He was out by the tar pits, as usual, thinking hard about tar, as usual. Tar occupied his thoughts when he went to the tar pits, but the rest of the time he could dismiss it, tar, from his head. He was a carrot-top, and he smelled of fresh-mown grass.

Tar is a product of the destructive distillation of organic substances. It is a highly complex material, varying in its composition according to the nature of the body from which it is distilled, different products, moreover, being obtained according to the temperature at which the process of distillation is carried on. As commercial products there are two principal classes of tar in use – wood tar, the product of the special distillation of several varieties of wood, and coal tar, which is primarily a by-product of the distillation of coal during the manufacture of gas for illuminating purposes.. These tars are intimately related to bitumen, asphalt, mineral pitch and petroleum.

He knew all this, and the more he thought about it, the more his head became tar-filled, almost up to the brim. It was a relief to lollop over to the pier and to board the waiting paddle-steamer, and to chug along the wide important river, all the way home. For a paddle-steamer snack, he had a blood orange in a paper bag.

He leaned on the rail, eating his snack and keeping an eye on the riverbank in hope of spotting an otter. When he was not at the tar pits, thinking about tar, much of his time was spent trying to devise a working otter-scanner. He envisioned some sort of contraption to be worn on his head, with a visor that could be lowered, with viewfinders attached, and a hand-held control panel, with lights and buzzers. Was there a riverbank creature more glorious than the otter? He thought not.

Yet the pull of the tar pits was irresistible. Sometimes, as soon as he disembarked at the pier close to home, he turned tail and reboarded the paddle-steamer and went straight back. Then he thought hard about wood tar. Wood tar, known also as Stockholm and as Archangel tar, is principally prepared in the great pine forests of central and northern Russia, Finland and Sweden. The material chiefly employed is the resinous stools and roots of the Scotch fir and the Siberian larch, with other less common fir-tree roots. A large amount of tar is also prepared from the roots of the swamp pine in North and South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama, in the United States. In the distillation of wood a series of products, including gas, tar, pyroligneous acid, acetone, wood spirit and charcoal may be obtained, and any of these may be the primary object of the operation.

He had never been to any of those places, to Russia or Finland or Sweden, to North or South Carolina or Georgia or Alabama in the United States. He had never been anywhere really, save for along the wide important river from his home to the tar pits and back. But he had no Wanderlust. And he was a moral cretin.

A portion of fruit in a paper bag was his favourite snack. He did not care much which fruit. He used the same paper bag day in day out until it was tattered and torn and fell to bits. Then he asked the greengrocer for a fresh paper bag. The greengrocer was a huge beast of a man with a florid face and one withered arm, and he did not give out paper bags willy nilly. But he liked to hear tales of tar.

Wood tar is used in medicine under the name of Fix liquida. Its preparation unguentum picis liquidae is composed of wood tar and yellow beeswax. Externally tar is a valuable stimulating dressing in scaly skin diseases, such as psoriasis and chronic eczema. Internally wood tar is a popular remedy as an expectorant in subacute and chronic bronchitis. It is usually given as tar water, one part of wood tar being stirred into four parts of water and filtered. Given internally tar is likely to upset the digestion; taken in large quantities it causes pain and vomiting and dark urine, symptoms similar to carbolic acid poisoning.

That is what he told the greengrocer when applying for his most recent new paper bag. It was a hot Thursday in August and he had some bright ideas in his head about the otter-scanner. He bought a Carlsbad plum to go in his new paper bag and headed towards the pier. Ah! Sweet mystery of life! At last I’ve found thee. Ah! I know at last the secret of it all! All the longing, seeking, striving, waiting, yearning, the burning hopes, the joy and idle tears that fall. Tar and otters! Otters and tar!

The “tar” found in tar pits is not actually tar.

The heavy bear who goes with me, a manifold honey to smear his face, clumsy and lumbering here and there, I wish I could say what kind of bear he is. Others, no doubt, could tell you, but I am afraid I am a trembling bundle of ursine ignorance. I have no idea which pigeonhole to put this bear into.

What I do know is that I am wholly responsible for it. I know this because the bear came to me in a dream, and in dreams begin responsibilities. It was a vivid dream, perhaps because, shortly before resting my head on the pillow, I had tucked into an enormous sandwich in which many a pickle had been inserted, pickles of all kinds. I know more about pickles than I do about bears, but this is neither the time nor the place for pickle matters.

In my dream, I think it was the year 1909, and I felt as if I were in a motion picture theatre, the long arm of light crossing the darkness and spinning, my eyes fixed on the screen. It was a silent picture, as if an old Biograph one, in which the actors are dressed in ridiculously old-fashioned clothes, and one flash succeeds another with sudden jumps. The actors too seem to jump about and walk too fast. The shots themselves are full of dots and rays, as if it were raining when the pictures were photographed. The light is bad. It was that kind of film.

Suddenly, among all these jumping actors, lumbered into view the heavy bear, the central ton of every place, the hungry beating brutish one in love with candy, anger, and sleep. Our eyes met, and I felt – oh so vividly – that from now on, until one of us died, this bear was my responsibility. Which is all very well in the world of dreams, but gave me something of a start when I woke up and found the bear, all too heavy and solid and, good heavens!, real, slumped at the foot of my bed.

I squeaked in fear, but soon enough learned there was nothing to be frightened of. It is a very placid bear, all things considered, except for those times when it is dishevelling all and climbing buildings and kicking footballs and boxing its brother bears in the hate-filled city. But it has never laid a paw on me. Indeed, it seems to take great pains to be helpful, acting like a crazy factotum.

It has proved to be an interesting few weeks, getting used to having my every footstep dogged by a heavy bear. It has certainly caused a bit of a rumpus in social situations, and on public transport. It had never before occurred to me that bears were not welcome on buses. Given the behaviour of a number of human passengers, this seems a huge injustice. I have tried to explain to bus drivers that the bear is my responsibility, and goes with me everywhere, but they are not willing to listen. So we have done a heck of a lot of walking, me and my bear, up hill and down dale and along all those lanes that the buses ply.

I am so tired at the end of each day that I have sworn off pickle sandwiches, but I still find it hard to sleep. This is because, breathing at my side, that heavy animal, that heavy bear who sleeps with me, howls in his sleep for a world of sugar. This despite the fact that I have made a complete change to my breakfast – or, as our Flemish pals call it, het ontbijt – diet. No more eggs and sausages and smokers’ poptarts for me! I have been buying enormous quantities of Sugar Puffs, dozens of cartons at a time. For those of you unfamiliar with British breakfast cereal brands, Sugar Puffs are made from sugar-coated wheat flavoured with honey, by the Quaker Oats company. My bear seems to like them, and in fact it has been feeding on Sugar Puffs for lunch and dinner and supper as well as breakfast. But it still howls in its sleep. And it is getting heavier.

I am stuck with my bear, and I am not complaining. But I noticed in the paper the other day that the local fleapit has a screening next week of an old Biograph motion picture called Actors In Ridiculously Old-Fashioned Clothes, Jumping About And Walking Too Fast In Dots And Rays, With A Bear! (Horst Gack, 1909). I wonder what will happen to my bear when it sees itself up on the screen. It came to me in a dream. Will it abandon me when it sees the dream? Will it take responsibility for itself, and find its own Sugar Puffs? I will let you know.

[With apologies to Delmore Schwartz.]

A letter arrives from Kimika Ying:

Dear Mr. Key : I came across the following picture today which struck me as remarkably familiar, and words from one of your earlier writings came to mind:

“Each Saturday morning, I don the diving helmet and cycle fourteen voots to a bucolic hamlet..”

You may well have seen this photo before, but while it was on my mind I wanted to take a moment to thank you for making the world a more surreal place. Listening to Hooting Yard is always a pleasure.

I had not seen the picture before, and nor did I recall the piece Ms Ying quoted – not surprisingly, as it is nine years old, appearing here in March 2004. Here are both the photograph (from this source) and my elderly tale, What’s On In Mustard Parva.

My diving helmet is made of gleaming brass. I polish it once a week, on Friday afternoons. Each Saturday morning, I don the diving helmet and cycle fourteen voots to a bucolic hamlet called Mustard Parva.

(Curiously, there is no neighbouring village named Mustard Magna, although a rustic barnyard person I met while drinking a pot of gaar in the local gaar-pot drinking hut told me that there had once been such a place. In the year of his birth, this toothless derelict said, the sizeable cluster of wooden buildings known as Mustard Magna had been invaded by a sloth of bears, many hundreds of them, driven insane by ergot poisoning, each bear capable of destroying a humble peasant dwelling with a single thwack from its mighty paw. Two hours after the first bear lumbered across Sawdust Bridge, the village was completely obliterated. It is still shown on some maps.)

Jamming my bicycle into a kiosk on Mustard Parva’s Yoko Ono Boulevard, I join six or seven other diving helmet enthusiasts for our weekly meeting. Huddled together in the upstairs room of a building fast succumbing to dry rot, we discuss our diving helmets and take lamentably inaccurate minutes which are published regularly through the good offices of the Mustard Parva Thing, whose editor is none other than the blind cousin of Marigold Chew.

Source : The Belle of Amherst & Other Essays Written During An Unprecedented Pea-souper by Dobson (limited edition of three copies, unsigned, bound in tat, and coated with a foul-smelling medicament concocted by Dr Fang)

There is a fictional character named, somewhat foolishly, “Ziggy Stardust”, the creation of a one-time student of mime named David Bowie. Among the attributes of Mr Stardust, we are told that he is “like a leper messiah”. I wondered if there was a real, non-fictional leper messiah Mr Bowie had in mind, or, given that he uses the indefinite rather than the definite article, whether there might actually be several such messiahs, languishing in leper colonies across the globe. One way to find out would be to make a tour of leper colonies, where they still exist, in countries including India, China, Romania, Egypt, Nepal, Somalia, Liberia, Vietnam, and Japan.

Before planning such an arduous itinerary, I did some background reading on Mr Bowie, and I discovered that he had often expressed an interest in the last-named of those nations, Japan. Somewhere he spoke of being “under Japanese influence” and elsewhere of “pictures of Jap girls in synthesis”. I also learned that he had once been buried up to his neck when pretending to be an inmate of a Second World War Japanese prisoner of war camp. These clues were enough for me to dismiss any thought of travelling to India, China, Romania, Egypt, Nepal, Somalia, Liberia, or Vietnam, and to focus all my attention on the land of the rising sun. It seemed fairly clear that, if there were indeed one or more leper messiahs, they were almost certainly to be found in a Japanese leper colony.

Impatient to proceed with my quest, I jumped into a Japanese car and told the driver to take me to the airport. Instead, he drove me to a forest in the Japanese car, and left a hole in the back of my head, hiding in the foliage and peat. It was wet and I was losing my body heat. Mr Bowie spoke of his honour being at stake when he was under Japanese influence, but for me it was more a case of injured pride, or nearly. And to make matters worse, I was nowhere near Japan, nowhere near even the airport. What price now my important research into Japanese leper messiahs?

Anyway, stumbling through the foliage, I came upon some picnickers. Along with their hamper and rug and folding chairs and cans of wasp repellant, they had a cassette deck. It was playing poptones. I cocked an ear and listened carefully, hoping it might be one of Mr Bowie’s songs about Mr Stardust, but alas it was not.

“Good afternoon,” I said to the picnickers, or rather shouted, to make myself heard above the din of poptones, “This is something of a long shot, but I don’t suppose you all hail from a nearby leper colony?”

“Actually, we do,” said one, munching on a sausage. I was both pleased and surprised to note that he was of decidedly oriental appearance. Indeed, in spite of the rain, he was wearing a kimono.

“May I join your picnic?” I asked, “I am famished.”

“Wait a moment,” he said, “We shall have to ask permission.”

“From whom?” I asked.

He pointed towards a tent which had been erected some yards away to the east.

“Our Almighty Lord and Master dwells within that tent,” he said, “We must seek his guidance in all things, including whether you may join us in our picnicking.” He swallowed another chunk of sausage.

Oh still my beating heart! Could it be that I had somehow located the leper messiah, picnicking in the British countryside?

“May I come into the tent with you?” I asked.

“I am afraid not,” said the Japanese picnic leper, “But you may wait at the tent flap.”

So I did, and quite against protocol I took the opportunity to peek inside. And I was astounded by what I saw. The leper messiah was not Japanese after all! There, in the gloom of the tent, I saw, dressed in scarlet and grey, sitting beside a telly, with his tiny hands on his tummy, chuckling away, a leprous, laughing gnome!

After they scooped out most of my vital innards, the surgeons replaced them, bish bosh, with artificial substitutes made from an amalgam of rubber and wire and tin and concrete. Then they sealed up the slicings they had made earlier, lifted me from the operating table and placed me into some sort of translucent jelly pod. There was a blinding flash of light, and the next thing I knew I was back in bed, in my pyjamas, in my chalet. I unbuttoned my pyjama jacket, expecting to see scars, but I was completely unmarked.

Now, from that account you might think I am describing the experience of being abducted by aliens. We know how fond they are of carrying out intrusive surgery for their own, inexplicable, purposes. Forgive me if I gave the wrong impression.

What actually happened was that I woke up, in my pyjamas, in my bed, in my chalet, and I felt distinctly peaky. Usually when I am peaky I swallow a glug of Dr Baxter’s Invigorating Syrup, but on this particular morning my peakiness was beyond the pale. One glug, then another, did nothing to alleviate it, and so I thought it best to consult my doctor. As it happens, his surgery is perched rather higher on the mountain slope than is my chalet, so by the time I staggered into the waiting room I was peakier still. I was so peaky it beggared belief.

When, eventually, I was ushered in to see Dr Fang, he took one look at me and gawped.

“Good heavens!” he cried, “Seldom have I encountered so peaky a patient! You may be mere minutes from death! Watch, now, as I prod my metal tapping machine and summon a hot air balloon to ferry you immediately to my exciting new research clinic, even higher up the mountain slope! There, my unpaid interns will carry out innovative and as yet untested procedures to obliterate all traces of peakiness and have you back on your feet in no time!”

Moments later, the door crashed open and a gaggle of said unpaid interns, all white coats and stethoscopes and burning enthusiasm, dragged me out and into the basket of their hot air balloon. At this point my peakiness reached a new pitch, and I lost consciousness. You know the rest.

The point is, do I feel any better? It is difficult to judge. Admittedly, I have not yet attempted to rise from my bed, in part because my new artificial innards seem to weigh considerably more than those they replaced, which I last saw tossed into a wastepaper bin in the clinic. Perhaps the extra weight I now carry is Dr Fang’s ruse to build up my strength. But I am also rather alarmed at the terrific rate at which my rubber and wire and tin and concrete heart is pounding. I seem to have acquired the metabolic rate of a squirrel. That may be a good thing, of course. I will be more alert, though constant quivering may prove socially ruinous.

Dr Fang has promised to pay me a chalet visit tomorrow, during which he will check my progress. I might also find out if there is any truth in the rumour that his experimental surgery is in fact part of a dastardly plan to breed a race of half-men, half-robotic automata, with whom he intends to conquer the world. I think I saw on his bookshelf a ringbinder on the spine of which was written Plan For Global Dominion Through The Agency Of Robot Squirrel People. I think I had best ask him if I could borrow it.

Now I think I will eat some nuts for supper.

Eerie old barn, wherein I lay sprawled,
The farm that it stands on, what is it called?
It goes by the name of Scroonhoonpooge Farmyard.
There, you see, that was not so hard.
But other questions we might raise
In these squalid, sordid days
In this eerie barn of woe
Have answers we will never know.