Hooting Yard

At midday, greased and pungent, the village wrestler took up his position by the war memorial. With his aggressive stance and tiny brain, he challenged everyone passing by to a wrestling bout. But not one among the villagers was fool enough to fight him and so, in his frustration, he would fling himself upon a dog or a chicken or a defenceless toddler straying from its mother’s apron-strings, and wrestle them to the ground and pin them there, counting to ten in awful grunts, and then stand up, arms raised aloft in victory.

He was the undefeated champ when, eventually, the sheriff shot into him a dart tipped with a powerful horse tranquilliser, and he keeled over, bashing his head on the war memorial. He lay there unconscious for days. The villagers debated what to do with him when he awoke. Chains and cages were suggested, as was electro-convulsive therapy. But then, when he did awake, the village wrestler was placid, all aggression spent. He took a chicken and a flask of water drawn from the village trough, and he wandered off along the lane that led to the aerodrome. We never saw him again.

Here is the official Hooting Yard bird forecast for south-east England. Today’s guest forecaster is Dame Vera Lynn.

There’ll be bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dover tomorrow.

NOTE : Hooting Yard is not responsible for any inaccuracies in the bird forecasts provided by our guests. And quite frankly, Dame Vera has been trotting out precisely the same forecast at regular intervals for the past seven decades. As far as we are aware, nobody has ever thought to carry out a statistical analysis of the accuracy, or otherwise, of her claims. Nor is her methodology at all clear. Certainly it is grotesque to think that she makes her pronouncements after “reading” the still-throbbing hot entrails of freshly-slaughtered bluebirds, a theory propounded by some irresponsible scalliwags in the Dover-based organisation Cliffwatch. Those people wouldn’t know a haruspex if one came up and biffed them in the chops.

Tomorrow’s bird forecast will be presented by special guest Dame Vera Lynn.

Our series on the origins of common phrases continues with a look at “to blodly go . . “.

What do we mean when we say “to blodly go . . .”? It is superficially similar to “to boldly go”, a phrase commonly used when describing the forward motion of the USS Enterprise, a spaceship on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, far in the future and, I have to tell you, wholly fictional in nature. By contrast, “to blodly go” is a way of describing the forward motion of one whose progress is accompanied by a soundtrack of tunes by the beat group Blodwyn Pig.

Unlike boldly going, there are various circumstances in which one may be blodly going, and these can be both fictional and non-fictional, that is, real, dammit, as real as the large stone kicked by Dr Johnson in order to refute Bishop Berkeley. But to consider fictional blodly going first, we might imagine a cinematheque film or television programme in which a character is seen in forward motion, from point A to point B, while on the soundtrack we hear, say, “The Modern Alchemist” or “Backwash” from Blodwyn Pig’s debut album Ahead Rings Out (1969).

In terms of all-too-real blodly going, this would be seen when a person is lolloping along the street with, inserted into their lugholes, the pods attached to a digital musical reproduction device such as an mp3 player. Unless they have the volume turned up to a barbarous pitch, we would not necessarily know they were listening to, for example, “The Squirrelling Must Go On” from Blodwyn Pig’s second album Getting To This (1970). We may therefore not know blodly going when we see it.

Similarly, a person may be driving a car or coach and be listening to a Blodwyn Pig recording on their on-board sound system. If the volume is not too loud, and they whizz past us as we stand at a bus stop awaiting hopelessly the 666, then we will be all unawares that such whizzing is blodly. But it is, it is.

One of the main differences between boldly going and blodly going is, of course, that in the former case Captain Kirk and his crew are zipping across galaxies with an attitude of boldness. These people are not shrinking violets who would hardly dare say “Boo!” to a goose, or indeed a space-goose. Wherever they go, at whatever warp factor, they go there boldly. But with blodly going, the goer has much more latitude. Going blodly might mean creeping, gadding, prancing, zooming, limping, skulking, zipping, careering, stalking, plodding, staggering or any number of other forms of locomotion. The blodliness of the act lies in the accompanying soundtrack.

Was this article helpful? Choose the statement below which best describes your response:

■ Yes, very helpful

■ No, not very helpful

■ I have no idea what you are talking about

■ I have always been a great fan of Blodwyn Pig and think the best move Mick Abrahams ever made was to leave Jethro Tull

■ I am Ian Anderson, and I stand on one leg to play my flute. What can Mick Abrahams do to compare with that, eh?

That morning, I strode out into the grounds of my country pile, whacking my stick at lupins and at crocuses and, in one instance, at a swan passing between one pond and another. Following the path towards the ha-ha, I was startled to spot a dimwit standing under the trellis. He was a still, grubby, plump dimwit. I asked him what in the name of all the angels in heaven he was doing in the grounds of my pile. His answer was incoherent, perhaps because he was a foreign dimwit whose language was not known to me. I took him by the hand, and led him, like a fat puppy, away from the trellis, all along the path into the house. I was wearing a pair of goatskin gloves, so I did not fear picking up any germs from his grubby hands.

I bade the dimwit sit at the banqueting table and rang for Snippage, my factotum, to fetch him a beaker of water. Snippage took an unconscionably long time to respond to my call, which was unlike him. It was turning into a very odd day. First the dimwit under the trellis, then a queerly delayed Snippage. It was while I waited for him that I reflected on an additional oddity. Where had that swan popped up from? I had never seen a swan on my estate before.

When Snippage eventually arrived in the banqueting hall, he was breathless and dishevelled and reeked of malt vinegar. I sent him off to get a beaker of water for the dimwit, and then recalled that he, Snippage, was of foreign parentage. Either his mother, or his father, or both, had come from a land so distant it was not even on the same continent, but far far away, on the other side of one of the oceans, Indian, Atlantic, Pacific, I can’t remember the names of the others offhand. It occurred to me that, given his parental provenance, Snippage might be able to communicate with the dimwit better than I could. While we awaited his return, I removed my goatskin gloves and thrummed my fingertips impatiently on the banqueting table. The dimwit sat, still and grubby and plump, staring vacantly ahead of him.

An hour passed, and there was no sign of Snippage. I was concerned that the dimwit would think me uncivil, having brought him into my castle and promised him water and then left him to sit there possibly dying of thirst while I thrummed and thrummed. Words would be useless. I rang for my underfactotum, Snippage’s nephew, and when he came clomping into the banqueting hall, his usual lopsided self on account of his corrective boot, I sent him in search of his uncle. The nephew was something of a dimwit himself, but he was always eager to follow simple instructions.

He returned, panting, not ten minutes later. Snippage, he explained, in his curiously high-pitched voice, was standing under the trellis, clasping to his chest the swan, which had been strangled, presumably by Snippage himself. What a palaver, I thought. I asked the youngster if, in addition, Snippage was in possession of a beaker of water. No, was the response.

I apologised to the dimwit at the table, in spite of the fact that he was taking no notice of me whatsoever. He was still gazing blankly at nothing. I began to wonder if he was a blind dimwit, but when I waved one of my goatskin gloves in front of his face I saw his eyes flicker, albeit briefly. I commanded young Snippage to remain with our guest, to guard him from my dogs and rats and the madwoman in the attic, who might choose this of all days to break loose and career about the castle causing havoc, and I strode out again, past the beds of lupins and crocuses, towards the ha-ha, and found Snippage precisely as his nephew had described him, under the trellis, clutching a strangled swan.

I asked him, in an exasperated voice, why he had not fetched a beaker of water for the dimwit. He did not answer, and when I looked closer, I saw that he had been turned into a pillar of salt, like Lot’s wife, unnamed in the Bible but known as Ado or Edith in some Jewish traditions. What in hell’s name was going on under my trellis?

When I went back to the banqueting hall, I found the dimwit and young Snippage deep in conversation. They were babbling and roaring and giggling together, as if drunk, in a language I did not understand. I cleared my throat in a melodramatic manner to announce my presence. They fell immediately silent, and turned their heads to look at me, and then they both burst into laughter, It was the most terrifying laughter I ever heard, and I can still hear it, ringing in my ears.

I turned and fled. I hardly knew where I was going. I only knew that I must not go anywhere near the trellis. I ran and stumbled and ran and limped and ran for mile after mile until I dropped, from exhaustion, into a ditch.

When I came to, the sky was darkling. Looming above me, on one side of the ditch was a swan, and on the other side the dimwit. Both were gazing at me with glares of unbridled savagery. I called out for young Snippage. He came clomping into view, from further along the ditch, bearing a beaker of water. I glugged it down and asked him to hoist me on his shoulders and carry me home. By midnight I was back in the banqueting hall, slumped in a chair, my head resting on the table.

Seventeen years have passed since that awful day, seventeen years in which I have not set foot outside the castle. And all that time, young Snippage, now nearly as old as his salt uncle was then, has been extending the trellis, bit by bit, until now it covers almost all of the estate. In a few days more, it will reach the castle wall, and there will be no escape. The dimwit will come for me, clutching a swan living or dead, and I will be undone.

We know of Pitt the Elder and Pitt the Younger, but what of Pitt the Middling? History has neglected him, presumably because he did not exist. But what if he had? What then?

We might write a thumping fat biography of the middling Pitt, middling in stature, middling in importance, fair to middling in his accomplishments. This biography we could make up from whole cloth or, if we preferred, we could cobble it together from snatches from the true biographies of the other Pitts, the Elder and the Younger, and, casting further afield, from the biographies of any number of not-Pitts, contemporaries, coevals, and peers. Judiciously constructed, such a book might tell us more, much more, about the world and the age of the Pitts than any existing biography of either one of them or of any of the many not-Pitts whose lives we would gut to tell of the Middling Pitt.

Our Pitt would be a sort of invisible man, one whose presence, however vivid, is nowhere attested in the available historical record. An invisible man and also a Frankenstein’s monster, into whom we breathe the spark of life. Vampire too, for never having really lived, he can never really die. He stalks the earth then, still, Pitt the Middling. If you glimpse his shadow, prancing down the street, tip your hat to him, toss him a coin. He deserves that much.

Curiosity killed the cat. But a cat has nine lives, so one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, or even eight instances of overweening and perilous curiosity will not prove ultimately fatal. It is the ninth instance that a cat has to worry about. But it will not worry, because it is ineradicably stupid. And thus, when its curiosity is piqued, for the ninth time, by a stray strand of string or a minuscule insect creeping along the wainscot, the cat will not pause to consider that this time, ah!, this time, there will be no coming back from the death it dallies with. It is not that the cat is brave, reckless, valiant. It is stupid, and it cannot count.

You would do well, then, if you care for a cat, and wish to protect it from harm, to teach it elementary arithmetic. Place the cat on a stool, and arm yourself with a series of flashcards on which the digits from 1 to 9 are written in clear big bold black sanserif. You need not bother with zero. No cat’s brain could ever cope with that concept.

The instruction of cats can prove highly exasperating, so you are advised to take some sort of bottled calmative elixir before starting. Drum the digits, and their significance, into the cat’s bonce. Check its progress with regular tests. If it leaves the stool, for example to pursue a stray strand of wool or a minuscule insect on the wainscot or, worse, a birdie in the garden, haul it back, replace it on the stool, and give it a ticking off.

Be warned that there is every possibility you will die before the cat has grasped the essentials. But you will die happy in the knowledge that you preserved the cat from harm for as long as you could, and left your considerable fortune to it in your last will and testament, to ensure it wants for nothing in this mortal world.

According to David Attenborough on BBC Radio 4’s Tweet Of The Day this morning, the sound made by the storm petrel has been described as “like a fairy being sick”. Conversely, in Lands of Faerie, for example in Cottingley, where the fairies are made of paper, a fairy being sick is compared to a storm petrel.

One might find it hard to imagine a fairy, especially a paper one, vomiting. But the Land of Faerie is (mostly) invisible to (most of) us. It is a parallel world where, could we see it, much would be familiar to us, albeit skewed and distorted. So, yes, fairies are sometimes sick, just as we are sometimes sick. But what they vomit up is not the same as what we vomit up. Yes, fairies shop for groceries in supermarkets with an increasing number of self-service tills, but they buy different groceries, in supermarkets which dimly resemble our own, and the protocol for self-service tills is like something from the fourteenth century. Fairies travel on buses, but not on our buses. I could go on.

Do you want me to go on? Or would you rather I shut up, so you can put on a pair of stout walking boots, and hike out to the seaside, in hope of finding a colony of storm petrels, so you can make a tape recording of their cries, and, later, back home, play it while reading a bedtime story to your tinies, that much-loved story from your own childhood, the one about the oh so delightful fluttering paper fairy that caught a stomach bug and vomited up a mess of fairy pottage, into a fairy bucket, in a little fairy cottage in Cottingley, and they called for a doctor, and the doctor who came hurrying across the fields with his black bag was Dr Arthur Conan Doyle?