah, but were he to pause long enough to ponder them, he would be a dead man. His guts would be spilled upon a mountain path in the far Tyrol and his foe would stand triumphantly over him, one corrective boot planted on his neck. By not immediately engaging his foe in battle, without stopping to think, all would be lost.

So the lesson we can learn from Rex Tint’s mezzotint is clear. When battling one’s foe, go on the attack. Slash and slice with your sword and thump thump thump with your big spiked thumping orb-on-a-stick. Do not stint.

Whatever the specific nature of one’s foe, and whatever the weaponry one has to hand, similar lessons can be learned by leafing through an album of mezzotints by Rex Tint, or indeed by careful study of other pictures by other artists. The important thing is to face one’s foe and do battle. Remember, if one chooses to flee and to hide in a barn, it might turn out to be the eerie barn at Scroonhoonpooge farmyard, where lurk fouler and more terrible foes than you could ever imagine in your most hideous dreams.