Jazz. And cows. David Thompson provides the link.

I do wish the cameraperson had trusted to our patience and not cut the film. I would have liked to see the cows making their approach to the fence.

The first fruits of my lobster research:

The common English lobster, (Homarus vulgaris), as seen on the marble slab of the fishmonger, is very unlike his relatives beneath the waves. The curled up form in which he is seen when so exposed is not that usually assumed in its own element, unless in the act of exerting its immense powers of retrograde motion. These are so great that one sudden downward sweep of its curiously constructed, oar-like tail, is sufficient to send it like an arrow, three- or four-and-twenty feet, with the most extraordinary precision, thereby enabling our friend to retreat with the greatest rapidity into nooks, corners, and crevices among the rocks, where pursuit would be hopeless. His eyes being arranged on foot stalks, or stems, are free from the inconvenient trammels of sockets, and possess a radius of vision commanding both front and rear, and from their compound form (being made up of a number of square lenses) are extremely penetrating and powerful. The slightest shadow passing over the pool in which the lobster may chance to be crawling or swimming, will frequently cause one of these sudden backward shoots to be made, and H. vulgaris vanishes into some cleft or cavity with a rapidity of motion which no harlequin could ever, even in his wildest dreams, hope to achieve. Down among the deep channels, between the crags at the sea’s bottom, alarms, except from the sea robbers themselves, are not to dreaded.

W B Lord, Crab, Shrimp, And Lobster Lore, Gathered Amongst The Rocks At The Sea-Shore, By The Riverside, And In The Forest (1867)

I don’t drive, and am almost wholly ignorant about cars. Certainly, other than a couple of iconic designs such as the VW Beetle and the Mini, I cannot tell one make of car from another. Thus it was, and remains, inexplicable to me how my eldest son, when tiny, eagerly announced the name of every car he saw. He was two or three years old at the time, not yet able to read, but when we went for a walk, he would point at each parked car we saw along a street, piping up its name. Other than his mispronunciation of “Ford Sierra” as “Fonsierra”, he was unerringly correct. Eventually, he stopped doing this, and moved on to other childish things, straightforward and unremarkable. One’s own child is never unremarkable, of course, but I mean to say that the talents he developed and displayed were not what Charles Fort would have described as “wild talents”, such as that somehow eerie, pre-literate knowledge of cars. Where did it come from?

I had more or less forgotten about this as the years passed, until this morning, when I read:

we moved back to Paris, and there I have, on my father’s authority, a story about people standing him drinks at the café while I entertained the clientele by identifying the marque of each car as it passed on the boulevard: “Renault! Peugeot! Citröen! Simca!” I haven’t evinced any savant talents since, but apparently at two I had this precocious knack – of cars only, French cars in particular.

That is Peter Blegvad, reminiscing in The Bleaching Stream (Journal of the London Institute of ‘Pataphysics, Number 3, Absolu 139). It is precisely the same case as my son – the infant savant, privy to a body of knowledge without apparent provenance, displayed for a brief period when very young. Is this more common than I thought?

Hooting Yard’s global dominion is well-attested, and there are readers and listeners all over the world. Some are fortunate enough to live and breathe and have their being in places with fantastic names. Consider the reader who sent me a snap of his membership card for Toad Suck Buck’s, a “restaurant and river vista” in Toad Suck, Arkansas. Toad Suck, I am told, is in a “dry” county, so in order to serve its customers with alcoholic beverages, Buck’s is a “privite” club. I am eager to join, and I bet you are too. Meanwhile, I am thrilled to know there is a Toad Suck Branch of the Hooting Yard Fan Club.

In an 1829 [stage] adaptation of Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering, a character is lost on a storm-racked Scottish heath, when suddenly: “Ha! What do I see on this lonely heath? A Piano? Who could be lonely with that? The moon will shortly rise and light me from this unhallowed place; so, to console myself, I will sing one of Julia’s favourite melodies.” And he does.

From The Invention Of Murder : How The Victorians Revelled In Death And Detection And Created Modern Crime by Judith Flanders (2011)

For some reason, quite possibly ignorance, I have never made it my practice to add “tags” to Hooting Yard postages. I shove them into a category, but have always neglected the tags. It is not something I have thought about, until today, when I have realised that a skilled “tagger” can create something approaching poetry.

The friend who I thumped on the bonce with the Hammer of Thumpiness, until she caved in and began blogging, is only six posts in at BlackberryJuniper And Sherbet, yet her grasp of tagging is a wonder to behold. Consider this:

memory

rain

Swanage

wind

What a corker! Time, surely, to eject Carol Ann Duffy* from the Laureateship and appoint my friend in her stead.

* NOTE : The preposterous Duffy’s latest witterings argue that teenpersons’ txt-spk has poetic potential. Shouldn’t she be promoting literacy rather than garbled barbarism?