Monthly Archives: January 2014

Almanacke Anomaly

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On New Year’s Eve, you will recall, we published Old Key’s Almanacke, a set of eerily unerring prognostications for the coming twelvemonth plucked from the aether by Old Key. Now, in today’s Dabbler, Old Key’s Almanacke reappears … yet each and every prognostication is different! What in the name of heaven can this mean?

The best way to find out, of course, would be to question Old Key himself. But where to find this eldritch figure, shrouded in a moth-eaten black cape besplattered with stars, a pointy hat atop his potato-shaped head? Old Key is famously elusive, and indeed some say he does not actually exist.

Even if he does exist, I have to say that the appearance of two entirely different sets of prognostications casts doubt on the worth of Old Key’s scrying skills. It may be that, slumped over his fiendish diagrams in his mountaintop redoubt, he simply makes it all up.

ADDENDUM : Dear Mr Key, writes Poppy Nisbet, I confess myself befuddled. One minute you say you do not know where to find Old Key, and indeed question his very existence, and then in almost the same breath you describe his appearance and pinpoint his location to a mountaintop redoubt. If anybody is unreliable here, it is you! Please explain what is going on.

I would happily respond in excruciating detail to Ms Nisbet, but unfortunately I have been issued with a notice to cease and desist by Old Key’s legal representatives. They have not specified from what, precisely, I should cease and desist, and I am not taking any chances. Nor would you, if you saw the huge malevolent snorting and stamping trio of horses, Freeman Hardy & Willis, astride which the lawyers came thundering to my door.

Puny Vercingetorix

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See Vercingetorix. Vercingetorix is puny. Hark! Hear Puny Vercingetorix clank. Wherefore does he clank? It is the clanking of his armour as he marches. Puny Vercingetorix is marching in his armour o’er the hills and far away.

So puny is Puny Vercingetorix that he has fallen behind the other marchers. Yes, there are other marchers. He does not march alone. Puny Vercingetorix is merely one tiny puny cog in a martial host. It is an army, clanking o’er the hills and far away. Puny Vercingetorix is bringing up the rear, having fallen behind, so far behind that even if his vision were piercing he could barely see the host ahead. But he is short-sighted as well as puny. He is short-sighted and has no spectacles, for nobody in the army is allowed spectacles. It is like the court of King George III.

What usually happens when a straggler falls far behind the marching host is that they are waylaid and carried off by marauding bears. There have been countless newspaper reports of such occurrences, most distressing, most distressing. But Puny Vercingetorix, though he is puny and myopic and neurasthenic and prone to terrible fits and something of a halfwit, is nevertheless possessed of a singular quality which, in his current circumstances, is as valuable as a chest crammed with precious stones. Puny Vercingetorix speaks the language of bears, at least the language of the bears that roam these hills far away.

He was taught to speak with bears when tiny, attached to a travelling circus.

Now, if as a straggling marcher cut off from the host he is waylaid by bears, Puny Vercingetorix will tilt his head to the appropriate angle, and raise one eyebrow, and make significant passing movements with his hands, and from his throat will erupt the most extraordinary noise. And the bears, rather than carrying him off to their lair, there to do him unimaginable harm, will each of them flop to the ground and flail about, beatific smiles on their faces. In the parlance of Doddy, he will have tickled their funny bones.

Up ahead, the host is clashing with a rival host, an army terrible with banners. Puny Vercingetorix is well out of it. He sits on a clump, and takes from his pouch his curds and whey, and snacks upon them, waiting for bears. It is the first Thursday of the fifteenth century.