Jerusalem

And did those feet? Well, did they? I don’t give two pins about the time, whether it was in ancient time or modern time or some other time, I just want to know if those feet did, and if they did, what it was, exactly, that they did. I suppose you will tell me that they walked. Lawks-a-mercy!, I’d never have guessed. Those feet walked, did they? Take me to the foot of our stairs! And don’t get me started on that holy lamb of God. If I catch sight of it I’ll have it sheared and its fleece spun and knitted into a pair of woolly socks before you can say Jack Spraggins. And I will put those socks on my feet and I will walk, yes, I will walk upon England’s mountains green. Just try to stop me, buster.

The King And Nitty

See, see, if you will, the king’s custard-crown, burnished and gleaming, made from metal so soft you could mould it like marzipan, though woe betide you if you put your hand anywhere near it when it’s atop the kingly head – he’ll hack two fingers off and shove them one each into your ears, muffling all sound, as happened alas to my spry confrère Nitty, poor Nitty, languishing deaf now in the king’s donjon, and all for his thoughtless prodding, from mere curiosity, that custard-crown.

There’s a sprig of larkspur on the donjon’s outer wall and on All Souls I’ll pluck a bud and wave it as a nosegay for all the good that will do poor Nitty. I plead his case with the hoity toity chamberlains and their scrivening beadles, booted callow murgatroyds with pig eyes not one of them a true prince, cushioned against fate, smacking their lips, oh all at sixes and sevens aboard the boat of state. I tried my own clambering aboard it, once, in spring, jaunty, feather-capp’d, in gorgeous hues, but was repelled with sticks and fists and cudgelry, bloodied and battered and half-drowned I was, afterward sprawled ashore in my pumps like a water-devil. Snip, snip, the ties loosed and away it went, billowing on green, out of my sight, me sloshed in bilge, and all for Nitty.

Now step one, two and cut brisk capers and you will see the custard-crown oh bright gleaming but now no longer embonced upon the kingly head, no, whippoorwills and shelmerdines came sweeping in and snatched it away and carried it to a darkling cave anent the lumpy bumpy banksome landing of the lake. Nitty has his army-in-exile here, custard-coloured like the crown, prinked, swift, but so disputatious they jabber phrenzies all the livelong day and terrible night and scarce can boil an egg for their supper so caught up are they in their rebarbative hoodoo. They might be ants.

The king, though, like a felled ox, still in his palace keep, dabbed at with ointments by his chatelaine, has Russian plimsolls hardily shod on his great titanic enormous feet, dangling over the end of the pallet. Up! Up! King! Birds chatter on the windowsill. There is lively sparring yet, in this kingdom. Jack Maglew and all his train cannot lift the king, hoist though they try with pulleys and contraptions of fabled strength. Custard-crownless, his life ebbs, while below in the donjon Nitty waggles the severed fingers plugging his ears and jumps through spirit hoops in dank darkness.

And now his army is on the march, beside the railings, with their banners, and their pipes tooting cacophonous, and swallows in formation flying o’er their horrible shrunken withered heads, that zombie army of Nitty’s conjuration, in rags and tatters, foul with sweat, swords rusted, as implacable in their progress as a swordfish spearing through the deep, marching clank and jangle on the palace, the collapsing palace, perched on its promontory and crumbling bit by bit into the sea.

I plucked another bud of larkspur and waved it as a nosegay and tested the wind. The wind is coming in. There is yet an empire to be flattened.

*

I noted on David Thompson’s blog that he will often append to a postage a request for donations. I think I will follow suit. If you enjoy reading Hooting Yard, and particularly if you have not previously felt impelled to donate, please consider bashing that button over to the right, and warming your cockles in the knowledge that you have done a generous deed.

Keith

For a long time I coveted my neighbour’s ox. I knew this was wrong, deeply wrong, but I just couldn’t help myself. It was a tremendous ox, with a splendid pair of horns, a tail that shouted “soup!”, and great bulky lumbering solidity. Its name was Keith. I watched it, through my greasy window pane, as it mooched in its oxy way around my neighbour’s paddock, and I coveted it.

I think it important to point out that I did not covet my neighbour’s house, which was in any case an unseemly hovel compared with my chalet. Nor did I covet his wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ass, for the simple reason that he did not possess any of these. He was a lonely and lowly fellow, crushed by penury, and it was something of a miracle that he had managed to get his hands on an ox.

And what an ox! The first time I slapped eyes on Keith I was transfixed. I rubbed at the window pane with a rag the better to view the magnificent beast. After a while I pulled up a chair so I could sit while peering through the pane, for I felt my spindly legs giving way due to nervous tension. I used the rag to mop my brow, and gazed, covetously, oh covetously, all the livelong day. Every now and then, Keith would snort, and I could hear him clearly, for his snorting was loud and sonorous, and I felt frissons of pleasure.

Full many a day sat I watching this majestic ox, coveting him, wanting him for my own. As I watched, I hatched plot after plot. I would beat my neighbour to death with a spade, and with the same spade bury him in the earth, and so claim Keith as mine. Or, I would run away with the ox, hauling him along by a halter, heading for the distant hills. Or, I would forge documents proving to the unsuspecting eye that I was the ox’s rightful owner, pursuing my neighbour through the highest courts in the land. Or, I would find, somewhere, a lesser ox, an inferior one, and when my neighbour’s back was turned would substitute it for Keith, and keep Keith with me always.

It was this latter plot that gave me pause. I realised I had not the first idea how to care for an ox. Upon what did one feed them? What oxy appurtenances did they require to live in comfort? Would I risk being gored by those horns were I inadvertently to vex my coveted Keith?

Then I began to wonder if my covetousness was all it seemed. Was it the ox I coveted, in and of itself, or was it the act of coveting something – anything – that rightly belonged to my neighbour? Could it be that what I really desired, over and above everything, was to sit peering through my greasy window pane, consumed with feelings of envy for the lonely lowly penurious wretch next door? And, had it not been his ox, would I have coveted whatever beast he kept in his paddock, be it a duck or an ant?

I was able to give further thought to these matters when the season of mists descended upon the land, and nothing was visible from my window, nothing at all save a milky grey blur of blankness. The air was so thick and dense that sound did not carry, and I could hear no snorts from Keith. I moved my chair away from the window, and pulled down the shutters, and I gazed instead at my ceiling, upon which, like Dennis Wheatley, I had painted the stars in their heavens.

Could I covet a star? I could. I picked one, fat and sprightly and sparkling, oh sparkling in a way no ox, not even Keith, could sparkle. And while I sat and waited out the long long months of mist, I hatched plot after plot to yank that star from the sky and drag it down to earth, to hold it beside me, burning bright, all mine, my coveted star.

Cow (And Dead Pig) News

Here at Hooting Yard we are, as you know, ever vigilant for news of lethal or otherwise miscreant cows. We could not fail to take note of the alarming tale of the Brazilian man killed by a cow falling through his roof.

Elsewhere, though it is hardly “news”, we learn from a list of children detained in a Worcestershire insane asylum between 1854 and 1900 that one poor little tot was there because he or she was “frightened by a cow”. Whatever terrors the cow may have provoked pale beside an entry further down the list, which tells us that another mite was placed in the asylum after “being put inside a recently killed pig”. To which one can only respond with a blood-curdling “eek!”.

Nashe, And Gosse On Nashe

Here is another excerpt from Nashe’s Lenten Stuff:

There was a herring, or there was not, for it was but a cropshin, one of the refuse sort of herrings, and this herring, or this cropshin, was censed and thurified in the smoke, and had got him a suit of durance that would last longer than one of Erra Pater’s almanacs, or a constable’s brown bill, only his head was in his tail, and that made his breath so strong that no man could abide him. Well, he was a Triton of his time, and a sweet-singing calandra to the state, yet not beloved of the showery Pleiades, or the Colossus of the Sun, however he thought himself another tumidus Antimachus, as complete an adelantado as he that is known by wearing a cloak of tuftaffaty eighteen year, and to Lady Turbot there is no demur but he would needs go a-wooing, and offered her for a dower whole hecatombs and a two-hand sword; she stared upon him with Megaera’s eyes, like Iris, the messenger of Juno, and bade him go eat a fool’s-head and garlic, for she would none of him; thereupon particularly strictly and usually he replied, that though thunder ne’er lights on Phoebus’ tree, and Amphion, that worthy musician, was husband to Niobe, and there was no such acceptable incense to the heavens as the blood of a traitor, revenged he would be by one chimera of imagination or other, and hamper and embrake her in those mortal straights for her disdain, that, in spite of divine symmetry & miniature, into her busky grove she should let him enter, and bid adieu, sweet lord, or the cramp of death should wrest her heart-strings.

I was going to post some Daily Nashe for a while, but it seems to me I could happily quote the entire book, so perhaps it is a better idea for you to go and read it directly – PDF here. You might also like to know what Edmund Gosse had to say about it, in An Essay On The Life & Writings Of Thomas Nashe (1892):

“Lenten Stuff” gives us evidence that Nashe had now arrived at a complete mastery of the fantastic and irrelevant manner which he aimed at. This book is admirably composed, if we can bring ourselves to admit that the genre is ever admirable. The writer’s vocabulary has become opulent, his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning.

The Daily Nashe

So eminently quotable is Thomas Nashe that I have decided to post a passage from his Lenten Stuff every day while I am reading it – The Daily Nashe, if you will. The Stuff is, among other things, a paean of praise to Great Yarmouth – though it appears he was sorely tempted to go further afield:

I had a crotchet in my head here to have given the reins to my pen, and run astray throughout all the coast towns of England, digging up their dilapidations and raking out of the dust-heap or charnel-house of tenebrous eld the rottenest relic of their monuments, and bright scoured the canker-eaten brass of their first bricklayers and founders, & commented and paralogized on their condition in the present, & in the preter tense, not for any love or hatred I bear them, but that I would not be snibbed, or have it cast in my dish that therefore I praise Yarmouth so rantantingly because I never elsewhere baited my horse, or took my bow and arrows and went to bed.

thomas-nashe

Nashe On Homer

I think I have written before about my dislike of the busie old foole, unruly sun, and its pitiless battering heat. Proper Hooting Yard weather is an overcast sky with a hint of drizzle. It may well be that this current mini-heatwave is what has caused the lack of sweeping paragraphs of majestic prose at your favourite website. I am listless and enervated, possibly even neurasthenic.

Anyway, at times like this, I find it can be useful to spur myself back into action by reading the titanic prose of past masters. Here is Thomas Nashe, from his final – and fabulous – work, Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599):

That good old blind bibber of Helicon, I wot well, came a-begging to one of the chief cities of Greece, & promised them vast corpulent volumes of immortality if they would bestow upon him but a slender out-brother’s annuity of mutton & broth, and a pallet to sleep on, and with derision they rejected him, whereupon he went to their enemies with the like proffer, who used him honourably, and whom he used so honourably that to this day, though it be three thousand year since, their name and glory flourish green in men’s memory through his industry. I trust you make no question that those dull-pated pennyfathers, that in such dudgeon scorn rejected him, drunk deep of the sour cup of repentance for it when the high flight of his lines in common bruit was oyezed. Yea, in the word of one no more wealthy than he was (wealthy, said I? nay, I’ll be sworn he was a grand-juryman in respect of me) those greybeard huddle-duddles and crusty cumtwangs were struck with such stinging remorse of their miserable Euclionism and snudgery, that he was not yet cold in his grave but they challenged him to be born amongst them, and they and six cities more entered a sharp war about it, every one of them laying claim to him as their own

When I Was A Child, I Spake As A Child

A. N. Wilson begins a book review in The Spectator with this splendid anecdote:

Ronald Knox, found awake aged four by a nanny, was asked what he was thinking about, and he replied “the past”.

A remark with a similar weight of world-weariness was made by my eldest son, when he was but a tot. Having contracted some sort of stomach bug, he vomited. As we mopped his fevered brow, he wailed “Oh, why can’t I have a happy life?”

Riddled With Knowledge

Mary Bousted, leader of one of the teachers’ unions, was on the radio the other day giving her views on the planned new national curriculum. Obviously she disapproved of it, because the teachers’ unions automatically disapprove of any and all revisions suggested by the government, whichever government is in power. What was striking, however, was one of her principal objections. The new curriculum, she warned darkly, is “riddled with knowledge”.

Heaven forfend that the teachers in our schools self-esteem ‘n’ diversity awareness hubs should be expected to impart knowledge to the tinies!

I am left speechless, but will merely note that Mary Bousted attended a grammar school and bears the title of “Doctor”. I think she must have been taught some “knowledge” somewhere along the line.

Inadvertent

I appear to be having one of those occasional unplanned and inadvertent Hooting Yard holidays. I must say it is all very relaxing. I shall return soon enough, meanwhile you lot can trawl through the archives to maintain your sanity.

At Dr Pindrop’s

So hushed was the consulting room of Dr Pindrop that you could hear a pin drop. Thus, at the moment I dropped a pin, I coughed loudly, to camouflage the ping! of its landing on the linoleum. Now all I had to do was to wait for Dr Pindrop to come in. I whistled an approximation of the song of the masked shrike, Lanius nubicus, getting into character as Flight Lieutenant Colin Blythe RAF, portrayed by Donald Pleasence in The Great Escape (John Sturges, 1963). When Dr Pindrop entered, he would be in the role of Flight Lieutenant Robert Hendley DFC RAF, played in the film by James Garner. We would enact, albeit imperfectly, the poignant scene where it becomes apparent that Blythe is virtually blind, what with the eye-strain brought on by all that diligent counterfeiting of papers and passports and what have you.

But when Dr Pindrop pushed open the door and entered his consulting room, I saw something was up. Unlike Blythe, my vision was not occluded. Indeed, it was so piercing that I could count each individual furrow on the troubled brow of Dr Pindrop, though I was waiting at the far end of the room.

“I am so sorry, Blodweg,” said Dr Pindrop, “Something has come up and I have no time to take part in our reenactment of a classic film scene.”

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“Oh, you need not worry your odd-shaped little head about the titanic responsibilities of an important physician,” he said, “Suffice to say I shall be spending the rest of the day applying probes to the brains of guinea pigs.”

I complained that this left me at something of a loose end, just when I had entered what I think of as “the zone”. In that zone, I was Donald Pleasence, or Colin Blythe, or some exquisite amalgam of the two.

“I understand your concern,” said Dr Pindrop, in that mollifying tone he usually employs at the bedsides of the stricken, “But listen, out there in the waiting room are all my guinea pigs, sitting quietly. You could deliver Blythe’s ornithology lecture, from earlier in the film, and whistle the song of the masked shrike, Lanius nubicus.”

“To guinea pigs?” I asked, aghast.

“They are human guinea pigs,” said Dr Pindrop.

I had to admit that this was a splendid idea, and meant that my intellectual and emotional straining to become Donald Pleasence / Colin Blythe would not go to waste.

pleasanceandshrike

“Before you go,” said Dr Pindrop, “Pick up that pin you dropped earlier, would you?”

As I went to retrieve it, he stuck out his leg and tripped me over. We had enacted the classic film scene, albeit imperfectly, after all!

Thrilled with my performance, and still in character, I went out into the waiting room to tell the human guinea pigs about birds. But they were no longer sitting quietly. They had been corralled into a corner of the waiting room by Dr Pindrop’s receptionist, Mrs Creasefrock, who was toting a submachine gun. It took me a matter of moments to realise that she was in “the zone” as Hans Gruber, the criminal mastermind from Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988) played by Alan Rickman.

“Mrs Creasefrock!” I cried, “I had no idea you too were a member of the Classic Action Film Scene Reenactment Society!”

She fired a burst of ammo into the ceiling and looked me over.

“Nice suit,” she said, “John Phillips, London. I have two myself. Rumour has it Arafat buys his there.”

Gosh, she really was in the zone! I had to think fast. This was no scene for Donald Pleasence. On the spur of the moment, I decided to shift character to one of Hans Gruber’s team of ruthless criminals, and I ran and crashed through the plate-glass window of Dr Pindrop’s waiting room, plummeting several storeys before landing with a terrific thump on a police car parked below, shattering the windscreen

“Hello!”, I said to the startled driver, “You must be Sergeant Al Powell, played by Reginald VelJohnson.”

I rubbed at my eyes to dislodge a fragment of the shattered windscreen.

“Can I help you?” said the driver.

“Oh no, please, it’s only something in my eye,” I said.

“Please let me look. I happen to be a doctor,” he said, and I realised he was the general secretary of the Classic Romantic Film Scene Reenactment Society. He was not Sergeant Al Powell. He was in the zone as Dr Alec Harvey, played by Trevor Howard in Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)!

It took all my thespian skills to slough off, in an instant, both Colin Blythe and a member of a German criminal gang.

“Oh, why must we be so withdrawn and shy and . . . difficult?” I said. The sun was shining on the nothing new.

At Grimpen Mire

I went for a stroll around Grimpen Mire. In my pocket, a doll made of wax. I paused by a tussock during a break in the rain. I smoked a cigarette and thought about Paavo Nurmi, the Flying Finn. It occurred to me that if ever I tried to run as far, as fast as him, I would almost certainly collapse from exhaustion. Grinding the butt of my cigarette into the muck, I took the doll from my pocket. From another pocket I took a batch of pins. Spatters of rain started up again. I adjusted my Homburg on my head, as best as I could with the doll in one hand and the pins in the other. It was my intention to pierce the doll with the pins while jabbering curses. I think it best that I do not divulge the name of the cursee. In any case, it hardly matters, because I did not carry out my plan. I cast the doll into the mire and dropped the pins in the muck by the mire’s edge. Then I turned on my heel and sprinted – yes!, sprinted! – back towards my shabby hotel room in the town. Long before I reached it, I collapsed from exhaustion. Unlike Paavo Nurmi, I had no idea how to pace myself. I am no Flying Finn, nor was meant to be. I sprawled there in the muck and the rain fell down on me. I let it fall. What could I have done to stop it? I have no power over the weather. He whom I had been on the point of cursing, oh, now he has such power. The day will come, perhaps, when he will have egg on his face. I am too tired to care. I have run out of steam. I fear that, as dusk falls, gruesome creatures will crawl from Grimpen Mire, grab me by the ankles, and drag me under. So be it.