Pancake Day

[This piece ought to have appeared on Tuesday. Mea culpa.]

Dobson adored Pancake Day. Every year, in the weeks leading up to Shrove Tuesday, he grew ever more hot-brained and excitable, gathering sacks of flour, carrying out repeated Orwellian egg counts, and begging Old Farmer Frack for churns of milk from the mad old rustic’s cow collection. Every year, too, he revised, polished, embroidered, and sometimes even rewrote from scratch his pamphlet Pancakes : Food Of The Gods? (out of print).

In the complete Dobson bibliography, this title appears both with and without that question mark, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s fatuous Soviet Communism : A New Civilization?, written in 1935 at the height of Stalin’s terror, which lost its question mark between its first and second editions. Why Dobson ever phrased his title as a query in the first place is unfathomable, for he was absolutely convinced that all divine beings subsisted on pancakes and nothing else. A glance at any sacred text or compendium of myths quickly disproves the pamphleteer’s theory, if we can call it that, though “delusional idée fixe” would express it better. Dobson spent a preposterous amount of time working his way through the foundational texts of all major religions, Tippexing out all mentions of foodstuffs and, as soon as the Tippex was dry, scribbling in the word “pancakes”. At one point he commissioned Rex Tint, the noted mezzotintist, to create a mezzotint showing the Greek gods atop Mount Olympus, stuffing their faces with pancakes. The work was never completed, or even begun, because Dobson wanted to pay the mezzotintist in eggs, flour, and milk, and Rex Tint, famously, was a “cash only” mezzotintist.

It comes as something of a surprise to learn that in spite of his enthusiasm, Dobson was a hopeless pancake maker. He could never get the mixture quite right, and his tossing technique was laughable. He tried to divert attention from his pancake ineptitude through a combination of bluster, weeping, and pointing out of the window at an imaginary flock of chaffinches. Only late in his life did he face up to the truth, in the remarkable pamphlet My Pancake Ineptitude : A Heart-Rending Confession In Sixteen Bursts Of Hallucinatory Prose (out of print). In the sixteenth and final text, Dobson makes his most compelling case for the divine nature of this simple aliment, although the prose is so hallucinatory that not even the most diligent, pancake-focused reader can work out what in heaven’s name he is babbling on about.

ADDENDUM : A better, and more accurate title than Soviet Communism : A New Civilization would have been Soviet Communism : Enemy Of Orchards, as Michael Gilleland at Laudator Temporis Acti reminds us.

When Baize And Prog Collide!

It is a truth universally acknowledged that, in this country at least, the cultural tastes of top sportspersons are irredeemably bland and lowbrow. Our native footballers, for example, when asked to name their favourite books, will invariably mention Harry Potter or Andy McNab, if, that is, they have ever read any books at all. (This is not the case with foreign footballers, particularly the French, who are intellectual titans by comparison.) Similarly, the default music choice for sporting champs seems to be smooth jazz, or jazz funk, or, in the world o’ rock, U2, Coldplay, and Phil Collins.

The great exception to this has always been snookerist Steve Davis. The carefully-crafted public image of a man who, away from a snooker table, is a boring mediocrity disguises the truth that Mr Davis is a fanatical and knowledgeable enthusiast of prog and related musics. Indeed, I seem to recall that some years ago he used his wealth to persuade Teutonic nutcases Magma to reform for a series of concerts, and has expressed a desire to do the same with Henry Cow, so far in vain.

steved

So I am extremely grateful to reader Alasdair Dickson for drawing my attention to PhoenixFM, Brentwood and Billericay’s community radio station, where Mr Davis has a regular show called The Interesting Alternative. Look at those playlists! As Mr Dickson says, there is a fair amount of witless prog noodling, but also early Soft Machine, the 5UU’s, Camberwell Now, Univers Zero, and many other Recommended or Recommendedish records.

I know that Hooting Yard readers never listen to any other radio station than ResonanceFM, but until the powers-that-be at Borough High Street snap up Steve Davis, you will all be forgiven for tuning in online to PhoenixFM for his show, wherever you are in the world.

William Tell : Second Statement Of Particulars

My name is William Tell and I am an archer of repute. Much of my time is spent hiking the twenty-six cantons of my Swiss homeland, firing arrows from my crossbow at that which presents itself to me as an appropriate target. In a single morning, to give an example, between breakfast and elevenses, I might shoot at a rampaging wild Swiss boar, a henchperson of the Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, or an orchard fruit. So accurate is my marksmanship, I have been known to balance an apple on my son’s head, take a considerable number of paces away from him, turn, aim, and splice the apple in two with a lethal wood and metal missile, without harming a hair on Walter’s abnormally large head. Walter is my son’s name.

Despite the size of his head, I have not yet tried to balance either a wild Swiss boar or a henchperson on it. That sort of thing would probably delight a circus crowd, between turns by clowns and performing seals, and at times of harvest failure, when the Tell chalet is short of food, I have considered it. Walter would have to be persuaded to wear some kind of brace, of metal and leather, to support his neck and his back, and I can foresee problems in so persuading him, for he is very fashion-conscious, quite a dandy in fact. Though just now it has occurred to me that slain United States President JFK wore a back-brace throughout his one thousand days in office, without the citizenry being aware of the fact. I must point that out to Walter, as reassurance, should I decide to go down the circus performing route, next time the Tells go hungry.

Over the years I have fired arrows from my crossbow in all twenty-six Swiss cantons, including those which were once officially half-cantons. But I have not shot at orchard fruits, whether balanced on Walter’s large bonce or not, in each and every one. Consulting my records, I see that no fruit has been in my crossbow-sights in Obwalden, Zug, Solothurn, or Thurgovia. I must rectify those omissions, for I am a determined archer, and a completist. I still remember the afternoon I was finally able to place an X against Ticino in my handwritten canton-list. There I was, in the market square of Bellinzona, the capital, my heart swelling with pride as a hardy band of my Italian-speaking countrymen cheered their “Guglielmo Tell” to the rafters. The rafters were those of a temporary wooden structure erected for my display of archery skills. Four wild Swiss boars had been captured in nets, by tough and fearless hunters, one boar tied to each wooden cornerpost, and I had shot them with my crossbow, one after another, spinning around with the grace of a ballerina. Walter was a babe in arms at the time, the arms being those of my wife Coco, who watched my feat of boar-slaughter-with-crossbow from a safe distance, sitting on a bench at the edge of the market square, outside a butcher’s shop selling spicy Italianate sausages.

When my third statement of particulars is due, I plan to say a few words about sausages in Switzerland. My son Walter will be a great help, for he is apprenticed to a butcher in our home village in the canton of Uri. The butcher was at first alarmed by Walter’s gigantic head, but when he learned that his papa was the legendary archer William Tell, his ecstasy was such that it rivalled that of the Woodcarver Steiner as documented in Werner Herzog’s 1974 film. Steiner, of course, is a man of Switzerland, a skiing ace, and his first name is Walter. I like to think he was named after my son, but I have not had an opportunity to question his parents on the matter. But as I said, I am a determined archer, and I will winkle out the truth, even if I have to tie the Woodcarver Steiner’s papa and mama to the cornerposts of a temporary wooden structure in the market square of a canton capital, and take aim at them with my crossbow, primed and ready to fire.

Impenetrable Mysteries

There are certain impenetrable mysteries which tug at our imaginations and allow us no peace of mind. I am sure I am not the only person to be kept awake at night, tossing and turning, chewing the pillow, my brain fuming as I ponder in perplexity for the umpteenth time whether, for example, Badge Man was a living, breathing, armed maniac or merely a trick of the light, whether the Loch Ness Monster truly exists or is just a figment in the minds of socially inept men in anoraks who like to spend their time sitting in the lochside drizzle with Thermos flask and binoculars, whether it is permissible simply to wipe over one’s socks when performing wudhu. These are all terrifically mysterious matters, and there are many more, so many more it is a wonder we are not stunned into mental collapse.

Every now and then, we stumble upon some fragmentary clue which promises to shed light where previously there has been only darkness, ignorance, and numbing stupidity. One of the greatest puzzles gnawing away inside my head has long been to find an answer to the question: what did Tiny Enid do, once she had grown up and was no longer tiny? Though I am still unable to give a full account of her adult doings, I can, today, say one thing with a modicum of confidence – she dressed up as a bat.

236244686_3ee7e0a689_o

There remains some doubt whether this really is Tiny Enid. It may be an impostor, or even a hallucination brought on by a surfeit of lampreys. I am clutching at straws, dammit, but sometimes that is all we can do.

The Statement Of William Tell

My name is William Tell, and I am an archer of repute. Like Caspar Badrutt, the hotelier who pioneered winter sports, I am a man of Switzerland, country of chocolate swiss roll and neutrality.

My son Walter has a large head, and as he lolloped along the mountain paths, it tilted upon his neck and swung from side to side. He had become an object of ridicule among the goatherds.

My wife, Coco, delved into ancient books to see if she could discover a spell to shrink Walter’s head. I was fully supportive of this strategy, and entered many crossbow tournaments, the idea being to win prize monies so Coco could afford to buy more and more ancient books.

Though I won contests in every canton of Switzerland, and even abroad, in Italy, where they called me Guglielmo, and our chalet was piled high with ancient books, Coco failed to discover an effective spell.

Walter became low-spirited and unusually cantankerous. I feared for my coop of hens, towards which my son began to mutter animadversions. He was projecting his inner turmoil against harmless poultry, a psychological commonplace. Goatherds are larger, and violent when threatened.

Desperate, I sought advice from the Swiss Institute Of Deportment. I was told that the muscles in Walter’s neck could be strengthened rather than his head shrunk. The way to do this was to make him carry pieces of fruit balanced atop his crown.

That goes some way to explaining why Walter had an apple on his head when Hermann Gessler, Austrian Vogt of Altdorf, came riding by on his horse. By every Alp in Switzerland, how I hated the Vogt!

I shot the apple off Walter’s head with my crossbow to show Gessler that I was not a man he should mess with. I had a pomegranate in my pocket, and was about to balance it on Gessler’s head when I was apprehended by his henchmen.

To his credit, my quick-thinking son unlatched the hens from the coop and set the fear of god into them. He pointed at the henchmen, and yelled “Kill!” They immediately unhanded me, and fled alongside their Vogt of Altdorf.

Inside the chalet, Coco had brewed a potion from a recipe in one of the ancient books. Walter took a sip and spat it out, but I drank an entire gobletful. Shortly afterwards I lost touch with reality.

My name is William Tell, and that is my statement. I cannot vouch for its accuracy, as the potion is still coursing through my veins. I must now go and tell everything I know about Switzerland to a man named Ruskin, who says he is writing a book about this fair country.

Chums In Khaki

“The first volume in the series, The Boy Scouts of the Eagle Patrol, was necessarily confined to the activities of the young organization; but Rob and his mates met and overcame many difficulties that are well worth reading about.

“In the second volume, The Boy Scouts on the Range, were recounted a series of strange adventures that befell some of the Eagles during a visit to the Far Southwest, where they took part in the wild life of a cattle ranch.

“Through the pages of The Boy Scouts and the Army Airship the reader will find that Rob and his comrades always bore themselves manfully, no matter the emergency; and that they scrupulously observed ‘scout law’ under any and every occasion, as every true wearer of the khaki makes it a point to do.

“After this, followed an account of many remarkable happenings that befell the Eagles when under canvas. The Boy Scouts’ Mountain Camp has deservedly been reckoned one of the very best scout books ever published for boys, and those who own a copy are likely to read it many times.

“Once more, chance allowed some of the leading characters in the Hampton Troop to come in touch with Government officers who were experimenting with a wonderfully designed submarine. It happened that Rob and his friends were enabled to assist Uncle Sam’s agents in defeating the plans of foreign spies who tried to steal the design of the new invention. In the pages of The Boy Scouts for Uncle Sam are recorded the adventures that accompanied their service, as well as mention of the reward following their victory.

“It was a happy chance that allowed some of the boys to pay a visit to the then uncompleted Panama Canal. While in the Canal Zone they again demonstrated that they were always wide-awake and devoted to the service of their country. Much useful information will also be found between the covers of this volume, called The Boy Scouts at the Panama Canal.

“Once more, Rob and several of his close adherents were unexpectedly allowed to take a trip. Andy Bowles, the bugler of the troop, had an uncle who owned a cattle ranch down in Chihuahua, in Mexico. He was sick, and unable to go down himself to dispose of the stock before the fighting forces of rebels and Federals drove the herds away. Accordingly, he sent his nephew and several of his chums to seek General Villa, whom he had once befriended, and gain his assistance in selling the valuable stock. The wonderful things they saw, and the peculiar adventures that came their way, have all been described in the seventh volume, just preceding this, under the title of The Boy Scouts Under Fire in Mexico.

“That, telling briefly some of the remarkable things that happened in their career as Boy Scouts, will have to suffice to introduce Rob and his two chums to the reader.”

From The Boy Scouts On Belgian Battlefields by Lieutenant Howard Payson (1915)

Soured Man, Stormy Petrel

“Few men, no matter what their calling, can have been the object of so many different descriptions as were applied to him… [Edward George Hemmerde, K.C., the Recorder for Liverpool] was variously depicted as ‘a profligate’, ‘a wastrel’, ‘a martyr to the establishment’, ‘a stormy petrel’, ‘a soured man’, ‘a good-time Charlie’, and ‘a man who was much maligned and misunderstood’; he was also… ‘an irrepressible, loud-mouthed, honourable and outspoken braggart’… His physical perfection was marred by only one thing – or rather, two things: his feet. They were enormous. In profile, straight-backed and vastly-booted, Hemmerde was shaped like the letter L… He was conscious, too, of the unloveliness of his speaking voice, which, when he was at all excited, rose to a high-pitched screech. Since it took very little to get him excited, his voice, almost as often as not, was up in the higher registers, causing distress to sensitive ear-drums…”

From The Killing Of Julia Wallace by Jonathan Goodman (1969)

Epigone

According to the art critic Cosmo Hoxtonwanker, “few things boost the ego of the great artist as much as the emergence, and failures, of their epigones, talentless imitators whose own work never cuts the mustard, but clearly owes everything to the example of the master. The opportunities for preening are legion.”

One might have hoped that the egos of the truly great would need no such puffing up, but Hoxtonwanker is surely right in this (as he rarely is in anything else). One thinks of the out of print pamphleteer Dobson, convinced at an early age that he would bestride the twentieth century like a colossus, but at the same time forever riven by doubts and insecurities. Marigold Chew has recalled how happy Dobson would be when some neophyte pamphleteer would blunder onto the scene, publishing a handful of hand-stitched copies of a tract with a title like Gosh, How I Wish I Was Dobson!, in prose that curdled as one read it. The bestselling paperbackist Pebblehead is reported to be equally gleeful when he sees the shelves stacked with pathetic imitations of his own tremendously thick glossy potboilers, so much so that he invites their authors round to his “chalet o’ prose” for cocktail parties, lording it over them and taunting them, often physically, by poking at them with a stick and dropping beetles into their drinks.

It is, of course, only the supreme talents, in any creative endeavour, who provoke the slavish and witless efforts of epigones. The rest of us must continue to plough our lonely furrows, keeping our spirits up as best we may, our egos fragile and subject to the vicissitudes of a world of pap.

Until now. For it is with possibly preposterous overexcitement that I can report the latest innovation from Blodgett Global Domination Cyber Enterprises GmbH. For the past couple of weeks, this brand new company, operating from an allotment shed near Sawdust Bridge, has been seeking ways to crush the likes of Google and Microsoft under its singularly decisive boot. Their first product is designed to appeal directly to persons of a creative bent who wish like hell they had an epigone, for just the kind of ego-boost Hoxtonwanker identifies.

The E-Pig One is a tiny robot pig that can be plugged in to your computer with a USB cable or a bit of fusewire knotted to a magnet. Once initialised, synched, and prinked, the circuit boards in the E-Pig One start buzzing away, creating copies of your most recent creative projects – whether they be novels or paintings or three-hour slabs of improv racket – and then cleverly draining all the spark out of them (if any). The resulting mess is then belched out on to the E-Pig One’s so-called “sty”. It has all the hallmarks of your own work, as it might have been imitated by a lesser being without access to the empyrean peaks of creative genius you inhabit. So you can bask and preen, while the E-Pig One whirrs to a standstill, charging up for its next task.

Such has been the industry buzz, Apple are apparently already working on an iPig. It won’t succeed. The beauty of the E-Pig One lies almost entirely in its spelling. That is what the punters will pay for.

Three Out Of Four Moptops

I have just started to read The Killing Of Julia Wallace, Jonathan Goodman’s account of one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing murder mysteries. The events took place in 1931, in Liverpool. Thirty-odd pages in, I have been struck by the following:

One of the key locations is Menlove Avenue, the road where John Lennon grew up. The evening before the murder of his wife, William Herbert Wallace played chess with a man named McCartney, and on the day of the killing itself, he paid a visit to a Mrs Harrison. Alas, the index shows no sign of anyone called Starkey, or Starr. Still, three out of four loveable moptops is a pretty good tally so far as meaningless yet interesting coincidences go.

The Blind Man As Poultry Inspector

Jorge Luis Borges’ tenure as a blind inspector of poultry, while brief, was not without precedent. We recall the case of Pimty, two decades earlier and far, far from Buenos Aires. It may be an exaggeration to dub him, as did Pebblehead in the title of his bestselling paperback biography, The Illustrious Pimty, but that there was a lustre about him cannot be denied, unless you want to start a punch-up. Pimty’s blindness was more Blunketty than Miltonic, he was the sort of man who enraged cows, when he trespassed in their fields, at weekends, carrying a picnic basket, under a thunderous sky, escaping the poultry market with its tin roofs and yelling merchants, his prison in the week, the inspector’s hut, the braille calendar hanging tattered from a nail and the nail rusted, pricking him if he wasn’t careful, blood on his fingers as his hands fumbled delving into a hen’s croup, prodding, inspecting, as he was paid to do, oh and more than generously, he got a fair whack, and he spent it on booze and floozies, they haunted the poultry market, like figures from an early Kirchner, gaudy, angular, themselves sozzled on bathtub gin, sometimes they clucked just like the hens, particularly in the early afternoon, poor Pimty fuddled but up to his duty, tape measure round his neck like a tailor shifting schmutter, god knows why, it wasn’t his job to measure the hens, nor their eggs, they joked he thought it was some kind of loose cravat, as if being blind he wouldn’t know, they should have learned from their failed tricks, those mischievous poulterers, shoving a ball of dough stuck with feathers on the inspector’s table, his rage was as terrible as the cows when he opened the gate of the field with one hand, holding tight to the picnic basket with the other, out in the mist, oblivious of it, but not of the cows that bore down on him, on Saturdays and Sundays when the poultry market was closed, shuttered, a deserted patch of concrete and cement, stray feathers scattered, neglected by the janitor’s broom, the janitor Pimty’s pal, some said his half-brother, deaf as a post where the inspector was blind, they made quite a pair even without the blood tie, always playing card games at lunchtime, rummy and spite and my lady’s bonnet and Croesus, no money ever changing hands, the table rickety, sawdust everywhere, the stove in the corner, rain on the roof, birds pecking grain from the floor, shadow in the hut door of the inspector of inspectors looming, come for the rent and a check up, Pimty defiant, spitting out his words, hair standing on end as if he’d seen a ghost, half these hens are sick, man, what do you expect me to do, have a tot of gin while you tally my ledgers, I have to go and have a word with a man about a Buff Orpington and a Dutch Hookbill, and off Pimty goes, weaving across the familiar yard, sniffing the air, a storm brewing, better put on his sou’wester, yellow as a duck in a nursery book, shiny cardboard pages, stiff, buckled here and there, as you’d expect, he remembered gazing and gazing, rapt, when still so tiny with eyes that worked, before the operation, the surgeon cutting the useless withered nerves and then the blur black, the new life, the hard study, the Poultry Inspection Board, such an easy examination, what’s this, what’s that, this is this sir and that is that sir and a badge for merit, he still wears it, polishes it and buffs it, daily, after breakfast, kippers or bloaters, Schoenberg cassette, Transfigured Night, day too, thinks Pimty, day too, transfigured and transformed, weekday poultry market and weekend picnic, when he gets out, humming as he approaches the gate in the field, beyond which angry cows await him, and he pacifies them, sweet nothings, try the same thing on the hens and there would be mayhem, that much he discovered, one awful Thursday, it was raining then too, and he slipped on straw or grease and gashed his leg, you won’t find a better tourniquet than a tape measure, believe you me, still there was much blood spilled before it was taut, Pimty’s gore, like a rare expensive wine, metallic bouquet, and something in it irresistible to ducks, dozens of them falling upon it like starvelings, splashing about in his blood, the inspector deafened by clucking, thinking I better find out exactly what it is that’s in my veins, I may be a miracle of medical science, who’d have thought, hens maddened by the blood-splattered ducks, shrieking tangles, add in the sirens from the emergency services and you have complete havoc, but Pimty back at the poultry market next morning, behind his table, sticking his fingers up a duck’s fundament, the sense of touch unerring, even through the rubber glove, bright yellow like the rainhat, like the ducks in the nursery book, so much yellow, it was Pierre Bonnard who said you can never have enough yellow, no more yellow for Pimty but the yellow in his brain, remembered yellow, bright enough when he strains the synapses, you can almost hear them ping and twang, if you listen carefully, and Pimty does, he’s all ears, that’s why he hears the enraged cows in the field even before they are enraged, before his thumb clicks open the gate, on picnic days, in sunshine or mist, or once, when his watch stopped, in the middle of the night, high wind, cattle in slumber, owls hooting, Pimty with his rug and hamper, jam sandwiches, fishpaste, cocoa, a drowned beetle in the flask, the janitor never joins him, Greb the janitor, he goes instead on organised picnics for the hard of hearing, to the grounds of castles and stately homes, not cow-strewn fields, always in daylight, light Pimty doesn’t see and hasn’t seen for years, though he senses it on his eternally closed lids, heat and cold, damp and haze, he no longer bothers with the sunglasses he used to sport, frames too heavy on the nose, he smashed them underfoot in a temper, drunk to hell at the time, swigging as he smashed, at the poultry market but off duty, on a Tuesday afternoon, with a floozie on his arm, giggling, egging him on, a bit batty if truth be told, or dotty, that’s the word, fond of the poultry, too fond maybe, in an unseemly way, kept trying to abduct a hen or a duck or a goose, take it home as a pet, oh go on Pimty nobody will miss it, I can call it Flopsy or Clytemnestra and make a pond for it in my bathtub, feed it grain or whatever it eats, I know a grain supplier, a man with a silo, oh pretty please, but for all he was drawn to grandiose debauch Pimty was as conscientious a poultry inspector as the market ever had, and he foiled her kidnaps, every one of them, using his lustre, really quite mysterious, but absolutely effective, going by results, the inspector of inspectors always had a good word for him, back at headquarters, that man Pimty is a bloody marvel, never a day goes by that his poultry inspections aren’t a masterclass in the art, even when he’s sozzled, there is a lustre about him that makes my jaw drop, Pimty never heard any of this, they never invited him to HQ, not even to the cocktail parties, a stuffy bunch, and him shall we say difficult, haphazard in certain settings, liable to break things, jugs, plates, toasters, he was a devil with toasters, rarely invited anywhere, hence the lonely picnics, Pimty in a field beneath the enormous sky, placating angry cows, sprawled on his rug, away from the poultry, maybe that was when he worked at his lustre, it was as if he emitted rays, no, a sheen, unearthly, when he chose to switch it on, which he certainly did when Pebblehead came calling, he’d heard rumours, bustled into the poultry market first thing Monday morning, in cape and spats, entourage of bodyguards, so where’s this blind inspector I’ve been hearing about, tell me dammit, I have a paperback to write, ah good day to you sir, gosh, Pebblehead dumbstruck, slumps in a chair, an assistant takes notes, Pimty all the while inspecting geese and hens and ducks, even a swan, mute, he doubles up on rubber gloves, uses some sort of beam, strange miniature torch, works its controls so so deftly, but the swan is dead, they prosecute the merchant, huge pile of legal papers, even bigger pile of braille for Pimty, big thick sheets, untold thousands of dots, he knows the whole thing backwards, fantastic witness, visits the swan killer in prison, dank cell, no smoking, repent, repent, but we can never have you back at the poultry market, you crossed a line and I drew that line, yes, and it’s indelible, like all my lines, wherever I draw them, he’s babbling, Pimty, making it up as he goes along, to strike the fear of god into the convict, before he’s shipped away, over the sea, to a penal colony, one specially built for bird-killers, rocky and remote, blasted by gales, screeching gulls, auks, guillemots, sky cold and grey and hopeless, place of penitence, prising barnacles from stone for food, all in Pimty’s mind, vengeful, eaten away with hatred, teeming visions, the hen in the brain, oh yes, lustrous, Pebblehead saw that, but he had no idea of Pimty in the round, the whole man, duck messiah, goose god. It is certainly worth reading the biography, soon to be a film, but much of what Pebblehead writes is nonsense. For one thing, Pimty looked absolutely nothing like Anthony Burgess.

The Potato, Certain Beliefs Regarding

“The folklore of the plant is meagre, considering its wide distribution, but there are a number of curious superstitions connected with it. In some parts there is a belief that it thrives best if planted on Maundy Thursday; in others, that if planted under certain stars it will become watery. In Devonshire the people believe that the potato is a certain cure for the toothache – not taken internally, but carried about in the pocket. It is by several writers mentioned as a reputed cure for rheumatism in the same way; only it is prescribed that, in order to be an effective cure in such cases, the potato should be stolen. Mr. Andrew Lang mentions an instance of faith in the practice of this cure, which he came across in a London drawing-room. He regards this belief as a survival of the old superstitions about mandrake, and as analogous to the habit of African tribes who wear roots round the neck as protection against wild animals.”

Benjamin Taylor, Storyology : Essays In Folk-Lore, Sea-Lore, And Plant-Lore (1900)

ADDENDUM : It may be worth noting here that, if you were suffering from rheumatism in Aveyron, and, in attempting a cure, stole a potato from the Wild Boy of that place, he would begin to scream. Not unlike a mandrake root pulled from the soil.

One Thousand

Today there is cause for celebration. No, not the Muggletonian Great Holiday, that was last week. The reason for unbridled cheer is that what you are reading is the one thousandth postage at Hooting Yard since the site was rejigged at the beginning of 2007. (I cannot recall precisely how many postages appeared in the old format, to be found in the 2003-2006 Archive, but if memory serves it is something in the region of 950.) A milestone to be celebrated, then – but how?

Ideally, you lot would cancel all other engagements, put your feet up, and spend the rest of the day rereading all one thousand postages, in chronological order, making notes in your jotter, pausing occasionally to stare out of the window as you mull over a particularly arresting item, and generally wallowing in the sheer Hooting Yardiness of it all. Always remember that a day devoted to Mr Key is never a wasted day. However, I am sensible enough to realise that most of you will have other things calling on your attention, such as feeding the hamster, waiting at the bus stop, smoking, genuflecting, pootling about, milking the cows, rummaging in the attic, taking your pills, repairing the fence down by the drainage ditch, tallying up the entries in your ledger, doing the dishes, spreading jam on bread, clutching at straws, embarking on a perilous journey downstream by kayak, grovelling in filth, putting the spuds on, intoning spells against the pestilence, mucking about, boiling your shirts, describing an arc parallel to the surface, dusting the mantelpiece, rekindling that lost love, chopping celery, going for gold, doing the odd bit of trepanning, squeezing out sponges, cutting up rough, vomiting, preening, polishing your shoon, checking the gutters, making hay while the sun shines, piling Ossa upon Pelion, folding your towels, voting with your feet, remembering a childhood idyll, splitting an atom, clocking in, lurking in the shrubbery, gathering your wits, burning an effigy, being Ringo Starr, toiling to no purpose, making whoopee, burgling the Watergate building, casting the runes, mesmerising a duck, emptying the bins, licking some stamps, darning a hole in your pippy bag, crunching numbers, thwacking a bluebottle, going rogue, distributing alms to paupers, looking shifty, holding out a glimmer of hope, pole-vaulting, caterwauling, playing pin-the-paper-to-the-cardboard, rinsing lettuce, closing the barn door, glorying in crime, sticking to the point, feeling off colour, pondering the ineffable, gargling, straining, wheedling, pining, flailing, and lying crumpled and woebegone and exhausted and hot-in-the-brain. You may have to do all of these or none, but in either case the chances are that you will be unable to devote your every waking hour to Hooting Yard, even though you yearn to do so. We shall have to come up with some other form of celebration.

It is at times like these a person’s thoughts turn to cake. It will have to be an enormous cake, to fit a thousand candles on to it. Think of all that burning wax!

I shall leave you with that thought, and press on. One could, of course, throw a party. Invite a thousand guests, and have each of them commit to memory, for party-piece recital, the text – or, as bespectacled postmodernist Jean-Pierre Obfusc would say, the discourse – of one Hooting Yard postage (including this one). The drawback to this otherwise fantastic scheme is that some postages run to thousands of words, whereas some, very occasionally, have been wholly pictorial, other than the title. Allocating all one thousand to the satisfaction of every single guest is a task fraught with difficulty, and is unlikely to be achieved without conflict and, indeed, fist-fights. Now, incidents of physical violence are not unknown among the readership. Even the surprisingly numerous Hooting Yard devotees of the Mennonite faith engage in punch-ups from time to time. Don’t even go there, as the airheads say. Taken all in all, I am not sure the party is such a good idea. Anyway, where would you fit so many people? They would not all fit into your chalet or hovel or well-appointed yet curiously pokey high-rise urban living pod, and rental fees for barns and disused aeroplane hangars have gone though the roof, according to what I have been reading in So You Want To Rent A Barn Or A Disused Aeroplane Hangar, Do You, Chum? magazine. (It’s interesting to note, by the way, that the late Harold Pinter was on the editorial advisory board of this threatening, sinister publication.)

Cake, burning wax, and party all proving prohibitive, what are we to do? Well, in extremis, one can always turn to Mrs Gubbins for some outré ideas. For once in her life, the octogenarian crone is not helping police with their inquiries, in spite of that dodgy business with the pile of mysteriously bleached bones and the trained vulture, and she is to be found snugly ensconced in an attic room at Haemoglobin Towers, furiously unravelling tea-cosies. Where once she did knit, now she unravels. By heck, there will be a glut in the used wool market by the time she is done! It is possible this is part of yet another criminal scheme, but if so it is one that is far too complicated for my puny and innocent brain. Best to ask no questions, and leave La Gubbins to her unravelling. I popped my head in to her sanctum, though, just to ask if she had any bright ideas for a Hooting Yard Thousandth Postage celebration. She looked up, fixed me with that unnerving gaze, like a blind person looking at a ghost, and pronounced the single word “Nobby”. Then she went back to her unravelling.

It was difficult to know what to make of this. The only Nobby that sprang to mind was Nobby Stiles, the popular Manchester United and England midfielder of the 1960s. His joyous capering on the pitch after England hoisted the Jules Rimet trophy in 1966 had captured the imagination of the press in those more seemly times, so perhaps that was what Mrs Gubbins was recommending – joyous capering on a field of grass. Or was she suggesting that I should enlist Nobby Stiles to help with planning a celebration? It seemed unlikely, though not of course impossible, that the retired footballer was a Hooting Yard fan, but even if he was, I did not know him, had never even collected his autograph when I was a tot, and had no idea how to get in touch with him. I entertained the thought that perhaps the crone had said “knobby”, with a K, meaning that which is characterised by having knobs, or the quality of knobbiness, such as, for example, a gnarled tree-trunk, or the backs of certain kinds of toad, but that seemed even more unfathomable. La Gubbins being the kind of woman she is, it is likely that her pronouncement was a sweeping one, containing all possible meanings of “(k)nobby”, with and without a K, plus additional meanings thus far unrevealed to the common timber of humanity. But I am afraid I had to dismiss, as wildly impractical, the idea of getting Nobby Stiles, and perhaps some other lesser-known Nobbys, to assist me in arranging a celebratory caper, of people and toads, round and round a tree in a field, much as it was appealing.

It was back to square one, and as we all know, deep in our hearts, the question always to be asked at square one is “What would Dobson do?” The beauty of the question is that if we are able to arrive at a half-way sensible answer, we know the guidance given will be infallible. Working out a valid Dobsonian response, however, is to blunder along a path strewn with nettles and serpents, unless of course one is satisfied with the generic answer “Write a pamphlet!”, which is, admittedly, correct ninety-nine times out of a hundred. Even in the present case, I can think of few methods of celebration more apposite than that every one of my readers should sit down at their nearest escritoire and pen a pamphlet. But think of the logistics. Someone would have to collate all the screeds, typeset them, print them, and distribute them to an uncaring world. I try my best to retain an attitude of breezy optimism, but I cannot see it happening. And I have not seen any vans driving past recently announcing, from the lettering on their sides, that they are in the business of Pamphleteering Solutions.

But “Write a pamphlet!” is not, invariably, the answer to the question “What would Dobson do?” Very, very occasionally, by deep analysis of the question, exercising the brainpans to their fullest extent and beyond, a different answer is revealed. To find out what this is we need to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the complete Dobson canon, and to have pieced together as much biographical information on the out of print pamphleteer as we can, not excluding rumour, hearsay, tavern mutterings, and wild surmise. That is why I put the question to Aloysius Nestingbird, who knows more about Dobson than anyone else alive. As it happens, Nestingbird is only barely alive, following a calamitous bobsleigh accident. Quite what a frail ninety-two-year-old was doing plunging down the Caspar Badrutt Memorial Perilous Ice Declivity at the Pointy Town Antarcticorama is a question for the bigwigs at the Fédération Internationale de Bobsleigh et de Tobogganing, who I understand have already empanelled a Board of Geriatric Investigation to be headed by the fiercely independent, because ignorant of bobsleigh matters in general, Ant, or it might be Dec, the taller of the pair, the one with the glassy eyes of death.

Anyway, I bluffed my way into the clinic where Nestingbird languishes, using the techniques prescribed by Blötzmann in his Methods Of Dissimulation To Be Employed When Entering Restricted Medical Facilities (Second Series), an invaluable work which I always carry with me, just in case. Nestingbird was almost invisible beneath a panoply of tubes and wires and monitors and bleepers and what have you, but I ripped them out of my way and put my mouth to his still-bloody, gored ear, and put to him, in a dulcet whisper, the question. I want to arrange a celebration of the thousandth Hooting Yard postage. What would Dobson do? Nestingbird groaned, and some sort of despicable fluid bubbled out between his bloody lips, but he managed to tell me the answer, albeit in a croak so weak I barely heard it. But hear it I did. He said “Nobby”.

Returning home via the funicular railway, I racked my brains to see if I could wring any sense from this. Put in my position, it appeared, Dobson would “do Nobby”, or, I suppose, “do a Nobby”, as if that made any difference. Neither was a phrase I had ever heard before, and nor had any of my fellow-passengers, whom I badgered about it, growing, I am ashamed to say, rather hysterical, to the point where I was bundled off the train as soon as it reached the base station and taken round the corner, past snow-covered shrubbery, and handed over to Detective Captain Cargpan and his toughs. It is lucky for me that Cargpan is a fanatical devotee of Hooting Yard, otherwise I feel certain I would have ended up back in the clinic, and in a much worse state than Aloysius Nestingbird. Instead, the doughty copper let me off with a mussing of my tremendous bouffant. He didn’t know what “doing Nobby” was, either.

I had the sinking feeling that if I sought advice from anybody else, from born-again beatnik poet Dennis Beerpint, for example, or from Old Farmer Frack, I would get the same response. When I eventually arrived home, I made a cup of tea and heated a couple of smokers’ poptarts. Perhaps the celebration would have to wait upon the two-thousandth postage. Or perhaps I should be grateful for my simple snack. I sat down at the table, slurped the tea and shovelled down the bitter poptarts. Was this, after all, “doing Nobby”?

The Sinus Chambers

So here they are then, the sinus chambers. Not, as you might think, inside somebody’s head, but out in the open, in a field, enormous, built of some tough metal, with rivets. They can be seen for miles around, for this is a flat country, parts of it below sea level, though we are far from the coast. Though so easily visible, lots and lots of people have come to the field to get a closer look. There are picnics taking place, some in the shadow cast by the mighty sinus chambers beneath the sun glittering in a cloudless blue. Awestruck tinies gasp, as do their parents, who forget the picnic sausages and lemonade as they gaze up at the giant construction.

It being a field, we have field officers stationed here and there to keep order. We have people on the ground, too, lying flat, at regular intervals, all the way from the coach park to the ground just yards from where the sinus chambers tower over us. Both the field officers and the people on the ground have been issued with badges as identification. The badges are enamel, and have upon them a device showing the sinus chambers in miniature and an arrow pointing up towards their own, inside-the-head, sinus chambers. Everybody has had to be very careful when pinning on their badges to ensure they are correctly aligned. Imagine the rumpus if an arrow pointed in the wrong direction.

During the afternoon the huge metal sinus chambers slowly fill up with liquid. It has been specially prepared by boffins using a formula they have kept secret from rival boffins, some foreign, some bad. When the fluid reaches a level marked upon the side of each sinus chamber in fluorescent zalemba, a hooter will be sounded, and the draining will begin. The piping and the siphons and the funnels and the nozzles have been checked and re-checked by a specialist team flown in from a far off country of which we know little.

Picnic hampers are packed away, and the shrieks of delight and frolic die in the throats of the tinies and their parents. In the coach park, the drivers huddled by the kiosk stub out their cigarettes, and gaze towards the field. Those who hold to their Catholicism make hurried signs of the cross. Even the birds perched in the trees are silenced.

There is a deafening metallic judder and clank. And then the gurgling begins…