Dear Mr Key : As someone with sausages on the brain, I was dismayed to note that you listed this condition as among the characteristics of the contemptible scoundrel who stole Dobson’s blotter. We are no more likely to turn to criminality than any other common or garden person you might encounter among the teeming masses, and to suggest otherwise is deeply unhelpful. I run a support group for people with sausages on the brain and am proud to say we do a lot of good work. We have organised sponsored archaeological digs, for example, and also other sorts of digging, with spades and shovels and special little forks, in loose soil, with prizes donated by wealthy television personalities, some of whom are newsreaders, who give their time freely, or almost freely save for small administrative fees, for the greater good. It might surprise you to know that some of these magnetic personalities have sausages on the brain themselves, and they are proving successful in life rather than languishing in prisons after being convicted of blotter theft. Digging up the ground in pursuit of archaeological knick-knacks, or just for the fun of it, is not the only activity we sponsor. Last month we held a fund-raising event at the perimeter of a remote airfield. There were balloons and ice cream wafers and clay pigeon shooting and a bran tub and scale model trench warfare novelty sing-songs and inflatable cloud chamber daredevil rides and all sorts of other things, hosted by Jimmy Savile, and the whole event passed off without any police involvement whatsoever, apart from a couple of cases of moral besmirchment. You can check the police log for yourself, and you will find not a scintilla of evidence that anyone with sausages on the brain thieved as much as a scrap of blotting paper, let alone an entire blotter. It is true that the stationery department at Hubermann’s has installed a state-of-the-art electronic security system with bleepers and klaxons and magnetic resonance panels for the exclusive detection of people with sausages on the brain who might find themselves wandering in a footloose and shabby manner therein, but that is just a sensible precaution in this disgusting world. Our support group was happy to provide advice to Hubermann’s management team, when a delegation visited our headquarters here on the atoll. Our single rowing boat plies back and forth to the mainland twice a week, by the way. Stories that the boat’s captain has to be bribed with frankfurters are completely baseless, as is the vindictive tittle-tattle suggesting there is a leak in the boat and that constant baling with buckets is required in order not to drown. The sea hereabouts is not always wild and dangerous, and attacks by shrieking demented guillemots have become much rarer, with only a handful of lacerations to passengers’ heads reported last Thursday. Uninvited visitors to the atoll are never beaten insensible with heavy cast iron frying pans, as has been reported in the scummy end of the press. We abandoned this custom some weeks ago after a plenary vote. Of course, if a wayfaring stranger turns up without a gift of boil-in-the-bag sausages for the welcoming committee, that is construed as unforgivable bad manners and the culprit simply gets what’s coming to them. Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind, and sometimes you just have to be cruel, cackling like a maniac as you enact your cruelties. That has always been my motto. In fact, I had it tattooed across my chest and my back, in vivid empurpled Gothic lettering, with flamboyant curclicues and bloodstains. Just try telling me I am wrong, and I will meet you at dawn at a place of your choosing, somewhere out on the moors, to engage in hand to hand combat, providing you do not try to enhance your musculature with chemical boosters. Here at the sausages on the brain support network we fight ferociously but fairly, as you will be able to see at first hand if you attend one of our daily rehearsal bouts. Daubed with the blood of goats and wearing special contact lenses to give them hallucinatory visions, the best of our warriors would curdle the fluids of the most jaundiced observer. Even Jimmy Savile swooned when we laid on a display for him, and I am not sure he has ever fully recovered. So by all means make your spiteful little remarks about us, but be warned that our vengeance will be immediate and savage and utterly, ridiculously disproportionate. Yours faithfully, Sausages On the Brain Person.
Dobson was very fond of his blotter. Whenever he wrote about it, which was more often than considered normal for a grown man, his prose attains a pitch of purple enthusiasm modern readers can find uncomfortable, not to say distressing. It has been said that the pamphleteer even had a pet name for his blotter, as if it were an animate being, like a puppy or a hamster, but nobody claims to know what it was. Citation needed, as they say on the Wikipedia. There has been some debate, of crushing tedium, as to whether Dobson’s attachment was to the blotter itself or to the sheets of blotting paper he inserted under its four leatherette corner flaps. He made something of a ritual of this, changing his blotting paper every Thursday afternoon at about four o clock, just before he had a cup of tea and a plate of bloaters. He seems to have inserted a fresh sheet irrespective of the state of the one to be discarded. As often as not, his blotting paper remained pristine, as he almost always wrote in pencil. The used sheets he kept in a cardboard box shoved underneath the sink in an outbuilding. Each time he filled the box, he secreted it somewhere, like a squirrel, and went to Hubermann’s Department Store to get a new cardboard box. To date, nobody has ever discovered where he hid all those boxes of slightly-used blotting paper. It is one of the enduring mysteries beloved of Dobsonists.
The blotter itself was unexceptionable, as blotters go. It was a flat leatherette rectangle with corner flaps under which the four corners of a sheet of blotting paper were tucked. Several witnesses have noted that, contrary to what one might expect, the blotter was not always in place on the pamphleteer’s escritoire. Sometimes he left it leaning, upright, against the wainscot. At other times he put it in a bag and carried it around with him for no apparent purpose. It was not unknown for him to eat his bloaters off it, or to use it as a bird table. Dobson was fantastically ignorant of the diet of birds, though, and would place his blotter on top of an upright stick in the garden and then scatter hard toffee marbles upon it. Such confectionery was avoided by any little birds alighting on the blotter bird table, for rare is the bird which can digest hard toffee. They would also risk breaking their little beaks on it, for Dobson’s preferred toffee marbles, which he bought in paper bags from a pedlar, were the hardest known to humankind, and he gave them an extra bake in his oven, for hours at a time, to make them harder still.
In a new, as yet unpublished book, Pamplog and Gloveages tell the story of how Dobson’s blotter was stolen and later recovered. Melodramatically, the pamphleteer once described this as “the worst week of my life”. On a rambunctious Wednesday, when the zodiac was in a meaningless alignment, the pamphleteer decided he needed to stiffen the back of his blotter to restore its rigidity. He filled a pail with starch and carefully lowered the blotter into it, and then he strode off full of vim to Blister Lane Lido for water polo practice. Dobson was a keen if inept player of that most thrilling of aquatic team sports, and he wrote a number of pamphlets about it, the best of which is probably A New And Improved Method Of Drying Your Puck With A Towel (out of print). In standard water polo, of course, pucks are not used, but the Blister Lane Academicals was no ordinary water polo team. Nor was this an ordinary practice, on this fateful Wednesday, for the coach wanted the team to try out a new tactic which involved distracting their opponents by imitating the calls of loons and shoveller ducks and grackles. By the time he returned home, Dobson was hoarse and exhausted. He went straight to the room in which he had left his blotter steeped in a pail of starch and was distraught to find it gone. The pail itself had been knocked over, and the starch had soaked into the floorboards.
Here is how Pamplog and Gloveages describe what happened next:
Dobson cried out. Dobson sobbed. Dobson crashed about the house. Dobson called Detective Captain Cargpan. Dobson told Detective Captain Cargpan that his blotter had been stolen. Dobson sat in a chair and waited for Detective Captain Cargpan to arrive. Dobson drank a tumbler of milk from a goat. See Dobson sit. See Dobson drink.
This sort of thing becomes tiresome after a few dozen pages, but I admire the authors’ attention to detail. Apparently they won a medal for an earlier book about the Watergate Hearings. What we learn in this new work is that the thief was a contemptible scoundrel with a pencil moustache, the look of a startled rabbit, a fixation upon blotters, a cheap pair of gloves, a corrective boot, a skewed sense of morals, a weak chin, a hacking cough, a sordid past, the wit of a drainpipe, a collapsing lung, a dubious parentage, odd socks, an odder cravat, bats in his belfry, shares in the Bradford and Bingley Building Society, corks on his uppers, plums in his pockets, catastrophic measle scars, rent arrears, vinegar in his ears and sausages on the brain. Detective Captain Cargpan tracked him down four days after the theft of Dobson’s blotter, hiding out in a House of Miscreants hard by the banks of
Dobson’s first words, when one of Detective Captain Cargpan’s henchmen returned the blotter to him at a rendezvous in a dismal canteen, were “Thank you so much for retrieving my natty blotter!” Studious Dobsonists will recognise that as the title of a dirge the pamphleteer composed for the Second International Anthony Burgess Festival Of Uncompromising Dirges, in Ṻlm, where it won fifteenth prize.
Our first example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching took place in a pantry cluttered with jars in much disorder. Some of the jars contained goo or curd or pips or suet, in varying quantities, and some of the jars were empty. None were clean. All the jars had a coating of grime, as if they had lain untouched for many moons, as indeed they had, for this was an abandoned pantry. The lids of the jars would not have been easy to loosen had a determined person entered the pantry bent upon loosening the lid of any one of the jars, perhaps to eke out some goo or curd or pips or suet, or perhaps to pour into one of the empty jars a new and exciting substance. And hark! Here comes such a person, a wheezing person stomping down the passage towards the pantry and kicking the door in. He is a liveried attendant gone to seed and become a brute and he is holding a hammer. He has come to smash all the jars in the pantry for he has lost all sense of decorum. And then an Angel of the Lord appears, all a-shimmer, and commands him to lay down his hammer and leave the cluttered jars untouched. This is when the person begins flapping about and twitching uncontrollably, for about thirty seconds, in fear and shame, before fleeing the abandoned pantry. That happened on a Thursday.
The second example involves a peasant and a cow and many bees. It was a Saturday. The peasant had trudged into the field to take a close look at the cow, for the cow had been fractious and the peasant was concerned. Though unlettered, the peasant had a goodly store of country wisdom and was confident that if the cow was sick he would be able to identify the nature of its malady and cure it. Like many a tragic hero in fiction, the peasant sought redemption for an enormity in his past, an enormity committed due to a character flaw. Careful study of tragic heroes will reveal that they often have such a flaw. One thinks of Coriolanus, for example, or Dobson. Neither the nature of the peasant’s fatal flaw, nor of the enormity for which he sought redemption, need concern us here, for this is not a tragedy, it is just an example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching. In any case, it is reportage rather than fiction. That being so, the reader is entitled to hard facts, rigorously researched, and the winnowing out of all fluffiness. That is why I have employed a Hooting Yard Fact-Checker so you can be absolutely sure that what you read here is the pure and unvarnished truth. Obviously you need to have confidence in the person charged with the fact-checking, and that is why I fought hard to get someone for the job who I know can be relied upon. Yes, it is easy to laugh at an ex-schoolteacher pushing sixty who still wishes to be known as “Sting”, but this was the man, remember, who first pointed out to the world that “Russians love their children too”. It is just such acuity of insight that makes him perfect for the job I have employed him to do, and for which I pay him a pittance each month. “Sting” has promised to set up a separate Hooting Yard Fact Check website, so we can all look forward to that.
I ought to point out here that, just as you can rely on me (and “Sting”) to provide you with big tough facts, so in return I expect a degree of attentiveness from you. Toe-tapping, head-scratching, and sloshing out of the ears with some sort of wax-crumbling fluid, these can surely wait until my report is done. That is the bargain we strike.
Now we’ve got that cleared up, like a rash, we can return to the peasant and the cow and the bees. But wait! You will want to be sure that they are bees, and not hornets, or wasps. Wait for a minute while I fire off a quick instruction to “Sting” to check up on that. Hmm. I have just realised how apposite his absurd nickname is for such a task.
OK. I have sent my missive and imagine that, as I write, “Sting” is checking his encyclopaedias and databases and whatnot. Unless I tell you otherwise, you can assume that the bees we are about to encounter in our second example of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching are indeed bees.
So the peasant with the tragic flaw trudged into the field to look at the cow, hoping to ascertain the nature of its sickness. Because it was a Saturday, the field was muddier than usual. The cow was standing more or less in the centre of the field, gazing at nothingness in a cow-like way. Its hocks had lost their shine, and the cardboard tag stapled to one of its ears was smudged. In this day and age, it is quite common for cows to have pieces of cardboard or plastic stapled to their ears, serving a number of purposes, and the staplers used are not so different from the staplers used in offices up and down the land. “Sting” told me that.
As he approached the cow, the peasant tried to dredge from his brain some of the folk wisdom with which it had been crammed since infancy. He remembered “If your cow is sick on a Monday morning / Go and spit upon a spade just as the day is dawning”, but that was no use to him, as it was Saturday. He remembered “Cow, cow, blotchy and stiff / Spray it with a bottle of Jif”, but that particular spell lost its efficacy when Jif products were renamed Cif as part of a marketing exercise early in the 21st century. And he remembered “Your cow is sick, it’s got bird flu / But the Russians love their children too”. As a piece of countryside lore this was useless, of course, as it did not suggest any remedies for the sick cow, but it is evidence of the extent to which the terrific profundities spouted by my fact-checking employee have entered the collective wisdom of the world.
Be that as it may, before the peasant got a chance to inspect the cow, a swarm of bees came in from the west, and buzzed menacingly about his head. Cue his uncontrollable flapping about and twitching, perfectly understandable in the circumstances. The bees harried the peasant until he turned tail and fled the field on that Saturday morning. The cow, by the way, had only a minor ailment, from which it recovered without human intervention, although I understand that it is currently in a cow-based twelve-step programme in an adjoining field. As for the peasant, he would have to await a new challenge to redeem himself from the peccadillos of his past, whatever they were.
We move on now, breathlessly but with vigour, to the third of our examples of uncontrollable flapping about and twitching. Forget pantries, forget peasants, this is a case of unearthly sci-fi stuff, set on a spaceship roaring through galaxies unimaginably distant, on a Tuesday evening. Captain Biff Bucklebim is at the controls on the deck of the USS Milquetoast Jesuit. He is a bit like Captain James T Kirk from Star Trek, but has a larger head and a speech impediment. As he likes to joke, it has been no impediment to his rise through the ranks of Starship Command, which has been meteoric. Captain Biff is still only twelve years old, although such are the warps and wefts of intergalactic travel that he is simultaneously ten thousand years old, and yet unborn, and akin to a god. Hard to get your head round, I know, and probably too much of a challenge for “Sting”, who is still working on those bees.
The USS Milquetoast Jesuit is sponsored by L’Oreal, and is powered by light-reflecting booster technology, just like Andi MacDowell’s hair. Captain Biff is contractually bound to use various L’Oreal hair products, but if he had his way he would smear his ginger mop with grease from the engine room. He is that kind of captain. When danger threatens, as it often does, he tousles his mop with one hand while punching the starship’s complicated control panel expertly with the other, all the while barking out commands to his crew. His accent is a curious mixture of
I hope you have found these three examples helpful. Please add your own in the Comments. And please note that as soon as “Sting” gets back to me about the bees, I will add his findings here as a post scriptum.
Sensible Peter Hitchens has made some judicious comments about the cardboard and chickenwire strategy game Grovel With Dampier. He rightly points out that it is “squalid mind poison” and “mental slurry”, riddled with “toxic fantasies” which turn those who play it into “desensitised amoral husk[s]”. Harsh but true.
The 2nd of May 1793 : “Sad, blowing, wintry weather. I think I saw an house martin.”
A reminder to readers not to forget your daily readings of The Natural History Of Selborne.
Let us turn our attention to the world of gaming. There has been a fantastic buzz in the industry as we approach the launch of the latest version of one of the most popular games on the planet, a multibillion-dollar money-spinner instantly recognisable from the three letters GWD.
I am speaking, of course, of Grovel With Dampier, the cardboard and chickenwire strategy game that numbers among its fans Yoko Ono, Dale Winton, President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedov of Turkmenistan, and Stephen Fry. I have been fortunate enough to get a sneak preview of version four and, let me tell you, it is everything it’s cracked up to be.
As with the earlier releases, the basic concept of Grovel With Dampier is deceptively simple. Sorry, that’s not quite right. There’s no deception involved. It is simple! You, the player, accompany a simulacrum of buccaneering sea captain Sir William Dampier (1651-1715) on his three circumnavigations of the globe. Every now and again, you both disembark from your ship, whether it be the Cygnet, the St George, or the Duke, and grovel in the stinking, muddy tidewaters of whichever land mass you are at the edge of. Then, your hair festooned with kelp and your eyes sore from salt water, you clamber back on to your ship and voyage onwards to seek further grovelling grounds.
Aficionados will be pleased to learn that most, if not all, of the irritating additional features have been removed from this new edition, allowing players to concentrate fully on the essence of the game. There is no distracting music, no bleeps and blips and high resolution graphics, just a sheet of cardboard and some chickenwire and the opportunity to pretend you really are grovelling with Dampier. Does it get any better than this?
The circumstances in which I first heard the legend of the golden pig were oddly similar to those of the Sermon on the Mount. Crushed in a multitude, I followed a beardy man up on to a hillock, and sat down and listened to him speak… well, more or less. There were two or three of us, rather than a heaving mass of humanity, it was a flat field, not a hillock, and we did not listen to a beardy man speaking to us directly but to the disembodied voice of a woman, broadcast from a radio set perched on the back of a farmer’s cart. The voice belonged to the Woman Of Twigs, the radio set was pneumatic, and the cart belonged to mad Old Farmer Frack. It was his field we gathered in, and it was partially flooded.
There was no sign of the horse we assumed must have pulled the cart into the middle of the field. Old Farmer Frack only had one horse, named Desmond, so it was likely he had led it off along the lane to the fruit and nut market. It seemed he planned to leave the cart in the field for some time, for its wheels had been removed. I had seen the cart before, so I knew that they were the big wheels of Motown, to where, at a guess, they were being returned. There were wheels within wheels, too, and it had to be assumed they were also bound for Motown.
My companions and I found a patch of field relatively free of puddles and crouched in the muck to listen to the voice of the Woman Of Twigs. It was hard to tell whether it was a live broadcast or had been pre-recorded, and the reception from the pneumatic radio set could have been better. Buffeting winds howling across the flat landscape caused interference, and we had to take off our densely-knit waxed woollen hats and prick up our ears. We were glad about the winds, though, for they kept spinning the sails of the windmills on Pang Hill. Unlike the windmills of your mind so memorably sung about by Rex Harrison’s son Noel, the Pang Hill windmills were proper windmills, and on days when the air was still and their sails creaked to a halt there was something ineffably sad about them.
Ineffably sad, too, was the cracked and desolate voice of the Woman Of Twigs as she told the legend of the golden pig, which was what we had come to the field to hear. Old Farmer Frack had sent out a circular a fortnight earlier, to announce this cultural event. It was a welcome interruption to the unremitting tedium of our rustic malaise, as thrilling in its way as the visit of the travelling cinematograph the previous year, when we had been treated to a showing, in a different but no less sodden field, of the first and second reels of Ivan Reitman’s classic picture My Super Ex-Girlfriend.
It was a mystery how mad Old Farmer Frack found the resources to provide us with such entertainments. He appeared to spend his entire time driving his bellowing cows from field to field, pointlessly, bellowing as he did so, but obviously there was another side to him which we did not see. It was hard to imagine him brokering deals in the offices of media moguls, his huge ox-like frame squashed into a tubular steel executive seating pod, poring over spreadsheets, but we supposed it must be so. The Advanced Powerpoint Presentation Skills Certificate nailed up on the side of the cow byre and laminated to protect it from rainstorms was evidence that Old Farmer Frack had an inner management pointyhead to whom he occasionally gave vent.
The same could not be said of the Woman Of Twigs. She seemed to hail from an entirely other world, remote and ancient and savage. I once read an exciting, and completely comprehensible essay in The Very Difficult Journal Of Postmodernist Impenetrability entitled “Pippy The Pony And Twee Transgressive Hermeneutics In Narratives Of The Other”, hoping that I might gain some insight into the frankly bewildering nature of the Woman Of Twigs, but I was disappointed. The laugh-a-minute text, or discourse, had nothing in it to help me understand a weird, immensely tall crone draped in a burlap shift, with countless twigs stuck in her mop of matted ghost-white hair. My time was not entirely wasted, however, as the essay contained an astute and devastating analysis of Rawson Marshall Thurber’s film Dodgeball, which I hope to see one day if Old Farmer Frack is able to bring the travelling cinema back to one of his fields.
I was mildly perplexed that the Woman Of Twigs had chosen not to appear in person to tell us the legend of the golden pig. Until recently she had been a familiar sight in our bucolic paradise, tottering about by the horse-trough or standing majestic and windswept in the middle of the moors. Certain spiteful gossips put it about that she had taken the Murdoch shilling and was due to host a breakfast-time chatshow on Sky. I hoped that was not true, and it indeed turned out to be a falsehood, for which those responsible were tethered to a cement block on the village green and beaten with cudgels. Old Farmer Frack rented out the cudgels himself, which showed yet another side to this surprisingly kaleidoscopic mad old man. It remained the case, however, that no one had seen hide nor hair nor twig of the Woman Of Twigs for weeks. Where she dwelt had always been an unfathomable mystery, so it was not a simple case of bashing her door down and clamping a bleeper round her ankle as we would normally do with aged solitaries.
Still, crouched in the field listening to the pneumatic radio blaring and crackling from Old Farmer Frack’s cart, it was good to hear her voice. I was unfamiliar with the legend of the golden pig, and I thank my lucky stars that I was not told it when I was tiny, for it is without doubt the most absolutely terrifying story I have ever heard.
As I am sure all Hooting Yardists know, Deuteronomy 8.8 reads : “A land of wheat, and barley, and vines, and fig trees, and pomegranates; a land of oil olive, and honey” - now all packed into one delicious snack bar!
You can find some other holy confectionery here, but before stuffing your face to the point of gluttony, do remember that elsewhere in Deuteronomy we are reminded of “that great and terrible wilderness, wherein were fiery serpents, and scorpions, and drought” (ie, Pointy Town).
“Ah, but look! The stricken ship has been abandoned by its crew. Their puddings had been over-egged and they all fell into the sea. And they were swallowed up each one, and fed the monsters of the deep. Now not a trace of them remains, except bones strewn on the ocean floor, and their stricken ship above, pecked at by indifferent auks.”
From The Contaminated Eggy Pudding Eaten By Incautious Sailors And Other Maritime Tragedies by Dennis Beerpint
For many years, Dobson worked intermittently at a taxonomy of crushed things and squashed things. He kept two notebooks, one with a blue cover, on which SQUASHED was written in big black bold capitals, and one with a yellow cover, on to which he stuck a Dymo-Tape® strip punched out with the word CRUSHED. Asked once by a bespectacled devotee if there was any significance in the blue and yellow colouring of the notebook covers, Dobson’s reply was drowned out by the screeching of a flock of linnets. Ornithologically alert readers will say “Oi! Hang on! Linnets don’t screech”, and they would of course be correct, but the linnets in question were rare screeching linnets, a flock of which Dobson had corralled in an annexe to the room in which he granted an interview to the bespectacled devotee, in
Had the rare screeching linnets not screeched, the bespectacled devotee would nevertheless have been disappointed by Dobson’s reply, for the colour coding of his crushed and squashed taxonomy notebooks was the sort of thing the pamphleteer preferred to keep under his hat. I can reveal, however, that when he bought the notebooks, Dobson was under the spell of the colour symbolism theories of Faffington.
Dobson had something of a knack for finding himself on sandbanks, in tar pits, or stranded in drainage ditches, without ever knowing quite how he got there. Marigold Chew had suggested that he get himself a pair of shoes with a compass concealed in the heel, such as were once worn by venturesome tinies, but the pamphleteer was far too fond of his padded Bulgarian Security Police hiking boots to contemplate a change of footwear. In any case, it was one of Dobson’s physical peculiarities that he emitted violent magnetic discharges, so that compasses in his vicinity went wildly spinning. By all accounts, Faffington too was subject to anomalous magnetic phenomena, although it is mere myth that the popular cartoon character Magnet Boy! The Boy Magnet was based on him.
During the period of his infatuation with the muddle-headed colour symbolist, Dobson considered writing a potted biography of Faffington, but found facts hard to come by. After a fortnight of tough and grizzled research, all he could say for certain was that Faffington had an extremely large head. Hatters were known to have baulked at his approach, and more than one practising phrenologist had been driven to fits and vapours when attending to him. That much gave Dobson about half a page of material, not nearly enough for a pamphlet, however potted it might be. He scrunched up the page on which he had jotted his notes and tossed it into a canal, an act of wanton littering which earned him withering looks from the lock keeper for the next twenty years.
The lock keeper, by coincidence, was the brother of the distressed polyglot Dobson encountered on that sandbank. In infancy, they had been briefly famous as a variety theatre act known as The Diminutive Cavorting Brothers. The future lock keeper cavorted sideways, and he who would a polyglot be cavorted up and down. They earned a small fortune before the elder one was six years old, but every penny was frittered away by their ne’er-do-well parents, a pair of rascals who came to a deservedly sticky end. Polyglot and lock keeper drifted apart in their teenage years, and were completely estranged by the time Dobson employed the one and disgruntled the other.
Had Dobson carried out a bit more research on the subject of his abandoned potted biography, he would have learned that Faffington also had a sibling from whom he was estranged. His sister was by turns a flapper, a bluestocking, an aviatrix, and the president of a small republic rich in bauxite and tin, and she was potrayed on film by both Mabel Normand and Constance Binney.
Dobson was watching the hoofing of a horse in a blacksmith’s yard one Wednesday morning, when an anvil toppled from its temporary hoist, weakened by rainwater, and fell into the mud, crushing an encampment of goldenback beetles. It was this incident which led to his interest in crushed things and squashed things, the project to create a proper taxonomy of which remained incomplete at his death.
“As we journey through life, discarding baggage along the way, we should keep an iron grip, to the very end, on the capacity for silliness. It preserves the soul from desiccation.” – Humphrey Lyttelton, 1921-2008, President of The Society For Italic Handwriting
Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips is the terrific new bestseller from Pebblehead. This time, the paperbackist gives us a thriller and, gosh, it certainly makes for an exciting read. The beginning of the book, though, is deceptively slow-moving, even dull. We learn that the eponymous hero is an emotional cripple who wallows in a stew of malignant Weltschmerz. He is an unattractive character, wearing unattractive clothing, giving off an unattractive pong, and living in an unattractive chalet in an unattractive seaside resort. We do not warm to him as we learn, in chapters one and two, of his grumbling and his scruffy dog and the bits of celery and spring onion forever stuck in his beard. We are repelled by his grimy bathtub and his many stains.
But then, in chapter three, Pebblehead pulls the rabbit out of the hat and we are off on a pell-mell rollercoaster ride of thrills and spills aplenty. What happens is that Fritz decides one morning to eat a piece of fruit. It is a pip-riddled fruit, and Fritz spits out the pips with such force that they lodge in the hinge of his door. The door is ajar at the time, because Fritz’s scruffy dog has lolloped into the chalet garden to piss on a briar patch. When the dog comes back in, Fritz goes to close the door, but cannot. It turns out that the pips Fritz spat across the room are of adamantine hardness, and, lodged in the hinge, prevent the door from shutting.
Thus begins a sequence of events that propels Fritz and his scruffy dog through a series of adventures that begins in an ironmonger’s shop and rapidly moves on to a coathanger factory, a sausage maker’s, the undersea headquarters of a madcap swordfish person, and a barn full of cows. All the while, the pips remain stuck in the hinge and the chalet door stays maddeningly ajar. Yet as the story progresses, Fritz’s Weltschmerz becomes less malignant and his dog less scruffy. By chapter forty-nine, when we find Fritz picking bits of celery and spring onion out of his beard and disposing of them down a hygenic chute, we are ready to forgive the griminess of his bathtub.
It must be said that the novel is not an unalloyed success. I could have done without the excessive use of exclamation marks, for example, and Pebblehead’s pip descriptions are deplorable. I suspect he may have copied them out of a cheap botanical gazetteer without first checking its accuracy. He has committed similar sins in the past, notably in the Wet Behind The Ears trilogy, vast chunks of which were plagiarised from a mistranslated Serbian birdseed catalogue.
These minor cavils aside, Fritz : His Hinge And His Pips is a tremendous addition to the Pebblehead canon. Read it with your feet up, on your balcony, if you have a balcony, with a bag of snacks at your side, the constant tweeting of chaffinches assailing your ears, freshly laundered socks on the washing line, sprites in the wainscot, and butchers’ drapes billowing in the balmy spring breeze.
I love Agence Eureka. Here’s a duck and a bucket found there.
In a thicket, with a compass, I am thinking about blubber. I use blubber for my candles. I’m the captain of a whaler. Some use tallow, I use blubber. It gets smoky in my cabin. I’m not in my cabin now. As I said, I’m in a thicket. I’m on shore leave for a fortnight. I’ve been hiking with the devil. Satan left me in a thicket on the wild and windy moors. But I’ve got my trusty compass and my pipe clamped in my jaws. I am smoking in the thicket. I hope to see my whaler soon. Don’t go hiking with the devil. Keep your compass in your pocket. I am thinking about blubber. Blubber is my candle light. It’s a comfort in this thicket on the wild and windy moors to think of blubber candle light, for the devil trapped me in this thicket and it is a pitch black night.
As a writer of bestselling paperbacks, Pebblehead tends not to attract serious critical attention. Too often, his works are dismissed as pap for airheads, and while this is arguably the case with such works as Pap For Airheads, Slops Of Triviality Sloshing About Between The Ears, and his thriller The Glazed Stare Of The Brain-Dead Mop-Bucket Zombie, it is an encouraging sign that one or two scholars are addressing the Pebblehead oeuvre with perspicuity and panache. Well, one, rather than one or two.
I refer to Sidney Ullage’s recent article in the literary journal Bookish Goo in which he examines the influence of ploppy noises in Pebblehead’s as yet unpublished blockbuster Dustbin Of Pomposity! Using critical techniques developed by men with terrific beards, Ullage argues that we cannot begin to understand the book without first being locked up in a dank cellar in which beetles scurry across the mildewed floor and mysterious ploppy noises can be heard, possibly coming from behind a panel hidden in the gloom.
There are those who poo-poo Ullage’s close reasoning and breathtaking critical acuity as the ravings of an idiot. There are those who accuse him of having a decidedly oddly-shaped head and the wrong sort of beard. There are those who, having engaged him in conversation at glamorous cocktail parties in swish urban rooftop gardens, dismiss him as a babbling freak with “issues”. There are those who wish he had been strangled at birth and disposed of in a pond. There are those who wish he had never been born at all. There are those who grunt unintelligibly at the mention of his name. There are those who pick holes in the sleeves of their jumpers before shovelling the contents of a jar of pickled sausages down their gullets.
I am proud to be among those who rightly see Sidney Ullage as a harbinger. I am not yet entirely clear what he harbinges, but by all that is holy in heaven and on earth I shall stand here and repeat what I have just said, over and over again, until not only am I blue in the face, but everything around me that has a face, the hens, the cows, the cassowaries, the ducks, the other ducks, they, too, all turn blue in the face, a blue like the mightiest of skies over Pointy Town on a blazing noon when the earth stops spinning.
