Are You Being Savaged?

Are You Being Savaged? was a popular television situation comedy in the 1970s. It was set in an eerie and mist-enshrouded forest clearing, where a cast of regular characters were attacked by a variety of wild beasts. Much of the humour derives from the attempts of the cast to fight off savage and blood-crazed panthers, lions, bears, etcetera, armed only with a tape measure.

Among the show’s memorable catchphrases were “Unhand me, you brute!”, “Eek! My windpipe has just been slashed by the razor-sharp claws of a wild hog!” and “Let’s put the kettle on for a nice piping hot cup of tea”.

Today DVD copies of the first two series are particularly popular with zoo monkeys.

Serpents

Emmett lived in a trailer park out by the airport. I took a back road and ran over a dead snake on the way. Louise turned to me. “You just drove right over that snake.”

“That was an old broken fan belt.”

“It was white on the bottom. Do you think I don’t know a snake when I see one?”

I told her he was already dead and that women were easily taken in by serpents.

Charles Portis, Gringos (1991)

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Auction

It is fundraising week at ResonanceFM, and I do encourage you to empty your bank account accordingly. There is the annual auction of enticing things, not least of which is a copy of the legendary Malice Aforethought Press paperback Twitching And Shattered, signed by Mr Key just the other day. Do remember that Resonance is a shoestring operation, that none of us who make the programmes get paid a penny, and that without your support the whole thing will go down the drain. Be generous!

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Papist Dabbling

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Over at The Dabbler this week I offer some advice to the conclave of cardinals before they gather to elect a new Pontiff. I would quite like to be Pope myself, standing on a balcony bestowing blessings upon a throng of the faithful. Alas, I am afraid that just at the time the redhats gather in Rome I shall be rejoining the international jet set and heading off in the opposite direction, bent on important Hooting Yard business in the New World. Further details to follow, but any fanatical devotees who are in New York City on the fourth of March may wish to clear their diaries.

Specks In The Sky

While I struggle manfully with a patch of desolate-wasteland-between-the-ears syndrome, here is another blast from the past, from this day exactly seven years ago. I have made a few little amendments, as is my whim:

A letter arrives from our Antipodean researcher Glyn Webster.

Dear Uncle Dan : Recently my dreams have been full of boredom and drudgery. The work is hard, the company is dull and I’m thoroughly relieved to open my eyes in the morning. Sometimes I wake up to find myself hauling my body out of the bed the way a shipwrecked sailor might haul himself ashore. What is happening to me? Yours in all simplicity, Glyn.

Devoted Hooting Yard readers may remember Uncle Dan, who used to pen a column here entitled Ask Uncle Dan. He was always generous with his advice on matters such as leeks, vim, and an old bag full of crocuses, and you can revisit his wise words by checking under ‘A’ in the 2003-2006 Archival Index.

Alas, this doyen of agony uncles is no longer with us. I always wondered what had happened to him, and coincidentally, on the very day Mr Webster’s letter arrived, the post person’s sack also contained this missive:

Dear Mr Key : You don’t know me, and I prefer to remain anonymous. I can tell you that I have a waxed moustache, but I hope you will not take the same view as Robert Baden-Powell, who wrote ‘I was once accused of mistrusting men with waxed moustaches. Well, so, to a certain extent, I do. It often means vanity and sometimes drink.’

I am not vain. I drink only lukewarm tap water, dandelion and burdock, and occasionally Tizer. I try not to preen my moustache overmuch, but I confess that waxing it has always been a small pleasure of mine, and Lord knows I deserve a small measure of pleasure, as who does not?

But to business! I am writing to you to pass on greetings from a fellow I met up in the hills last Thursday. Like me, he was unwilling to divulge his name, but he said that you would know who he was. He was dressed in billowing cloth which looked as if once it had been a parachute or part of a parachute, and his face had the pallor of bean curd. He too, sported a waxed moustache, but I did not smell drink on his breath, nor did he seem to be puffed up with vanity. It makes one wonder if Baden-Powell had any kind of grip on reality, quite frankly.

Anyway, as I say, we were up in the hills, this fellow and I. He was standing upright on a boulder, peering intently at a speck in the sky in the far distance. ‘What do you see?’ I asked, when I was close enough for him to hear me above the wild and wailing wind. For answer, he merely pointed, and I turned to look at the unmoving speck. Neither of us had binoculars, more’s the pity.

‘I hear the sound of mandolins,’ he said suddenly, in a voice which, curiously, reminded me of television presenter Dale Winton, ‘For wild is the wind. As for what I see, look!, that speck is what I see. I have been watching it for three hours and it has not moved. It is a very mysterious speck.’

I offered him a plum from my fruit-bag, but he refused it because, he said, it was bruised, and he would not eat bruised plums. Instead, he took a Surgeon’s Biscuit from some pocket or pouch concealed within his billowing cloth, and began chewing on it. The wind was howling with even more violence now, and I bid the man come shelter with me in an ornithologist’s hide I knew of not a hundred paces away. He jumped down from his perch on the boulder with surprising sprightliness, and then took me by the arm. It was an overfamiliar yet somehow reassuring gesture.

And so we sat in the hide, me with my plums and he with his biscuits, and we waited for the wind in the hills to die down. To pass the time, we played a game of Tea Strainers, improvising with broken twigs.

When we parted, an hour or so later, he returned to his boulder and pointed out that the unmoving speck was still there. I looked, but now I could not see it. I preened my moustache and said farewell, but not before promising to write to you. Yours faithfully, Mister X.

There is no doubt in my mind that the man my anonymous correspondent met in the hills was Uncle Dan. He was always seeing still specks in the sky that were invisible to almost everyone else, and was forever lamenting that, in all his years as an agony uncle, no one wrote to him reporting a similar experience. I once asked him how he would reply, if someone did, and he muttered something in his Dale Winton voice about paralysed chaffinches caught and cushioned in air pockets.

As for Glyn Webster’s heartfelt plea, I have placed it in a cardboard box along with many other unanswered letters to Uncle Dan. One day he may return to us, in his billowing cloth, with his waxed moustache and his pallor of bean curd, and his mighty, towering wisdom.

Vile Mud And Weeds

From the archives, this postage first appeared seven years ago today, on 13 February 2006:

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Almost exactly two years ago, on 13 March 2004 to be precise, our quote of the day was by William Hope Hodgson, from From The Tideless Sea. To jog your memories, he wrote

I am writing this in the saloon of the sailing ship, Homebird, and writing with but little hope of human eye ever seeing that which I write; for we are in the heart of the dread Sargasso Sea – the Tideless Sea of the North Atlantic. From the stump of our mizzen mast, one may see, spread out to the far horizon, an interminable waste of weed – a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness!

When I chose the quotation I was unfamiliar with the work of Hodgson, a state of affairs which continued, shamefully, until just a few days ago. I am indebted to Tim Gadd for drawing my attention to this superb writer and encouraging me to immerse myself in the slimy, weed-choked pages of his books.

William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918) was an author, photographer, sailor, and body-builder, who wrote four novels before concentrating on short fiction. He was killed in the First World War. H. P. Lovecraft was an admirer, praising his “serious treatment of unreality,” and the critic Sam Gafford notes “his apparently inexplicable choice of writing styles” in an essay entitled Writing Backwards.

Reading his first published novel, The Boats Of The ‘Glen Carrig’, I was struck by something else ‘apparently inexplicable’. The story purports to be

an account of [the boats’] Adventures in the Strange places of the Earth, after the foundering of the good ship ‘Glen Carrig’ through striking upon a hidden rock in the unknown seas to the Southward, As told by John Winterstraw, Gent., to his son James Winterstraw, in the year 1757, and by him committed very properly and legibly to manuscript

so what we get is a thrilling yarn wherein the narrator recounts coming ashore in the Land of Lonesomeness. . .

we found it to be of an abominable flatness, desolate beyond all that I could have imagined… in the end, we found… a slimy-banked creek… the banks being composed of a vile mud

. . . before heading off to an island on a weed-choked sea where the bulk of the tale takes place. As in From The Tideless Sea, the setting is thus an interminable waste of weed – a treacherous, silent vastitude of slime and hideousness!

Lurking in the weeds are various disgusting creatures which our heroes fight off and outwit, in between doing boat repairs. But is there any other writer who would take pains to mention every single occasion his characters break off for a meal? Until the end, where several weeks’ action is summarised, the narrative takes us day by day, and Hodgson regularly reassures us that the castaways are getting proper meals.

I did some basic word-count analysis on the novel, and Hodgson’s focus of attention became clear. It is indeed a weed-choked book – weed, and enticing variants such as the weed-continent, appear 223 times (in a 60,000-word text). Considering that our narrator and his curiously anonymous pals spend much time in terror of the various disgusting creatures I mentioned, it is no surprise to find hideous, monsters, and tentacles accounting for a total of 51 words. Yet breakfast, dinner, and food win the day with 53. And as it seems de rigueur to have a puff after every meal, smoke is mentioned 15 times.

I have just begun reading Hodgson’s second novel, The House On The Borderland, and sure enough, by page three,

Tonnison had got the stove lit now and was busy cutting slices of bacon into the frying pan.

I hope an enterprising publisher reissues Hodgson’s works, if one has not already done so, but I would dearly like to see The William Hope Hodgson Recipe Book, a boon for any picnic-person in a silent vastitude of slime and hideousness!

A Small Nice Pig And Mysterious East German Sausages

Yesterday I came upon two phrases, the one spoken and the other written. I overheard a reference to “a small nice pig”, and I read the words “mysterious East German sausages”. Given that the pig was “nice”, I can only hope that it did not end up as a constituent part of the sausages.

The contexts of both phrases need not concern us, and in any case I shall soon forget them, given the parlous state of my memory. Ideally, I would construct texts around both the small nice pig and the mysterious East German sausages, use them as springboards for flights of invention, embed them within sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose. One day, one day . . .

For the time being, rather than scribbling them in a jotting pad, I decided to share them with you lot, by giving them a postage of their own, which will also act as an aide memoire. You will encounter them both again, of that there is little doubt.

On Why I Should Be The Next Pope

So, having previously explained why I should have been the next Archbishop of Canterbury and why I was the obvious choice to be the next Director General of the BBC, I will no doubt be asked to explain why I should be the next Pope. Do I really need to argue my case? Has the world collapsed to the extent that it is even necessary for me to stake my claim? I mean, isn’t it blindingly obvious that I would be absolutely the finest Pontiff you could imagine? I shall sit by my metal tapping machine and await the call from the conclave of cardinals, and while I wait I shall give due consideration to the pontifical name I shall adopt. Readers may have their own suggestions of course, which you may wish to note in the comments.

Meanwhile, it appears that these very sensible persons of the Islamic persuasion were correct after all. . .

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Glob Song

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(To the tune of Oh Bring Me Your Winding-Sheet, Mother Of Mine)

My name is P.V.Glob
I wrote a book about a bog
“Bog” spelled backwards is “Gob”
And that is the name of my dog

In Russian, “God” is “Bog”
And my dog Gob’s a dog-god
He sleeps all day like a log
For a dog he’s a lazy sod

I walk Gob to the bog
To wake him from his snooze
I can’t see the bog for the fog
But I hear the cows’ plaintive moos

There are, you see, cows near the bog
And one of them is a cow-god
A god like Gog and Magog
Gods who are really quite odd

So slumped in the muck by the bog
Invisible because of the fog
There’s me, the writer P.V.Glob
And my little pet doggie, Gob

He is by no means a fearsome hound
Wait! What’s that uncanny sound?
It’s the sound of the cow-god’s bog-side mooing
The sound of my and Gob’s undoing.

Who Was Captain Nitty?

Who was Captain Nitty? Interestingly enough, it is a question that has never been asked before. In the long march of humankind, from primeval swamps to space age fabness, nobody has ever wanted to know who exactly this Captain Nitty person actually was. That should tell us something, but what? It might tell us that Captain Nitty was an almost staggeringly insignificant figure. It might tell us that he never actually existed and is mere figment.

Note those figs. Fig-ure, and fig-ment. We are all familiar, I think, from our picture books, with “Fig. 1” or “Fig. A.” Sometimes, depending on the nature of the book, a Fig. might be a Plate. How much easier it would be to answer our question if we had a Fig. or a Plate depicting Captain Nitty. If that were the case, we could simply point at the picture and say, “There! That is Captain Nitty,” and all curiosity – if indeed there were any – would be satisfied, and we could go off and do something else, something perhaps of more import, such as circumnavigating a duckpond, or visiting an owl sanctuary.

But, just as nobody has ever cared to ask who Captain Nitty was, nor has anybody ever bothered to depict him, whether in pen and ink or daubs of paint or by mechanical means such as a camera or Blötzmannscope. Even the noted mezzotintist Rex Tint never made a mezzotint of Captain Nitty, possibly because nobody was ever prepared to pay the fat fee demanded by Rex Tint for one of his mezzotints.

In the absence of a Fig. or a Plate, then, how are we to go about answering the question? Is there a potted biography to which we might refer? “Potted”, in this sense, does not mean literally that the biography is to be found planted in a pot, like, say, an aspidistra. We must not get in a muddle about all these figs and plates and pots. If we confuse them with actual figs, and actual plates, and actual pots, our brains are likely to overheat as we struggle to comprehend what we are talking about. If such overheating does occur – and there are times when it does, it does – then a circumnavigation of the duckpond, or a visit to an owl sanctuary, is a splendid coolant.

Brain duly cooled, however, we are still at something of a loss regarding Captain Nitty, as we have discovered, to our horror – and that is not too strong a word – that no potted biography of him exists. We ought of course to realise this. For someone to have written a biography, potted or otherwise, they would first have had to ask the question “Who was Captain Nitty?”, albeit silently, to themselves, and we already know that it is an unasked question.

There are of course innumerable other questions which have never been asked, ever, by anybody. How do you boil an ostrich-head?, for example, or Were the tears of Saint Veronica used as a gum for postage stamps? We could witter away until the cows come home compiling a list of untold thousands of unasked questions, but to do so would bring us no closer to knowing who Captain Nitty was, would it?

“Would” has the same pronunciation as “wood”, but again we must avoid getting all befuddled about wood, as with figs and plates and pots. Generally, we should always be on our guard against befuddlement. I should cocoa.

The Four Soups

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In a comment on yesterday’s postage about Nixonian soup hatred, Salim Fadhley asks the intriguing question if the serving of shark’s fin soup at a dinner on the President’s state visit to China in 1972 prompted one of his “six crises”. We shall overlook the fact that Nixon published his book of that title ten years earlier, in 1962, and we shall also overlook the fact that Mr Fadhley’s question is easily answered, either by reading the book itself or, if the prospect of hundreds of pages of Nixonian prose does not appeal, a summary of its contents which can be found on the wikipedia. We will soon learn that the shark’s fin soup did not pose a crisis for Nixon, or at least not one of the six he wrote about.

But that is so disappointing, is it not? I would prefer to think that there is another book by Nixon, entitled perhaps Soup Crises, in which the thirty-seventh Potus describes in dramatic and unflinching detail the various soup crises he had to face. If, in the course of his life, there were only four soup crises, then an alternative title for the book could be The Four Soups. Happily, this is an anagram of House Of Turps, an out of print pamphlet by Mr Key. Could it be that I was anagrammatically channelling Nixon in 1989? I must consult a brain quack to delve into this important question.

No More Soup, Ever

We already knew about Richard Milhous Nixon’s love of mashed potatoes. Now, thanks to Salim Fadhley, we learn of his diametrically opposite view of soup. Mr Fadhley pointed me to this passage from President Nixon : Alone In The White House by Richard Reeves (2001):

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. . .on March 24 [1969], the President hosted his first state dinner, for Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau of Canada. He complained to Haldeman about it the next morning : “We’ve got to speed up these dinners. They take forever. So why don’t we just leave out the soup course?”

“Well. . .” Haldeman began.

Nixon cut him off : “Men don’t really like soup.”

On a hunch, the chief of staff called the President’s valet, Manolo Sanchez, and asked : “Was there anything wrong with the President’s suit after that dinner last night?”

“Yes. He spilled soup down the vest.”

The action memo went out : No more soup, ever.

More About Pebblehead’s Typewriter

The picture of Pebblehead’s typewriter posted yesterday prompted a bulging postbag, with numerous readers clamouring for further particulars of the bestselling paperbackist’s working practices. Among the commoner questions were: How does Pebblehead manage to bash out so many potboilers? How many typewriters does he get through in an average week? Is he capable of writing a word without having that pipe, crammed with acrid Serbian tobacco, clamped between his teeth? Does he employ a team of monkey typists?

I was about to write, “Alas, we may never know…”, when all of a sudden, a moment ago, Alan the postal crow flew in through the crow-vent with a press release clutched in his beak. I gave him some millet, and he relinquished the paper, upon which the following was printed, by the looks of it on a wonky Gestetner machine:

Raymond Roussel told us How I Wrote Certain Of My Books in 1932. Now, Pebblehead promises to tell us How I Wrote Certain Of My Potboilers. This will undoubtedly be the publishing sensation of 2013, or 2014, or whenever Pebblehead manages to deliver the manuscript, in between bashing out hundreds more potboilers and destroying quite a few typewriters in the process, while monkeys cavort around him in his chalet o’ prose.

Sucking on his pipe, its bowl stuffed with acrid Serbian tobacco, the bestselling paperbackist said: “Begone, Krishnan Guru-Murthy! I have no idea what you and your camera crew from Channel 4 News think you’re doing, camped out in front of my chalet o’ prose. You are interrupting the creative process of the most tireless potboilerist in the world, and if you do not leave immediately I shall have you set upon by Alpine zombies in tattered Nazi uniforms brandishing ray guns from outer space!”

If and when How I Wrote Certain Of My Potboilers is ever actually published, review copies will be sent out via Alan the postal crow. Make sure your crow-vent is clear and free from sordid and unseemly detritus, bones of voles, etcetera.