On Homburg

“I am going to Switzerland,” announced Dobson at breakfast one morning in the 1950s.

“Oh?” asked Marigold Chew, chewing on a sausage.

“For some time now I have been keen to wear a Homburg hat on my head,” said the greatest out of print pamphleteer of the twentieth century, “And I thought there would be no better place to obtain the hat than in Homburg itself, which I have learned is a municipality in the Swiss canton of Thurgau. So that is where I shall go, as soon as I have managed to complete the extremely intricate lacing up of these Guatemalan traffic policeman’s boots.”

“Before you go,” said Marigold Chew, “It might be helpful for you to know that the Homburg hat originated not in the Swiss Homburg of which you speak, but in Bad Homburg vor der Höhe in the Hochtaunuskreis district of Hesse in Germany. King Edward VII came back from a jaunt there sporting the hat, and made it popular.”

But Dobson was so intent on the complicated lacing of his boots that he did not listen to his inamorata, and before she could stop him he had donned his long Tzipi Gulbenkian overcoat and crashed out of the door into the autumnal 1950s downpour.

When, later, much later, he arrived in the Swiss municipality of Homburg, it did not take him long to discover he was in the wrong Homburg. The conversation he had with the proprietor of a Swiss hat shop has not been recorded, but we do know that Dobson blew a gasket and spent several hours in the custody of Homburg law enforcement officers. Released after promising that he would leave the town immediately and never, ever return, Dobson headed for Bad Homburg vor der Höhe. Having only enough cash to buy a hat, he had to walk. It was raining in both Switzerland and Germany at that time, and as he trudged north, for two hundred and forty miles, his temper grew ever fouler.

By the time he arrived at the home of the hat he was exhausted and filthy and sopping wet. He slumped on a municipal bench and scribbled some notes in his jotter, notes which later formed the basis of his magnificent pamphlet Thoughts Upon A Rain-soaked Trudge From Homburg To Homburg (out of print). They were not pretty thoughts. A gaggle of Bad Homburg tots were out on an instructional walk with their governess, and when they stopped to stare at the bedraggled pamphleteer he threw pebbles at them. This led to an altercation with the tots and their governess and several German law enforcement officers, from which Dobson only managed to extricate himself by promising to write a pamphlet in praise of Bad Homburg tots and governesses and law enforcement officers. No trace of such a work has ever been found among his papers, but diligent Dobsonists continue to rummage. Perhaps one day it will be unearthed.

Quenching his thirst with water from a puddle – into which he had earlier inadvertently sploshed up to his ankles – Dobson set off in search of a hat shop. He soon found one, and managed to buy a hat without causing a rumpus. He was, for a few moments, happy.

“I cannot wait to get home!” he said to himself, “Marigold Chew will be resmitten, all over again, when she sees me sporting my Homburg hat on my head!”

The idyll did not last. Barely had the pamphleteer set foot outside the hat shop than he was accosted by a German person wearing some kind of uniform, who jabbed him on the shoulder and shouted.

“Your trouser cuffs are dirty and your shoes are laced up wrong. You’d better take off your Homburg, ‘cos your overcoat is too long.”

“I beg your pardon?” spluttered Dobson. The man repeated himself word for word.

“Now look here,” said the pamphleteer, “First, my trouser cuffs are only dirty because I have walked two hundred and forty miles to get here, and stepped in many a puddle along the way. Second, these are not shoes but boots, specifically Guatemalan traffic policeman’s boots. The lacing of them is an extremely intricate business, and I would challenge anybody to lace them up correctly at the first attempt. Third, this overcoat is not too long. Yes, it is long, for it is of the stylish cut designed by tiptop overcoat designer Tzipi Gulbenkian. Ladies have been known to swoon at the sight of its decisive and urgent swish as I sashay along the boulevards engarbed in it. And no, I will not remove my brand new Homburg hat, nor doff it, to you or to any other man.”

“Then I must place you under immediate arrest,” said his accoster.

“And who might you be, and what agency does that uniform signify?” asked Dobson.

“I am Obergruppengit Von Höhenzollernschweswigstockhausenstimmung of the Bad Homburg vor der Höhe Sartorial Standards Enforcement Police,” he said, “And if you do not come quietly I will thump you several times with unimaginable brutality until you sob for your mama.”

Dobson was not a physical coward, but nor was he a fool.

“What if I take my hat off and put it in a carrier bag until I leave your delightful spa town with its delightful tots and delightful governesses and delightful law enforcement officers?” he whimpered.

“That will be acceptable, said the Obergruppengit.

So Dobson put his Homburg hat in a carrier bag, and the rain poured down upon his bare unhatted bonce. As he did so, the town clock in the Bad Homburg market square stood waiting for the hour, when its hands they both turned backwards, and on meeting they devoured both themselves and also any fool who dared to tell the time. As we have learned, Dobson was not a fool. He trudged, in the rain, out of Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, headed for home. And the sun and moon shattered, and the signposts ceased to sign.

Brute Beauty And Valour And Dabbling

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This week my cupboard in The Dabbler contains an exclusive, and scintillating, review of my new paperback Brute Beauty And Valour And Act, Oh, Air, Pride, Plume, Here Buckle! I wrote the review myself, so nobody else would have to. The best thing to do is to go and read it, and then make purchase of several copies of the book, wait for it to plop through your letterbox, then read the book itself, from cover to cover, repeatedly, until the unfathomable wisdom contained therein is drummed into your brain.

On Why Mitt Romney Lost

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There will be much soul-searching among US Republicans as they seek to account for their defeat in the presidential election. A variety of factors will be blamed, a variety of prescriptions for future strategy put forward. They could save themselves much time and much agonising by paying heed to Hooting Yard. The reason Mitt Romney lost is clear. As with so many things, oh! so many, there is a simple ornithological explanation.

Readers will probably be aware that hot on the heels of the US election, the Chinese too are ushering in their new leadership. As is the way with people’s republics, the people themselves have absolutely no say in the matter. The Chinese government is appointed, every ten years, by the all-powerful Party. As communists, the Party bigwigs clearly know what is best for the little people, hence the absence of such bourgeois twaddle as voting booths and ballot boxes.

As part of this authoritarian approach, the Party is keen to ensure the people do not get any funny ideas about possible alternatives. Thus the BBC Today programme this morning reported that an instruction has been issued nationwide. All Chinese pigeons are to be kept encaged until the end of the Party Congress, to foil the possibility of pigeons being used to carry propaganda leaflets from place to place, thus stirring unrest.

Now, we know the Asiatic peoples are extremely fond of their birds and poultry, and it is undoubtedly the case that the domestic pet pigeon population of China is far, far greater than its United States equivalent. Nevertheless, we should not discount the tremendous power of propaganda in the form of a leaflet tied to the leg of a pigeon swooping down from the sky. Which of us would be immune to the message borne to us by so spectacular an agency? Television, the press, Het Internet, the mass media in general may overwhelm us, but nothing can approach the sheer spellbinding thrill of a communiqué delivered to us tied to the leg of an avian herald swooping down from the wide blue empyrean. The Chinese Communist Party understands this.

It seems quite clear that the first thing Mitt Romney ought to have done, having won his party’s nomination to run for president, was to arrange for the encaging of the entire American pigeon population. Ah, you will argue, but Romney was merely the candidate, without the necessary powers. I say, Pish! Politics is a dark art, and such technicalities should not be used as excuses. All the Man in the Mormon Underpants need have done is to have his backroom team devise forged official announcements.

Americans, of course, do not take kindly to orders from central government, so a hardline approach would not have worked. A command such as “Cage your pigeon now, on pain of death for both you and the pigeon!” would have been torn up and cast into the waste chute by the majority of pigeon-owners. A more subtle approach, appealing to traditional American values, would be far more effective. “A caged and flight-inhibited pigeon is an American pigeon!” is a slogan that might work, as is “In the land of the free, pigeons stay cooped up!”

Without such a plan, with every day that passed, no doubt the Obama campaign was busy tying messages to the legs of pigeons in every hamlet and town and city in every state across the land, from sea to shining sea. By the time election day dawned, the damage was done.

Instead of grounding the birds in their coops and cages, could Romney have countered with his own troop of pigeons, carrying the Republican message? After all, pigeons themselves have no party affiliation, or indeed any affiliation whatsoever other than a fondness for pecking millet, making somewhat sinister burbly cooing noises, flying hither and thither, and defecating copiously. Tie a message to a pigeon’s leg, either in writing or pictograms, and the bird will not actually try to read it. Remember, they have incredibly tiny brains in their tiny birdy heads. They will simply soar away into the sky and carry the message wherever they are sent. So, yes, in theory, the Republicans could have stolen a march on their rivals by harnessing pigeon propaganda power. Why didn’t they?

It is no accident, I think, that there is absolutely no reference to pigeons in the Book of Mormon. I have checked in An Exhaustive Concordance of the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price (1977), which helpfully lists all the words – 5,596 of them – and the number of times each one appears in that very sensible book. Given Mitt Romney’s sincere devotion to his faith, we can conclude that he is very probably unaware of the existence of pigeons. If Joseph Smith had no occasion to mention them when he transcribed the contents of the golden plates, then they are clearly outwith God’s plan, and can be ignored, even actively shunned. Thus were the seeds sewn of Romney’s defeat.

This, then, is the single crucial lesson the Republicans must learn before the election of 2016. They have to bite the bullet and acknowledge the existence of pigeons. That is the first step. Take that step, and all else follows. They can then decide to campaign on the basis of nationwide pet pigeon encaging and encooping, or tie their own messages to the legs of these filthy avian pariahs and let them fly free. But they must do one or another. It is the pigeons who will win the election, as they have just demonstrated.

On Picnic Panic

Psychiatrists, phrenologists, and other brain doctors have identified a common mind-malaise known as picnic panic. This distressing condition afflicts picnickers who fly into a panic when picnicking. It can be terribly, terribly debilitating, and ruins many an otherwise splendid bucolic picnicking idyll.

Consider the following case study. Ned B_____, a hale and hearty moustachioed jolly type of fellow, fond of rowing boats and bird slaughter, was exactly the type of person you might find attending a picnic in the 1930s. And attend several picnics he did. At each one, however, he fell victim to picnic panic, the panic increasing in severity to the point where, at his final picnic, he ran screaming into a nearby forest and was found, weeks later, a gibbering maniac beyond all hope of redemption. He was confined to an Asylum for the Hopelessly Bewildered until 1963.

Upon his release, Ned B_____ was found accommodation in a dilapidated seaside resort, far from the field where once he had picnicked. A carer was appointed, a retired aviatrix named Mavis Handbasin, a very sensible woman with impeccable references. Among other responsibilities, she was charged with ensuring that Ned B_____ never consumed a single crumb of food nor slurp of drink when out of doors. It was thought, with good reason, that if ever he did so traumatic memories of picnics past might well up in his brain, and lead to further calamity. For this reason, too, he was kept away from all kinds of rugs and blankets, even when indoors.

For several years, all was well. Ned B______ passed his days happily enough, in standard dilapidated seaside resort fashion. He was even known to chuckle occasionally, at some amusement or other. He began a stamp collection, and adopted a pudding-basin hairstyle. He often dreamed of slaughtering seagulls, but they were only dreams. It was not thought advisable to allow him a firearm.

In the summer of 1968, however, during the third phase of the Tet Offensive, disaster struck. That good woman Mavis Handbasin arrived one morning at Ned B______’s squalid seafront boarding house to find him gone. On the wall of his kitchenette, scrawled in bright red crayon the colour of blood, were the letters PICN, followed by a long mad vertical line trailing off, down towards the wainscot. It had almost certainly been intended as a second letter I. Mavis Handbasin intuited the ghost of a final letter C, and her head began to spin. Somehow, something had inserted the idea of picnics into Ned B______’s poor shattered brain. She must find him before he did himself a mischief, or caused mayhem and havoc.

She found him soon enough. There he was, upon the pebbly beach, just yards from his door. He was sat upon a raincoat he had spread out upon the pebbles, in imitation of a picnic blanket in a field. He was eating a sausage. As she approached, Mavis Handbasin saw that his eyes were glazed and his countenance stuck in a rictus of terror. His pudding-basin haircut was in a state of the utmost dishevelment. His flesh was the colour of curd. Miss Handbasin was neither a psychiatrist nor a phrenologist nor any kind of brain doctor, but she had been awarded a certificate of attendance at the module of a training course designed to teach amateurs to recognise the telltale signs of picnic panic. Looking at Ned B______, on the beach with a sausage on that summer’s day, she thought she had never in her life seen a more vivid exemplum of the malady.

And as she looked, the once hale and hearty moustachioed jolly fellow, now reduced to a wreck, swallowed the last bit of sausage. He began to flap his arms, desperately, his head uptilted, mad eyes gazing at the sky. His carer knew all too well what this meant. Panicked by his impromptu picnic, Ned B______’s wild brain told him to flee, and he was trying to flee by flying. He was turning into a seagull.

She took from its sling her Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, cocked it, aimed, and shot him dead.

Such is the instructive case of Ned B______. It is important to note, however, that not all authorities agree that death by sniper’s bullet is the inevitable outcome in every case of picnic panic. Mistakes were made in this case, not least allowing Ned B______ simultaneous access to a beach, a raincoat, and a sausage. One, or even two, of those he could have coped with, if carefully monitored. It was the combination of all three that proved  fatal.

Source : “The Terrifically Exciting Doings Of Mavis Handbasin”, Episode 43, in Miss Blossom Partridge’s Weekly Digest, Vol. XXXIII, No. 7. No author is given, and it is thought the “doings” are a thinly-disguised autobiography penned by Mavis Handbasin herself, from her attic room in an Asylum for the Hopelessly Bewildered perched on a hillside on the outskirts of Pointy Town. Visitors report that Miss Handbasin enjoys weekly picnics, in all weathers, and has never shown the slightest sign of picnic panic.

Tap-Tap

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Mr Kearney, firing from both barrels, demolishes pseudonyms like a cowboy smashing bottles in a bar-room, and woven into his staid bibliographical canvas is a host of colourful figures, shorn of their aliases: authors, publishers, illustrators, booksellers, who have had a hand in this bizarre trade almost since the invention of moveable types. Perhaps the strangest of these is Alphonse Momas, a hack-pornographer or ‘pisse-copie’. . . who wrote no fewer than forty-five books in the [Private Case] and whose output was so prolific that he had to use nine pseudonyms: Le Nismois, Tap-Tap, Cain d’Abel, L’Erotin, Fuckwell, Un journaliste du siècle dernier, Mercadette, Pan-Pan, and Trix. Mr Kearney tells us Momas was a civil servant attached to the Paris police and that he devoted himself to spiritualism in later life. I recall reading, in some attack on spiritualism, perhaps one of Fr Raupert’s spirited diatribes, of a clergyman much given to the practice of automatic writing who, to his distress, found his hand suddenly impelled by an agency capable only of the grossest indecencies. Each day on awakening from the trance into which he had thrown himself, pen in hand, in humble expectation of exploring life beyond the veil, he discovered he had been delivered of page after page of writings of the lowest and most shocking kind. Perhaps it was the spirit of Tap-Tap’, ‘coming through’.

Timothy D’Arch Smith, in a review of Patrick J. Kearney’s The Private Case : An Annotated Bibliography Of The Private Case Erotica Collection In The British [Museum] Library, collected in The Books Of The Beast (1987).

On My Picnic Button

My panic button was not the only button I lost to the predations of a bird. My picnic button, too, was pecked and snatched and carried away by a crow. For all I know, it might have been the same crew that took my panic button. Perhaps there is a separate piece to be written about lost buttons, for I have lost many buttons, so many, I had not thought crows had undone so many.

My picnic button was an heirloom, as you will probably have guessed. You do not see so many of them these days. They were popular in the interwar years. Their exact purpose is no longer clear, but at the time there was scarce a picnic embarked upon in these isles where a picnic button was not taken along, in the hamper, or in the pocket of one of the picnickers. We will investigate further after I have told you the story of how I came to be in possession of one, until it was cruelly snatched away from me, by a crow.

My uncle Quentin was a world-famous and bad-tempered yet loveable scientist from Kirrin Island. When he died, we found his entire worldly goods stored in four supermarket carrier bags. It was a heteroclite jumble, including the skull of a hare, an envelope from L. Garvin, Honey Merchants, containing grey mullet scales, a cheese box containing a puffin’s beak, together with a Windsor & Newton leaflet containing advice on the control of moth damage to paint brushes, an envelope containing snow bunting feathers, a list of mills from Merionethshire, an envelope containing bits of silver foil (‘from Aunt Ethel’), a book of telephone numbers – containing none, an exercise book containing a hair prescription from a Dr Ferguson of Bromsgrove, a large photo of sheep in a slate pen, various brown envelopes (empty), an envelope containing a single dead prawn, and a picnic button. Curiously, the picnic button apart, this collection of bits and bobs was identical to the contents of the four supermarket carrier bags containing the worldly goods of the late R.S. Thomas and his wife, as noted in Byron Rogers’ biography of the poet. [I am indebted to Nige for alerting me to this.]

After my uncle’s funeral – where, according to his wishes, his corpse was encased in a gigantic wicker man and set ablaze – my siblings and cousins and I divvied up the contents of the carrier bags. We realised, after aligning the items on a baize tabletop and counting them, that their number matched exactly those of us there gathered. So we decided upon a raffle. It was by this means that I acquired the picnic button and bore it away, in a pocket of my Tyrolean sports-casual jacket, which I wore to the funeral in defiance of all etiquette. Everybody else was dressed in the correct black, from head to toe. I like to think Uncle Quentin would have approved of my jacket-decision, for he was a great fan of The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965), and would softly sing “Edelweiss”, word-imperfect, on the rare occasions when he was not in a bad temper.

As soon as I got home, I took down from the bookcase The Encyclopaedia Of Buttons and read up on my newly acquired picnic button. This is what I discovered:

During the interwar years, no picnic in these isles was complete without a picnic button. One among any complement of picnickers would be designated the buttoneer, and be charged with bringing the picnic button to the picnic. It would either be carried in the hamper or in the buttoneer’s pocket. Written picnic reminiscences are sparse on detail of the button, and today, in the postwar years, there are two rival theories regarding the purpose of the picnic button. These may be scientifically summarised as follows:

The picnic button was always a bright and glittery button, and was placed at edge of the picnic blanket. Its brightness and glitter were designed to attract the attention of, for example, swooping crows or similar picnic predators. It was thought that, dazzled by the button, any swooping crow (or similar) would have its attention distracted from picnic essentials such as cream crackers, sausages, or cans of Squelcho!, which it might otherwise grasp in its savage talons and carry away in flight. Thus a picnic button was very rarely among the items needing to be packed up and loaded on to the brake at the end of the picnic. Keen picnickers of the era kept a huge supply of picnic buttons for this very reason.

This theory has been comprehensively demolished by Wigmarole et al in A Discursive Analysis Of The Picnic Button 1918-1939, wherein it is argued that the picnic button was merely a so-called “spare button” taken to the picnic in case one of the participating ladies’ or gentlemen’s buttons became snagged on a thorn or similar pointy brambly bit of vegetation, and thus loosed, and thus detached, and thus lost, upon the ground, or in a puddle.

Dinsby, the picnic historian, fired back with a broadside arguing that such a button would only have ever been called a spare button, and not a picnic button. At time of writing [1962] the controversy has yet to be resolved.

And fifty years later, that remains the case. All I am able to say on the matter is based on my own experience. The week after Uncle Quentin’s funeral, I went on a picnic in the field where the charred remains of the wicker man still smouldered. I placed my heirloom picnic button on the edge of the picnic blanket. Before I even had time to remove from the hamper the cream crackers and sausages and cans of Squelcho!, down swooped a crow and snatched the button in its beak, and flew away into the wild blue yonder. I have not had the heart to have a picnic since that terrible day.

On My Panic Button

When she observed that I was boggle-eyed and twitching and panting, I explained to my lifestyle coach that I suffered from debilitating panic attacks.

By the way, if you do not have a lifestyle coach, I strongly recommend that you acquire one. Mine is peculiarly expensive, but I think some come at a discount. I can say without fear of contradiction that since hiring my lifestyle coach I have become a butterfly where once I was a caterpillar. I fly where once I crawled. Actually, it is not true that I say that without fear of contradiction. Plenty of people will line up to contradict me, to charge that I more closely resemble a creature crawling upon its belly upon the earth. Hence my panic attacks.

“What you need,” said my lifestyle coach, “is a panic button.”

Happily, she had a box full of such buttons in her desk drawer, and sold one to me there and then. It was peculiarly expensive, for a button, and there was no discount available.

When I got home, I sewed the button on to my jacket, roughly in the vicinity of my heart. The idea was that, whenever I felt a panic attack coming upon me, I should clutch at the button desperately. To avert the risk of ripping the button loose, in my desperation, I sewed it on using a good deal of extremely strong thread, as my lifestyle coach advised. I need hardly add that the jacket to which I chose to affix my panic button was of Tyrolean sports-casual cut, similar to that worn by Christopher Plummer in The Sound Of Music (Robert Wise, 1965). It is my jacket du jour, every jour.

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Tyrolean sports-casual jacket, prior to affixation of the panic button

Now it is a curious fact that many people think they know much about buttons without really knowing the first thing about them. To the untrained eye, for example, my panic button looked like a stray button inexplicably sewn on to my jacket more or less over where my heart was pounding like a steam hammer. The button-ignorant might posit the slapdash handiwork of a myopic or distracted sempstress. Thus, prancing along the boulevard in the autumnal sunshine for the first time since affixing my panic button, I was emotionally prepared for the barrage of catcalls and brickbats I was sure to receive. If and when an urchin pointed at my heart and shouted “Oi, mister! You’ve got a stray button there on your Tyrolean sports-casual jacket! Looks like it was sewn on by a half-blind sempstress!”, I would not need to clutch at my button in desperation to stave off a panic attack. Already it seemed to be working its magic, helping to keep a sense of gibbering terror welling up and undoing me.

As it happened, on that first outing with the panic button, I had no cause to clutch at it at all. It was if, with the reassurance of its presence, all the usual prods to my panic vanished. Louring clouds, misaligned paving slabs, yapping puppies, bookshop window displays piled high with Jeanette Winterson paperbacks . . . where usually I would shriek and stagger boggle-eyed and twitching and panting through the streets, I was a picture of calmness and insouciance. I may even have essayed a whistle, a chirpy tune half-remembered from a childhood jamboree.

On the corner of Ringo Starr Street and Erebus & Terror Mews, I bumped unexpectedly into my lifestyle coach. She was sitting on a bench feeding birds with stale bread from a greaseproof paper bag.

“I have to say,” I had to say, “This panic button you sold me is worth every penny! I have been out and about now for ten minutes and not once have I felt even the merest pang of panic. I have not had to clutch at it in desperation once!”

She turned her head to look at me and there was an eerie cast to her countenance.

“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag,” she said.

I looked at her more closely and realised she was not my lifestyle coach after all. Or, if she was, she had aged by several decades since I saw her the day before. I felt a sudden tremor of fear.

“Feed the birds, tuppence a bag, tuppence, tuppence, tuppence a bag,” she said again, gazing straight into my eyes with a look I could now see was a hideous admixture of amusement and fathomless malevolence.

Birds were swooping around us in teeming profusion, crows and linnets and sparrows and starlings and tippihedrens and peewits. Instinctively, I knew the moment had come to clutch at my panic button. But as I raised my hand towards my heart, where the button glittered on my Tyrolean sports-casual jacket, one of the birds swooped in and pecked it clean away. I had used extremely strong thread, but it was no match for the sharp savage beak of the crow. The bird flew up and up, carrying my panic button away into the sky, the sky where I ought to have been fluttering like a butterfly. Instead, in my panic I tottered and fell to the ground, upon misaligned paving slabs, down on my belly like a caterpillar. I clutched at the strand of broken thread where my button had been. My lifestyle coach, or the aged biddy who had taken her place, stood up from the bench, and trod upon the small of my back as she shambled away with her now empty greaseproof paper bag. The louring clouds broke, and a deluge poured down upon me. I was unbuttoned and undone.

On Maddened Janitors

Janitors can become maddened for a variety of reasons. It is important to learn to recognise the telltale signs, among which are an empurpled face, wild dishevelled hair, and grunting. If you find yourself in a locked building with a maddened janitor, the best thing to do is to confine him in a cupboard while you desperately seek a key to the locked door, thus allowing you to flee.

There are several accounts of people upending the janitor’s bucket and cramming it over his head. The idea seems to be that, robbed of sight, with an upturned bucket on his head, the maddened janitor will be rendered harmless. This is absolutely wrong. In these circumstances, the janitor merely becomes more maddened, and brandishes his mop the more menacingly, plodding sightless along the corridors of the locked building like unto a zombie. If he manages to corner you, and whack you on the bonce with his mop, you will fall unconscious, and when you awake you too will have become a maddened janitor, destined to roam the corridors and cubbies of the locked building forever more.

In any town or city you are likely to see buildings shuttered and abandoned, boarded up or slated for demolition. These are the haunts of whole colonies of maddened janitors, roaming eternally in the darkness. Sometimes one of them might stumble upon a bunch of keys, and rattle them, and seek to find a door they will unlock. To date, no maddened janitors have ever managed to escape into the open streets. It is thought they would perish at the instant of leaving their building, but nobody is quite sure. That is why boardings-up are made as fast as possible, not just with hardboard but with planks of wood and chains and electric alarm systems and, in some cases, patrolling dogs.

It can happen that one of the smaller and stupider patrol dogs will find its way into the building through a duct or flap. It is unlikely ever to emerge, for it will be set upon by the maddened janitors with their mops, and no matter how shrill its yapping, it is doomed. To what purpose the maddened janitors put the battered corpses of small and stupid patrol dogs is a matter of conjecture, one which we may not wish to dwell on if we are ever to get a good night’s sleep.

Several bright minds have pondered the possibility of somehow unmaddening a maddened janitor. Can they be proffered gifts, perhaps, to placate them? One brave researcher worked his way through a hamper full of possible offerings, including buns, biscuits, ice cubes, pre-stunned puppies, new mop handles, linctus, and feathers. The results varied. Maddened janitors by turns quaked, groaned, had convulsive fits, or thumped their heads repeatedly against walls. But not one was unmaddened.

It might be thought demolition of the building housing a maddened janitor colony would finish them off. But no. Often, from the rubble, in the night, groans can be heard, and the clank of mop handle against bucket, and the faint rattling of a bunch of keys. They are down there somewhere, furious now, madder than ever, waiting only to rise up. But as they cannot bear the open air, they wait, and wait, until such time as a new building rises in place of the old. Its gleaming new corridors and space age swishy automatic doors and CCTV cameras promise a new dispensation. Tenants are not hard to find, sprightly young dotcom startups for example.

One night, a few months after the company has moved in, an eager young whippersnapper is working late at his desk, sweeping his fingertips back and forth across the screen of his iFaff, generating a revenue stream. He is tiring, and in need of coffee, so heads off along the corridor to the hot drink dispenser. The only sound is the low hum of nocturnal light and power. As he approaches the machine he rummages in his pocket for coinage. The clinking of metal is enough to rouse, from the subterranean depths of the building, a maddened janitor. He is one who had a bucket upturned over his head. He brandishes his mop, and clambers from the pit, into the boiler room, and along the basement corridors, through the fuse cupboard, to the stairs. And up he comes, sightless because of his bucket, implacable, grunting, feeling his way forward with his outstretched mop. Were you there, a fly on the wall, you might just be able to see bits of small and stupid dog entangled in the strands of the mop.

The keen young web entrepreneur has made his selection from the numberless coffee choices available, and is listening to it hiss and glug into a paper cup. It is the last thing he will ever hear, because he is an inattentive young man who knows nothing of the hidden world.

But you do, now. And you will not be inattentive, as you trudge in the autumn rain along the boarded-up high streets of your dismal town. You will hurry your pace, your collar pulled up, puffing on a gasper, listening for the yap of patrol dogs, muttering a prayer.

On Cav And Pag

Cav and Pag went up the hill to sing a gorgeous aria. Cav fell down and broke his crown and Pag came tumbling after. Cav and Pag lay in the muck at the foot of the hill with dented heads. They sang a siren song, hoping to attract an ambulance with a proper blaring siren. This is a technique known as sympathetic singing. You sing making the sounds of what you wish for. It doesn’t always work, but today it did, and Cav and Pag were halfway through the second verse of their siren song when along came an ambulance. Its blaring siren drowned out their singing.

The paramedics deployed goo and bandages and pills and bundled Cav and Pag into the back of the ambulance. For bureaucratic reasons they were taken to two different clinics, Cav to a rustic wellbeing centre and Pag to a clown hospital. Lying in their beds, many miles apart, Cav and Pag sang a duet. Each could hear the other’s part through hidden earpieces. But other patients on their wards, hearing only half a song, grew restive, and chucked things at them, hoping thereby to shut them up. The rustic patients showered Cav with rotten fruit and vegetables, and the clowns chucked pails of water over Pag.

Both of them stopped singing, and now all they could hear in their hidden earpieces was a low electronic hum. Cav and Pag began to hum in unison, but this served to exasperate the sick and recuperating rustics and clowns even further. The rustics rang their bells and the clowns parped their hooters to summon brutes, who turfed Cav out of the rustic wellbeing centre and Pag out of the clown hospital more or less instantaneously.

The singers sat, with bandaged heads, on pathways many miles apart. They struck up another duet, a gorgeous one, and began, tentatively, to make their ways towards each other. Both had head injuries, and were somewhat disorientated, and discovered, as they staggered along their pathways, that their sense of balance had been affected, and they kept toppling over. Eventually the strain of singing and moving at the same time became too much. Cav lay down to rest in a ditch, and Pag found a park bench upon which to sprawl. They fell silent. Their earpieces hummed.

Unbeknown either to Cav or Pag, the humming of their earpieces was picked up by a Blötzmann mast towering over a top secret national security facility, a cluster of deceptively ramshackle huts surrounded by a tall wire fence. It took an operative sat at his scanner in one of the huts mere seconds to locate, precisely, Cav’s ditch and Pag’s park bench. Mere seconds later, a gate in the fence buzzed open and a pair of bulky armoured vehicles trundled out, their drivers taking them in opposite directions.

They picked Cav up first. He was asleep, and they injected him with a serum to ensure he did not wake. Pag proved less tractable. He had dozed, but was woken by birdsong, and when they came to get him he was clowning around, still bandaged, still disorientated. He tried to escape their clutches by doing pratfalls on banana skins. They had to Taser him.

Cav and Pag were held in separate but adjoining rooms in a subterranean part of the facility. Their hidden earpieces were removed and taken to a lab for analysis. Data was extracted and transferred to old fashioned magnetic tape. The resulting recordings were then piped in to their separate holding cells through huge loudspeakers. Sat on stools, provided with beakers of vitamin-enhanced tap water, Cav was made to listen to Pag and Pag to Cav.

At first, they heard a gorgeous aria. But at the control desk in the Blötzmannite nerve centre, a sinister operative began a series of tape manipulations he had learned from various argumentative German composers in the 1950s. Cav and Pag heard each other backwards, at double speed, with distorted pitch, and with all sorts of other modifications. And always, as a running undertone, that electronic hum.

Their brains were already dislodged from their tumblings down the hill, and the tape recordings served only to derange them further. On day six, when they were taken out of their holding cells, both Cav and Pag, though outwardly right as rain, their bandages removed, were inwardly doolally.

It was at this point they were taken back to the foot of the hill, and injected with a serum that put them back to sleep. When they awoke, in the muck, they would remember nothing. Their tumblings, their broken crowns, the paramedics, the clinics, the rustics and clowns and rotten fruit and vegetables and pails of water and the top secret facility, the manipulated tape recordings, all forgotten.

Cav woke first, and shook Pag to wake him too. They rubbed their heads, in consternation and perplexity rather than from any physical cause.

“I am not sure where we are,” sang Cav, gorgeously, “But I feel curiously impelled, impelled, oh! impelled, tra-la, tra-lee, to go to Dallas, Texas.”

“Me too, me too, me too!” sang Pag, equally gorgeously.

“I shall take a Mannlicher-Carcano sniper’s rifle with me, to the Texas Schoolbook Depositor-eee!” sang Cav.

“And I shall keep watch, holding an umbrella, upon the grassy knoll, fol de rol!” sang Pag.

And so the pair set out on their journey, and they climbed every mountain and forded every stream, singing their hearts out, oh so gorgeously.

On Owls

I Heard The Owl Call My Name was a bestseller in the 1970s, alongside such now neglected titles as Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance. What all three had in common was a concern with the ultimate meaning of existence, or at least the meaning of existence in the specific context of blissed-out self-obsessed post-hippy North America. I actually read the latter two titles, in my misguided teendom, though thankfully I seem to have recovered from the experience with no ill effects. But I never got round to I Heard The Owl Call My Name, and thus it continues to intrigue me. Well, not to a debilitating extent. I do not wake up every morning fretting about it, nor have I sought to obtain a copy. What intrigues me is the title.

The book was written by Margaret Craven. Now, over the years I have listened to numberless owls, and not one of them has ever uttered the cry “Margaret Craven”, nor any sound remotely akin to it, no matter how strangulated the voice in which we pronounce it in an attempt to mimic an owl. Aha!, I hear you say, but I Heard The Owl Call My Name is a novel, is it not?, so perhaps the name the owl calls is that of a fictional narrator, rather than of a non-fictional author. This is a persuasive argument until one does a spot of research and discovers that the book concerns a dying Anglican vicar named Mark Brian. Again, “Mark Brian” is not by any stretch of the imagination the sort of sound made by any owl it has ever been my pleasure to hear, as I crunch through the duff on the forest floor in the dead of night, my lantern occasionally picking out the fugitive sight of a small scurrying mammal, its heart pounding in terror. It is in such a place, at such a time, that one is likely to hear owls hooting.

We use the onomatopoeic word “hoot” to represent the call of an owl, or, if we are writing a children’s book, we might deploy “too-wit, too-woo”. We will not, ever, use “Margaret Craven” or “Mark Brian”, and if we ever had a dramatic brain-embranglement and did so, we would befuddle our readers utterly, to the point where they would probably toss our book aside in exasperation, and who would blame them for so doing?

Now as I say, I have not read the book, so there is every possibility that perhaps the dying vicar has a parishioner named Biff Hoot or Ted Toowit or Sacheverell Toowoo, and it is this person who hears their name called by the owl, while crunching through the duff on the forest floor in the dead of night, their lantern occasionally picking out the fugitive sight of a small scurrying mammal, its heart pounding in terror. Biff, or Ted, or Sacheverell then scampers to the church to tell the vicar of this exciting turn of events, and to seek his judicious religious advice on what it might portend, in terms of the meaning of existence, only to find the vicar sprawled on the floorboards in front of the altar, dying.

Why is he dying? Has he been attacked by owls, pecking at him with their beaks and slashing at him with their talons? Owls are more likely to set upon the small scurrying mammals in the nocturnal forest, rather than a human vicar in a candlelit church. So what might account for such a palaver? It could be that, rather than being a stereotypical beardy Anglican vicar, Mark Brian is an effeminate cross-dressing vicar who bears a startling resemblance to Tippi Hedren. In this scenario, the owls would simply be attempting to reenact a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s documentary The Birds (1963). Or we might posit that, on the other side of the forest there is a sinister military-industrial hazchem facility, leakage from which the owls have been exposed to, transforming them from common or garden owls to science fiction monster owls of unbridled savagery.

His life ebbing away, the vicar moans weakly for help, at which point Biff or Ted or Sacheverell comes scampering up the nave. He cradles Mark Brian’s torn and bloody head in his arms, and whispers, “I heard the owl call my name”. The vicar’s eyelids flutter and his breath rattles. Does he still have strength enough to speak, and to reveal to his needy parishioner the ultimate meaning of existence? We would hope so, this being a 1970s bestseller.

I Heard The Owl Call My Name (1967) predates both Jonathan Livingston Seagull (1970) and Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). Could it be that both Richard Bach and Robert M. Pirsig were shameless plagiarists? Is the wisdom in their books lifted wholesale from Margaret Craven, who has the dying vicar vouchsafe to Biff or Ted or Sacheverell what it all means?

“You say the owl called your name?”, he gasps, “It is a sign. I understand the language of owls, and I think I know what it would have said next had you stayed to listen, instead of sprinting pell mell out of the forest and through the village and into the church and along the nave to come and cradle me in your arms in my dying moments.”

Biff or Ted or Sacheverell dabs at the vicar’s brow with a dampened rag, trying his best to comfort him, desperate to keep him alive long enough that he might impart the wisdom of the owl.

“You must repair your motorcycle,” groans Mark Brian, “And you must zoom upon it down to the seaside. There you will find a different form of bird life, seagulls rather than owls. The seagull will not call your name. It will swoop and scavenge and soar. Watch it carefully, in the dappled sunlight. Then…”

But before he can complete the sentence – and thus divulge the ultimate meaning of 1970s existence – the vicar collapses and dies.

I hope this is an adequate summary of a book I have never read. If it isn’t, it damned well ought to be.