Lapel Accoutrement Luminary Poll

Here at Haemoglobin Towers there is much whirring and clanking as the finishing touches are put to your favourite book of the year, the annual Hooting Yard paperback. The publication of this mighty tome is imminent, imminent I tell you!

Meanwhile, never resting on our laurels, and determined always to extend our global reach, possibly into extraterrestrial zones, the thought occurred to present one of the new and gorgeous Hooting Yard lapel accoutrements to a living luminary. This lucky luminary could then act as our ambassador when hobnobbing with the great and good and with that Fry person. But upon which luminary should we bestow this signal honour? Readers, you decide!

The most deserving luminary to receive a complementary Hooting Yard lapel accoutrement (25mm across) is








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Digby Thew

Digby Thew, oh Digby Thew! What are we doing to do with you?

If it please Your Worships, I would like very much to be a conductor on the sleeping car of an important railway line. I would wear a cap, and have a sash, and fill out dockets, and attend to the passengers’ every need. I would hope the sleeping car, like the rest of the train, at least in its first class compartments, was fitted out to the brim of luxury.

Digby Thew, oh Digby Thew! What on earth’s come over you?

I realise my request is an unexpected one, Your Worships, given that until now my place has been in the fields, tilling. And tilling hopelessly, I might add. But I must confess that, like a number of characters in the great dramatic tragedies, I have a vaunting ambition. I have not actually seen any of these plays myself, indeed I have never been within ten miles of a theatricum, but I have heard of them, repeatedly, from my more learned colleagues in the fields, when tilling.

Arbogast, what say you? What’s your take on Digby Thew?

As you know, Your Worships, I have compiled a lengthy and exhaustive report on the Tiller Thew. I think you will find it appended to Bundle Six. My conclusions there set out are that Digby Thew is a hopeless tiller of the fields, as he himself acknowledges. It is high time he was dragged away from said fields, to till no more, in perpetuity, and found some other line to which to apply his talents. For let there be no mistake that talent he has, oodles of it, oodles. Our quandary is to discover the nature of that talent. It may well be that the wearing of a cap and a sash, the wearing of them alone, leaving aside the dockets and the attending, will help to reveal it.

Put Digby Thew in cap and sash? That may be considered rash.

It may indeed, Your Worships, but think how you would be commended for boldness if everything worked out ticketyboo.

Very well then, Digby Thew. Now prove yourself to be ticketyboo.

I will do my utmost, Your Worships. In cap and sash I shall prance along the corridor of the sleeping car of the important railway line, filling out and issuing dockets. Oh, I am almost physically sick with excitement! To think that a hopeless tiller of the fields such as me should be given the chance to prove himself ticketyboo! I shall not let you down, Your Worships!

*

Newspaper reports on the following day told a terrible tale of mayhem and chaos on the railways. In the sleeping car, nobody got a wink of sleep. They were kept awake all night by the antics of the conductor, who wreaked untold damage to the purple and gold luxurious deep plush pile carpet in the car, by hacking at it all night long, hopelessly, with a hoe.

Excess Gas

Hooting Yard reader Richard Carter has a letter published in the latest edition of the London Review Of Books. I take the liberty of reproducing it here for your edification and instruction. Our resident anagrammatist R. (who is not Richard, by the way) should find it of particular interest:

Steven Shapin writes that Darwin’s uncontrollable retching and farting seriously limited his public life (LRB, 30 June). Some years ago, to my delight, I worked out that the great man’s full name, Charles Robert Darwin, is an anagram of ‘rectal winds abhorrer’. Unfortunately for my anagram, the meanings of words, like species, can evolve. On the rare occasions that Darwin mentioned his problems to friends, he always used the word ‘flatulence’. Nowadays, we think of flatulence as being synonymous with farting, but in Darwin’s day it meant (as it technically still does) an accumulation of gases in the alimentary canal. While I’m sure that Darwin must have vented his excess gas one way or the other, there’s no reason to believe that his farts were uncontrollable.

Badges!

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At last! Your chance to announce your unalloyed devotion to Hooting Yard by sporting an exclusive Hooting Yard badge! Hand-crafted by unpaid half-blind orphans in the dank cellars of Pang Hill Orphanage, the badges measure 25mm across and are non-edible, nourishing the spirit rather than the corporeal maw.

How to order:

1. Click the Donate button to your right and send £1.25 per badge to the Keeper of the Hooting Yard Privy Purse. This includes the cost of postage and packing and the PayPal clawback. If you live outside the UK you might wish to add a widow’s mite for extra postage.

2. Send me an email telling me your postal address, with the subject heading “Gosh, I am breathless with excitement at the prospect of wearing my Hooting Yard lapel badge”, or words to that effect.

3. Allow sufficient time for Mr Key to drag his weary bones to the post office to complete the transaction.

Note for subscribers: Sensible persons with a Hooting Yard subscription will be receiving their complimentary badge shortly, so need not lift a finger.

Rose Grainger

It may come as a relief to some readers to learn that I am done with Cornelius Cardew for the time being. I am now turning my attention to Percy Grainger. Thanks to Strange Flowers, we have already learned how to speak like the madcap Antipodean, and when I start reading the biography I have borrowed from the library I shall regale you with interesting snippets. For now, let us consider the title he gave to a pen-portrait of his mother:

“Mother’s Wilfulness, Recklessness, Fearlessness, Bossiness, Violence If Opposed, Tendency To Burn Food When Cooking, Vehemence”

PercyrosePercy and his Ma

Nature Notes

On May 13 1988 I was amused to read a report in The Daily Telegraph that the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had erected a mesh fence to keep bird-fanciers away from a colony of little terns on Great Yarmouth beach, whose numbers had grown from 20 pairs to 70 pairs in three years.

On August 2 1990 I was interested to read a report in The Daily Telegraph as follows:

“Britain’s biggest breeding colony of little terns, on Great Yarmouth Beach, Norfolk, where 201 pairs were nesting, has been largely wiped out by two hedgehogs and a kestrel.”

Kestrels, of course, are fanatically protected by all the high-tech and paramilitary resources of the multi-million pound RSPB, which on this occasion seems to have been hoist with its own petard, as they say. It is hard to know with whom we should sympathise most in this tale: the ordinary bird-fanciers, who were kept away from fancying little terns by a mesh fence put up by the superior bird-fanciers of the RSPB bureaucracy, or the unfortunate little terns, condemned to twitter away unseen.

My own sympathies are with the hedgehogs. They are delightful, if slightly flea-ridden, animals, with whom it is sometimes possible to hold an intelligent conversation. Has anybody ever had an intelligent conversation with a little tern? Hedgehogs do not demand a whole apparatus of repression to survive. Every time a hedgehog wipes out a little tern, it is a blow for freedom.

Auberon Waugh, “Nature Notes”, The Daily Telegraph, 11 August 1990

Orwellian Dabbling

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Devoted Hooting Yardists will be familiar with the contents of Key’s Cupboard this week, where I bring to the attention of Dabbler readers the egg-counting antics of George Orwell. I often reflect – and by “often” I mean daily, daily – on the fact that two titanic figures in the cultural landscape of the twentieth century had such wildly divergent attitudes to eggs. There is Orwell, thin and wiry, with his love of eggs, and Alfred Hitchcock, plump and bloated, who was terrified of them.

It could be argued that Orwell was not an egg lover as such, that he merely had a mania for counting them, a mania that could have found expression in the counting of other farm (or smallholding) produce. Frankly I cannot be bothered to do the biographical research which would be necessary to write a monograph entitled George Orwell’s Attitude Towards Eggs. Perhaps someone else could take on that important task.

Friday Quiz

I snap my fingers and, foof-la!, inaugurate the Hooting Yard Friday Quiz. (It is likely, not to say inevitable, that tomorrow I shall snap my fingers again and, foof-la!, abolish the Hooting Yard Friday Quiz, so make the most of it while you have the chance.)

This week’s challenge is to identify correctly the forty-seven fictional characters listed yesterday in the piece Unhinged By Cream Crackers. You need to provide the title of the work, be it a novel or a play or a film or what have you, where the character first appeared.

The first person to post a full and correct list in the Comments will win a modest prize. I do not yet know what it will be, but I will think of something, and it will not be a world cruise aboard the HMS Corrugated Cardboard.

Unhinged By Cream Crackers

Dear Mr Key, writes Poppy Nisbet, I have been commissioned to write a book entitled Fifty Anecdotes About Cream Crackers, and to date I have managed to find only two true life cream cracker-related stories which are even mildly entertaining. In your piece on the cardboard sign “Depressed Horse Never Knew Saucepans” you write “It was not the cream crackers which unhinged me, as they have done before.” I would be very interested to know about the earlier unhingement to which you allude, as it could provide invaluable material for my book.

Well, Poppy Nisbet, Poppy Nisbet, I am happy to oblige, as they used to sing in the old folk song “Poppy Nisbet”. To ensure my reply is as helpful as possible, I consulted my papers to winkle out each and every cream cracker unhingement reference, and I find that there is not just the one incident to report, but several.

Before going into any detail I think it is important to point out that in these unhingements there is no connection whatsoever, in either a literal or legal or moral or incoherent sense, between the snackfood treat commonly known as a cream cracker (a sort of glorified water biscuit) and the use of the word “crackers” as a euphemism for mad, crazy, nuts, insane, deranged, bedizened, or, indeed, unhinged. I am glad we have cleared that one up at the outset. I know from experience that all sorts of misunderstandings can occur when readers think that there is a link, either fearsomely strong, as with an iron chain, or more fragile, as with a gossamer thread, between the snackfood and the mental or emotional condition. That there can be such a link, I do not deny. Consider for example the case of the German railway sleeping car attendant Ravilious, who was driven crackers by crackers by dint of the word association, just as, later, he was to suffer abasement in a basement and to be abused on a bus – though what he was doing aboard a bus, when loyalty ought to have limited his mode of travel to the German railway system, is a mystery. Not an ineffable one, perhaps, such as the nature of God or the alignment of certain tree clumps, but a mystery nevertheless, and one which you, Poppy Nisbet, Poppy Nisbet, may wish to investigate when you have finished writing Fifty Anecdotes About Cream Crackers, assuming of course you do finish writing it, and do not simply abandon the project through lassitude, blockage, or persistent cramp.

If you do abandon the book, one excuse you will not have is a lack of material, because I see, on looking through my papers, that I can furnish you with no fewer than forty-seven cream cracker unhingement yarns. As you already have two in the bag, as you say, then you need find only one more to tot up the anecdote-count to a half-century, and, foof-la!, there is your book, done and dusted.

I realise it may beggar belief that one man can lay claim to forty-seven separate episodes of unhingement by cream cracker, but I insist that I speak the truth. After all, for what possible reason would I lie to you, Poppy Nisbet, Poppy Nisbet? I am unlikely to benefit from having my anecdotes retailed, in your book, presumably under cover of anonymity, an anonymity I will wish to preserve for insurance purposes. In fact I would suggest that you invent forty-seven different fictional characters to act as the supposed protagonists of the events to which I shall make you privy. You can be quite explicit about such a manoeuvre, by which I mean you need not pull the wool over your readers’ eyes by pretending that, say, Mr X or Ms Y or Dr Z stand in for three different “real” people. You may want to make it blatantly obvious that you are using made-up names by co-opting forty-seven fictional characters who already exist, invented by others, as I did when writing my as yet unpublished manuscript Forty-Seven Lightly Fictionalised Accounts Of Ineffably Mysterious Tree Clump Alignment Shenanigans. The true life heroes and heroines of these tales are disguised by obviously fictional names: Emma Bovary, Martin Chuzzlewit, Tyrone Slothrop, Peason, Josef Bong, Raskolnikov, Winnie Verloc, Lupin Pooter, Dolores Haze, Ravelstein, Arturo Ui, Winston Smith, Grimes, Pinkie Brown, Geoffrey Firmin, Steerpike, Pointsman, Grabber, Myra Breckinridge, Molloy, Pangloss, Krishnan Guru-Murthy, Roger Thornhill, Guy Secretan, Ilya Kuryakin, Clare Quilty, Lemuel Gulliver, Doctor Slop, Sara Lund, Inspector Truscott, Ned Stark, Cissie Colpitts, Sebastian Dangerfield, Giles De’Ath, Ronnie Bostock, Ebin Willoweed, Hans Gruber, Wendy Hale, Chance Hale, Watt, Prince Zaleski, Roger Ackroyd, Evadne Mount, Arthur Gordon Pym, De Selby, Mike Hammer, and the man with the twisted lip. You are quite welcome to use the very same pseudonyms in your forty-seven accounts of my cream cracker unhingements, although you may of course wish to pick your own, or even make them up entire out of whole cloth, if that is the kind of thing you like to do, when fighting off lassitude, blockage, and persistent cramps. I know I do.

Earlier I described cream crackers as glorified water biscuits. It may be of interest to you, Poppy Nisbet, Poppy Nisbet, that, when looking through my papers, in addition to records of forty-seven unhingements by cream cracker, I came upon no fewer than fifty-three derangements by water biscuit. Yes, yes, I know, that too beggars belief, but there you go. I can only speak as I find. It occurs to me that if, in spite of all, you are unable to come up with a fiftieth anecdote for your cream cracker tally, you could renegotiate the deal with your publisher and instead give them Fifty Anecdotes About Water Biscuits. I have all the material you will need, and instead of having to root around desperately trying to track down a fiftieth diverting and entertaining and instructive cream cracker story, you would simply have to discard three of my water biscuit tales. Alternatively, I could do that for you, sending you just the fifty you need, each one guaranteed to be a full and true account of an occasion on which, for a variety of reasons, I underwent a spell of derangement due to a water biscuit, or in some cases water biscuits plural. That is the kind of stuff which I think would make any publisher happy, or at least any publisher worth his salt.

I am not going to digress upon the salt content, or lack of it, in cream crackers and/or water biscuits, as that way madness lies, or, if not madness, then at the very least unhingement or derangement, as I know to my cost.

So, Poppy Nisbet, Poppy Nisbet, let me know by return of post which road you wish to go down, the Avenue De Cream Crackers or the Boulevard Du Water Biscuits. I will then send you a very lengthy screed, which you may fillet or primp, as you so wish.

What Was Cardew Thinking?

John Tilbury, in his biography Cornelius Cardew :  A Life Unfinished (2008) on some of the later songs, when our hero had become a member of the Central Committee of the Revolutionary Communist Party Of Britain (Marxist-Leninist):

Invariably, the songs are extended by virtue of repetition ; in “Revisionist Somersaults And The Opportunist Opposition” the brevity and uneventfulness of the melody is a blessing, except that there are ten verses; the crude lyric is provided with music which is appropriately routine… How can this be explained – by which I mean, what was Cardew thinking at the time? I quote just the first verse:

One jumps out and one jumps in saying

CPC(ML) agent of the bourgeoisie

The Moscow ‘communists’ really love this country

And say that CPC(ML) is against democracy

With one foot in and the other also

The revisionists and opportunists defend the status quo

“An Opportunist Has Come Back Home” is an endless, turgid, sectarian tract attacking a ‘revisionist’ who has betrayed the Party. The text is spoken and sung; the music is interspersed with, and accompanies, speech alternating with a sung chorus… the whole text [is] of extraordinary length, doubtless uncut and unabridged. Here, towards the beginning, Voice 1 describes the young man:

Oh beautiful sight! What a striking pose!

Oh look at his Russian greatcoat,

The Mao badge on his lapel,

His Castroite fatigues,

And this is not all! Oh yes!

(Voice II)

An opportunist has come back home

For me, the wonderful thing about these songs is that they are sung in an impeccably upper middle class accent, and have a jauntiness redolent of the Bloomsbury set on a picnic outing. Not so much jolly hockey sticks as jolly petrol bombs. (I’m also intrigued by the way the ideological imperative of the lyrics means that they rarely scan comfortably. Well, you try packing “our ideology is Marxism-Leninism, we’re workers and like workers everywhere our aspiration is for socialism ushered in by violent revolution” or “in utter chaos the old order spews out unlimited decadence and parasitism” into a singable song.)

Ghost Owl

“Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache.”

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“Fortunately, there was no sign of the bird and we can only assume that it had flown away probably suffering from a headache.”

Details here.