The Despicable Noodles

“These noodles are despicable!” shouted the priest.

He was glaring at the bowl set before him, his eyes glistening like globs of molten fire. Or rather, his eye, for he had just the one. He had plucked out its twin, years ago, in an act of penitence for sins as despicable as his noodles.

“They are the last noodles in the monastery pantry, Father,” said the monk.

“I am a Monsignor!” shouted the priest, “And you will address me as Your Magnificence!”

He was a very shouty Monsignor.

“Forgive me, Monsignor, but I do not think that is the correct form of address for your station within the hierarchy of the Church,” said the monk. Deftly, he placed a pair of chopsticks next to the bowl. “Now eat up before your noodles go cold.”

The Monsignor’s eye burned with even greater ferocity and he banged his fist upon the table. He had only the one fist, for the arm to which its twin had once formed the extremity had been ripped from its socket, years ago, in an agricultural mishap.

“Cold and despicable noodles!” he shouted, “Is this how you welcome My Magnificence to your shabby abbey?”

“This is a monastery rather than an abbey, Monsignor,” replied the monk, tucking a bib of golden cloth under his superior’s chin, “And though the shabbiness of its fabric is unarguable, our souls are pure, or at least as pure as constant and hysterical prayer can make them.”

The Monsignor swept the bowl aside with his one forearm, and it clattered to the floor, strewing the noodles all kim kam. The bowl did not break, for it was made of tin.

“Bring me better noodles!” he shouted, “And serve them in a ceramic bowl!”

“I am afraid I cannot accede to your request,” said the monk, “For as I have explained, these noodles were the last in the pantry, and our stocks are now exhausted. As for the bowl, it has perhaps escaped your Monsignorial notice that we are a tinny monastery, and quite, quite potless.”

As he spoke, the monk used a broom to sweep the strewn noodles back into the bowl, which he replaced in front of the Monsignor.

“There,” he said, or cooed, “No harm done. Tuck in.”

The monk was going to add a jaunty remark about mishaps in a monastery refectory being far less traumatic than agricultural mishaps, comparing the circumstances and ramifications of both, but before he could do so the Monsignor started shouting again.

“What filth has been commingled with these noodles as you swept them back into the bowl from your refectory floor?” he roared, with such titanic rage that his whole body trembled and the bib of golden cloth came loose. The monk gently tucked it back into place.

“I grant there is filth on our floor, Monsignor, but rest assured it is mild filth, the odd pock of dust and perhaps a few million harmless bacteria. Who knows, they may add a certain piquancy to your noodles.”

The Monsignor’s countenance, already florid, now took on the tint we imagine a painter might use to depict the fires of hell.

“These noodles were despicable when first you set them before me!” he shouted, “And now they are doubly despicable! You have the gall to make My Magnificence feed on dust and bacteria as well?”

“Monsignor,” said the monk, his patience almost inhuman, “There are paupers in the hovels surrounding our monastery who would happily lick that tin bowl clean. Might I suggest you take off all those bright-bejewelled rings on your fingers the better to manipulate the chopsticks?”

“Speak not to me of paupers!” boomed the Monsignor, “I swept past their hovels astride my horse on my way here! Had I still a second arm I would have used it to cut them down with a mighty Monsignorial sword!”

“All well and good if it please you,” said the monk, “But slaughtering paupers, even in thought only, is hungry work, as many a baron and brigand can attest, so you really ought to gobble up those noodles while they’re lukewarm.”

“Where are all the other monks?” shouted the Monsignor, changing the subject suddenly, to distract attention from the fact that now he began sliding the bright-bejewelled rings off his fingers using his teeth, prepatory to picking up the chopsticks and eating the contents of his tin bowl. His hunger had defeated his pride.

“Don’t you worry your little head about them,” said the monk. It was his first error, in this battle of wits to force the bowl of noodles and dust and bacteria down the Monsignor’s gob. If there was one thing the Monsignor was sensitive about, to the point of psychosis, it was the size of his head. Once, it had been of average adult human head dimension, but following a missionary-among-jungle-tribesmen mishap, years ago, it had been shrunk to the size of a potato. A bigger than average potato, but a potato nevertheless.

Once again sending the bowl clattering across the floor with a sweep of his forearm, the Monsignor rose from his stool and clumped out of the refectory on his crutches, shouting incoherent imprecations as he went. Outside, in the rain, his tubercular yet elegant horse was waiting. He mounted it, slotted his crutches into the panniers, and hi-ho’ed away, towards a different monastery, surrounded by different hovels, where he hoped to be fed less despicable noodles.

In his tantrum, he had forgotten to retrieve his bright-bejewelled rings. The monk gathered them from the table, and later that day, when it had ceased to rain, he squelched out into the muck and distributed them among the paupers, first insisting that they kneel down and pray, constantly, hysterically, and at so high a pitch of frenzy that miles away, sitting down to a supper of picable noodles in the refectory of a nunnery, the Monsignor thought he could hear the shrieking of the damned. It was a din that delighted him. As he swallowed the last noodle from his ceramic bowl, he grinned, a grin somehow wider than his tiny head allowed, and so terrifying that the nun who served him his noodles swooned.

O Anglepoise Man!

(To the tune of O Tannenbaum, if you put some effort into it.)

O Anglepoise Man, toss me a bone, for I am famished and dressed in rags! They sent me to Mudchute to jabber and keen, which was fine by me, I had no particular plans for October. I travelled there by train, clutching a mittenful of coupons. Before I arrived it occurred to me that I am a total irrelevance in the grand scheme of things, as seen from the perspective of, say, a Mudchute magnifico. There are plenty of magnificos in Mudchute, more than you might imagine, yes, you, Anglepoise Man! My disembarkation from the train had something of the farce about it. Rix would have approved. After I’d pulled up my trousers – ragged, ragged! – I swept across the pavings towards my assignation. At this stage I already wanted a bone upon which to gnaw, but there was no sign of you, nor of any other superheroes. I could have had noodles, from Hong Fat Goon, but, do you know what?, they were despicable noodles. So despicable, indeed, that in comparison I took on an air of nobility. If I planted myself next to the noodles, even in my rags and insignificance I would have shone brightly, like young Apollo. But what sort of behaviour would that be? Foolish behaviour, that’s what. I took up my post at the jabbering and keening slab, put there by a paviour, a proper Mudchute paviour. Did you know there are almost as many paviours as magnificos? I didn’t. But then I know very little about Mudchute, still. For instance, I had absolutely no idea it was your spiritual home, Anglepoise Man. I always thought you hailed from somewhere far away, even mythical, Zembla or Gondwanaland. Nobody ever asked me to keen and jabber there, in either of them, in October or any other month, in spite of my clutch of coupons. My mittens are the only part of my apparel that are not rags. They were donated to me by a benefactor. He bore a striking resemblance to you, Anglepoise Man. Perhaps he is your brother, or one of your dozens of cousins? He gave me mittens instead of the bone I wanted. Wanted? Yearned for! O to yearn for a bone! What am I become? Irrelevant, insignificant, surely. At least I may buff my shrivelled sense of self with the knowledge that I am not as despicable as the noodles. Not yet.

The Defiant Ones

The Defiant Ones lodged in a suite in a hotel at the foot of a tremendous mountain. There were several of them. It is impossible to be precise about their number, for, true to their name, they defied accurate counting. If you attempted to take a tally, you would discover that one had popped out to the post office, or was concealed behind an arras, or one was counted twice by being duplicated in a mirror, or by radically changing his appearance in the middle of the counting. And after all, did it really matter how many, or how few, they were, the Defiant Ones?

It mattered to the major domo, who ran, as he liked to put it, “a tight hotel”. Most people would have used the common phrase “a tight ship”, but the major domo hated nautical metaphors, for reasons buried deep in his psyche, if he could be said to have a psyche, and whenever he was tempted to use one he plumped for hotel imagery instead. So he would say “worse things happen in hotels” rather than “worse things happen at sea”, or refer to the “mamahotel” in place of “the mothership”. Because of these verbal idiosyncracies, it was often said of him that he was born to the hotel business, even though in truth he was the progeny of death-defying circus acrobats. Was it their defiance of death that caused him to be so preoccupied with the Defiant Ones in the suite of the hotel?

It cannot be said that death was among the things defied by the Defiant Ones, for on at least one occasion the problem of counting them accurately hinged upon the fact that one or more of them had died, and rapidly been encoffined and carted away to a burial ground. The major domo, or his proxy tallyman, was unable to match the number of dead Defiant Ones with the number of coffins seen delivered to the hotel, nor indeed with the number of coffins later carted away. O such perplexity!

You would think a tallyman, employed by the hotel for the specific purpose of conducting counts and tallies, with no other duties to bother his big hairy head, could be relied upon to arrive at accurate numbers. And indeed, when counting rooms or corners in corridors or cutlery services or flower beds or types of blossom depicted upon wallpapers, the tallyman could not be faulted. He was even awarded bonuses. But the Defiant Ones, their numbers, and their coffins, defied him. This wreaked havoc with his sense of professional tallying worth, and for a time he took to drink. He might have ended in the gutter, were it not that his slide into degradation and debauch was halted by the major domo, by dint of persistent hectoring underscored by vivid hotel-related metaphors.

“Imagine a hotel…” the major domo would begin, slapping the tallyman round the face, in a pantry or a cubby where the latter had taken refuge with a bottle of mother’s ruin. The metaphors came pouring out thick and fast, until the tallyman had sobered up, and could see in his mind’s eye a gorgeous and glorious hotel, perched on a promontory overlooking a glittering sea, a sea empty of shipping.

In his turn, the major domo began to imagine his own hotel emptied of the Defiant Ones. How he wished they would leave! He gave instructions to the chambermaids to neglect cleaning the suite, but the Defiant Ones defied this ruse by doing their own cleaning. He had their breakfast sausages overcooked, or undercooked, or, in desperation, wholly absent from their plates, but they defied this by filling their bellies with extra kedgeree or kippers, obtained through machinations the major domo could never fathom, and his tallyman was helpless to prevent. He went so far as to devise a plot, Heliogabalus-like, to construct a false ceiling in their suite, with a view to smothering them under a cascade of roses and violets, but the Defiant Ones defied this by burning to a cinder every single florist’s shop for miles around.

Those florists who had lived above their business premises, which was almost all of them, now took rooms in the hotel, and this was to prove the undoing of the Defiant Ones. Their acts of arson had been ingeniously disguised as Acts of God, and thus they were not viewed with suspicion by the newly-arrived florist hotel guests. Yet an equilibrium, unacknowledged but decisive, was upset. The tallyman, quite capable of taking accurate count of the florists, reported their numbers daily to the major domo. And though the Defiant Ones still defied counting, it became obvious even to the untrained eye that they were outnumbered by florists. How could they hope to defy this stark fact, except by recruiting further Defiant Ones to their uncountable band? But there were only so many beds, so many easy chairs, so much oxygen that could be crammed into their suite. Something the Defiant Ones could not defy, try as they might, were the physical laws which governed not just the hotel, but the universe itself.

Though try they did. They all sat up one night, out on the balcony of their suite, by turns imploring the heavens and casting runes and conjuring Beelzebub to appear in a cloud of smoke and manoeuvring their arms in obscurely significant passing movements through the cold air. But in the morning, the balcony was the same balcony, the suite the same suite, the hotel absolutely the same hotel. At breakfast, there were no sausages to be had, though they saw the plates of the florists piled high with them. The Defiant Ones stuffed themselves with their mysteriously-obtained kippers and kedgeree and went clumping out of the breakfast room, making as much noise as possible, defiance etched on each of their defiant countenances. They hiked half way up the mountain, and took shelter in a bivouac from where they could look down upon the roof of the hotel, with its towers and chimneys and turrets. Sudden gusts of icy wind whipped in, but they defied them, staying where they were, huddling close together on the mountainside. Then, from above, from far above, a rumble of dislodged rocks. The Defiant Ones could not defy a mighty Alpine avalanche.

The hotel, however, could. The major domo had seen to that. At the first stirrings of the rumbling rocks high above, he set the tallyman to count and count again the avalanche-protection devices, and he gathered the florists and all the other guests in the hotel ballroom, and he announced, in his surprisingly high and squeaky voice, “Imagine a hotel… a hotel that evaporates at the approach of tumbling rocks in an Alpine avalanche, and then the very same hotel, identical in every detail, comes shimmering into solid form, miles away, at the foot of a different, more stable mountain, and all around the fields are rife with blossoms, a riot of blossoms, ready for the plucking. Imagine that.”

And so they did, and so we do.

ResoVision

Unlikely as it may seem, the first – and quite probably only – edition of your favourite television show of all time, The Frank Key And Lepke B. Half-Hour will be broadcast live, yes live!, on ResoVision tomorrow (Saturday) at 2.30 PM UK time. Turn on, tune in, shovel snack foods down your gullet, furrow your brow, and concentrate. That is all I ask of you. God knows it is little enough, at least for the time being, pending inquiries, debriefings, further snacking opportunities, and hell freezing over.

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich & Wynken, Blynken & Nod

Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich one night in the wood encountered a witch. She was a bricklaying witch and she carried a hod. She asked “Which of you is Blynken, which Wynken, which Nod?” Beaky replied on behalf of the five, “That trio is fictional, but we are alive. They were invented for verse by Eugene Field.” With these words the fivesome’s fate was sealed. The witch’s countenance became twisted with hate and she cried “I’m his childhood sweetheart, Captivity Waite! He abandoned me, the cur, the dog, yet my name is immortalised in his autobiog, Love Affairs Of A Bibliomaniac“, and then, maddened, she started to whack Dave Dee and Dozy and Beaky and Mick and Tich with brick after brick after brick until in the wood in the dead of the night the soul of each pop star took heavenward flight. Their mortal lives gone, they sat next to God, despatched by the bricklaying witch with her hod.

Further Dabbling

Dabbler-3logo (1)For my cupboard at The Dabbler this week, I exhumed a brace of ancient tales buried, like Chilean miners, deep in the Hooting Yard archives, dusted them down, glued them together, and applied a lick o’ lacquer to freshen them up for a new readership. And in a promptly-posted comment, I preempt an objection that may be raised by pedants on the lookout for flaws in what is a piece of startling, even brutal, realism.

Maud Wasp And The Top Glintist

Waspish playwright Maud Wasp had a glint in her eye, so she made an appointment with a top glintist to have it analysed.

“Gaze at my panel and I’ll take a look at your glint,” said the glintist.

The panel was a rectangle of hardboard affixed to the wall with many many tacks. Upon it had been drawn, with a thick black marker pen, an abstruse pattern of dots and zigzags and sigils and letters from a possibly mystic alphabet. Maud Wasp gazed at it, as bidden.

As a playwright, she was alert to the sonic characteristics of the human voice, and she had noted that the glintist spoke in a croaking and guttural manner, scarcely louder than a whisper.

“Assuming I may speak while I gaze without interfering with your analysis, may I ask if there is something amiss with your windpipe?” she asked.

The glintist, who was peering at Maud Wasp’s right eye through his patent glintoscope, replied “You are not the first person to ask me that. I do indeed have an anomalous windpipe, with the result that my voice sounds as if it is issuing from long ago and far away.”

“Yes,” said Maud Wasp, “It is almost as if I am being addressed by some chthonic being from the primordial sludge.”

The glintist snapped his glintoscope shut and slid it back into its velveteen pochette, which in turn he popped into a pocket of his bomber jacket.

“I have examined the glint in your eye with sufficient rigour to write my report,” he said, “You may cease gazing at the panel.”

“That was quick,” said Maud Wasp, who had been expecting a lengthier procedure.

“One of the reasons I am a top glintist, Miss Wasp, is the startling rapidity with which I work,” he said. There was the merest hint, in his croaking, that he felt impugned, a hint picked up by the alert playwright.

“I did not mean to impugn you,” she said, “In fact I am delighted that I can avert my gaze so soon from that confounded panel of yours. The pattern was beginning to play havoc with my brainpans.”

“It is rather disturbing,” said the glintist, “I copied it from a plate in a book almost as ancient as my voice, a tome kept under lock and key in a forbidden library, reputed to be the work of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.”

“I thought I had seen it somewhere before,” said Maud Wasp, “I consulted that very book when writing the fourth of my so-called ‘pond plays’. You may remember the deus ex machina at the end, where a milk of magnesia man is lowered onto the stage by a pulley.”

“I’m afraid I have never seen any of your plays,” said the glintist, “My work keeps me fantastically busy, and on the rare occasions I might be free to make a trip to the theatre, I often have to go to a kiosk on a seaside pier where a charlatan healer makes enigmatic passing movements of his hands over my anomalous windpipe.”

“Have to?” asked the playwright, somewhat waspishly.

“Indeed so,” said the glintist, and to Maud Wasp’s surprise she saw tears welling up in his eyes. “I cannot very well neglect to meet the demands of my sainted mother’s last will and testament.”

“What a foul legacy!” cried Maud Wasp, “I am not so sure your mother was a saint!”

“It is due to her I am a top glintist, Miss Wasp,” said the glintist, “If you only knew the sacrifices she made for me, scrubbing doorsteps and darning military flags and boiling soap and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with Communists and sewing buttons onto orphans’ cardigans…”

His croaking whisper trailed off as salt tears gushed and rolled down his cheeks.

“There, there,” said the playwright, “I did not mean to upset you. Though I cannot help but observe, if you continue to weep such copious tears, you could collect them in that dent in your floor to form a sort of indoor pond.”

“Why in the name of heaven would I wish to do that?” croaked the glintist.

“I am fond of ponds,” said Maud Wasp, “And many of my plays, more than you can imagine, are set in or next to ponds.” She grinned then, a weird and waspish grin which disconcerted the glintist. “I am so glad that I had the foresight to tuck into a pocket of my bomber jacket a handy pocket-sized tape recorder to preserve our conversation on magnetic tape. When I get home I shall transcribe it and use it as the climactic scene in the play I am currently writing.”

“Has our conversation been sufficiently dramatic?” asked the glintist.

“Trust me,” said Maud Wasp, “I have an innate sense of the kind of dialogue my audiences will lap up and gasp at.”

As she spoke, the glint in her eye glinted the more brilliantly.

“Now we know why you have a glint in your eye,” said the glintist, demonstrating the expertise that made him no mere glintist but a top glintist.

Visual Splendour

From the hallowed shed of OutaSpaceman, a new wonder! Taking a couple of drawings from Hooting Yard calendars of the last century, he has fashioned a breathtaking animated film:

It is to be hoped this will be shown on ResoVision, ResonanceFM’s four-day televisual experiment, beamed to you live from the Frieze Art Fair. Word has it that Mr Key and Lepke B will be re-forming their double act to present a brand new piece of gorgeousness – as yet unwritten and un(de)composed – on Saturday.

Istvan & Gilbert

Reading Gilbert Adair’s second Evadne Mount mystery, A Mysterious Affair Of Style (2007), I note that his film director character Rex Hanway has a cat called Cato. This served to remind me of a personal favourite from the implausibly vast Hooting Yard archives, the 2004 quotation from Spine-Tingling Tales Of Glucose Deficiency by Istvan Scrimgeour :  “He had two pets: a cat called Doge and a dog called Cato.”

Where Is The Emperor?

Where is the Emperor?

In his bath. Verily, his tub overfloweth. Water scented with bergamot and petunias and lilac cascaded over the side and has formed puddles and streams upon the imperial bathroom floor tiles. Flunkies with mops mop, to no avail, for the Emperor splashes about like a hippopotamus in a swamp, and he will not allow the taps to be turned off. Water gushes from them, water already scented, in its tank, above under the eaves of the imperial palace roof. The Emperor is playing with his ducks. The imperial ducks are not yellow plastic ones as might be found in a commoner’s or a pauper’s bath, but real living breathing quacking bebeaked and befeathered ducks, such as might be mesmerised by Gerard Manley Hopkins or Orson Welles, were either of those noteworthies alive to see the Emperor in his bath, if, of course, they were allowed into his presence, and that of his ducks. Each duck is tagged with the imperial duck-tag, designed by the Emperor himself, one day when he had nothing better to do, and his Empire was at peace.

Is the Empire at peace still?

No. Wars rage in almost every corner of the Empire, and where wars do not rage there are skirmishes. Some of the skirmishes are bloodier and more gruesome than the wars. There is lopping of limbs and burning of barns. Imperial military strategists huddle in groups, fighting among themselves. Several of the most senior strategists expect a summons to attend the Emperor in his bath. They have ordered a consignment of galoshes to ensure, in the event of a summons, their elegantly shaped leathern imperial army boots do not get wet, stamping through the imperial bathroom puddles and streams, those as yet unmopped by mopping flunkies. The galoshes have not yet arrived at the imperial palace, for such is the chaos wrought by wars and skirmishes that supply lines are unreliable. Train carriages sit abandoned in sidings, or are blown up by the bombs of insurgents and partisans and any number of raggle-taggle enemies of the mighty Empire.

What is the latest news?

Anti-imperialist forces have taken parts of the capital, and are encroaching upon the imperial palace itself. Some windows on the lower floors, gorgeous windows of stained glass for which the Empire is famous, have been shattered by insurgent rifle fire. Krishnan Guru-Murthy from Channel Four News has been helicoptered in to present live updates under trying conditions. His makeshift broadcast centre was until last week the home of the imperial duckman, who was forced to flee across the mountains. Before he fled, he ferried the ducks one by one to a place of safety in the imperial palace. Fanatically loyal to the last, he scrubbed each and every duck-tag clean of grease and spottings. If ever the Emperor sees the duckman again, he is going to award him a medal.

Will the Emperor ever see his duckman again?

That we cannot say. Events are moving so fast only a fool would predict what lies ahead in the next ten minutes, let alone in the coming days and weeks and months. And though it seems a paradox, what with all the splashing and sloshing and quacking, the one still centre of calm throughout the Empire is the imperial bathtub. For the Emperor has a glint in his eye, a glint that would announce to the mopping flunkies, were they allowed to look upon the imperial countenance, and to the senior military strategists, were they summoned in their galoshes to the imperial presence, that the Emperor has a plan.

What is the imperial plan?

The glint in the imperial eye has been studied by top glintists, and they report the blurred outline of a large and lovely house perched high in the Swiss Alps, the seat of a government in exile, and within, on an upper floor, beneath a tank brimming with water scented with bergamot and petunias and lilac, a magnificently-appointed bathroom, at its centre a tub, in which ducks splash and quack, and an Emperor weeps for what was lost.

Débilité sociale

debilitesociale

How infuriating that the site of one’s débilité sociale is located, so precisely, low down at the back of the head! This makes it extremely difficult to deal with, when one eventually gathers sufficient courage – moral and physical – to do something about it. Whether one intends to tweak it with tweezers, modify it with blows from a hammer, or wrench it out entirely with a pair of pliers, its position makes any approach fraught with difficulties, difficulties which may prove insuperable to the sufferer from débilité sociale in particular. Why on earth did God make us in so cack-handed a manner?

An array of mirrors, precisely angled, will go some way to helping us, but mirror-reflections can be notoriously misleading, particularly to those who are optically stupid. Reflections, and reflections of reflections, and reflections of reflections of reflections, and so forth depending upon the number of mirrors in one’s array, can baffle the brightest, and it is not the brightest we are talking about here.

Add to that the dexterity required to deploy one’s tweezers or hammer or pliers at the back of one’s bonce without doing oneself a mischief and one can appreciate how perilous the process is certain to be. What was the Lord thinking?

An alternative of course is to accept one’s débilité sociale for what it is, and carry on regardless. But therein lie even greater disasters, what with one thing and another, to all intents and purposes, speaking in the round, as my old father-confessor used to say, or rather whisper, lugubriously, in his box, after Mass, when the weight of my sins grew too much to bear, and I went to see him, for absolution, and for tips on the proper usage of tweezers and hammers and pliers, which, being that rare thing, a practical priest, he was ever happy to divulge, albeit with equal lugube. Spirit and matter were as one to him. He had not the merest tinct of débilité sociale. At least, I do not think he did, but then I cannot recall ever seeing the back of his head.

(Drawing of head – not the father-confessor’s – from Agence Eureka)

Kew. Turge.

One twentieth-century Thursday, under a leaden sky, the balletomane Nan Kew was gadding about the boulevards of Pointy Town when she encountered the Swiss dramaturge Rolf Turge, accompanied by his deputy dramaturge Bob Dep.

Cue much mwah! mwah! kissing of both air and cheeks, immediately after which Nan Kew, balletomane that she was, began babbling excitedly about a new ballet she had seen only the other day, a work of contemporary urgency in which the Hungarian toxic sludge disaster was interpreted in the form of ungainly cavorting and the tooting of piccolos.

“I agree it is both urgent and contemporary,” Rolf Turge managed to interrupt after ten minutes or so, “But it lacks the even greater contemporaneity and hectic urgency with which a dramaturge, particularly a Swiss one, would imbue it.”

Bob Dep remained silent, for unlike many a deputy, he was not facetious.

“Even were I to concede that so unimprovable a ballet could be improved,” said Nan Kew, “Surely an indigenous Hungarian dramaturge would out-turge one from Switzerland, no?”

“Might I suggest,” said Rolf Turge, “That so ballet-bedizened is your balletomane brain that the grand heroics of Swiss dramaturgy fall outwith your pond of competence?”

Had they not been such fast pals, Nan Kew might have taken offence at this. As it was, she made a mental note to ponder, next time she could concentrate on something other than the ballet for a few minutes, Rolf Turge’s curious choice of the image of a pond to represent her area of knowledge and expertise.

Bob Dep, who was skilled in the telepathic arts, chuckled and butted in.

“Ponder ponds as you like, Nan Kew, but the guvnor’s usage merely reflects his, and my, current preoccupation, which is the pond plays of Maud Wasp, the waspish playwright.”

“Have any of them been adapted as ballets?” asked the balletomane, predictably.

“Not as such,” said Bob Dep. If examined, this could be seen as an enigmatic statement, but though he was telepathic, the deputy was as enigmatic as he was facetious, which is to say not at all.

Nan Kew was about to resume her seemingly endless blathering about the Hungarian toxic sludge disaster ballet, but before she could do so Swiss dramaturge Rolf Turge blurted out a dramatic expostulation.

“Look!” he cried, “A hole has been dug in the road, by some agency unknown to us, though we might surmise it to have been a fellow with a spade.”

He pointed, as only a Swiss dramaturge could, with an elegant beringed finger at the hole, and both Nan Kew and Bob Dep peered where he pointed.

The two gentlemen and the lady then contemplated the length of dug-up pipeline exposed by the digging. At that very moment, the astonishingly tall Renaissance man Peter Blegvad was passing by, and he executed a drawing of the scene, helping to make it vivid for us.

pipeline

But not, perhaps, as vivid as we would like. The original drawing was fanatic with detail of Nan Kew, Rolf Turge, and Bob Dep, so much so that one might have mistaken it for a hyperrealist linocut by noted hyperrealist linocutter Rex Hyper. But when Peter Blegvad showed the finished drawing to the trio, they became strangely fractious, and insisted that he obscure their features. Reluctantly, he did so, as you can see.

Unbeknownst to Peter Blegvad, the balletomane and the dramaturge and the deputy dramaturge were each of them on the run from the Pointy Town police force, following a series of crimes against the performing arts. How one might commit such crimes is a mystery, as Mrs Robert Fripp might put it. Maud Wasp would put it more waspishly, were anyone to ask her opinion. But nobody did, for she lived in an ivory tower, with her pet wasp Martin, in an atmosphere of Jacobean tragedy.

Bedabblered!

Dabbler-3logo (1)To celebrate the restoration and reopening of Strawberry Hill, I suggest we do our utmost to revive a word coined by Horace Walpole and used by him, as far as I know, just once. Devoted Hooting Yard readers will know the word whereof I speak, but it seemed appropriate to persuade readers of the super soaraway Dabbler to join us in our cause.