Monthly Archives: April 2011

Quote Of The Decade

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… the decade being the 1970s, my source again Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed: The Golden Age Of Paranoia (2009). It is a book of many delights, not least the account of the evening of 5th  April 1976 at 5 Lord North Street, the London home of Harold Wilson. Earlier that day, Wilson resigned as prime minister, and now he has invited two BBC journalists, Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtior, to join him for a quiet drink – and to persuade them to investigate the many plots against him, variously ascribed to the KGB, the CIA, MI5, or the Post Office, perhaps all of them. At one point, Wilson says:

I see myself as the big fat spider in the corner of the room. Sometimes I speak when I’m asleep. You should both listen. Occasionally when we meet I might tell you to go to the Charing Cross Road and kick a blind man standing on the corner. That blind man may tell you something, lead you somewhere.

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Idea For An Opera

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Far away, out on the desolate moors, in moonlight, the goatherd manqué peered into the night, lost in thought. Under the same moon, a year ago, he still had his goats to herd. But they were taken from him, and he was banished, goatless, to wander the moors, wrapped in a tattered and threadbare shawl, to feed off nettles and puddlewater, to rue his fate.

Yet on this night, clear and still, with fat stars twinkling across the boundless firmament, the bereft goatherd’s thoughts were not of himself, of his own ruin, but of another. Whatever became, he wondered, after his mocking, after the Count’s curse, after he was accosted by the assassin Sparafucile, after the abduction of Gilda, after being beaten up by courtiers, after his vow of revenge, after the parley with Sparafucile and the thunderstorm and Gilda’s dressing in a man’s garb, after receiving the sack, after weighting the sack with stones, after opening the sack, after finding the mortally wounded Gilda, after her death-groans, whatever became, the goatherd wondered, whatever became of the hunchbacked court jester Rigoletto? Rigoletto, his brother?

He chided himself. “I was too busy with my goats! I cared more for my goats than I did for my disfigured brother! And now my niece is dead and my brother none knows where. I have lost all, my goats and my niece and my brother. I wander these moors, alone, weeping, subsisting on nettles and puddlewater, mocked by the moon and the stars. Has any man suffered such torment since Job?”

There came of a sudden, across the desolation, a response.

“Possibly not,” said a voice. Out of the night, a figure approached the goatherd, the figure of a man with flowing locks and a pointy beard, dressed to the nines in an Italianate suit, waving a gold-knobbed cane, a true boulevard magnifico uncannily transported to the desolate moor.

“Forgive me,” he said, as he reached the patch of bracken where the goatherd stood, tragically goatless yet noble, silhouetted in the moonlight, “I could not help overhearing your bewailings as I strolled stylishly across this desolate moor on this clear still moonlit night. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Signor Crepusco. But perhaps you have heard of me?”

The goatherd could but grunt.

“Ah well, “ said the Signor, “Mayhap my glittering reputation as a composer of operatic masterpieces has not yet reached this land of desolation and nettles and puddles. No matter! Soon it shall, for your woebegone blatherings have touched me to the soul, and I intend to write an opera about you! Come, goatless yet noble fellow, repair with me to the inn where I have taken rooms, and we shall set to work by candlelight!”

And thus was hatched the embryo of one of the titanic operatic masterpieces of this or any other time, of this or any other planet.

Colossal Implications

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The implications of this would seem to me to be quite colossal. [If a man could influence inanimate objects by the power of thought,] then surely it becomes more than possible that we all either have within our minds or can be in direct touch with powers so massive as to dwarf our mightiest machines and maybe ultimately to make our whole materialist technology obsolete? In medieval times, the Establishment, faced by such a threat to its orthodox beliefs, would quickly have burnt Uri Geller at the stake. In our more sophisticated modern world The Times simply maintains a dignified silence.

Hamish Scott of London SW10, reading perhaps just a teensy bit too much into the conjuring tricks of Uri Geller, in a letter to The Times in 1973, quoted in Francis Wheen’s Strange Days Indeed : The Golden Age Of Paranoia (2009). A more sensible response to Mr Geller was uttered by Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, no less, who secured herself a wee corner in history when, on television early in this century, she uttered the immortal words “These are Uri’s underpants. Burn them.” A contemporaneous report can be found here.

A Mere Idle Tale Of The Heathen People

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Chapter One of The Saga Of Halfred The Sigskald : A Northern Tale Of The Tenth Century by Felix Dahn, translated by Sophie F E Veitch (1886)

Nigh upon fifty winters ago, there was growing up in the North a boy named Halfred. In Iceland, on the Hamund Fjord, stood the splendid hall of his father, Hamund.

At that time, so the heathen people believe, elves and goblins still moved about freely among the Northern nations. And many say that an elf, who had been friendly to the powerful Hamund, drew near to the shield cradle of the boy Halfred, and for his first food laid wild honey upon his lips, and said—

Victory shall be thine in harping / Victory shall be thine in singing / Sigskald shall all nations name thee

But this is a mere idle tale of the heathen people.

And Halfred grew, and was strong and beautiful. He sat often alone on the cliffs, and listened how the wind played in rifts in the crags, and he would fain have tuned his harp to the same strain, and because he could not do it he was filled with fury.

And when this fury swept over his forehead the veins in his temples swelled, and there came a red darkness before his eyes. And then his arm sometimes did that whereof his head knew nothing.

When his father died Halfred took the seat of honour in the hall. But he took no heed to preserve or improve his inheritance. He gave himself up to harp playing and feats of arms. He devised a new strain in singing, “Halfred’s strain,” which greatly charmed all who heard it, and in which none could imitate him. And in hatchet throwing, not one of the men of Iceland could equal him. He dashed his hammer through three shields, and at two ships’ lengths he would not miss with its sharp edge a finger broad arrow shaft.

His mind was now set upon building a dragon ship, strong and splendid, worthy of a Viking, wherein he might make voyages, to harry or levy toll upon island and mainland, or to play his harp in the halls of kings.

And through many an anxious night he considered how he should build his ship, and could devise no plan. Yet the image of the ship was always before his eyes, as it must be, with prow and stem, with board and bow; and instead of a dragon it must carry a silver swan on the prow.

And when, one morning, he came out of the hall, and looked out over the Fjord, towards the north, there, from the south-south-east, came floating into Hamund’s Bay a mighty ship, with swelling sails. Then Halfred and his house-churls seized their weapons, and hurried out either to drive away or welcome the sailors. Ever nearer drove the ship, but neither helmet nor spear flashed on board, and though they shouted through the trumpet all was still. Then Halfred and his followers sprang into the boat, and rowed to the great ship, and saw that it was altogether empty, and climbed on board. And this was the most splendid dragon ship that ever spread sail on the salt seas. But instead of a dragon it bore a silver swan upon the prow.

And moreover also, Halfred told me, the ship was in all things the same as the image he had seen in his night and day dreams; forty oars in iron rowlocks, the deck pavillioned with shields, the sails purple-striped, the prow carved with runes against breakers, and the ropes of sea-dogs’ skin. And the high-arched silver wings of the swan were ingeniously carved, and the wind rushed through them with a melodious sound.

And Halfred sprang up to the seat of honour on the upper-deck, upon which lay spread a purple royal mantle, and a silver harp, with a swan’s head, leaned against it.

And Halfred said—

Singing Swan shalt thou be called, my ship / Singing and victorious shalt thou sail

And many said the elf who had given him his name had sent the Singing Swan to him.

But that is an idle tale of the heathen people. For it has often happened that slightly anchored ships have broken away in storms, while the seamen were carousing ashore.

Goatherd In Residence

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In the same publication where Dennis Beerpint saw a classified advertisement for the post of Poet In Residence at Beppo Lamont’s Travelling Big Top Circus, there was a similar item inviting applications for a Goatherd In Residence at an evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg. This was the very same evaporated milk factory where, many many years ago, Dobson served as a janitor, though during the out of print pamphleteer’s janitorial tenure the post of Resident Goatherd did not exist.

The advert has led to conjecture that at least some of the milk used for the manufacture of evaporated milk at the factory is goats’ milk which, as we know from H S Holmes Pegler’s article on goat-keeping in The Listener, Vol I No 16, 1st May 1929, has a “peculiarly goaty flavour”. In Winnipeg, then, we would expect the resultant product to have a peculiarly evaporated, goaty flavour. Taste tests are to be carried out, with the participation of a volunteer panel, to ascertain if this is indeed the case.

Meanwhile, a second body of opinion has emerged, positing the possibility that it is not the peculiarly goaty flavoured milk that is evaporated, but the goats themselves. But is it likely, or even feasible, to effect the evaporation of a goat, a creature of flesh and muscle and goaty sinew? A goatherd, charged with the care of the goats, would hardly stand idly by, chewing a piece of straw, while his goats evaporated before his startled eyes, would he? I suppose he might, if he were complicit in their evaporation, if indeed he had been employed for the very purpose of evaporating them, one by one, by fair means or foul. This might go some way to explain the placing of an advertisement for the Goatherd In Residence in an obscure and arcane academic journal, almost all the subscribers to which are beardy postmodernist fatheads with little grasp of life in the raw, rather than, say, in a cheaply photocopied newssheet for rustics, distributed by hand at peasant gatherings and barn dances.

One way to find out what is really going on at that evaporated milk factory in Winnipeg would be to undertake close observation and regular, systematic counting of the goats. Thereagain, the goats may be corralled at some ancillary goatstead at some distance from the evaporated milk factory, on the outskirts of the city, even outwith Winnipeg itself. Such an arrangement, of course, would necessitate the transportation of the evaporated goats from goatstead to factory. It is difficult to imagine precisely what form of transport one would use, to contain securely the evaporated essence of goat in transit across the cold wastes of the state of Manitoba, without that peculiarly goaty vaporous essence dispersing upon the winds. Are there canisters for the purpose, made of matériel with properties such as will not contaminate the vapours and thus sully the peculiarly goaty flavour of the tinned product eventually to find its way on to the shelves of our favourite evaporated milk retail outlets? We would need to station observers along all the main freight routes into Winnipeg, road, rail, and river, hoping to spot a telltale canister aboard a lorry or cart or truck or train or barge, to follow its progress, and then to slink by subterfuge into the unloading bay at the evaporated milk factory, to watch events unfold. Dobson, during his janitorship, would have made the perfect “inside man” for the job. It is yet another example of an opportunity lost in his long and ultimately tragic career.

I have tried to find out who, if anybody, applied for the post of Goatherd In Residence, but the Winnipeg evaporated milk factory’s Human and Capric Resources Department did not respond to my enquiries. I am tempted to drop the matter, and instead embark upon urgent and overdue pillow research. Tempted, but not yet decided. First I shall fix a tumbler of cocoa, made with evaporated milk. I shall be alert for the peculiar flavour of goat, evaporated or otherwise.

Distemper Has Struck

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Yesterday evening I went to an event irresistibly entitled Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies But Were Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe. Geographer Amy Cutler gave a talk in which she explored similarities between Defoe’s A Journal Of The Plague Year (1722) and modern zombie films. She provided a handout in which quotations from Defoe are presented in a sort of multiple choice format, and it is so splendid that I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

DISTEMPER HAS STRUCK LONDON. I WOULD (PLEASE MARK)

Run about the Streets Naked except a pair of Drawers about my Waste, crying Day and Night, with a Voice and Countenance full of horror, a swift pace, and no Body cou’d ever find me to stop, or rest, or take any Sustenance.

Make a strange Hubbub, quacking and tampering in Physick, and invite the People to come to me for INCOMPARABLE Remedies.

Go to the Pye-tavern (in Aldgate), and in the middle of all this Horror, behave with all the Revelling and roaring extravagances, and make impudent Mocks and Jeers.

Break into a Store-house or Ware-house and seize upon an abundance of High-crown’d Hats, as they were no Bodies Goods.

Grow stupid or melancholy, wander away into the Fields, and Woods (of Camberwell), and into secret uncouth Places out of the Compass of the Communication, almost any where to creep into a Bush, or Hedge, and DIE.

Make use of the most excessive Plenty of all sorts of Fruit, such as Apples, Pears, Plumbs, and the cheaper, because of the want of People; eat them to excess, and be brought to Fluxes, griping of the Guts, Surfeits, and the like, and dye of it.

Cure my Body of the Plague with the violent Motion of my Arms and Legs when I throw down my Nurse and run over her, run down Stairs and into the Street directly to the Thames, throw away my Shirt, swim quite over the River to the Falcon Stairs (Southwark); where landing, and finding no People there, run about the Streets there, naked as I am, for a good while, when it being by that time High-water, I take the River again, and swim back to the Still-yard, land, run up the streets again to my own House, knock at the Door, run up the Stairs, and into my Bed again.

Go about denouncing of Judgment upon the City in a frightful manner, sometimes quite naked, and with a Pan of burning Charcoal on my Head.

Make my Boat serve me for a House (in Bow), and row down the River to Woolwich, and lay in little or nothing but Biscuit Bread, and Ship Beer, and die alone in my Wherrie.

Be absolutely overcome with the Pressure upon my Spirits, that by degrees, my Head sunk into my Body, that the Crown of my Head was very little seen above the Bones of my Shoulders; and by Degrees, loseing both Voice and Sense, my Face looking forward, lay against my Collar-Bone, and cou’d not be kept up any otherwise, unless held up by the Hands of other People.

With as little Baggage as possible, travel on from Wapping to Hackney until I came into the great North Road on the top of Stamford-Hill, and make forwards to Epping-Forest, and pitch my tent with an old Soldier, a Biscuit Baker, and a lame Sailor, and live like Hermits in Holes and Caves.

Being tyed in my Bed, and finding no other Way to deliver myself, set the Bed on fire with my Candle, and Burn myself in my Bed.

Proverbial Dabbling

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I am pleased to report that Hooting Yard came out on top in a recent poll asking punters “Which blog with the word ‘Hooting’ in its title do you think keeps its finger most firmly on the pulse of the global body politic?” Many thanks to the untold billions of readers who voted for us. Commemorative biros will be in the post shortly (ink not included).

Sometimes, however, one has to hike elsewhere to find out what’s really going on, as airheads and conspiracy theorists like to put it. So today you had better open the door of my cupboard in The Dabbler, where the current unrest in Libya is fully and cogently analysed through the prism of some Libyan proverbs.

The Pillow Pamphlets

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Capacious and pulsating it may have been, but Dobson’s brain contained many, many pockets of ignorance. He was in his mid fifties, for example, when he first came upon the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, a work of which he had no previous inkling. He did not read it, merely noting the title on the spine of a copy lodged on the bookshelf of his friend Ah-Fang Van Der Houygendorp, the Sino-Dutch artist and mountaineer.

Back at home later that day, he mentioned it to Marigold Chew.

“Did you know that an eleventh century Japanese bint wrote an entire book about pillows?” he asked.

“Yes, Dobson, of course,” said Marigold Chew, “I have borrowed it from the mobile library more than once, and read it from cover to cover.”

“Speaking of the mobile library,” said Dobson, and he embarked on a long-winded and pettifogging digression upon the mobile library, which in that place at that time took the form of a cart pulled by an elegant yet tubercular drayhorse, the cart piled high with hardbacks covered in greaseproof paper jackets, the drayhorse chivvied on its way by an equally elegant and equally tubercular librarian-carter, a man of grim countenance and terrible personal habits who bore a distinct resemblance to the actor Karl Johnson, noted for his roles as elderly peasant Twister Turrill in Lark Rise To Candleford and as Wittgenstein in Derek Jarman’s Wittgenstein. In fact, it may even have been Johnson himself, moonlighting as a mobile librarian to supplement his thespian earnings. Dobson posited this possibility, but doubted it was true, as we, too, must doubt it until all the evidence is in.

So implacable was the pamphleteer’s babbling that Marigold Chew was unable to get a word in edgeways, and was thus given no opportunity to point out to Dobson that the Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon, like all pillow books, was not actually a book about pillows, but a collection of lists and aphorisms and observations and jottings and poems and opinions and anecdotes. Had he ceased prattling for but a moment, Dobson would have learned this, and not, when eventually he exhausted the topic of the mobile library and the greaseproof paper jackets and the drayhorse and the librarian-carter and the actor and the fictional peasant and the non-fictional philosopher, gone scurrying off to his escritoire to sit and scribble the following:

I have learned that a thousand years ago, a woman from the land of Yoko Ono wrote an entire book about pillows. Such is human progress that in the intervening millennium there must be much, much more to be said on the subject. Clearly I am the pamphleteer to take on this daunting task. I shall set to work on the Pillow Book of Dobson as soon as I have taken a nap. NB: The nap will of course be research for my Pillow Book, as I shall be resting my head upon a pillow while I nap, and present my findings as soon as I wake up.

As far as we know, the promised “findings” were never written down. So refreshed was Dobson by his nap that, upon waking, he immediately put on his Iberian duck hunter’s boots, grabbed an Alpenstock in his fist, and set out for a jaunty hike that took him past the electricity pylons and the abandoned swimming pool and the badger rescue station and the allotments. All the while he hiked, he concentrated his mind on pillows – a thousand years of pillows! His brain reeled as he struggled to comprehend the sheer amount of material he would have to marshal in the making of his Pillow Book. What advances mankind must have made in the field of pillows since the eleventh century! How many heads had rested on how many pillows in that time? How many dreams dreamt during pillow-assisted dozes and naps and even comas? Pausing for a breather outside the bolted and shuttered off licence, Dobson suddenly felt intimidated by the scale of the task before him. He watched the skies for swifts and sparrows and starlings and other birds beginning with S. He rattled the bolts on the off licence door. He chucked his Alpenstock into a ditch. And then he turned for home, resolved to write, not a Pillow Book, but a whole series of Pillow Pamphlets, each to tackle a single, manageable subsection of his vast unwieldy subject matter.

“Marigold!” he announced, bustling through the door, “I have had a brainwave with regard to my working methods on the pillow project!”

“I did not know you had embarked upon a pillow project, Dobson,” said Marigold Chew, “And what have you done with the Alpenstock?”

“Oh, I chucked it into a ditch,” said Dobson, “I shall go and retrieve it later. But first I must write out the plan for my Pillow Pamphlets, updating a thousand years of pillow history since Sei Shōnagon wrote her book about pillows long long ago in far Japan!”

But so exhausted was the pamphleteer by his hiking and his brain activity that before sitting at his escritoire he took another nap. He thus set a pattern for what was to follow. Every time he determined to set to work on the Pillow Pamphlets, he convinced himself that further practical pillow research was necessary, and lay his head upon a pillow, and fell asleep.

The project was eventually abandoned when the pamphleteer’s attention was distracted by cataclysmic world events, and he turned his energies to writing his famous pamphlet On The Inadvisability Of Taking Daytime Naps During The Unfolding Of Cataclysmic World Events (out of print).

Notes And Queries

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“How can I allay my fear of death?” asked a latter-day Edgar Allan Poe in Notes & Queries in yesterday’s Grauniad. A decidedly fatuous answer was given by one Fred Huckle of London SW1, who suggested “Develop a belief in some form of reincarnation.” In other words, become a credulous nincompoop and cram your brain with poppycock. One may as well advise someone to “develop a belief” in a flat earth or fairies or the legendary “third Miliband”.

That, at least, was my initial reaction. I turned elsewhere in the paper and chortled at Boris Johnson’s vision of next year’s Diamond Jubilee, with a “royal quinquereme” sailing the Thames from Putney to Tower Bridge, “probably rowed by oiled and manacled MPs”. But as is the way with these things I remained preoccupied by Mr Huckle’s twaddle, and eventually chucked the Grauniad to one side and started rummaging among the bookshelves to do a spot of research.

Some hours later I found what I was looking for. Far from dispensing foolish advice, Mr Huckle was clearly familiar with the case of Prince Fulgencio, as related in Dobson’s pamphlet The Case Of Prince Fulgencio (out of print). I quote:

Prince Fulgencio was terrified of death. So titanic was his ego that, though mildly fearful on his own account, he agonised over the great peril the world would face in the event of his dissolution. How in heaven, he wondered, would the mass of humanity cope without Prince Fulgencio there as guide and saviour and model and paragon? He did not know that the scrofulous peasants huddled in their hovels in the shadow of his palace prayed daily for his death, and hatched plots against him.

It happened that one day Prince Fulgencio was riding through the deep dark forest astride his trusty horse, Keith, when he came upon the hut of a wizard. The Prince was much troubled that day, as usual, about the prospect of his demise, and he wondered if he might find succour in the wizard’s woohoo. Dismounting, he barged into the hut in his shouty blustery violent way, and found the wizard standing in the middle of a pentangle scraped on the floor, waving his arms about in haphazard yet highly significant magical passing movements, intoning gibberish, and listening to an Alain De Botton podcast on his iDeBotton.

“Ho there, wizardy man!” shouted Prince Fulgencio, “I am Prince Fulgencio and I am terrified of death! What can you do to give me succour?

“My name is Huckle,” croaked the wise old wizard, removing from his filthy ears the headphones, together with a couple of crumbs of impacted earwax, “If ye seek succour you must bring me a frog and a toad and a goose and a squirrel and twigs of hazel and larch and sycamore and a chest of gold.”

Prince Fulgencio was not a prince to tolerate impertinence from wizards. He biffed Huckle in the chops with his jewel-encrusted princely sceptre-cum-bludgeon and shouted at him again, this time louder and in a voice more searing and raucous, like a crow with an Asbo.

“Oof!” said the wizard, “Steady on, guv. Alright, I’ll give you succour. You must develop a belief in some sort of reincarnation to allay your fear of death.”

The prince was not impressed, and did a bit more biffing.

“What sort of wishy-washy Guardian-reading poltroonery is that?” he shouted.

“Oof!” said the wizard again, a few more times, “Please listen, o Prince! Take this magic glass, and as you look into it every morning while doing your princely ablutions, repeat over and over again the words ‘I am absolutely convinced I shall not die but will be reborn in a new corporeal frame!’ You will be surprised how quickly you come to believe it.”

“So I could come back as an even more fantastic version of Prince Fulgencio?” shouted Prince Fulgencio.

“Well, yes, in theory,” said the wizard. He thought it best not to mention that the magic mirror might bring the prince back in the form of a worm or a gnat or a Wivenhoe bus conductor.

“I shall give it a try,” shouted Prince Fulgencio, “But woe betide you, wizardy man, if the magic wrought by your magic glass does not work!”, and he strode out of the hut and jumped back into the saddle and went a-galloping on Keith back to his palace.

When Prince Fulgencio did die, many years later, the peasants chopped his corpse into little bits and buried the bits in quicklime and laid waste to the land around the pit so that nothing grew there for a thousand years. Shortly after his death, legend has it that Huckle the wizard was walking along a path in the deep dark woods from his hut to the newsagent’s, to buy a copy of the Guardian, when he was harried by a tiny flying ant. He smote it, it fell to earth, and he crushed it under his wizardy boot. In some versions of the legend, the harrying is done not by a tiny flying ant but by a large ungainly lumbering bus conductor from Wivenhoe. All other details remain the same.

Sound And Vision

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Two clips for your instruction and enlightenment. First, a Tesla Cage Of Death! Many thanks to Ed Baxter for drawing it to my attention.

Next, the radio recording of WNEW reporter Icarus “Ike” Pappas on the scene as Jack Ruby shoots Lee Harvey Oswald in Dallas on 24 November 1963. “Jack Ruby’s the name.” “Jack Ruby?” “He runs the Carousel Club.” “He runs the Carousel Club?” Holy mackerel!

Lars Tax, The Circus Strongman

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News just in that weedy versifier Dennis Beerpint has been appointed Poet In Residence at Beppo Lamont’s Travelling Big Top Circus. Chief among his duties is to write a life in verse of the circus strongman, Lars Tax, also known as The Mighty Lars. So strong is Mr Tax that he has been known to hoist o’er his head a container lorry cram-packed with smithys’ anvils while pulling a concert hall across a field with his teeth. For the duration of his residency, our fey poet has been billeted in Lars Tax’s caravan, a flimsy construction of balsa wood and straw regularly subject to ruinous damage when the strongman engages in such mundane activities as yawning or combing his hair. By more or less imprisoning him with his subject, it is hoped that Beerpint will dash off a vivid “Life” fairly quickly, after which he can concentrate on other Big Top topics, including clowns and bears and trapeze artists and lions.

Three weeks in, Beerpint has completed just a single couplet:

Lars Tax was born sixty years ago / But whereabouts I do not know.

The problem, apparently, is that the circus strongman is a deaf mute, and fails to respond to any of the biographical questions fired at him by the spindly, neurasthenic poet. “Tell me when you first realised you were gifted with superhuman strength,” Beerpint will say, and Lars Tax will peer at him through his curiously milky eyes then turn about and start pitching cannonballs, four at a time, beyond the visible horizon. Luckily, like many a circus strongman, Mr Tax is a gentle, kindly soul, and has shown no intention of lifting up Beerpint with his little finger and pitching him beyond the horizon.

As time passes, however, the poet is growing increasingly fretful about his Life In Verse, and is sorely tempted to make the whole thing up. It would not be the first time Beerpint has cobbled together a fictional rhyming biography of a circus strongman. Which of us can forget that majestic sequence A Life Of Circus Strongman Gravat Pang In Four Hundred Sonnets? Mr Pang, of Icarus Drumgoole’s Fantastic Big Top And Flea Circus, was quite the opposite of a deaf mute, a strongman so garrulous that he hardly ever stopped talking. Beerpint simply followed him around, scribbling into his notepad like a Boswell, and then churned the words into verse.

We shall watch with interest how this current Big Top residency works out. Rumour has it that Lars Tax has grown fond of his puny caravan-mate, and wishes to train him up as an apprentice strongman. To this end, the Mighty Lars has been shovelling fistfuls of vitamin pills down the poet’s throat and encouraging him to push the caravan, weighted with several elephants and lions and anvils and cannonballs, from village to village, as they travel the land, ‘til kingdom come.

Dennis Beerpint’s latest slim volume of twee verse, Limericks Born Of Physical Exhaustion and Vitamin Overdose, is available from selected purveyors of slim volumes of twee verse.

Aerated Celerywater

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celerytonicLudicrously obsessed as I am by the Kennedy assassination, my current reading is Vincent Bugliosi’s Four Days In November (2007), an extraordinarily detailed narrative of the events in Dallas forty-eight years ago. Bugliosi, famed as the prosecutor in the Manson murders, has won great respect for his “precise and definitive” account, “put[ting] all the pieces together”, carefully documenting his tale with thousands of footnotes referring to primary sources.

Yet here I am, on page 310, when we have arrived at 1.50 AM on Saturday 23 November, and I am ready to toss the book across the room in exasperation. Why?

“Most of Dallas is asleep when Ruby finally enters the KLIF building after Russ Knight gets back from City Hall and opens the door. Several of the guys on duty are glad to see Jack’s big paper sack full of corned-beef sandwiches and soft drinks. “I figured you guys would be hungry,” Jack tells them, “and I brought these up for you.” Knight and DJ Danny McCurdy were intrigued by Doctor Black’s celery tonic in its peculiarly shaped bottle and expensive-looking gold foil, which neither of them had ever seen before. Whoever heard of a soft drink with celery in it? Jack explains that it’s something you normally get only in New York and is especially pleased when McCurdy thinks it’s the best soft drink he’s ever had.”

There is, of course, no such drink as “Doctor Black’s celery tonic”. Bugliosi is confusing it with Doctor Brown’s celery tonic, also known as Cel-Ray. If he cannot get that right, if he muddles Black with Brown, how can we trust anything he says in this bulky doorstop of a book? Such inaccurate flimflam is enough to have me signing up to the absurd and paranoid Oliver Stone-Jim Garrison theories about the case.

McCurdy may have asked “Whoever heard of a soft drink with celery in it?” but a more pertinent question is surely “Whoever would have thought that a soft drink with celery in it would prove so crucial a factor in the Kennedy assassination?”