This week in my cupboard at The Dabbler you lot can read about a tortoise, a jar of marmalade, and an invisible pigeon. Yes, we continue with extracts from my (very) Brief Lives, a forthcoming reference work which will be an essential addition to any respectable bookshelf.
As far as I am aware, we have not yet mastered the art of travelling backwards in time. That being so, why is it that no politician, of whatever stripe, can open their mouth without uttering the redundant phrase “going forward”, often repeatedly? Listen to any current affairs programme for a few minutes and you will hear it.
The only solution is for the whole sorry lot of them to have some kind of contraption fitted to their heads which delivers a high-voltage electro-convulsive shock each and every time they use the phrase. Perhaps – in the future – this will happen. (“In the future” is an archaic term. It used to be what people said where they now say “going forward”.)
The latest issue of the weekly magazine Doings Of Pebblehead – The Weekly Magazine Devoted To The Doings Of The Paperback Potboilerist Pebblehead contains a fascinating interview with the paperback potboilerist Pebblehead. In it, he announces a brand new work in progress, which he is currently bashing out on his typewriter in his so-called chalet o’ prose, pipe clenched between his jaws.
“As you know,” he says, “I have written a tremendous number of police procedurals, many of them featuring maverick detective Detective Captain Cargpan. The other day, I was about to embark on another one when the thought occurred to me that perhaps it was time I wrote a different type of procedural. After all, why should the police be the only public servants whose procedures are examined in forensic and, let us not forget, thrilling detail by fiction writers? God knows how many paperbacks and television shows have been devoted to following police procedures. Well, I decided to break with convention and write a paperback potboiling blockbuster which, while decisively procedural, focusses on different procedures. As yet untitled, it will be a lollipop lady procedural, the first, I hope, of many.”
Outside of Britain and Australia, readers may not know what a lollipop lady is. Helpfully, then, the editors of Doings Of Pebblehead – The Weekly Magazine Devoted To The Doings Of The Paperback Potboilerist Pebblehead provide a footnote explaining that a lollipop lady is a lady armed with a circular placard, resembling a gigantic lollipop, who strides into the road and causes traffic to halt so that gaggles of tinies on their way to their schools self esteem ‘n’ diversity awareness hubs can cross the road without being squashed to death under the wheels of cars, vans, trucks, lorries, buses, coaches, and huge sinister smoke-belching tankers such as the one featured in Steven Spielberg’s second film, Duel (1971), starring Dennis Weaver.
The magazine also includes a picture of a lollipop lady, similar to the one below, so the more dimwitted among the readers can grasp what Pebblehead is talking about.
“It seems to me,” continues Pebblehead in this fascinating interview, “That there is a great deal of thrilling fictional potential in a lollipop lady procedural following the procedures of a lollipop lady. She is a lone figure, striding out into the menace of the open road, into the path of cars, vans, trucks, lorries, buses, coaches, and huge sinister smoke-belching tankers such as the one featured in Steven Spielberg’s second film, Duel (1971), starring Dennis Weaver, and causing them to put on their brakes and slow to a halt through the sheer force of her personality, not forgetting her circular placard resembling a giant lollipop, so that tinies, who without her would almost certainly be squashed to death under the wheels of the speeding cars, vans, trucks, lorries, buses, coaches, and huge sinister smoke-belching tankers such as the one featured in Steven Spielberg’s second film, Duel (1971), starring Dennis Weaver, can safely reach their schools self esteem ‘n’ diversity awareness hubs. At the moment I am tussling with the name to give my heroine. I think I might call her Mrs Cargpan. Then readers will have the added frisson of wondering if she is the wife of the hero of many of my police procedurals, maverick detective Detective Captain Cargpan.”
So saying, the indefatigable paperback potboilerist clenched his pipe between his jaws and dismissed the callow cub reporter from Doings Of Pebblehead – The Weekly Magazine Devoted To The Doings Of The Paperback Potboilerist Pebblehead with a lordly wave of his surprisingly dainty hand.
This is a brief housekeeping post which will be of interest only to those who follow Hooting Yard on Twitter. I should first of all explain that I never go anywhere near that site, all the Hooting Yard updates – 2.084 to date – being automatically generated every time I update the blog.
That said, after blowing my raspberry of contempt at Ian Katz it occurred to me that it would be a splendid idea if someone tweeted that particular postage at him. I would do so myself if I knew how. But in investigating the matter, and thus – for once – going to my Twitter page, I discovered, lawks amercy!, that various people who have been “following” me have sent me messages, asked me questions, or generally attempted to engage in conversation. All of these have of course been ignored because I have never seen them.
I do not wish these clearly very perspicacious folk to think ill of me for not responding to them. So, my apologies, but in future I would recommend adding comments here on the blog to those of you who wish to communicate. I am not sure I can face the Twitter experience on a regular basis.
I am indebted to Rob Howard for drawing to my attention the inscription which the Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II (884 – 859 BC) had carved, repeatedly, all over his palace. As Mr Howard says, it reminds us, in its verbosity and boastfulness, of Prince Fulgencio, of whom you will have read here from time to time.
The so-called Standard Inscription was carved across the centre of every wall panel in the North-West Palace, forming a decorative band around each room. Occasionally, on narrow panels, part of the text was omitted. Otherwise there was no significant variation and the catalogue of royal titles, claims and achievements was simply repeated over and over again.
Palace of Ashur-nasir-pal, priest of Ashur, favourite of Enlil and Ninurta, beloved of Anu and Dagan, the weapon of the great gods, the mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria; son of Tukulti-Ninurta, the great king, the mighty king, king of the world, king of Assyria, the son of Adad-nirari, the great king, the mighty king, king of Assyria; the valiant man, who acts with the support of Ashur, his lord, and has no equal among the princes of the four quarters of the world; the wonderful shepherd who is not afraid of battle; the great flood which none can oppose; the king who makes those who are not subject to him submissive; who has subjugated all mankind; the mighty warrior who treads on the neck of his enemies, tramples down all foes, and shatters the forces of the proud; the king who acts with the support of the great gods, and whose hand has conquered all lands, who has subjugated all the mountains and received their tribute, taking hostages and establishing his power over all countries.
When Ashur, the lord who called me by my name and has made my kingdom great, entrusted his merciless weapon to my lordly arms, I overthrew the widespread troops of the land of Lullume in battle. With the assistance of Shamash and Adad, the gods who help me, I thundered like Adad the destroyer over the troops of the Nairi lands, Habhi, Shubaru, and Nirib. I am the king who has brought into submission at his feet the lands from beyond the Tigris to Mount Lebanon and the Great Sea, the whole of the land of Laqe, the land of Suhi as far as Rapiqu, and whose hand has conquered from the source of the river Subnat to the land of Urartu.
The area from the mountain passes of Kirruri to the land of Gilzanu, from beyond the Lower Zab to the city of Til-Bari which is north of the land of Zaban, from the city of Til-sha-abtani to Til-sha-Zabdani, Hirimu and Harutu, fortresses of the land of Karduniash, I have restored to the borders of my land. From the mountain passes of Babite to the land of Hashmar I have counted the inhabitants as peoples of my land. Over the lands which I have subjugated I have appointed my governors, and they do obeisance.
I am Ashurnasirpal, the celebrated prince, who reveres the great gods, the fierce dragon, conqueror of the cities and mountains to their furthest extent, king of rulers who has tamed the stiff-necked peoples, who is crowned with splendour, who is not afraid of battle, the merciless champion who shakes resistance, the glorious king, the shepherd, the protection of the whole world, the king, the word of whose mouth destroys mountains and seas, who by his lordly attack has forced fierce and merciless kings from the rising to the setting sun to acknowledge one rule.
The former city of Kalhu, which Shalmaneser king of Assyria, a prince who preceded me, had built, that city had fallen into ruins and lay deserted. That city I built anew. I took the peoples whom my hand had conquered from the lands which I had subjugated, from the land of Suhi, from the whole of the land of Laqe, from the city of Sirqu on the other side of the Euphrates, from the furthest extent of the land of Zamua, from Bit-Adini and the land of Hatte, and from Lubarna, king of the land of Patina, and made them settle there.
I removed the ancient mound and dug down to the water level. I sank the foundations one hundred and twenty brick courses deep. A palace with halls of cedar, cypress, juniper, box-wood, meskannu-wood, terebinth and tamarisk, I founded as my royal residence for my lordly pleasure forever.
Creatures of the mountains and seas I fashioned in white limestone and alabaster, and set them up at its gates. I adorned it, and made it glorious, and set ornamental knobs of bronze all around it. I fixed doors of cedar, cypress, juniper and meskannu-wood in its gates. I took in great quantities, and placed there, silver, gold, tin, bronze and iron, booty taken by my hands from the lands which I had conquered.
I have paid little attention to the current kerfuffle at the BBC. As stated previously, I am intensely relaxed about the fact that some people have far more money than I will ever have, and I cannot bestir myself to get in a flap about it. It is of course preposterous that the ex-Deputy Director General was given a million pound payoff in order to keep him focussed on his decisively important work (or words to that affect) but, heigh ho, that is the way of the world and to expect any better is to live in a fool’s paradise.
At the same time, I can be roused to a sort of impotent armchair-based fury when these ridiculously overpaid persons make public display of their own witlessness and stupidity. Consider Ian Katz, lately the deputy editor of the Guardian and now installed as the editor of BBC’s Newsnight. I do not know how much he is paid but it is no doubt a sum beyond my wildest dreams.
Katz is the latest in a long line of supposedly intelligent persons who is unable to master the difference between sending a private message and broadcasting it to the entire world. In his editorial role, he apparently sent a “tweet” in which he said a Labour shadow minister was boring – for which he later apologised. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. It is the sentence that followed the accusation that bothers me. Katz wrote:
playout was fun tho, wasn’t it? telly MUCH better than snooooozepapers innit
Let me remind you. This man was deputy editor of a serious newspaper and is now editor of a flagship current affairs programme. No doubt he would say he is being playful and “ironic”. But for him to even think of writing – and then actually to write – such infantile twaddle is profoundly depressing.
Katz should be locked in a cupboard with a copy of The Anatomy Of Melancholy, and taken out at intervals to have his brain sluiced. Then he might begin to earn a tiny fraction of what he is paid.
Hist! Hist! And list! List and mark! List with each and every one of your ears, and mark well. Mark on your slate as you list! If you hear cracks, wracks, snap shut your eyes anon and picture the yawning chasm opening before you. The great gulf betwixt you and Elysium. Then ope up your eyes and scratch scratch scratch ‘pon your slate.
Is it Elysium or Atlantis? Gondwanaland or Shoeburyness? Wherever it is it is beyond your reach, beyond the gaping chasm on the brink of which you teeter. All brinks are for teetering upon, in this life. Mark that well. Old Blubberlips might have told you different, back when, but Old Blubberlips was put here purposely to mislead you. Could you not spot that?
Consider. Consider first his blubbery lips, the blubbery face in which they sat, the awful potato of his head. Contrast the spindly arms and legs. And that voice! As if drawn out from between those blubberlips by the hot pincers of Gnar-Gack. Pincers forged in the subterranean furnace of Far Tantarabim by the blind albino scuttling dwarves of Gnar-Gack. O that Shoeburyness be twinned with so foul a place!
But you knew not. You were drunk on the gibbering of Old Blubberlips, were you not? You lapped up every splutter. And then the wind came in from the west, the killing wind, bringing pestilence and pomposity and skittery pugwash blandishments. The wind came in and tossed you around like the veriest of tosspots. Unmoored, with new pimples in place of old, you took your bearings when the wind passed and knew no longer where you were.
Of Old Blubberlips there was no trace. One last grunt and he was gone. There was a cave-mouth into which some say he fled. But it flooded and you could not follow. And as cracks opened and spat mud, you sought safety in a spinney of beech and box and sycamore. Now there came the sound of gunfire in the distance, and the weird music of xylophones and wobbly saws.
And so, the long march. The long march to Elysium or Atlantis, to Gondwanaland or Shoeburyness. You were accompanied along the way by birds, so many birds!, you could not count them. And you came to the chasm, and teetered on the brink. The birds turned, heeled, buckled, flew back from whence they came. You fossicked in your pocket for your slate. You plucked from your tresses a pointy thing, lodged there by the wind.
And all your mutterings and jabberings and curses ceased as you were made to hist! Hist! And made to list with all your ears and mark, mark well, and take the measure.
My father’s a hedger and ditcher. My mother does nothing but spin. As for me, I have a collapsed lung, frostbitten fingers, and a metal plate in my skull. While my father busies himself with his hedges and ditches, and my mother in her mania spins round and round and round, her wits long ago lost to some mental malady, I lie abed and, with nothing better to do, turn my mind to probing the secrets of the universe. There are ineffable mysteries to be unravelled, of that I am sure. What is by no means clear is that my own unravellings make any sense whatsoever.
For example, one secret of the universe I have much mulled over is the number of angels who can, at any one time, dance upon the head of a pin. I have a pin, here in my sickbed, but it is the devil of a difficulty to hold it in my frostbitten fingers. I asked my father to take a short break from his hedging and ditching and to rig up a contraption whereby the pin might be held close to my head, close enough that I could peer at the pinhead with some hope of spotting, and counting, angels. But alas, in response to this request my father retorted that he needs must spend every waking hour hedging and ditching if he were to earn the wages to pay for the soup that sustains me. I considered asking my mother for help, but she is too far gone, spinning and spinning, like a whirling dervish.
So the pin remains lying on my bedside table, next to my water glass and an immensely fat book of intractable German philosophy. I can, it is true, see the pinhead, but it is too far from my eyes for me to look at it with anything like the necessary acuity. I know that if I stretch out one of my hands to pick it up it will almost certainly fall from my frostbitten fingers and that will be a disaster. I have been wondering if I might calculate the number of dancing angels through the power of my mind alone. But I do not really know where to start, with such a cogitation.
Another mystery by which I am much exercised is to wonder which came first, the chicken or the egg? I have not bothered to ask either my father or my mother to bring me a chicken and an egg, and to place them on my bedside table next to the pin and the water glass and the immensely fat book of intractable German philosophy. From what I have gathered about the parlous state of the agricultural economy, at least as it affects this household, there would be neither a spare chicken nor a spare egg for my purposes. Instead, I have imagined a chicken, and imagined an egg, and I toss and buffet them about inside my brain. I try to avoid imagining an imaginary pin alongside them, as that would needlessly complicate matters. But an imaginary pin, with imaginary angels dancing on its head, will keep on forcing its way into my brain. It pricks the chicken and it scratches the eggshell, and before I know where I am my head is a chaotic pandaemonium of din and wrack.
Perhaps I might be better occupied concentrating on my recovery, if a recovery is on the cards. Then I might help my father hedge and ditch, or join my mother, spinning and spinning and spinning, whirling round and round and round, in the grip of her madness, so happy, so, so happy.
Farmers’ knitwear is a particularly important and engaging topic. I know this, because I spoke to a farmer about it. He was a big, florid fellow with a big, florid head, and he was leaning against a fence, waving a stick at some cows. I was lost in the countryside and when I saw him, from a distance, silhouetted against a breathtakingly gorgeous sunset, I decided to approach him at speed, before he vanished, so I could ask him where I was.
Mere seconds later, because I can move jolly fast when I have to, I tipped my hat to him in greeting. He was not wearing a hat, which I thought unusual for a farmer, but what do I know of farmers? Not much, as it turned out. For example, not only did I think all farmers wore hats, all the time, but I had no idea they were so interested in knitwear, and in discussing it with complete strangers lost in the countryside.
Before I had a chance to ask the farmer where I was, he started talking to me about his cardigan. It was, he explained, a farmers’ cardigan, knitted from wool. See how the length of the sleeves matches the length of my arms, he said. See how the buttons are fastened in a straight vertical line down the middle of the cardigan front. When I am done with my cows for the evening, he said, perhaps you would like to come back with me to my farmhouse, where I can show you the niddy noddy on which the wool for this cardigan was wound from the bobbin into a skein.
This was a lot for me to take in, and I am afraid my face must have betrayed a certain hesitancy. It’s all the same to me, said the farmer. And he turned back to his cows and waved the stick at them again. I assured him I would be more than happy to repair to the farmhouse. Already the thought had sparked in my brain that I might stay there, eating his food and sleeping on his sofa, for weeks or months. Then I would not need to find out where I was. I would no longer be lost, for I would have a haven at his hearth.
To expedite my plan, while we trudged across the fields towards the farmhouse, I expressed far more interest in his knitwear than I really felt. He told me about his swift as well as his niddy noddy. I thought he was suddenly talking about birds, but he corrected me after I mumbled something about linnets. At one point he hoicked up his trouser-cuffs and invited me to look at his socks. They were knit from the same batch of wool as the cardigan,
When we got to the farmhouse I fell a little behind him as he approached the door. I saw a spade leaning against the wall, picked it up, and bashed his head in while he was still in the doorway. Stepping over him, I went into the farmhouse kitchen and put the kettle on for a nice reviving cuppa. There was a woolly hat hanging from a nail on the back of the door. I knew I couldn’t be completely mistaken about farmers’ hats. I took off my own hat and removed the farmer’s woolly hat from the nail and put it on my head, a smaller and less florid head than the farmer’s, adjusting it to a rakish angle. Knowing what I now knew about farmers’ knitwear, I could tell it was knit from the same batch of wool as the cardigan and the socks.
When the tea was brewed I sat in the farmer’s chair drinking from the farmer’s teacup. The swift and the niddy noddy stood in the kitchen corner. The sun had set by now, and through the open doorway where the farmer’s body lay, I could hear the distant bellowing of his cows in the black and starless night.
In Victoria Of England (1936), Edith Sitwell tells us
the Queen’s sympathies were aroused when, towards the end of August 1892, Mr Gladstone had a miraculous escape from the sinister attentions of a cow. It appears from a letter written to the Queen by Mrs Gladstone that this highly reprehensible animal rushed at Mr Gladstone and threw him upon his back, after which she stood over him, glaring in a most threatening manner. Mr Gladstone glared back, and some moments had been spent in this mutual pursuit before the statesman, who, according to his wife, had never lost his presence of mind for a moment, was able to rise to his feet and dart behind a tree – whereupon the cow forgot him immediately and strolled away. The cow was shot.
In this respect, if no other, David Blunkett is the Gladstone de nos jours.
My cupboard at The Dabbler this week includes a seagull, a squirrel, and a refrigerator – each of them pertinent to the lives of twentieth-century noteworthies. There are noteworthies from past centuries, too, in extracts from my forthcoming magnum opus Brief Lives. I suspect it will be a long, long time forthcoming. I need to build up a card index.
The painter Duff Painter was known as “the painter of painters”. This was not because he was considered the greatest of painters, nor that he was held in the highest of esteem by his fellow painters. Rather, he was dubbed “the painter of painters” because of the single-minded intensity of his vision. During his long career, Duff Painter confined himself to one subject. All he ever painted was painters, that is, the lengths of rope attached to the bows of boats for tying them to the quayside, or to bigger ships.
Painter’s paintings of painters were done in an incoherent jumble of styles, and he worked fast, often completing several paintings of painters in a single day. He might do an impressionistic daub in the morning, an expressionistic daub in the afternoon, and a quite frankly cack-handed impasto mulch in the evening. When one considers that he lived to the age of ninety, and was active up to the very end, it comes as no surprise to learn that a complete catalogue raisonné of his output has yet to be compiled – though not for want of trying.
The art critic Godolphin Weems has spent years devoting himself to the project, trying to track down every single Painter painter painting in existence, photographing it with a superduper high resolution camera, writing a brisk yet captivating thousand word essay on it, and ranking it in order of both painterliness and importance. So tireless and unstinting has Weems been that today he cuts a sorry figure, sprawled on a municipal park bench in a dilapidated seaside resort, swigging turps from a bottle wrapped in a paper bag. Now almost ninety himself, Weems is no more than half-way through his mighty task.
He has not yet, for example, managed to locate the astonishing works of Painter’s late period, where he took to daubing paint directly on to painters. Many of these so-called “ropey paintings” are probably attached to the bows of boats, tied to quaysides or ships, and God alone knows where they are scattered upon the waterways of the world.
A hyperrealist painting of a painter by Duff Painter (Cat. no. 1,386,037a)
. . . that very excitable, choleric, good-natured old gentleman, with his popping, bobbling gestures, his habit of exploding into a room rather than entering it, his obstinacy allied so strangely with extreme changeableness, his ideas that floated in and out of his mind as if they were blown by a sea-gale, his head shaped like a pineapple, and his eyes that floated on the surface of his face as if they were bubbles. Mr Greville remarked that “King William had considerable facility in expressing himself, but what he said was generally useless and improper”.
King William IV, described by Edith Sitwell in Victoria Of England (1936)
Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
Janitor, janitor, where is your mop?
For Christ’s sake, let the question drop!
Janitor, janitor, where is your pail?
You have no pail and you have no mop.
You have no bucket, you have no keys.
Oh please please let this matter drop!
These are the first two verses of Janitor, Janitor, one of the songs collected in the new compendium Four Hundred And Forty-Four Songs About Janitors And Janissaries, edited by Dennis Beerpint. It is a work of majestic scholarship, and Beerpint is to be congratulated for the depth of his scholarship, the rigour of his method, the pernicketyness of his annotations, the suavity of his commentary, the glamour of his bouffant, the schmaltz of his windpipery, the electrocution of his swan, the guzzling of his wren pie, the redundancy of his courage, the consistency of his porridge, and the tess of his durbevilles. What he is most certainly not to be congratulated for is that creaking malignant awful dehydrated boney boney trapeze artiste air he simultaneously exudes and muffles, muffles and exudes, all spat-out fruit-pips and prisoner’s dilemma, a mole in the headlights of a tractor, a tractor in a field, a field in Merrie England where rustics cavort around a maypole before slumping exhausted on to bales of hay and straw, picking gorse and bracken out of their hair, while in the blue blue skies above, dirigibles loom like so many gas-filled balloons above the verdant splendour.
It is a verdant splendour many of the janitors in this magnificent anthology would do well to revisit, could they but drag themselves away for five minutes from their interminable corridors, punctuated by cupboards, where keys are rattled, and buckets and pails and mops are mislaid, and there is terrible weeping in the dark hours before the dawn.
